Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Roof, Road, and River

The world as we know it is coming to an end.

But maybe this isn’t such a big deal. ‘The world as we know it’ is a very dynamic thing, constantly shifting form and changing into something different. In a sense, the world has been coming to an end every day for centuries, and we’ve grudgingly, and often subconsciously, had to adapt.

As humans, we seem to assume that because something is the way it is, it will therefore remain that way for all eternity. This mindset often acts as a mental cage, blocking us from the possibilities of change.

Our cities have changed hugely over the past hundred years. For several early decades of the 20th Century, New York and Chicago were the only cities with skyscrapers, and even those could barely equal the Great Pyramid. The vertical dimension suddenly sprang into being in urban centres.

Now we face a different kind of change: the breakdown of conventional infrastructure into something much simpler. Subsistence-based living. We think of this as the way of the past, as something we have long surpassed. But our world may require us to reconsider our ‘progress’.

Half the world now lives in cities, and a large proportion of those in developing countries live in urban slums and shanty-towns. The reasons for the trends behind this situation have been well-documented by my fellow team-members, but I wish to make a specific comparison. In Europe, during the Industrial Revolution, a similar migration took place. What was different about that time?

In the 18th and 19th centuries, urbanization took place in the richest and probably most technologically advanced nations in the world. There were problems with poverty, but always offset by rapidly increasing prosperity.

Most urbanization now is happening in the poorest countries in the world. It is a reaction pattern to trends in other nations, and governments have less effective power to direct the explosion of their cities. With a more global economy, environmental concerns, and widespread war and conflict, the stakes are higher in every way.

As a result, most newcomers to urban areas are unable to take part in the official economy. They must create everything on their own – shanty towns spring up, crowding thousands of people in ridiculously small areas, and an unofficial economy of small service and supply businesses is awakened.

The exact nature of this ‘informal sector’ may vary, but governments are beginning to recognize its potential. My question is: are there ways in which the informal sector can organize itself, perhaps with some support from outside, to provide basic infrastructure for its own constituent people? They have many needs, but three of the most necessary are shelter, adequate transportation, and water.

In the abstract, we are interested in the Roof, the Road, and the River.



Sources:

Clark, David. Urban World / Global City. London: Routledge, 1996.
McKay, Donald. “Point, Line, and Plane".

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