I’ve really been enjoying the “TED” (Technology, Entertainment, Design) series. One talk that really got me thinking was Stewart Brand‘s Why Squatter Cities are a Good Thing. (see below)

I’m certainly no expert on the issues Brand is dealing with here, and not very good at articulating my reactions to this particular piece. Luckily, I have a close friend who is: Zot Lynn Zurgot, who honored me with this extremely well-written response, which I’m proud to present here:

It occurs to me that a city or other urban conglomeration does
not feed itself, and cannot without an organized and
concentrated effort to annex surrounding lands and
derive its sustenance from inside that border. i see
no evidence of even discussion of this crucial
ingredient in making cities sustainable. In this new
century, long-distance shipping of food will be
exposed, by high fuel prices, for the unsupportable
Ponzi scheme that it is. Hydroponics, even in stacked
towers, may be possible, but will need huge imports of
nutrients; from where is that to come? Even if such a
design dream could be arranged, hydroponic produce
shares with its chemical-input Big Ag cousins a loss
of 40% to 60% of its antioxidants compared with
organic produce grown in guess what – real soil
enriched by bacteria and fungi and cyclic return of
nutrients.

Brand, as always, is pleasant and stimulating,
well-informed and well-intentioned, and ready to
challenge us to think differently. This particular
difference is not necessarily clearer or useful, and
betrays a drifter’s sense of ungrounded speculative
contextlessness. The demographics are fascinating,
and who knows what they mean?

i am suspicious of hidden biases against rural people.
In the US, such biases need not be hidden; one can
still proudly denigrate hicks and rubes and rednecks
without fear of being called on it, the way one would
(and, yes, should) be called on one’s racism or
antisemitism. This is ugly and unacceptable, not to
mention ungrateful (with one’s mouth full). The
comparative lists of urban and rural assumptions
rudely chart raw prejudice in Brand, not conditions in
the world.

i do see that urban experience can be very green,
using little resources (particularly for personal
transportation, but also for home heating because of
sharing hive walls) and gaining quick access to
helpful information and allies, though for many the
separation from powerplants and sewer treatment plants
and growing plants can allow them to drift away from
their green focus. It makes a big difference what the
urbanite chooses to eat; an unbelievable bounty is
made available (at least to the capitalized) at all
seasons, and much comes with hidden costs not visible
at point of sale.

Of course, i also think that an enriched,
cosmopolitan, multicultural experience is salutary (at
least for a while). i also am very interested in
squatters and their experimental cultures. Like you,
i take hope from their attempts. Seems like so much
of the real innovation in human social structures that
we so desperately need is now coming from – well, the
desperate. How very inspiring and exciting, really.

The squatter slums i worked in in Guatemala City did
have an impressive level of creativity, cooperation,
solidarity, imagination, initiative, chutzpah, hope,
innovation, and verve. Also, disease, filth, hunger,
ignorance, violence, crime, despair, stench, neglect,
ennui, anomie, and abuse. The same can-do spirit that
allowed people to make shacks out of random detritus
also led to plenty of accidental deaths and injuries
when they collapsed or burned. i saw a cliff edge, a
foot beyond the wall of the shack i was in, that made
a perfect out-of-sight-out-of-mind garbage disposal –
over which numerous people had plummeted to death,
reportedly not all accidentally. Let me point out in
direct contradiction to Brand: plenty of unemployment,
by which i mean not only that plenty of individuals
experienced lack of formal or informal enterprise but
also lack of use of their sparkling human potential.
i did see mothers who turned a small sewing machine or
an orange peeler into a microbusiness, but also those
who’d given up on trying. How many of each? It can
be hard to tell what a lot of people i saw (but didn’t
know personally) were doing with their time; maybe
they were busy when i wasn’t there, but it sure looked
like there was a lot of hanging around and waiting to
die. Some didn’t have long to wait: i did see a
disturbing number of funerals for very young people.
But that was way back in 1987; maybe such places are
somehow different now.

Sure are a lot of people in them.Free-marketeers,
libertarians, and other fans of organized crime must
admire (with Brand) the unregulated economic activity;
while liberals and upholders of labor, safety, human
rights, and environmental standards must be horrified.

i found the comments below the video to be salient.

i can’t imagine taking seriously Brand’s perception
that upon arrival into shantytowns, peoples’
reproductive rates fall “below replacement”.

Of course, i must again insist that any boundary used
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boundaries that make sense ecologically.  City limits,
and boundaries drawn around favelas and other ad hoc
urbanities, are routinely crossed by members of the
population, by diseases and parasites, and especially
by food. This means that they are not ecological
boundaries, so no ecological or population-biology
conclusions may be valid based on such arbitrary
delineations. Look at Wilson’s island biogeography:
the borders of nation-states and cities do not
qualify. They are not units. Can you draw a
conclusion about how much blood is pumped by the brain
itself? About the water in a ten-foot section of a
river? About the nutrient flow and leaf growth of a
rootless tree? Feh.

The fact that overfed mammals in cages overpopulate to
the point where many repeatedly leap from the highest
spot in the cage, nervously lick off fur and keep
licking the raw skin, form gangs for violent abuse
unseen in uncrowded conditions, and start to chew off
their own limbs in the presence of excess food (if the
experiment is allowed to continue that far) is an
argument not to create such conditions, even if it
eventually results in an increased infant mortality
rate that, through dead babies, results in a new
equilibrium that holds the population level and its
resulting insanity to a high but finite level. Can
you truly distinguish this from what Brand admires?

MPS: Brand says Cities are “wealth creators”…
it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that urbanization
makes it much easier to educate and employ people?

Zot: It sure can look that way when viewing the city only
on its own, without regard to the systems of which it
is a part, and upon which it depends. 

i like the thinking about cities shown in the writings
of Jane Jacobs. i particularly recommend her “The
Nature of Economies”.

The real creation of wealth in cities comes from
import substitution. That is, a colonial settlement
(and let’s face it, every city we know of started with
such a dark, bloody, and brutal history – does that
not give us pause when praising urbanization?) only
begins to generate wealth when it moves away from
importing its supplies from the empire of which it is
an outpost, and moves away from merely exploiting the
natural resources at its new site. Instead, a
settlement only begins to create value when it
integrates itself into the resource flows already
existing at its site in ways that reduce its nonlocal
dependence and reduce the exploitative distortion of
resource flows. This generally must begin by serving
local needs, though expanding this into exports can
benefit the settlement and its balance of trade (as
long as it’s not doing so at the expense of the
natural resource capital).

Such cities become wealth creators.  The rest are just
wealth concentrators and exploiters.  Sure, most
cities and other refugee camps are mixes of both.
Pushing the mix toward wealth creation requires
understanding and championing import substitution, not
randomly praising conglomerations of any and all
types.

Tragically, i don’t hear any pop-culture figure (among
which i include politicians) talking about import
substitution, not by any name.

MPS: Another implied benefit that SB doesn’t really mention is
increased available habitat for other species, forests, etc.,
as humans vacate rural areas and cluster together in cities.

Huh?  How do you figure? These newly displaced
landtenders (might as well call them refugees and
illegal immigrants) are not setting up Nature
Conservancy land trusts on the land they are forced to
abandon (often by the dumping of artificially
low-priced food shipped in from afar, that is, from
industrial countries with farm subsidies). They leave
with lots of observation-based information about that
land and its plants and animals; often that precious
information is lost, and becomes unavailable to those
who “tend” it after that.
And just who do you think
that is? Hint: it’s not the World Wildlife Fund or
The Jane Goodall Institute. It’s Dole, and Cargill,
it’s Monsanto, and Shell, and ADM.

Also, it’s water: displacement of people by dams is
just as destructive of habitat as it is of
communities.

MPS: I see reason for hope here, albeit an oversimplified
presentation.

Well, good. i do too. Not in the way you do, i
suspect. Peace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2005/07/seeds_of_suicid.html