Smart slums: utopian or dystopian vision of the future? | Global Development Professionals Network | The Guardian. Life in a smart city is a frictionless; free of traffic congestion, optimally lit, with everything from bins to buildings constantly reporting their status and managing their interactions with residents. The smart slum is still a peripheral idea, but we can speculate on the likely impact of extending this ‘smartness’ to slums and make two competing claims. Firstly, that development professionals should be wary of smart slums repeating some of the negative impacts of ICT4D; and secondly, that a push for smart slums could be appropriated for social justice. The idea of the smart city is a vision of a networked urbanism. The promise is that environmental monitoring and feedback from embedded sensors everywhere will simultaneously deliver greener and more productive cities.
The smart city itself is by no means a new idea. The idea of smart slums shares a great deal with the way slum mapping has adopted new technologies and participatory processes. Creative new ways cities are handling slums. Skyscrapers and shanties, gleaming malls and run-down markets, palatial houses and the poor guys who build them: those are the divides in cities like Mumbai, Nairobi and Manila. Rich and poor do not much mingle. But a movement's afoot to change that. It aims to integrate the poor into the urban bloodstream, instead of shunting them from sight. For this "inclusive cities" movement, urban renewal doesn't require razing slums and markets. Instead, a world-class city embraces its informal workers, those who work for cash and usually lie outside the tax system, uncounted. Some shining examples: Bogotá recently incorporated 15,000 informal trash pickers into its municipal rubbish and recycling program.
In February, India's parliament passed a law to regulate and protect street vendors, and last year saw the creation of the first worldwide domestic workers union. More from OZY.com: A Hong Kong gem The hot new players in Silicon Valley San Francisco's real development challenge Ozy.com. See The Stunning Sprawl Of Mexico City's 20 Million People, From Above. More than 20 million people live in Mexico City and its sprawling suburbs--a number that’s hard to even begin to comprehend until you see images like the ones above from photographer Pablo Lopez Luz. Lopez had been documenting the sprawling urban landscape of the city from the ground at first.
“I was interested in showing the seemingly unending spread of the city towards the hillsides and still virgin landscape as an example of the overgrowth of the city, and also this particular relationship between man and space,” he says. But from the air, he soon realized, Mexico City is a completely different experience. “From the ground it seems like there is no end to the vast city, especially on a busy day. However, it’s only from the sky that you actually get to see what the busyness and overgrowth of Mexico City actually looks like.
It's a very strange feeling, especially if you are flying over the city by night.” [Image: Courtesy of Pablo Lopez Luz] China's Tanka boat people's floating homes. Ancient fishing people in China have built a village on water home to thousands The Tanka people, named 'gypsies of the sea', live in floating homes and seafood farms By Daily Mail Reporter Published: 13:23 GMT, 9 October 2013 | Updated: 19:39 GMT, 9 October 2013 This community in southeast China is home to 7,000 fishermen refusing to conform to modern lives, remaining in their traditional floating homes on the sea. The Tanka people, also called boat people or 'gypsies of the sea' can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty where local fishermen settled on their vessels to avoid wartime chaos on the mainland.
The floating fishermen's village is located in Ningde City in southeast China’s Fujian province. Working the waves: Named the 'gypsies on the sea', the fishermen in Fujian lives by the same traditions as their ancestors Whatever floats your boat: Wooden houses and seafood farms build a water community in Ningde City in southeast China. Tomorrow's cities: Rio de Janeiro's bid to become a smart city. 8 September 2013Last updated at 21:09 ET By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter Rio: Latin America's first 'smart city'? Rio de Janeiro's famously chaotic favelas are as much a landmark of the city as the Christ statue or Sugarloaf Mountain but few would see them as the natural home to smart technologies. However, a remarkable project is under way that is already changing lives, and it is one of which the city government, keen to put Rio on the map as Latin America's first smart city, should take note.
Morro dos Prazeres favela is one of the areas that has been mapped by teenagers The project, co-ordinated by Unicef in collaboration with local non-government organisation CEDAPS (Centro de Promocao da Saude) has local teenagers digitally mapping five favelas in order to highlight some of the challenges for those living there. The data is uploaded to a website and added to an online map. It is proving an effective way of getting changes made. How smart? Camera view School campaign “Start Quote. Why Slums Could Be The Key To Sustainable Urban Energy System Transformation.
This is a community post, untouched by our editors. Over the past few years, anthropogenic climate change has become a central issue worldwide. There is a consensus now that rapid global warming by more than 2°C would overburden societies’ capacity to adapt. In order to restrict global warming to a mean temperature change of 2°C a fast transformative counteraction is required. In the words of Westley et al. (2011) – “…the transformative development may require radical, systemic shifts in deeply held values and beliefs, patterns of social behavior, and multi-level governance and management regimes”.
Therefore the global energy system must fundamentally be decarbonized by 2050. It is evident that most of the growth in the world’s population for the near future will take place in cities and towns of the developing world. Urbanization is quite new global phenomena. Today more than half of the world’s total population is living in the cities. Striking Photos of Mongolia's Hillside Slums - Mark Byrnes. Mongolia, a country with one of the world’s fastest growing economies, is also the least dense, with 2.8 million people spread out over an area approximately three times the size of France (slightly over 600,000 square miles).
Each year, between 30,000 to 40,000 people migrate to the nation's capital, Ulan Bator, home to more than half of Mongolia's population. View Larger Map More than half of Ulan Bator's residents live in "ger" districts, where there's no access to basic public services like roads, plumbing or electricity. In the winter, residents burn coal and trash to stay warm, which can produce pollution bad enough to cause problems at the airport's air control tower. "Ger" refers to the round tents synonymous with Mongolia's nomadic traditions. Reuters photographer Carlos Barria documented life in Ulan Bator's gers. A boy walks at an area known as a ger district, where some residents live in traditional Mongolian tents, in Ulan Bator June 22, 2013. Inside Caracas' Tower of David, the World's Tallest Slum. William Gibson's Bridge trilogy is incredible because of the portrait of post-decline life it paints: Thousands of people living in an outcast society extra-legally built within and upon the Bay Bridge in San Francisco.
But you needn't look to fiction to find such a strikingly modern version of a slum. In the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, a city which has seen a couple decades of economic turmoil, as many as 2,500 people have taken residence in the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, an unfinished skyscraper that's also known as the Tower of David. The 45-story building was original funded in the early 90s by financier David Brillembourg, for whom the tower is named. He died in 1993, and when Venezuela's banking crisis hit in 1994, the building—which was half-finished, lacking elevators, installed utilities, and guard rails—the government took it over. It's not an easy life, as the Vocativ folks show. @derektmead. Mohammadreza Momeni - Брачную ночь. 「屋根の上の人生」イランの奇妙な街 "Sar Agha Seyyed" の不思議な画像たち. (┘°Д°)┘ ﾅﾝﾀﾞｺﾚﾊ?! なにがどうなってるの？？
まるでおもちゃのよう。 イスファハーン の東200km、イラン南西部ザグロス山脈にある遊牧民の部族の街「 Sar Agha Seyyed 」は、あまりに急斜面にあるために僕らがよく知っている "道路"がなく 、代わりに屋根の上の空間をインフラとして使っています モンゴルによる征服、オスマン・ペルシャ戦争の世紀を経てこの地に安息を見つけた部族の祖先。 これは妄想力を駆り立てられるっっ 行ってみたいなぁ このような急斜面の街が、イランには他にもあるそうです Masuleh Abyaneh Uraman なんかドキドキしてきた. Climbing and the Rio de Janeiro favelas - Planetmountain.com, climbing, News, mountaineering. Asa Firestone and the Centro de Escalada Urbana, the climbing initiative to help children living in the favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Can climbing help kids from the slums of Rio?
This is the question which Asa Firestone asked himself in 2003. The American climber had visited Rio de Janeiro intent of climbing the marvellous granite Two Brothers Peak above the world-famous Ipanema Beach, but at the time the mountain which rises directly out of one of the largest favela in Brasil - the 200,000-strong Rocinha favela - was considered simply too dangerous. "I was frustrated that a peak could not be climbed because of crime. " explained Firestone, who then realised "(...) that the local resource for climbing presented a unique opportunity for kids from the slums of Rio to replace the risks of drugs, violence, and gangs, with the healthier risks of rock climbing and adventure. " Brazil: Sustainable Fashion Born In Favelas Eurasia Review. By Tierramerica By Fabiana Frayssinet A Brazilian designer has taken fashion from the exclusivity of the catwalk to the reality of the favela, to demonstrate that styles, trends and fads are also born in these poor neighborhoods of cities like Rio de Janeiro.
The Mangueira favela or shantytown, home to some 18,000 people, bears no resemblance whatsoever to Milan or Paris. Brazil Once overrun by drug trafficking-related violence, Mangueira is currently undergoing a process of “pacification”– a government strategy combining police repression and social spending. “We’re the ones who set trends. A different type of braid, a shoe style, a stitching detail on a blouse, or some other idea that occurs one day to a woman in the favela: all of it eventually ends up on the other side of the world, or “out there” as Oliveira sees it. These new trends spread quickly through the city, because “the people up here are very creative.
Oliveira is one of the students in the sewing class. Brazil’s favela cuisine tries to seize the spotlight. RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – At the top of the Morro da Providência favela, Rosana Batista Damasceno, 42, proudly displays the new graffiti sign on the façade of her bar, Sabor das Loiras e Gelada do Moreno. The establishment will be one of the 16 entrants among the Brazilian pubs, bars, restaurants and family residences competing in the inaugural Flavors of the Port Culinary and Cultural Festival from noon to 10 p.m. local time on Nov. 24-25.
All of the contestants are in the Morro da Providência favela, the neighboring Morro do Pinto favela or on the streets of the port area in downtown Rio de Janeiro, which is being revitalized and renamed Porto Maravilha (Marvelous Port). The favelas’ streets and alleys will feature musical performances and booths selling crafts. Admission is free. “The community is already familiar with my cooking. In order to draw in tourists, maps for the festival were distributed throughout the city. Rio de Janeiro’s first favela “My business wasn’t on the books.