A billion people live in the slums of the world's biggest cities. In 25 years, 2 billion people will be slum-dwellers. Stewart Brand looks at the slum and sees a hopeful future of compact urbanization that ought to be encouraged. It's a fascinating read. Here's some excerpts:
Vast numbers of people will begin climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder, from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat and soy to meat—and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of it will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince them to stay in their villages. Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.
The point is clear: environmentalists have yet to seize the opportunity offered by urbanisation. Two major campaigns should be mounted: one to protect the newly-emptied countryside, the other to green the hell out of the growing cities.
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.” The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents.
Urban roofs offer no end of opportunities for energy saving and “reconciliation ecology.” Planting a green roof with its own ecological community is well-established. For food, add an “ultraefficient greenhouse”; for extra power, add solar collectors. And the most dramatic gains can come from simply making everything white. According to a 2008 study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, if the world’s 100 largest cities replaced their dark roofs in this way, it could offset 44 metric gigatonnes of greenhouse gases.
[If slums are considered] overall a net good for those who move there, it is because cities offer more than just jobs. They are transformative: in the slums, as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan, and with it everything the dictionary says that cosmopolitan means: multicultural, multiracial, global, worldly-wise, well travelled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane.