Cocoon Societies

Thinking Positively About Slums

New Zealand is a cocoon society. It is focused upon cotton wool swaddling of its citizens, with the government and its agencies responsible to prevent harm or danger. The culture and prevailing political ideology is fixated with stopping harm occurring, rather than with mitigating downstream damage. This ideology is legislatively prescribed in the Occupational Safety and Health regime, the ACC regime, the Resource Management Act, and literally thousands upon thousands of standards, rules, and regulations written by bureaucratic process and enforced by state functionaries designed to prevent unintended harmful consequences ever occurring.

It is no surprise, therefore, that a cocoon society struggles to increase its standard of living. Risk is so mitigated it stops human ambition, drive, and creativity in its tracks. It makes both labour and capital productively weak and far less creative and dynamic.

A recent article in an environmentalist magazine, Prospect, argued that slums have enormous unintended beneficial effects for humanity. The point is that when human beings are faced with great difficulties in a society that lets them be, they prove to be remarkably adaptive, creative, and very effective at solving their own problems in a way that benefits the whole, as an unintended consequence. Slums, the article argued, are good for the environment, if you take a developmental view, rather than a static snapshot approach.

The article, by Stewart Brand was entitled, How Slums Can Save the Planet. It argues that whilst 60 million people in the developed world are leaving the countryside and drifting to cities every year in the longer run it is a very good thing.

Now, in New Zealand, we would prefer not to have slums in our cities. We want to be cocooned from such developments. Our noses wrinkle at the mere imagination of the olfactory offence. But times are a-changing--at least elsewhere in the world.

The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”

Slums, apparently, are very successful in raising the living standards of their occupants. They do so efficiently and cost-effectively. And there is not a risk-prevention agency in sight! The reason? The remarkable creativity, energy, and adaptability of human beings--at least when they are not being enervated by thousands of rules, and sapped by finger-wagging no-no's.

The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

What makes slums so effective at gradual and steady improvement? In the first place, they are remarkably efficient in utilizing resources and in recycling and re-using anything and everything. Out of this comes division of labour, expertise, trade, commerce, and rising standards of living.

Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.”

Secondly, slums develop into concentrated urban centres which use resources most cost-effectively.

In his 1985 article, Calthorpe made a statement that still jars with most people: “The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.” “Green Manhattan” was the inflammatory title of a 2004 New Yorker article by David Owen. “By the most significant measures,” he wrote, “New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world…The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than 800 times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful.” He went on to note that this very compactness forces people to live in the world’s most energy-efficient apartment buildings. . . .

Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 per cent of the land. Demographers expect developing countries to stabilise at 80 per cent urban, as nearly all developed countries have. On that basis, 80 per cent of humanity may live on 3 per cent of the land by 2050. Consider just the infrastructure efficiencies. According to a 2004 UN report: “The concentration of population and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit cost of piped water, sewers, drains, roads, electricity, garbage collection, transport, health care, and schools.” In the developed world, cities are green because they cut energy use; in the developing world, their greenness lies in how they take the pressure off rural waste.

A standard objection is to point to the enormous problems faced by rapidly growing cities. And the problems are real. But human ingenuity, creativity, and adaptability enable cities to solve the problems and develop above and beyond. In New Zealand we have got sucked into an ideology which says prevention of the problems in the first place is better than not having to solve problems. When it comes to economic development most often this is not the case. Societies which try to move from subsistence agriculture to developed industrial economies without going through the pressures of urban population drift and struggles of Dickensian England have succumbed to wishful thinking. The chaotic stench of slum life is a necessary stage in most developing economies. And people in those circumstances provide their own best longer term solutions.

Whilst it has been fashionable in an elitist kind of way to tut-tut over the harshness of urban living conditions in England as it was going through the Industrial Revolution, it is conveniently forgotten that although it is reported that one could smell London from over ten miles away, thousands upon thousands of people drifted to London and other urban centres because their recently left rural living conditions were substantially worse. People will courageously and willingly accept difficult living conditions if two factors exist: firstly, that urban slum dwelling is marginally better than the rural impoverishment whence they recently came; secondly, that the slum provides the prospect of improvement in the future.

Finally, New Zealand's attempt to prevent environmental despoilation at all costs and "trade" on an image/value of being clean and green is tailor made for the prevailing ideology of cocoonism. However, it locks in economic stagnation. Paradoxically, it is also likely to lead to greater environmental damage in the longer term.