Arrival Cities

The BBC's Shalu Yadav looks at why Gurgaon, India's Millennium City, has turned out to be a failure in planning.

Infrastructure is in a shambles: electricity is infrequent and erratic, groundwater is declining at an alarming rate, and the sewage system and roads are decrepit. There aren't enough policemen to secure the burgeoning population.

A whopping 70% of the residents are dependant on ground water, which is being indiscriminately extracted despite restrictions.

Things are so alarming that the federal ground water authorities have warned that the water table will be completely depleted by 2017.

The sewage situation also looks dire.

Delhi's Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) believes that by 2021, Gurgaon's estimated 3.5m people will produce so much waste that the city will be drowning in its own sewage.

"Unfortunately in India, infrastructure doesn't precede development. That is why one feels that Gurgaon and many upcoming Indian cities are a failure. India needs sustainable urbanisation, " Lalit Jain, chairman of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers' Association of India said.

Mauritius is an island of promise and of prosperity, an island symbolising dreams of brighter tomorrows.   ... a new ordered urban form is strongly needed: one that promotes the connection of human beings to their activities. As for its structure, instead of centralised city, we need a living & productive model. One of which could be that of a geometrically living cellular pattern where each cells having their own cores, much like a living organism. A setting of this sort, adapted to our local planning code, would have numerous advantages:

• It would help promote a decentralised system.
• Vehicular transportation would be discouraged and basic activities that connect a human to his habitat, such as walking, would be on the increase. 
• The panorama would be more pleasing as our roads would be populated with fewer cars. This would in turn decrease the need for numerous parking lots and hence encourage the green expansion of land. This would also directly impact on the pollution levels.
• A drop in stress levels and increase in productivity rate.
• Economically more viable as it would reduce our energy consumption through vehicular fuel cut back and decreased electricity consumption through reduced heat island effect.

Since 1970, the population of Manaus grew from 300,000 to over 2 million inhabitants.  Many of those who arrived, lacking a place to live, squatted on empty lots and built palafitas—wooden shacks that sit on stilts. 

By 2003 the city of Manaus faced important urban challenges as a result of rapid population growth, unplanned city growth, and a lack of investment in sanitation infrastructure. 

The government of the State of Amazonas, of which Manaus is the capital, decided to take action to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants of the igarapés and bring back the splendor of the city of Manaus.  The government began preparing an Integrated Urban Plan for the city that included engineering, environment, urbanization, housing, social, and institutional action. 

If (like me) you’ve been sitting at your desk for too long, then you really ought to get up, find the nearest park, and go for a nice walk.

Writing about the paper, Richard Coyne (Researcher at Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh) says the work shows the public benefits of investing in greenery:

"Our study has implications for promoting urban green space to enhance mood, important in encouraging people to walk more or engage in other forms of physical or reflective activity. More green plazas, parkland, trees, access to the countryside, and urban design and architecture that incorporates more of the atmosphere of outdoor open space are all good for our health and wellbeing."

Written by the founders of Food Tank; 13 resolutions for changing the food production system.

Growing in Cities:  Food production doesn’t only happen in fields or factories. Nearly one billion people worldwide produce food in cities. In Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, farmers are growing seeds of indigenous vegetables and selling them to rural farmers. At Bell Book & Candle restaurant in New York, customers are served rosemary, cherry tomatoes, romaine, and other produce grown from the restaurant’s aeroponic rooftop garden.
 
Creating Better Access:  People’s Grocery in Oakland and Fresh Moves in Chicago bring mobile grocery stores to food deserts giving low-income consumers opportunities to make healthy food choices. Instead of chips and soda, they provide customers with affordable organic produce, not typically available in their communities.

"Citizens become participants in data collection without having to alter their normal routines," Fawkes said. The goal in such cases is less to create scientific data than to create "good-enough data," Fawkes said, that such information could help get the U.N. started in taking a closer look at local needs and developing response plans. Quickly collected crowd-sourced data can enable early interventions and the implementation of social safety nets that can bring quick aid to a disaster zone or political crisis and thereby prevent long-term damage to communities.

‎"We feel the greatest hope for fundamental change starts with the foundation for the future -- our youth -- so the Food Fight team combined music and film with a school curriculum, to help teachers engage students on the most pressing issues we face, in a unique way.

The flaws of our global economy are best exposed by looking at our food system -- soil-depleting and oil-depleting factory farming, economic policies that contribute to starvation abroad, and disease and obesity at home, all packaged with a marketing campaign to enforce the "buy first, ask never" social contract -- just buy what they say to buy, and eat/shut up.

If we care about our kids, ourselves, and our planet, it's time to expose the truth on a broader scale, and hope enough Food Fighters step up to make the changes we need."

SHARE IT? Accompanying FREE CURRICULUM, LYRICS & SONG DOWNLOAD at http://SosJuice.com/foodfight ;

A little more than 30 years ago, a teenager named Jadav "Molai" Payeng began burying seeds along a barren sandbar near his birthplace in northern India's Assam region to grow a refuge for wildlife. Not long after, he decided to dedicate his life to this endeavor, so he moved to the site where he could work full-time creating a lush new forest ecosystem. Incredibly, the spot today hosts a sprawling 1,360 acres of jungle that Payeng planted — single-handedly. The Times of India recently caught up with Payeng in his remote forest lodge to learn more about how he came to leave such an indelible mark on the landscape.

It all started way back in 1979, when floods washed a large number of snakes ashore on the sandbar. One day, after the waters had receded, Payeng, only 16 then, found the place dotted with the dead reptiles. That was the turning point of his life.

"The snakes died in the heat, without any tree cover. I sat down and wept over their lifeless forms. It was carnage. I alerted the forest department and asked them if they could grow trees there. They said nothing would grow there. Instead, they asked me to try growing bamboo. It was painful, but I did it. There was nobody to help me. Nobody was interested," says Payeng, now 47.

Dakshinpuri is a working class neighborhood in South Delhi, created during the Emergency in 1975 as part of a mass resettlement campaign of inner-city slum-dwellers to the outskirts of the city. This blog is about the history of Dakshinpuri, as reflected in the stories of its residents--stories about carving a neighborhood out of the wilderness, about urban demolition, water pumps, TV-centers and first electricity bills, about plot cards, bricks and bulldozers.

Dakshinpuri was created as part of the Emergency’s mass resettlement campaign of inner-city slum dwellers to the outskirts of Delhi. The displacement of about 120,000 families and the creation of 27 resettlement colonies, mostly on the periphery of the city, were part of the Emergency’s sweeping urban development plan to beautify and organize the city. According to Emma Tarlo, who cites a DDA (Delhi Development Authority) publication of the time, the demolitions and planting of trees were directly proportional: half a million people were resettled and half a million trees were planted. While Delhi’s poor was relocated to the vast wilderness surrounding Delhi, their former homes were being leveled and converted to parks, stadiums and shopping centers. (While sterilization was often a prerequisite for getting a plot card later on in the Emergency, in Dakshinpuri, which was mostly settled in the summer/monsoon months of 1975, it does not seem to have played a role in the resettlement process.) Dakshinpuri's primarily Dalit residents were given leases for 99 years--and for most, it was the first time they had ever legally owned land.

Pune, India, has developed a a waste-management approach that is improving the environment, as well as the livelihoods and social standing of some of the city’s poorest inhabitants.

Waste-pickers are often uneducated, rural migrants who sift through trash heaps or landfills, looking for plastics and glass that they sell to middlemen by weight, who send them to be recycled.  This informal system results in recycling rates of almost 50 percent for plastics (as compared with 8.2 percent in the United States) — which is why activists call waste-pickers “invisible environmentalists.”

Waste-picking is full of occupational hazards. Waste-pickers sifting through trash with bare hands encounter rusty metal, cut glass, needles and menstrual blood; their life expectancy may be a decade or more below the average. With a daily income of 60 rupees (one dollar) in Pune, most cannot afford proper meals or medical care. Police and security guards harass them, particularly women. Governments offers little protection.

It took years for K.K.P.K.P. to mobilize the waste-pickers, who were scattered and reluctant to take time off work for meetings. As the group came together, however, they found a sympathetic ear in the Pune Municipal Corporation (P.M.C.), the city’s governing body.

That led to the innovation that changed Chandani’s life and has evolved into a waste-management approach that others can learn from. In 2007, the K.K.P.K.P. and Pune’s government got together to create a cooperative called Solid Waste Collection and Handling (Swach). The idea was to engage waste-pickers to handle almost all of the city’s waste, a remarkable departure from other cities, where private contractors haul waste to landfills with trucks. The question was: Could Swach save the Pune government lots of money, improve the environment and improve livelihoods for some of the city’s poorest inhabitants? The answer appears to be yes to all three.

With financing from the IDB, the Favela-Bairro project has helped more than 100 communities.

also see:

http://web.mit.edu/urbanupgrading/upgrading/case-examples/ce-BL-fav.html

"The Inter-American Development Bank funded this US$180 million “slum to neighborhood” project in 1995 in which it sought to integrate existing favelas into the fabric of the city through infrastructure upgrading and service increases. The project involves 253,000 residents in 73 communities. Key to the success of this large project was a committed and flexible city government and the use of intra- and extra-institutional partnerships with NGOs, the private sector, churches, and the general population. Especially instrumental was the use of grass-roots level infrastructure upgrading experts as project managers who could work easily with both the government and with the community members."

Humans began to live in urban settlements about 7 thousand years ago. As humans continued to evolve over the millennia, so too did our cities.

Now that the majority of humans live in cities, we're going to be confronting a new set of problems in urban life. For one thing, natural disasters in cities can cause much greater numbers of fatalities than in sparse, rural communities. So the cities of tomorrow will need to be robust against many kinds of disaster, from earthquakes and floods, to radiation bombardment. It's possible that many cities will built partly under ground, and partly under water. They might even be built inside a single building surrounded by farms. Not only will such structures allow us to conserve space, but layers of earth and water are excellent protection against radiation.

Many future-minded designers and architects believe that cities of the future will survive these kinds of disasters partly by changing the materials we use to build. Instead of dead trees, we'll use living ones, combined with genetically modified algae and other plants that could purify water and air, as well as provide energy. In a recent book,Rachel Armstrong has described what she calls "living architecture," where cities are built with semi-living materials that can repair their own cracks and heal themselves when damaged by a quake or just regular wear and tear. She proposes rescuing Venice from drowning by engineering a living reef underneath the city. It would be made with calcium-extruding protocells that latch onto the city's existing piles, strengthening them and attracting living creatures whose shells will eventually turn into a true ocean reef.

Kimberly Coburn, who founded The Homestead Atlanta, explains why 'old-school' is making a comeback with the modern homesteading movement.

Is there a difference in curriculum for a folk school in a city compared to one serving more rural regions? 

To be honest, that's something we'll have to see moving forward. For the most part, no — sustainability and the ability to care for yourself with aesthetic integrity are of equal value whether you're living on 20 acres or in a high-rise. Of course, certain concessions have to be made and alternative approaches explored to compensate for the lack of time and space facing most urban dwellers, but what is lost in land availability is made up for by availability of resources and community. If, for instance, you took a beginning blacksmithing class with The Homestead Atlanta and really wanted to continue learning, there are a surprising number of forges scattered across the city. One significant difference I've noticed between urban and rural regions in terms of this kind of education is that many of the lost arts were never entirely lost in rural areas. Plenty of people — whether by choice or necessity — maintain a "fix it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" ethic while urban culture seems increasingly dependent on the temporary and the disposable. All the more reason, then, to offer education where it's needed most.

PlanIt is a game about the issues that face local government, designed to get people (especially young people) more involved and understanding of what goes in to managing their communities.

It works like this: A group--say, a planning commission or small business--puts up a few hundred dollars for community investment. Players register on the PlanIt platform, and take part in three "missions." To win pledgeable "coins," they complete "challenges" within each mission. Then the projects with the most pledged coins get real cash to spend.

About half the players so far have been under 18. Gordon says younger people add a lot of competitive spirit, and are important for encouraging others to play. "This is their first introduction to anything to do with civic engagement. They provide really meaningful input into these issues. And not only that, they also tend to motivate the adults."

Urban farmers in Africa are increasingly being recognized as important contributors to the green sector.

... more small farmers are needed to make Africa self-sufficient, IFAD’s 2011 Rural Poverty Report stated. Although the farms are small, they must work efficiently as businesses.

“Smallholder farming can offer a route out of poverty for many,” IFAD President Kanayo Nwanze noted in his report, “but only if it is productive, commercially oriented and well-linked to modern markets.”

The Allotment, a hotel whose culinary focus makes growing and cooking food the fundamental ingredient of the guest experience.

A “grow, teach, eat, and share” idea that links the necessary hotel functions of sourcing, food production, cooking, and serving, the Allotment is composed of four distinct elements–a market, restaurant, rooftop urban farm, and an off-site experience where guests explore the city’s culinary offerings with the hotel’s chefs.

http://www.jovoto.com/projects/rethink-hotels/ideas/21873

More natural environment can soften the blow of toxic stress in early childhood.

A growing body of primarily correlative evidence suggests that, even in the densest urban neighborhoods, negative stress, obesity and other health problems are reduced and psychological and physical health improved when children and adults experience more nature in their everyday lives. These studies suggest that nearby nature can also stimulate learning abilities and reduce the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and we know that therapies using gardening or animal companions do improve psychological health. We also know that parks with the richest biodiversity appear to have a positive impact on psychological well-being and social bonding among humans.

Earlier this month, national security scholar Patrick Doherty published a proposal in Foreign Policy magazine for America’s next “grand strategy,” a plan for how the U.S. should reposition itself in a world defined less by threats from communism or terrorism and more by the global challenge of sustainability. His offering is among a crop of such foreign policy tracts all aiming big ideas at the newly re-inaugurated president.

These treatises usually have little to do with the more prosaic problems of cities, with housing or transportation or unemployment. But part of Doherty’s particular argument snagged our attention: He believes a central piece of American security and strength in the 21st century will reside in walkable neighborhoods.

Walkability, as we typically think of it in cities, is deeply connected to sustainability, public health and economic development. But foreign policy? That was a new one even for us.

Doherty’s basic idea is that pent-up demand for such communities could help power a new American economic engine in the same way that suburban housing (and all of the consumption that came with it) made America economically and globally powerful in the Cold War era.

Emily Badger

31 Jan 2013