Pax Urbana

Dharavi, Mumbai. Photo by Scott Eells.

The majority of humanity now lives in cities. I've seen much hand-wringing over this, but little consideration of the possible benefits it could offer. Now, writer Stewart Brand offers a detailed defense, starting with that most maligned aspect of urban infection — slums:

There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.”

The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”

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Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 per cent of the land. Demographers expect developing countries to stabilise at 80 per cent urban, as nearly all developed countries have. On that basis, 80 per cent of humanity may live on 3 per cent of the land by 2050. Consider just the infrastructure efficiencies. According to a 2004 UN report: “The concentration of population and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit cost of piped water, sewers, drains, roads, electricity, garbage collection, transport, health care, and schools.” In the developed world, cities are green because they cut energy use; in the developing world, their greenness lies in how they take the pressure off rural waste.

Some parts of the article are too optimistic for my taste — slums have very real problems with runoff and erosion (not to mention fire and crime) — but I'm endorsing the piece because it raises some very real points in city's favor. 

First, as it repeatedly says: dense metropoli are damn efficient. Second, in its focus on the slums, this article takes the discussion about urbanism away from the squeaky clean planners' version that's all perfectly designed towers and plazas. Chaos is part of a city's fabric as well, and Brand makes some solid arguments for its necessity as part of a larger whole. (Planning for disorder? Exactly, read your Tao.)

I'm also happy to see any article that treats citizens of the developing world as something other than benighted cyphers. This is a major pet peeve of mine, as depending on who you ask, massive percentages of the world either need companies to bring the blessings of modern capitalism or selfless activists to save them from said capitalists. Missing in this is consideration that, like every human culture on the face of the damn planet, the developing world is composed of people with just as much natural ingenuity as you or I. Because we tend to view innovation in a fairly narrow window, we overlook some lower-tech strokes of genius going on around the world.

I read some years ago about how the cities of the Middle East mostly lost their wide checkerboard of Roman lanes after the Arabs drove the Byzantine Empire out. When I'd mostly heard this referenced before, it was as a negative, look-how-civilization-has-fallen sort of thing. However, camels, which handled winding roads better, had replaced wagons as the main form of mercantile transportation and a maze of neighborhoods was a huge impediment to the very real risk of outside invasion. Even seeming squalor, sometimes, has its method.

More than one wag has dubbed cities unnatural, but our species has been building them since we knew how. For what it's worth I think rural life is just as natural. What I don't think works particularly well is the sprawling, suburban hybrid that emerged over the last 50 years. That particular method is too dependent on some fairly tenuous resources and doesn't seem to work particularly well culturally, lacking both urban ferment and rural tranquility. 

Of course, we could end up with a dystopian hellscape out of all this chaos, but what else is new?

Comments

[Claudia]

Great post, as usual. I think the dynamism of slums, esp in the developing world, is underestimated, though I also would be careful of skipping over the misery. But would these same people be less miserable in the countryside? It is hard to say. I have never been starvation-poor. But I did grow up in a brutally impoverished area in New England under extremely adverse circumstances. Often in my family we debate whether my mother, single parent of four, should have moved to a city where she might have found a job...leaving us children...where (in those days, daycare wasn't prevalent, and how do you afford daycare for four kids anyhow?). I was back East not long ago talking with a friend whose stepfather was beating her mother and raping her sister...and she said the only thing that got her through was being able to go into the woods and "find something beautiful to look at. I'd try to do that every day." There's a lot to be said for those who live in brutal circumstances having the refuge of nature, if there is no other refuge. For small children, where "income generation" opportunities may be irrelevant, this may be salvation. Or not. Mileage varies. Just raising the point. It would be interesting to see if slum children in, say, Mumbai, end up better off in, say two generations, than slum kids in, say, Boston's Combat Zone have. Or if the hum of energy and enterprise in today's 3rd-world slums is more due to the newness of them and the same hope and enterprise that brought people to the cities in the first place, as with immigration waves in America. Once people get entrenched in poverty and ghettoes, is it then better to be poor in the country or the city, I wonder?

[Richard Balmer]

I'm in absolute agreement with you about the advantages of cities in terms of dynamism, efficiency... I think there's a difference between proclaiming the advantages of living in *cities* and living in *slums*. Through a weird internet quirk i've been recently in communication with members of the Mumbai waste authority who basically radiate increasing desperation at the situation they've got in places like Dharavi - those shanty-towns are primarily built on piles of waste in what was originally a swamp (there's only a city there at all because of a quirk of early-modern period European dynastic politics...) and they produce vast amounts of waste in turn, most of which is currently being shipped at great expense to landfill ever further from the city - and villages getting suddenly stuck downwind from them are currently involved in violent disputes with police and waste authorities... I've been reading Mike Davis' Planet of Slums book which cites figures written after that UN report that suggested that in most of these places supposed economic growth appeared to consist of developing new ways of cannibalising diminishing resources.

I've got no idea how one would go about harnessing the innovatory impulses you talk about while finding some ways to find the crippling rates of overcrowding, joblessness, malnutrition and disease endemic to these places. Certainly, Haussmann style rebuilding isn't a good option, and neither is - god forbid - gentrification. One thing that has really interested me recently: a relative of mine was researching family history, in particular colonial era forts on the East Coast of India. Far more interestingly than that, he was posting pictures on the internet, and got the interest of local history enthusiasts... who then were able to use the information gleaned as part of a campaign against a new, vastly polluting factory going up near the town. I wonder if those sorts of connections, linking these new cities into existing networks where there is money and expertise to provide support for local initiatives, might be a better model than the two "slum-dwellers as benighted cyphers" options you rightly criticised above.

[David Forbes]

Wow, two great comments.

Claudia: A great point. I grew up in an area with some pretty dire rural poverty, but I think in that too, the metropolis balances out by offering increased opportunities just because of the sheer array of businesses and cultures within walking distance (or a short drive).

Long story short, it always sucks (to varying degrees) to be poor, but I think it's even (albeit different) for rural or urban.

Richard: Thanks for the added insights about Mumbai. Waste and many of the other factors you allude to are a very real problem, and useful as a counterpoint to the perhaps too-optimistic tilt of Brand's original article.

I think linking into networks is absolutely essential. One method (among many, of course) would be better linking these slums with microloans, and offering resources for the ad-hoc civic organizations that develop in them to better manage waste and similar problems.

I'm reminded of research I did into the Kowloon Walled City sometime ago, which in some ways is the archetypal anarchic slum. At one point, the Triads essentially controlled the area, until a massive sweep by the police took them out. However, after that the police left the inhabitants to their own devices and civic organizations. The result was that Kowloon actually had less crime than some surrounding areas. Food for thought, certainly.