Pandemics and the Planet of Slums

In Kinshasa, Congo, the only way people have been able to survive the collapse of the state and the economy is by bringing agriculture into the city. There are chickens and other animals roaming everywhere. These kinds of conditions transform the whole ecology of disease, speeding up transmission among animals and enabling the leap to humans. They create linkages and causal chains that weren’t there before.

One example: Urbanization in West Africa has increased demand for protein in diets. At the same time, European companies have driven West African fishermen out of their traditional fishing zones, which provided most of their protein. Without fish for protein, people turned to the bush meat trade in the big logging countries such as Gabon. That demand for bush meat, for example from monkeys or chimps, has broken down all the biological species barriers for disease. People are eating wild mammals that carry exotic diseases like the Ebola virus or HIV.

- Mike Davis, renowned urban theorist and author of “Planet of Slums”

The Rise of the Underground

Economists have long thought the underground economy — the vast, unregulated market encompassing everything from street vendors to unlicensed cab drivers — was bad news for the world economy. Now it’s taking on a new role as one of the last safe havens in a darkening financial climate, forcing analysts to rethink their views…

Some researchers are starting to argue the informal economy is becoming a permanent fixture in some poorer countries — in good times and bad — as population growth outstrips job creation. The current recession, which is pressuring companies to cut labor costs, could intensify that process by pushing companies to ditch expensive formal workers in favor of cheaper part-time employees without benefits. Many laid-off workers may never be re-absorbed by the formal economy, as companies grow more accustomed to the flexibility of their informal counterparts.

- Patrick Barta for the Wall Street Journal

Irvine Welsh in Mumbai: A Tale of Two Cities

Poverty, particularly in the West, has often been ideologically associated with sloth and indolence since the Industrial Revolution. Dharavi, a hub of constant activity and home to around 15,000 small businesses, instantly dispels this myth. I’ve never seen so much constant, back-breaking, mind-numbing work going on. In cramped and dangerous workshops, people recycle plastic and aluminium to manufacture pots, handbags, suitcases and just about everything else.

Most of Dharavi’s citizens hail from villages like the one in “the Darkness”, the original home of Balram, the memorable protagonist of The White Tiger. They are stoical in the face of the danger their activities in confined spaces presents; toxic paint fumes spew from a makeshift plant, adjacent to where children are playing. Yet it’s poverty without apparent misery, and the levels of industry and enterprise on display are breathtaking.

- Irvine Welsh

(photos via EVOL)