In this TED talk Stewart Brand talks about the increasing move of the world’s population to urban areas. Most of these areas are slums. But, he argues, despite the label of a slum these places are good things. They are filled with people trying to get out of rural poverty. They act as population sinks (the birthrate drops to a replacement rate as soon as people move into urban areas and then continues to drop as cities become more established). He also argues that these slum cities are creating wealth (1/6 of India’s GDP comes from Mumbai).
I think that this is an interesting perspective. It certainly helps to assuage some people’s worries about the world ending after being covered by teaming slums filled with poverty and pollution. However, I think that it is a pretty impersonal viewpoint. These people may be climbing out of poverty but they are doing so by having to live in unsanitary conditions and by working in situations where they are being exploited or excluded totally from the formal economy. Also, although the population growth rate may be dropping in these urban slums this is partially because so many children die of disease or violence. Even if these children do live there is a high probability that they will never have access to adequate amounts of clean water, formal education, or opportunities for upward mobility. I wouldn’t necessarily say that slums are a good thing.
-Hannah Andrew
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