even slums have their apologists

"cities are changing everything."

"dense concentrations of light dominate continents and cluster on coastlines, revealing their own patterns. the united states and europe are completely alight. a thick band of light extends all the way from europe to the middle east, across siberia to northern asia. the lights then spread down the brightly profiled landmasses of japan and south korea, spill along the eastern half of china to indonesia, and collect in a pool that illumintes the entire indian subcontinent. the southern and northern coasts of africa are ringed with light, and the glow in the eastern regions of south america extends around the southern and western coastlines....these vast areas of light are evidence of a new ecological order- of the urban biome we are creating."
jeb brugman. welcome to the urban revolution: how cities are changing the world.


"the squatters have no electricity- or, if they are lucky, they loop wires through the trees and pirate service from far away poles. but would you have electricity if your local utility hadn't run cables near your home? there are 1 billion squatters in the world today, almost one in six people on the planet. if current trends continue there will be 2 billion by 2030 and 3 billion (more than one-third of humanity) by the mid-point of the twenty-first century."

from world changing" a user's guide for the 21st century.

"the majority of the world's poor no longer live in inner cities. since 1970 the largest share of world urban population growth has been absorbed by the slum communities on the periphery of third world cities. the 'horizontalization' of cities is often as astonishing as their population growth: khartoum in 1988 for example was 48 times larger than in 1955. indeed the suburban zones of many poor cities atre now so vast as to suggest the need to think peripherallly."

"but the principal function of the third world urban edge is as a human dump. in some cases urban waste and unwanted immigrants end up together, as in such infamous "garbage slums" as the aptly named quarantina outside beirut. hoilar kusha outside khartoum, santa cruz meyechualco in mexico city, the former smoky mountain in manilla, or the huge dhapa dump and slum on the fringe of kolkata."
mike davis. planet of slums.

i tried to read brugman's book...honest...but i've thrown it across the room so many times the binding is split and the pages are falling out...they're numbered but i dont have the will to put them back in order...which is alright...it was gibberish even when it was functional...jeb must have something of a differen photo of earth at night than i do ...can't argue about western europe...but the light begins to thin out when you get to poland...it gets a bit sparse west of the mississippi too...siberia? where'd he come up with that? japan is lit up but they seem to have encountered something of a problem there snd may be a bit dimmer these days...a few people live in the interior of australia but they have a culture that seriously predates electricity and are probably not overly concerned... have a look at the amazon basin or central africa...millions, if not billions of folks there...but not much light...jeb argues ( among other things) that cities are an efficient way to distribute resources...and he could be right about that...but they're energy sinks too...electrical balck holes...some are better than others...new york is surprisingly efficient...but that may be because they learned to turn off the lights when they leave the room so the average new yorker uses only 4696 killowatt hours of electricity a year...san fanciscans use 6753...our neighbors in chicago use 8143...when you go towards the south and west west of the mississippi it gets truly ugly....pheonix 13344, houston 14542...and dallas tops out at 16116 ( yearbook statistical energy review 2010) lots of air conditioners out there... while cities may be an efficient way to allocate resources...in an ideal world....they are energy pigs...(and one has to wonder how much of that energy goes to the poor)...to sustain themselves they need lots of high quality energy and if we are not on the cusp of running out of that particular commodity, we are on the cusp of a radical change in how it is produced and how much it will cost...so jeb, not everyone in dallas will be able to keep the house at 65 degrees in august anymore and the likelyhood of the urban poor in lima or lagos ever seeing a fair and equitable share of that energy is as remote as reality is for you...oil is under $100 a barrel for the first time in weeks ($99.95 last time i looked) but it won't stay there for any great length of time...energy inertia due to sunk costs and human reliance on habit to obviate thought will change the way things pan out in the urban landscape...none of this will be as easy as the free marketeers want us to believe...they are selling a bill of goods to preserve themselves for as long as possible...the dialectic grinds on and no-one ( not even me) is sure of what's next...what, i wonder, happens when opec decides to price oil in euros or yuan instead of dollars? i wonder.