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Permalink Reply by gmoke on June 11, 2008 at 1:04am

"There's no unemployment in squatter cities."

But how much slavery, indentured servitude, and forced labor?

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Permalink Reply by Sepp on June 11, 2008 at 9:42am

The swadeshi movement will bring the excitement, the employment, the progress people are looking for in the squatter cities to the countryside.

I bet we are at a turning point. An inversion of the concentration trend to where people start moving from the city to the country.

The reason we are going to leave the cities is that connectivity, production and all the good things in life will be available everywhere, not only in crowded places, and countryside will be that much healthier and esthetically pleasing to live in. It's a slow change but it's coming.

Non polluting and fast individual transportation is one of the must-develop-and-deploy technologies.

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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on June 11, 2008 at 10:51am

One of the things about the cities is that they are dependent on the market for food supply. They aren't food self-sufficient, which is why the recent price spike in food has brought so many to the brink of starvation.

If you grow most or all of your own food, a spike in food prices makes you richer. But if you are dependent on the global economy and its fluctuations, a spike in food prices leaves you hungry.

For this reason alone, I think the only shelter against globalization for the poor is food self-sufficiency. And that means villages.

I think we might see a model where a few members of each family, or a few households in each village, work in the cities for hard cash, some of which they send home. But in a food crisis or an economic downturn, they head back to the food security of the village.

I was, to tell the truth, shocked and appalled by the shortsightedness of Stuart Brand's presentation. I thought he knew better.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Watkins on June 11, 2008 at 3:19pm

He's spot on, especially in regard to the desirability of living in a city instead of a village. Talk to people who've come from villages, and most likely their story will be in line with Brand's. (Though to be fair, I've only spoken to a small number myself - I must do some asking as I travel.)

Having only heard that excerpt (they haven't put the full talk on Youtube yet) I can't judge how well he addressed the energy and food issues.

Urban agriculture will be part of the solution, but only part - because it's a challenge growing abundant food in such a small space per capita, and because there will be other solutions. There always are.

If energy prices drop (e.g. through very cheap solar) then energy isn't likely to cause a crisis - though there will be pains as well as gains during the adjustment. Fertilizer relies on fossil fuels, with 5% of the yearly supply of relatively abundant natural gas used to make nitrogen - not sustainable, but it won't be disappearing this decade. Oil and fertilizer produced from waste is another, more sustainable part of the solution. I find the idea of aerobic sewage treatment very wasteful, when there's biogas and the remaining sludge has value as a soil food. Some more prospects are mentioned in the Wikipedia page on fertilizer - there's a link to a an article about a waste-to-fertilizer process near the bottom of that section.

Mining to supply other nutrients may be more of a problem, but I wonder how much of this will be addressed by good soil microrganisms - compost teas, but developed to the next level in terms of scale and refinement. What I've heard sounds promising, about the ability of certain fungi to break down rocks into nutrients, but I haven't looked into it.

So, I don't see any likelihood that we'll be forced back to village life, and that's a good thing.

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