With more than 300,000 rickshaws on its streets, the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, has the highest concentration of the cabs in the world. But the Dhaka District Corp. has issued only 80,000 licenses; the other 220,000 drivers operate with forged ones. Competition among driver for passengers is fierce.
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What do slums teach us about greener living?
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff | 09.21.09
Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, has a new book coming in October called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
In it, the longtime environmentalist argues that nuclear power, genetically modified crops, and geo-engineering – approaches generally abhorred by enviro-purists – are necessary to solve the litany of ecological problems currently facing humanity.
(For a quick run-through of the ideas contained in the book, see Mr. Brand’s TED talk here. And here’s a more recent, albeit longer talk.)
The ideas Brand proposes are not necessarily new. (For articles on geoengineering, click here. And here’s a story on the “new nuclear enthusiasm.”
But one of Brand’s ideas warrants special attention for its counterintuitive implications. Urban slums, he says, nearly all of which exist in the developing world, are a solution to poverty, he argues, not a cause.
They’re also good for the environment.
In the October issue of Wired magazine (though unavailable on its website at this writing), “The Smart List” issue, he explains:
What makes squatter cities so important?
That’s where vast number of humans – slum dwellers – are doing urban stuff in new and amazing ways. And […] there are a billion of them! People are trying desperately to get out of poverty, so there’s a lot of creativity; they collaborate in ways that we’ve completely forgotten how to do in regular cities. And there’s a transition: People come in from the countryside, enter the rickshaw economy, and work for almost nothing. But after a while, they move uptown, into the formal economy.[…]
Why are they good for the environment?
Cities draw people away from subsistence farming, which is ecologically devastating, and they defuse the population bomb. In the villages, women spend their time doing agricultural stuff, for no pay, or having lots and lots of kids. When women move to town, it’s better to have fewer kids, bear down, and get them some education, some economic opportunity. Women become important, powerful creatures in the slums. They’re often the ones running the community-based organizations, and they’re considered the most reliable recipients of microfinance loans.
To recap, people leaving the countryside for cities remove some of the ecological strain on the surrounding landscape. This migration also helps solve, without top-down coercion, the population problem. (See Monitor colleague Greg Lamb’s story on overpopulation.) The economic empowerment of women in slums leads to fewer children, and birthrates for new urban arrivals quickly fall to replacement level – that’s 2.1 children per couple – and then keep dropping, he says.
The numbers of people involved in this worldwide migration to cities are astounding. Every week, about 1.3 million people move to cities around the world, mostly in developing nations. That’s 70 million new city-dwellers per year. “Villages of the world are emptying out,” Brand says in his TED talk.
To support his thesis that squatter slums present a solution rather than a problem, Brand cites “The Challenge of Slums,” a 2003 global report by the United Nations Human Settlements Program, and “Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World,” by journalist Robert Neuwirth.
The UN report says: “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.”
In the Wired article, Brand explains what government can do to help:
<< Will environmental threats result in new world cooperation? | MainThe suffering is great, and crime is rampant [in slums]. We made the mistake of romanticizing villages, and we don’t need to make that mistake again. But the main thing is not to bulldoze the slums. Treat the people as pioneers. Get them some grid electricity, water, sanitation, crime prevention. All that makes a huge difference.
Comments
2. Mike Moxcey | 09.22.09
Urban slums is what made England and America great. They are a direct result of industrial agriculture (which supports more people with less cost). The horror stories of London from the 1820s and New York from the 1880s show those countries had horrible slums but they turned out the next generation of entrepreneurs.
However, just because the growth has occurred that way in the past doesn’t mean it should in the future. Brand correctly identifies the benefits of the urban slum as opposed to the rural slum but he makes the same mistake every traditionalist does by thinking that what did happen to make the current future is what must happen to make it again.
3. Jim Smith | 09.22.09
Stewart Brand (and this article) miss the point, which is:
All our ecological problems stem from TOO MANY PEOPLE!
Nuclear Power, genetically modified crops and geo-engineering are distractions that only “treat the symptoms” - not the underlying cause.
Put our money and efforts into family-planning education and freely available birth control to all who want it. That is a better start.
4. joeshuren | 09.22.09
Although it is true that the Grameen Foundation gives microloans to groups of just women, they are not urban women. Men can’t be trusted to invest in their families as women do. In the cities, new migrants tend to trade on the streets and work underground everywhere, but they want to transition to being small capitalists and shopkeepers. Neuwirth and Brand present information largely about slums, such as Mumbai or Rio. But in China, there are hardly any real slums. There are the same migrant workers and tensions, but the housing is better, maybe because of land ownership differences. While the average carbon footprint in US is 20 tons/yr/p, New York City’s is one-third of that, and China’s one-fifth. China has more than 100 cities with more than 1m population. It would be good to compare how Chinese megacities compare to India’s. The “freedom” and “democracy” in India might be illusory. Yet the same dynamics such as demographic transition apply, so there is reason to be optimistic about the world.
5. Derek | 09.23.09
The propaganda is spread pretty thick with this story…just look how it starts. This Stewart Brand is set up as an “environmentalist” and then what he says is presented as a fresh line of reasoning for environmentalists to consider. Brand is obviously not an environmentalist; he is suggesting a shift away from people maintaining an ecologically sustainable village-agronomics to market capitalism. Market capitalism rejects sustainablity at its core, there must be continued growth for capitalism to work. Sustainability requires a zero-growth model where natural services (think trees growing, rivers flowing) is balanced with quality of human AND non-human life. In the village-agronomics model, the so called “subsistence farming”,any ecologically devastation incured would naturally limit productivity of people, a natural feedback loop which would limit prosperity certainly, but also limits the “devastation” to what nature can ecologically “handle”.
6. Muriel Strand | 09.23.09
i agree that stewart brand is out to lunch. we don’t need nuclear power either.
7. Sharon McEachern | 09.24.09
One of the things that slums have taught us about greener living is beware of lead poisoning. According to the World Health Organization, about half of all urban children world-wide and under the age of five test with blood lead levels higher than the CDC’s safe limit. That’s not just third world countries. Lead poisoning is said to be the most common environmental illness in children in the U.S.
It’s worse than anyone knew. The CDC’s safe levels are wrong. Lead concentrations in blood, only half as much as the internationally-accepted “safe” level hurts children’s intellectual and emotional development. Just last week, researchers from the University of Bristol in the U.K. released findings showing that the lead level which everyone thought for decades was safe is in reality dangerous and twice as high as it should be, particularly for young children. Read more about the study at:
http://www.ethicsoup.com/2009/09/new-research-shows-even-safe-lead-levels-hurts-kids.html
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1. Jean | 09.22.09
Are women in slums really becoming powerful creatures? Receiving microfinance loans? I hope that the actual article in Wired actually backs up these lofty claims, as well as the statement that subsistence farming is ecologically devastating -as if it were a fact and not an opinion! Pretty presumptuous, and many environmentalists would disagree…what’s the point in making these types of unsubstantiated claims other than for shock value? I find no real valid, proven reason from this article to advocate for city slum dwelling from this. And none of the “clarity, context, and compassion” that the Monitor has sought to offer. Please don’t lower your standards by reporting misleading quotes and incomplete facts from other “news” services.