Developing Affordable Housing Ecosystems World Wide
By: David A. Smith
“Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water.”
– Noah Cross, Chinatown
“‘Course I’m respectable. I’m old.”
Someday I’ll post in detail about Chinatown, because it (and its spiritual cousin, True Confessions) is a great film about housing development and municipal infrastructure, whose economic power did much to define [...]
By: David A. Smith
Statistics are not stories – but then again, stories are not statistics, and statistics represent the totality of real life.
We choose to remember our highlights and lowlights, our moments of intensity – and we choose to forget anything that is drab, commonplace, routine, or redolent of the profane. So, for [...]
By: David A. Smith
They’re called zabaleen, after an Arabic phrase meaning ‘garbage people’, and you wouldn’t want to be one:
Most of the inhabitants of Garbage City are Coptic Christians.
An estimated 60,000 – 70,000 Zabaleen live in an area known locally as Garbage City, and are mostly descendants of poor farmers from Upper Egypt who settled [...]
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1].
Yesterday’s exploration of 1984 (a devastating movie, by the way) developed the poverty of slums: how Winston Smith and all his like were ground into subservience by squalid living conditions, deliberate under-maintenance, and oppressive overt surveillance – where both work and home are merely a low-grade prison.
Big Brother is watching you
Early [...]
Continuing our occasional series on the Ultimate Future City:
The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov, 11/07
The Naked Sun, by Isaac Asimov, 11/07
The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg, 12/07
Diaspar, The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke, 3/08
Cities in Flight, Part 1 and Part 2: 8/08
Perhaps the most famous year in fiction begins in the [...]
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