“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 Los Angeles – a city that grew where it wanted to grow.

Self-gerrymandered with self-interest in mind: Los Angeles

In a similar way, the typhoon-battered city of Manila is now proposing to grow by relocation, moving those who lived on its squalid and polluted river banks out to a new city a-building.  As reported in Bulatlat:

16 Oct 2009: Relocation Solution Poses a Dilemma to Slum Dwellers Made Homeless by Ondoy

Days after Ondoy struck, the government declared that it would no longer allow these poor Filipinos to return to their shattered homes.

Manila waterway slums before the typhoons

What is the ‘home’ to go back to?  Disaster can create an urban palimpsest, wiping away everything but the land itself.  So, as in Joe Slovo in Cape Town, we have the tension – an urgent need to do something very quickly, and a unique opportunity to do something very profound.

MANILA – In the aftermath of typhoon Ondoy, many were quick to blame the urban poor living along the creeks, waterways and riverbanks of Metro Manila. Their shanties and their garbage block these sewage systems, hence worsening the impact of the typhoon, so goes the familiar criticism.

Nonsense.  While I have not toured the now-destroyed riverbank slums, the pictures I saw at the Asia-Pacific Housing Forum, coupled with the scale of flooding, make this claim just about impossible. 

Days after the disaster, the government declared that it would no longer allow these poor Filipinos to return to their shattered homes.  Vice President Noli de Castro, who also chairs the Housing Urban Development Coordinating Council, confirmed in a news report that the families who were living along waterways and riverbanks would no longer be allowed to rebuild their homes in those areas.

Mr. de Castro’s long been interested in housing and slums

Anti-poor, or another reason?

He said government-acquired lands outside of the metropolis are more than enough to give homes to the displaced victims of Ondoy.

A good idea … if built fast enough.

De Castro offered 1,400 houses that may be utilized as relocation sites for displaced victims of Ondoy.

Sounds better …

Of these, 400 units are located in Towerville Resettlement in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan; 250 units in Southville 4 in Sta. Rosa, Laguna; 500 units in Southville 5 in Biñan, Laguna; and 250 units in Southville 5-A, also in Biñan.

Metro Manila – growing like Los Angeles

That’s the alternative offered – not a return to the insecure, filthy, disease-ridden rabbit warrens you knew, but to cleanly blocked and properly built new house.  There’s a powerful case for it.

“Our cities are so bad I sometimes wonder if we should just build completely new ones from scratch.”

– Quote from a Mexican expert at the AHI symposium

Mexico City, 28-30 October, 2009

Manila waterway slums before the typhoons

Imagine if you could de-densify the slums by expanding the city.  Can you?

He said there are 5,721 lots that may be developed to accommodate the displaced families.

Reblocking – Solly Angel’s arterial grid of dirt roads, plus security of tenure in your own plot of land – is a powerful combination.  Give people s plan and confidence in their piece of it and they will build.

“Technically, there is nothing wrong with the relocation of the families living along the areas that the government deems as danger zones,” Jon Vincent Marin, spokesman of the urban-poor group Kadamay, told Bulatlat.

A group worthy of your support

I bumped into Kadamay at Asia-Pacific.  I liked their thinking and tend to trust their perspectives.  Nor is he an unthinking doomsayer:

Marin emphasized that their organization understands the direct and immediate threat that storm surges could bring to these families.

Yet he’s a further realist:

“But if they will be relocated to areas where there is no social services and job opportunities, then there is something wrong with the relocation,” he pointed out.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Will the government follow through by creating not just a relocation camp but an actual city beyond the city?

“The government thinks that the only solution to the problem is to relocate urban-poor communities outside Metro Manila where they would not survive,” Marin said.

People move to cities in search of a better life.  Relocating them to the far countryside without income opportunities is like pulling up weeds and transplanting them to the desert; they’ll die, and your city will still have weeds.

He said these families would eventually return to the metropolis and live along the riverbanks and waterways because their condition in the relocation areas are worse than what they would be leaving behind in Metro Manila.

One cannot repatriate people into the rural poverty and expect them to stay here.  But you can bring the city to the country.  Paging Noah Cross.

Or should we?

“I’m going to bring LA to the water.”

As a participant at AHI’s recent Mexico City symposium on land irresolution commented, “People can become urbanized without moving.”

Manila waterway slums before the typhoons

Chinatown’s Noah Cross wanted the valley to become Los Angeles simply to boost the value of its land.  He had no thought of affordability except insofar as it could be achieved by building blocks and locks of houses.  “The future, Mister Gitts, the future!” 

Marin said the mere location of the resettlement areas pose problems to the families. “Most of these relocation sites are located in remote areas. They would have no source of income there. Naturally, they would want to go back to the metropolis, where at least they would have something to eat.”

He didn’t foresee that LA would grow so vast that even the valley would be built-up and dense, or that its most enduring feature would be the marvelous grid of streets, not the boxy bungalows he scattered like a human orchard.  He can be excused his lack of foresight regarding the need for social infrastructure, but the Manilans have no such excuse.

“At the right time, and in the right place, a man is capable of just about anything.”

In a recent relief operation, the Citizen’s Disaster Response Center found that most of the houses in the resettlement area in Marilao, Bulacan, had been washed away. “The houses there were made from substandard materials,” deputy executive director Carlos Padolina told Bulatlat. He said the walls were mere layers of hallow blocks and without the thick metal braces inside that would have supported these.

You must fix the houses.  You must fix the income-generation possibilities.

Should the “relocatees” choose to continue working in Metro Manila, they would have to spend so much for their fares to go home to their new homes, the transportation cost eating into the little income they have.

Manila waterway slums before the typhoon: bathing

In such a case, the families would solve their problem by geographically dividing: the earner in the city, his or her family in the country.  That’s family-destabilizing.  So is this:

Marin added that most of the relocation sites do not have access to basic services such as hospitals and schools.

City-building involves building new economies.  If you want people to come, you must build it.  Build a social infrastructure: homes, schools, jobs, shopping, safety.  Expand the city; bring it to the country.

And since the framework of the housing services of the government is profit-oriented, the resettlement units are not given free.

That’s sound policy: People value only what they pay for.

Be it ever some humble, you should pay something for it

Only this week, de Castro said that the resettlement for the victims of Ondoy will be offered at an “affordable” package of two-year moratorium on their payments, with a monthly amortization of roughly P200 at 6% per annum that is payable in 30 years.

That’s an extremely affordable monthly payment. 

But Marin said that “even if it’s just P300 to P500 a month, we have to consider the kind of jobs that they have. They have children to feed and to send to school.”

Yes, affordability is measured relative to income.  It has to be.

“For a genuine housing service for the poor,” Marin said, “a big fund is needed.” But he told Bulatlat that these projects of the government only receive 0.4 to 0.6 percent of the total budget for the expenditure of the government.

Affordable housing is expensive for government.  Money is a gating factor. 

No entry into housing without money

More money is better – but some money is much better than no money, and smart money is best of all.

 “Relocation should not only include houses. It should include social services and livelihood for the people,” Marin said.

In a statement, Kadamay reiterated that the devastation that Ondoy has brought could be the perfect opportunity for the government to change their housing projects for the poor.

Yes, if one can move quickly and wisely.  Not easy.

“We should all remember that the poor communities living along the riverbanks and waterways are only there because of too much poverty, lack of job opportunities, source of livelihood and social services,” he said. “They are not dusts that the government can sweep under the rug.” (Bulatlat.com)

If that happens, it will be as Noah Cross put it:

“‘Course I’m respectable.  I’m old.  Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

– Noah Cross, Chinatown

“And I lasted long enough”

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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 instance, even though we spend an average of fifteen minutes a day communing with our inner selves – roughly 1% of our lives, day in and day out – and via these moments of Zen delivering roughly two pounds of dump per day, one will find nary a mention thereof in our fiction, our journalism. We all know it, but we all overlook it, and our future selves will have no knowledge of it.

“The whole of this built-up area is commonly called Manchester, and contains about 400,000 people. This is probably an underestimate rather than an exaggeration. Owing to the curious lay-out of the town it is quite possible for someone to live for years in Manchester and to travel daily to and from his work without ever seeing a working-class quarter or coming into contact with an artisan. He who visits Manchester simply on business or for pleasure need never see the slums, mainly because the working-class districts and the middle-class districts are quite distinct.”

– Friedrich Engels, Condition of the Working-Class in England, 1844

The nuclear family

Indeed, if an alien species were to reconstruct our lives based solely on what we report, rather than what we experience, their view would be skewed indeed.

And its nucleus?

The more distant our histories, the more they are made up of tales about kings and emperors, slaughters and famines, and the less they actually capture ordinary life. So we are left with fables and epics, and propaganda repurposed as factual reference – until, that is, somebody actually excavates the slums, as explored in this story from The Guardian, UK:

“This is our archaeological handbook,” says Chris Wild, brandishing The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, a muddy, thumbed paperback. “Engels.”

You’ll forgive me if I look for a second opinion

We take our narratives wherever we find our primary sources, and the closer they are to actual grit, the better.

This, though, is far from being the only contemporary account of late 19th-century living conditions in this part of inner-city Manchester. In 1870, the Manchester Guardian – as this paper was then known – published a series of articles on the city’s slums, opening with a scene of 18 adults and several babies squeezed round a single fireplace.

Only 140 years ago, and yet we are limited to a handful of texts of unverifiable reliability.

A find from the archaeological dig of the area that housed Manchester’s poor in the 19th century. Photograph: Mike Pitts

Along with Engels’ account, the newspaper’s archive reports proved influential in the decision to investigate this site.

Every now and then, I’ve teased about archeological digs in mundane urban sites. I’ve since changed my mind – those infill locations are the only record we are likely to find of the life ordinary people actually lived, as opposed to the prismatic records of fiction or journalism yellow or otherwise. Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization has a truly mind-altering appendix on Roman pots.

Everything you always wanted to deduce from pots …

In particular, Ward-Perkins uses pots’ very ubiquity – their cheapness, utility in many forms, and durability as shards – to show just how much powerful evidence can be extracted from the statistics surrounding their prevalence, distribution, and condition. Though tabulations tell tales different from masterpieces, they are no less valid for doing so.

Not one to leave an investigation unfinished, the Guardian has today returned to the same streets (Miller, Dantzic and Angel) near the city’s Victoria Station.

Near the river, near the railway station = probable 19th century slum

All that remains of those slums are street patterns, a handful of reconstructed museums, records … and whatever trash we can find in the soil below.

Soon I’m kneeling on the ground in an area where Engels described “cattle-sheds for human beings.”

That slum is long gone – today nothing remains above ground but plaques.

In the post-industrial city, downtown is rich, not poor

Archaeologists are uncovering some of the worst of these slums, the subdivided cellars where people shared beds or slept in doorways while pigs ate human waste in alleys above. A collection of rubbish – bottles, a woman’s shoe, broken crockery – lies on the dirt before me.

Aside from connecting us to their humanity, these quotidian objects can tell stories about household composition, wealth, and consumption. It’s painstaking compilation work, without which we have only anecdotes, not statistics.

Little more than a century ago, this part of Manchester, then the powerhouse of the industrial revolution, was as near to hell on earth as you are likely to get in peacetime. The poor, including thousands who fled the Irish potato famine around 1850, came here for the work. Many of them would have had jobs in a large Arkwright mill on the edge of this site.

History is selective; we know what Arkwright looked like; his workers are for the most part faceless.

We have paintings of Arkwright, but not of his workers

They suffered industrial injury, cholera, TB and typhus; consumed adulterated food and contaminated water; and lived in a maze of wet, filthy, light-deprived rooms and passages.

Britain at Play, 1943

At the end of Dantzic street was a stone-flagged area that became a playground in the 1880s (LS Lowry painted it as Britain at Play in 1943).

Lowry was born in 1887 and began painting seriously in 1905. We can see his pictures as depicting the panoply of the vernacular, much like Brueghel.

Hunters in the Snow, 1565

By combining near-contemporaneous images with carefully catalogued descriptions of the finds, we can build a picture of the unknown:

The stone flags were to stop illegal excavation and sale of the soil for fertiliser: it contained the mass graves of some 40,000 paupers.

Aside from the mute testimony of forty thousand dead, that is a mine of information. Nutrition, hygiene, disease, living conditions, affordable technology – all can be gleaned by painstaking excavation, documentation, and extrapolation.

“Victorian squalor”

By the 1950s the houses had gone, through a combination of slum clearance and wartime bombing. Today, it’s a car park.

Curiously, that preserves it for later investigation.

Meanwhile, in 1863 the newly founded Co-operative Society opened its offices a couple of blocks away. It stayed put, so now a collection of listed buildings, one of them as recent as 1962, fills 20 acres. It is, says the Co-op, the largest regeneration site in Manchester. In 2012 its huge new HQ will rise over the Angel Meadow car park.

When the urban tomb is opened, knowledge can be gained; and if not captured then, it will be irrecoverable. It’s worth spending a few bucks – preferably the public’s bucks, not imposing this as an unfunded mandate on the unlucky developer – to take the time and fine what can be found.

English slum children, 1912

It is now August, and day three of a nine-week excavation. Even within the profession, industrial archaeology remains a controversial area; some academics, especially, perhaps, historians, still question the need for digging the remains of such recent times.

“They say we’ve got all the information,” says Wild.

Maybe we have the narrative. We lack the detail – and the detail reshapes the narrative. New technology is uncovering new insights into the Roman Empire, particularly about its economy and hence about the structure of its whole society.

“But we’re testing the texts.”

The slums of Manchester are much more relevant today than Rome is, because what they were can show us how they formalized, knowledge that is directly, immediately relevant to the challenges of formalizing slums in today’s global south.

The historic maps, for example, are proving inconsistent.

The map is not the territory. The story is not the history.

Alfred Korzybski: “These aren’t merely semantic distinctions.”

Wild hopes they will be able to show the actual house plans, and he is convinced his work will reveal details overlooked by contemporary accounts.

Details like population density. Details like frequency of indoor plumbing. Location of water sources. The vitals of a city’s functioning.

Information that could be of immense value in demonstrating to the global south that their problems are not a universe apart from those faced by the global north – and, for that matter, in reminding the north that we too had these festering dens.

We stop at the foot of a ceramic toilet, dating from the late 19th century and cemented into a small, square floor.

The “filthy pan closet” – 1887

Beneath, explains Wild, lies the earth of an earlier pail closet – just a bucket under a plank.

Even this is much cleaner than was the reality

Map that against mortality rates and you can find something astonishing – like the cause of cholera – and use that for something revolutionary – like eliminating urban cholera. Or something more prosaic – like the tempo and sequence of private capital improvement – and maybe a road map to improving informal settlements in the global south.

Broken drains protrude from the side of the trench, and cellar walls made from poor-quality bricks bow under pressure. These were once homes.

From such pipes we can reconstruct the evolution of Manchester’s municipal infrastructure, and how long it took public infrastructure to catch up to catch up with private investment and exploitation. By dating the joins, we can reconstruct the sequence. We can retroactively map slum upgrading, nineteenth-century style. Properly interpreted and expressed, this could be hugely valuable information right now, for in slums are revolutions and terrorists born.

The Uprising, depicting 1848 and the overthrow of King Louis-Philippe

Plenty of archeological raw material is there for the learning.

Just one cubic meter of inner-city Manchester would be expected to generate more artifacts than found in a century of excavation at Stonehenge.

Think of that – think of the incredible richness of information that could be found.

“There were more people living in this part of Manchester than in the whole of Britain in the bronze age,” he says. “This is the archaeology of the masses.”

The ones forgotten.

Daumier, The Burden

The thimbles and toys, the bits of clothes and china, have a poignant association with known events, and, potentially, named individuals. With such objects Jackson anticipates links with Manchester’s People’s History Museum, due to re-open soon with a new extension – and with the Co-op’s own archive.

We are all children of slumdwellers.

“I want the younger generation to see this,” says Wild, looking across a row of Victorian lodging-house cellars. “We should help the rest of the world not to make the mistakes we made.”

Or fix them faster.

Ever tried.

Ever failed.

No matter.

Try again.

Fail again.

Fail better.

– Samuel Beckett

Daumier, The Laundress

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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 in the city in the 1950s. By virtue of their being Coptic Christians and of their occupation, the zabaleen are discriminated against, and face compounded hardships brought about by the pervasive corruption and kleptocracy of Egypt’s governance. Since they’re not Muslims, social services provided by Islamic organizations are not extended to them as well.

But their lives, which until four months ago were merely difficult, have now become even harder, for as the Boston Globe reported last June, the Egyptian government decided their mode of living represented a health hazard – a result which has had remarkable unintended consequences that tell us something profound about slums.

Zabaleen pigs, before they were slaughtered

CAIRO – A bent man walks with a sack of garbage draped over him, hiding all but his legs as he lopes up the hill toward women and children with quick hands and shrewd eyes for spotting things of value.

Trash trailing off him, he teeters around a corner and disappears into a parade of bent men. Sacks drop and flies gather in dark, humming whirls. Hands scrape plastic and rip cardboard, but a sound is missing.

The squeal is gone.

Pigs are not to blame for the so-called swine flu, which in any case has not been found in this hilltop slum, but trucks flanked by armed police have come anyway and hauled away the pigs.

Raised by Coptic Christian garbage collectors who fattened them with trash and sold them to non-Muslim butchers, the animals were among the 300,000 pigs the government ordered corralled and culled. Their silence means that what scant prosperity there was amid these cliffs has vanished.

A zabaleen boy and his family’s pigs, in the time before

As amplified in a later Boston Globe article (whose text is in burnt orange), the zabaleen were not only slum dwellers but a society of ragpickers:

For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city.  They collected the trash, sold the recyclables, and fed the organic waste to their pigs – which they then slaughtered and ate.

[In spring, 2009], President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed in order to prevent the spread of the [H1N1] disease.

Bound for the slaughter

As I’ve previously posted, ragpicking in a slumdweller’s profession as old as slums. 

Manet, The Ragpicker, circa 1869

Informal professions have a few advantages:

They require little formal education.

They need no permits.

They reward initiative, enterprise, and a strong work ethic.

The law tends not to enforce against them, since they are peaceable and provide a useful service no one else wants to do.

One of 15 members of a ragpickers’ co-op, Sao Paulo

“Doing the jobs Americans won’t” has become a rallying cry for the immigration debate, and whatever one thinks about immigration, it’s certainly true that throughout history, some professions have been done only by those who could find no other.

In economic terms, everybody’s trash becomes somebody else’s job:

Distasteful though we might find it, it is a profession:

Man and donkey hauling trash back to Garbage City

“How will I feed my children now? I’ve lost 70% of my income,” says Ramzi Shawki, whose 120 pigs lived in a pen next to his house until they were driven away, slaughtered, and buried in trenches. “Our pigs are not sick. I can hold them in my arms. I’m 41 years old. I was born into collecting garbage and raising pigs. I’ve never been infected. But whoever doesn’t give up their pigs gets arrested.”

The Shawki clan and many of their neighbors in a cliffside neighborhood of Cairo survive by collecting garbage. They also raised pigs until the government ordered 300,000 swine killed amid concerns – now dismissed – that the animals spread the epidemic. (Asmaa Waguih for The Los Angeles Times)

Cairo’s Garbage City: note trash on the rooftops

Whatever the motivations, the government sought to provide compensation:

“The government gave me 2,500 pounds for my animals,” about $450, says Shawki, “but they were worth 18,000 pounds.”

That might not be our perspective, but people see what they expect to see.

“This is not a slum,” says one. “It is good up here, not like people say.”

Like many slums, it is also a hive of activity – low-skilled, low-technology, low-paying activity.

Sorting the trash into recycling

Like many slums, Garbage City was founded on low-value land:

They feel safe up here, though sometimes boulders shear off the brittle cliffs and smash rooftops below.

Safety is relative – Garbage City was the only land from which it was not worth displacing the poor.

Most of these men arrived in Cairo as boys decades ago from villages in southern Egypt.

People move to cities in search of a better life.  They gravitate to slums because that’s where the affordability is, and where the low-skilled jobs are. 

Sorting bottles for recycling of their plastic

Four months ago, their livelihood was wiped out by government action that smacks more of prejudice and fear than reason:

President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed in order to prevent the spread of the disease when the swine flu fear first emerged, long before even one case was reported in Egypt.

Slander led to slaughter:

When health officials worldwide said that the virus was not being passed by pigs, the Egyptian government said the cull was no longer about flu, but about cleaning up the zabaleen’s crowded, filthy, neighborhood.

I doubt that, for slum cleanup has been used as a code word for slum eradication for centuries – and as far as I know, the Egyptian government did nothing other than kill all the pigs who, though dead, are taking their revenge:

The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.

There is trash, which must be piled up, and there is garbage, which can be eaten

 “The problem is clear in the streets,’’ said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. “There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue.’’

But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.

When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring – in what public health specialists said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu – it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.

It’s tempting to see slumdwellers as ‘those’ people, the more so when they have a different ethnicity, a different religion.

Zabaleen children, photographed by Melissa Leiter

What started out as an impulsive response to the swine flu threat has turned into a social, environmental, and political problem for the Arab world’s most populous state.

All those people, all that refuse

The health outbreak – a health-risk epidemic caused by a misguided attempt to address a health risk! – serves as proof of so many principles concerning the complexity and interdependence of slums.

“Everything’s connected to everything else”

It has exposed the failings of a government where:

Let’s count them.

[1] Markets move faster than governments

The power is concentrated at the top.

 [2] At AHI we believe that the best level of government to tackle slums is municipal, because municipal government cannot escape the slums on their doorstep.

Decisions are often carried out with little consideration for their consequences.

[3] Slums are cities’ Cryptobiotica: ‘those’ people provide essential services at low investment and low labor cost.

Hard work, low pay

[Here is a good Zabaleen photo essay. – Ed.]

[4] Slums are resilient, both robust and change-resistant:

Where follow-up is often nonexistent

“The main problem in Egypt is follow-up,’’ said Sabir Abdel Aziz Galal, chief of the infectious disease department at the Ministry of Agriculture.

[5] Markets will always find practical solutions when government doesn’t.

Speaking broadly, there are two systems for receiving services in Egypt: the government system and the do-it-yourself system.

Want to guess which is more popular?

Cairo’s garbage collection belonged to the informal sector. The government hired multinational companies to collect the trash, and the companies decided to place bins around the city. But they failed to understand the ethos of the community. People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to someone collecting it from the door.

Pickup and dropoff, an informal service

A key blockage to slum upgrading and formalization is that entry into the visible, legal, electronic formal system swaps in a new form of inefficiency (bureaucracy) for an old one (corruption and baksheesh).  Just as means-testing can create an unwanted poverty trap, the ‘visibility surcharge’ is a huge drag on slum upgrading. 

Could he find a formal job?

California’s bureaucracy, for example, was recently estimated to be costing the state $500 billion a year, a sum so staggering it beggars the imagination.

“The straight and narrow path is just too bureaucratic and burdensome for the rich person, and for the poor, the formal system does not provide him with survival, it does not give him safety security or meet his needs,’’ said Laila Iskandar Kamel, chairwoman of a community development organization in Cairo.

Laila Iskandar Kamel

As I wrote in cryptobiotica, a slum is worthless only when seen from a distance:

Cities and slums are economic ecosystems, and just as a biological ecosystem has its biota, so to do all the active entities – that is, the companies, professionals, and individuals who operate within the ecosystem – comprise its ecota [my ungainly term].

From a distance, cryptobiotica looks like nothing much

Cryptobiotic soil is found throughout the world. In arid regions, these living soil crusts are dominated by cyanobacteria, and also include soil lichens, mosses, green algae, microfungi and bacteria.

In other words, what appears from our vast height to be simply dried mud is actually a complex interdependent community of organisms that have eked an existence out of an inhospitable and apparently empty environment.

Sort of like the people who live in slums.

Cairo and the Egyptian government didn’t realize that they needed the pigs; they needed the zabaleen; they needed Garbage City. 

Order out of chaos: value out of poverty

Now they’ve destroyed its livelihood, and it may be too politically embarrassing to walk back from that mistake.

What the Egyptian government did is understandable.  That doesn’t excuse it, nor make it wise.

Where will his work be?  Where his education?

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[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 in the novel Winston Smith writes, I understand the how, I do not understand the WHY.  He comes to.

Just as a slum is the proof of poverty, poverty itself makes all of existence into a slum – and it is no coincidence that Winston’s seminal act, the one crimethink from which flows the entire novel, is nothing more dangerous than writing in a book, and not just any book but an opulent, luxurious, sensual book:

He went back to the living room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen.  From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-size blank book with a red back and a marbled color. 

By a quirk of the room’s layout (housing again), Winston has a tiny sanctuary of invisibility, where he may quietly commit apostasy to Big Brother:

For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position.  Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window.  To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves.  By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went.  He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. 

It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do. 

In his corner, Winston may do the most erotic thing George Orwell could imagine:

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer.  It was a particularly beautiful book.  Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past.  He could guess, however that the book was much older than that.  Page 9.

With that, he begins to write his own words in this luscious book.

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what has been done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the day of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!  Page 27

Winston understands – it is his first insight – that poverty is itself a prison, one that subjugates and destroys the human spirit.  First he writes:

Until they [the poor] become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.  That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks.  Page 61.

Later this goal is explicitly said back to him, with the most chilling earnestness:

In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.  Everything else we shall destroy – everything.  We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.  No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.  Page 220.

Winston’s confessor might have been describing a place where there is no law, where the state is absent.

But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.  Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.  The sex instinct will be eradicated.  Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card.  We shall abolish the orgasm.  Our neurologists are at work upon it now.  Page 220.

You are the last man, Winston

Throughout the story, Winston’s spirits are mirrored in his surrounding, and in particular the man-made objects of his surroundings.  Enjoyment of the simplest pleasures is itself a rebellious act:

Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate.  It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper.  Chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire.  But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the piece she had given him.  The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling.  Page 101

It burns like fire

Again and again, the tool of oppression is poverty, and the tiniest wealth is represented as freedom:

The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling.  It was filled with some kind of heavy, sandlike stuff which yielded where you touched it.

“It isn’t sugar?” he said.  Page 117.

Coffee smells of sex:

The smell that rose from the saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive.  What was even better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine.  Page 120.

Oceania’s leaders did not so much create this grinding poverty as they recognized how its manifestation could become a tool of their own self-perpetuation:

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.  War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.  Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed.  Page 157.

Berlin, 1945

No matter how many pictures we see of those times, those of us my age and younger cannot conceive just how desperately poor was Western Europe in 1945, particularly Britain, which had been at war for six solid years, bombed beginning and end.  Meat rationing was not eliminated in England until 1952.  His Winston Smith, born in 1945 (in 1984 he’s 39), personifies the era:

He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time [1955]: the periodical panics about air raids and the sheltering inn Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same color, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance – above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. 

Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me

Orwell knew what he was talking about: his Down and Out in Paris and London chronicled his year living as a hobo.

He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scavenging around dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the passage of trucks which traveled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oatcake.  Page 133.

In Oceania, people area controlled with the simplest, cheapest of means.  Let them fight desperately, miserably for shoelaces, razor blades, proper soap, and keep coffee or chocolate as half-remembered ecstasies. 

In all his travels, Winston meets one kindred soul – O’Brien, and it is O’Brien who proves to be Winston’s interlocutor, Winston’s torturer, Winston’s confessor, and in the end, his spiritual guide. 

We are kindred spirits, Winston thought

Unique among 1984’s characters, O’Brien lives well, for he is part of Oceania’s rulers: the Inner Party:

It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived.  The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro – everything was intimidating.  139.

No one dares trust

Reading 1984 again, as a science fiction author, I have found an economic flaw in his horror: Orwell’s Oceania cannot survive, because it is living on borrowed time economically.  Oceania’s buildings are falling down, and when they collapse, nothing will replace them … and Oceania’s bureaucracy will collapse.

In my amateur political diagnosis, that’s why South Africa ended apartheid.  All the sanctions, all the approbation, all the editorials played their tiny part.  When four-fifths (the blacks) were held in intellectual and economic subservience, half of the population (women) were sidelined as spouse, and a solid third of the remainder were engaged either in policing their own country or trying to police their neighbors’ – well, there was simply not enough labor to sustain a productive economy.  The Law of Economic Gravity took hold, and the nation went bankrupt – and to their credit, the whites had the good sense to see this before it happened, and to make a gift of what they would have had to surrender in any event.

Finance too plays a role.  As we’ve seen, cities require infrastructure, and infrastructure costs so much money it takes financial markets.  Dictatorships can command forced labor into vast civic works projects, but that is all.  They tend to run catastrophic macroeconomic policy, which leads to ruinous inflation, and chokes off capital investment.

Dictatorships that commit so much of their state’s wealth to policing eventually implode on themselves – they cannot generate enough wealth, and they cannot invest.  As we have seen – in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe –

2007: Starvation in Zimbabwe

– and in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea – the collapse can go one and on and on, the poor being reduced to starvation as an ever-dwindling elite circles ever-shrinking wagons. 

It matters not how many die, if I am surrounded by loyal troops

In 1984, there is no hope – because there are no economics.  In Zimbabwe, there must be hope, as there must be in North Korea.  The hope comes not from institutions, not from their disgusting and evil leadership, not alas from the people inside those wretched countries, but from the law of economic gravity.  A dictatorship can impoverish its own people, it can grind them into passivity with a combination of force, prisons, slums, and poverty.  Doing so writes its own death warrant – and so our hope, a hope Winston Smith never had, is that those states go bankrupt, as soon as possible. 

“If that is granted, all else follows.”

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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 most tactile not-present:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.  Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

In previous posts, I’ve profiled visions of ultimate future cities.  Some of these visions are nightmares – and yet, nightmares that can see around us if we know where to look, in the slums inside.

Victory mansions? Soviet flats

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.  At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall.  It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features. 

George Orwell’s writing has the clarity and simplicity of genius: with never an inflation, nary an exclamation point, nothing but the impressions of everyday, he created the world’s catchword for dystopia, and all out of his own experience.  Poverty, disease, war, humiliation, bombing, death, and political cant – he experienced them all, and in 1948 he wrote the work that, in reversing two digits, made itself into a symbol.

George Orwell in 1948 …

Winston Smith in 1984 …

Tyranny, says Orwell, is enforced poverty, and what makes 1984 remarkable is Orwell’s understanding of how denying people even the most trivial and mundane of personal accessories can reduce them to groping about for a rusty razor-blade, or an unbroken shoelace.

Winston made for the stairs.  It was no use trying the lift.  Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours.  It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.  The flat was seven flights up, and Winston who was thirty-nine, and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way.  Page 5.

In ancient Rome, the cheap rooms – the insulae – were always on the top floors, above the rich who occupied the spacious atria and impluvia below.  So it remained past Dickens’ time – the higher you had to climb, the poorer you were – until the invention of elevators, when status and value were reversed.

Until, that is, the elevators break.

Exterior hallway in Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago

Some months back I was in India, visiting a friend who lived in a large, fantastically located apartment in downtown Mumbai – on a side street abutting the shorefront, with a view of the dark sparkling Indian Ocean to the west.  The elevator scarcely worked; in fact it seldom worked, for the building was rent-controlled, payments frozen in the rupees of fifty years earlier, so the landlord had no incentive to maintain, and every incentive to allow the building to age into obsolescence, decaying into physical collapse, whence it could be condemned, emptied and sold, to be demolished and replaced with a springing thirty-story high-rise. 

A broken elevator testifies that a landlord does not care – and that is the message being sent by the Party, rulers of Oceania:

Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces.  The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked wherever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. 

Even solid construction dies without maintenance, and without money

In fact, worse than the landlord who does not care is the landlord who wants to prevent improvement:

Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window pane for two years.  Page 21.

George Orwell, seeing a future

For Orwell, tyranny meant poverty, and poverty meant housing poverty – a slum. 

The Parsons’ flat was bigger than Winston’s, and dingy in a different way.  Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal.  Games impediments – hockey sticks, boxing gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out – lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise books. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which – one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how – was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.  In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen.  Page 21.

Decaying high-rise public housing, Chicago

Re-reading 1984 twenty or so years after my last reading, I am struck by how consistently Orwell paints his dystopia in the practical terms of living and working – especially living – and how the simplest comforts denied are the instruments of repression.  Everything is decaying:

The reality was dingy, decaying cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.  He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs. Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked wastepipe.  Page 64. 

Oceania is a world of slums, vividly described and all too believable:

He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-story houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat holes.  There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles.  In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alleyways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers – girls in full bloom, with crudely lip-sticked mouths, and youths who chased girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years’ time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and the scattered at angry tells from their mothers.  Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up.  70.

For Orwell, as for my developer friend, a slum can be a low-cost prison.  Victory Mansions’ rooms are little different from prisons – in fact, his descriptions of being in prison are roughly the same as Victory Mansions, where you are the prisoner and ‘they’ are the jailers:

Big Brother is watching you

A prison is a place of no privacy – as O’Brien puts it, we shall meet in the place where there are no shadows.

Winston kept his back to the telescreen.  It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.  A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.  This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste – this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.  Page 7

In a prison, your schedule is not your own.  You rise on their schedule, you work on their schedule, you eat and sleep on their schedule, you do what they want:

The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes [… ] Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym shoes, had already appeared.  “Arms bending and stretching!” she yapped out.  […]

“Smith!” screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen.  “6079 Smith W!  Yes, you!  Bend lower, please.  You can do better than that.  You’re not trying.  Lower, please!  That’s better, comrade.  Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.”  Page 34.

If they are the jailers, ‘we’ are the prisoners, and if we are in prison, we are already guilty, so anything more we do is no more than confirming our guilt:

Life as she saw it was quite simple.  You wanted a good time: ‘they,’ meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it;’ you broke the rules as best you could.  She seemed to think it just as natural that ‘they’ should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught.  109. 

Julia: “Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say.  It’s the only way to be safe.”

We read 1984 and it grips us because we all fear it.  We fear falling from the ladder of success, falling out of the nest of material possession, falling into begging.

“You see now,” said O’Brien, “that it is at any rate possible.”
“Yes,” said Winston.  Page 213

“They do not exist.  You do not exist.”

Poverty, in 1984, is a slum, and all its characters live and work there every day.

All but one.

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2].

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