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Two articles on Swine Flu. The new, freshly-released flu from the makers of Bird Flu, SARS and other Global Pandemics.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/health/don’t-panic-but-you-are-going-to-die-200904271727/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico-health
One from the brilliant Daily Mash. The other a polemic by Mike Davis, one of my favourite writers, not necessarily for the veracity of his writing, but more for the intense rage that seems to burst from every one of his pores. If only everyone could write with that conviction.
Last night I woke with a start at 5am. I had a song in my head. Or more like an extract from a song. A clear melody with a beautiful sound. I kept humming, got out of bed, tried to write it down. It went something like this “aaaaaah, hmmmmmmmmmmm,ddmmmmmmmm,laaaaaa.” Then I thought that the likelihood of me being able to remember the tune to that in the morning was low to zero. So I dozily turned on my computer, plugged in the microphone and sung the refrain into the recorder. Shortly after that I flopped back into bed, excited about the possibility that I had just created the basis to a potentially amazing song.
This morning, when I woke for the second time, I turned my laptop on and played it back expectantly…It’s quite clearly “Zombie” by the Cranberries, which I had been practising for about an hour before I went to bed. Sometimes my mind plays cruel tricks on me.
This also reminded me of the time in Kashmir when I was lying on the floor of the tent, tucked under a mountain of blankets, and thinking about how loud the complete silence around us was. It was like the mountains were echoing silence and it was so loud I couldn’t breathe. I was half-sleeping, half-dreaming in a doze of altitude-sickness with pulsating squares of colour behind my eyelids and this amazing minimalist techno tune just came to me. And now, whenever I hear techno I see these huge pulsing pink squares.
Back in London. I have obviously been asked the same question countless times by now – “So – did you enjoy India?” There’s no definitive answer. I enjoyed some places, some experiences and some meetings. There were moments of joy and elation and moments where I felt sickened by where I was, what I was doing and how the people around me lived.
Since I’ve been back I’ve been reading “Slumming India” by Gita Dewan Verman. She is an urban developer with a conscience and as a result dropped out of “the system” by which I mean the endless circle of NGOs, consultants, government bodies and supra-government institutions that have their grubby hands all over the slum real-estate in Indian cities and proceed to do nothing constructive with any of their money. There is no solution. If they knock down the slums and re-develop there is no way they can maintain the density of the original dwellings and thereby the economic ouput and social mapping of the place – some people must be resettled, but who and where is anyone’s guess. What the slum-dwellers want is represented by people like Jockin but even he doesn’t speak for everyone and is what they want actually best anyway? A lot of people want to stay in the slums despite the disease festering in their homes, the lack of education and infrastructure. I would like to be involved but in truth I am fairly sure that this is not my job – this should be the job of the Indian government or a similarly accountable and representative organisation.
Articles like this: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-dharavi8-2008sep08,0,1830588.story demonstrate what is going to happen regardless of any government initiative. The private sector will no doubt bulldoze their way into Dharavi, destroying a million lives and a million jobs, providing very little in return.
So, we left off in McLeod Ganj where I was going slightly mad due to a mixture of monsoon rains, constant hassle from shop touts and extreme boredom.
A twelve hour, mosquito-infested bus journey took us to Delhi and abruptly dropped us off in an area outside the city centre where people were conducting their morning ritual of defecating and washing in the Yamuna River. As you can imagine, not a pleasant sight or smell. Three of us piled into an autorickshaw to Pahar Ganj which seems to be the only affordable place for non-millionaire travellers in Delhi and at the same time is a stinking, rat and cockroach infestested hole. We quickly made our way to Connaught Place after dropping off our bags in our prison cell/hotel room to organise our onwards travels in Rajasthan.
We spent one more day in Delhi, visiting Qutb Minar and Lal Quila, and then left early the next morning after being followed through Pahar Ganj by two young men who clearly wanted to steal our bags. I looked one of them squarely in the eye after being shoulder barged for the second or third time and asked him what he thought he was doing, he looked squarely back at me with a blank stare, but thankfully after that they left us alone. Leaving the polluted, chaotic and mostly charmless Delhi behind was a great relief…..
First stop Jaipur. Soph was attacked by a three year old who won. We saw a ridiculous Bollywood film in an amazing art-deco cinema. We were harrassed by Indians. We bought shoes, jewellery and silk. We ate palak paneer and halwa. I was sick. We walked around Amber Fort. We were harrassed some more. We took pictures of a palace on a lake and were startled by a beggar slithering up to us, his broken legs trailing behind. We left.
Then Pushar and some relief. Here we mostly chilled at the Sunset Cafe, watching the magical sunset over the lake and the sky turning pink, golden orange and then a deep dark red and the sun vanished behind the temples and prayer calls and drumming echoed around us. We met some great people. We were hassled again and ripped off with English prices for everything. We thought we were wise to it by now but we were not. We were attacked with Henna and did not pay our happy price.
Next stop Udaipur. Beautiful city set around a palace in the middle of a lake. Relatively hassle free. Amazing buildings made from soft, golden stone. We met more great people. We ate more palak paneer. We got more sick.
Ranakpur. 500 year old Jain temples. Pay for cover. Pay for camera. Pay, pay, pay.
Then Jodhpur. Another day, another fort. A city of blue spread out below. Beautiful. More hassle. More english prices. More sick.
Now Jaiselmer. Electrocuted by our shower. Towering sandstone fort. More lies. More pay. More hassle. Momos for dinner.
Okay I’m tired of writing in short sentences but my English has been reduced since being here. Joining words disappear and words become short, brief and distorted – two purposes – get somewhere to stay and don’t get ripped off at the same time.
We have five more days in India and I’m half looking forward to coming home and half sad to leave. I miss my city which I understand. I find it difficult to understand my interactions here – never quite sure whether it’s bad if I assume everyone is lying to me or if it is right to protect myself. I do think I may kiss the ground at Heathrow.
Well, all has changed today as my patience with the mountain travelling Israeli hippy trail took a nosedive.
There is a flying cockroach divebombing me at the moment so I must be brief.
We (being heavily influenced by I) are now going to Delhi the day after tomorrow to do our last two weeks in Rajasthan. The mountains are beautiful but the urbanite in me needs something more than yak wool scarves and waterfalls to keep me entertained. I’m also intensely sick of the food and the way the cakes everywhere north of Delhi seem to be magically made by the same person and taste precisely of nothing. I am imagining an enormous spider shaped creature with 20 arms sitting amongst piles of cake trays and small ovens mixing nonedescript batters of banana, lemon and chocolate nothingness.
Today we saw the Dalai Lama’s residence and temple which was okay but the highlight of the day was seeing a Buddhist monk poking an elephant-sized cow with a stripey umbrella. Karmic retribution? We also watched an interesting film about Tibet at the museum here which I would definitely recommend. We are staying at a guesthouse called Om with magnificent views of the enormous valley below us, eagles flying below and chai on call however I really wouldn’t mind being in a giant multiplex watching Iron Man.
First blog post in India and it’s on an Israeli keyboard. That says it all really. Well, all except the mad dogs, dreamlike never-ending bus journeys, dhal, glacier-fed lakes, piles of rotting rubbish, bats in your hair, disfiguring sunburn, cups of chai, countless scarves, palak paneer, mountains that stretch forever in the distance, stares and smiles and a nation of people beeping, pushing and spitting their way into the future.
So far we have done quite a lot of moving around. We arrived in Delhi disorientated and sweaty just over three weeks ago and have travelled from there to Srinigar, 7 days in Kashmiri Himalayas, 2 day bus journey to Leh, a few days in Ladakh, then a mammoth 22 hour bus journey to Manali and tomorrow we are off to Dharmasala to catch a glimpse of the Dalai Lama. So much to say and so little desire to spend a long time on this keyboard so I will only mention the highlights.
The Lotus Temple in Delhi was captivating – a towering white edifice that seemed to be growing organically out of the perfect green grass. Inside chanting richocheted off the cool, sloping stone walls and we took a moment’s rest to recover from the steamy heat outside.
The Taj Mahal, the ultimate tribute to love, as described by all the guide books, was also beautiful but so recognisable that the image had lost some of its power to me at least. The beauty was also thwarted somewhat by our paan-stained guide who spoke at breakneck speed and failed to give us any real information about it that we couldn’t read in the book. After visiting the Taj he took us to some tourist shops where we were ceremonially ripped-off buying souvenirs before a 4 hour journey back to Delhi through some magical countryside where whole villages seemed to be illuminated by fairy-lights, cows trundled slowly by the roadside and three lanes turned into 5 then 6 as masses of vehicles pushed their way towards the city.
In Srinigar we stayed on a houseboat on Lake Nageen waking up to lotus flowers and the sounds of children playing in the water as well as echoing chants coming from the Jama Masjeed on the other side of the Lake. After this we did a 7-day trek in the Himalayas from Sonmarg to Lake Gangabal. This was probably the most unforgettable thing I’ve done so far apart from a particularly traumatic experience with a yak-cheese pizza. We spent 7 days in almost complete isolation apart from shepherds and a few small settlements on the way. The towering Himalayas and crisp, blue lakes fed directly from glaciers were a source of much personal meditation and not a little suffering. Arriving hot and flustered from a long day of quite technically challenging (to a person with little to no coordination) trekking at a clear, blue lake is perfection in itself and despite the water being bone-chillingly cold I was always eager to jump straight in.
After this we headed to Leh where it was amazing to bump into some familiar faces, Ollie and Aimone, and to unwind from a particularly stressful journey which involved a fallen bridge and a consequential crossing of a very fast moving river over 2 slippery logs. The landscape in Ladakh, of which Leh is the capital, was a big change from Kashmir, looking more like Mars than anything I’ve seen on Earth. The towering moutains were twice and high and contained strange shapes carved over years of sand erosion. Another memorable experience in Leh was a brilliant jam with some Indian-Irishmen singing Irish drinking songs.
From Leh we continued to Manali on an unforgettable journey both due to the aforementioned yak-cheese pizza and the last 3 hours where we careered slowly down a cloud-strewn pass at 4000m with a driver who had been on the road for 20 hours and could barely see out of the windows. At most points in the journey I was physically somewhere between the chair and the ceiling due to the amazing quality of Indian roads and mentally somewhere completely different. On our numerous stops I stumbled blindly out of the bus to catch some fresh air and settle the cheese continously curdling in my stomach. Finally after 22 hours we arrived in drizzling Manali and found enlightenment i.e. a room with HBO. After 2 second I was asleep.
First post feels finished now. Tomorrow Dharmasala. Then Amristar, Chandigarh, Shimla, Rishikesh, Gangotry and etc……We will see.
As the plane gradually made its descent towards Mumbai’s Chatrapati Shivaji Airport, my eyes were drawn to an intense array of lights outside the cabin window. Spread below us was a dense canopy of twinkling bulbs illuminating an organic mass of structures heaped on top of each other. Then: touchdown. They disappeared from sight.
From street level, on the drive from the airport, they are drawn into clearer focus. This is the Santa Cruz slum housing some of the city’s 12 million inhabitants with no access to formal or legal housing. The dwellings press right up against the airport’s perimeter, obstructing plans to build a new runway to add to the single one that is currently South Asia’s busiest.
One hour later after a drive in one of Mumbai’s famously psychedelic Fiat taxis, we are in Colaba in the downtown area of the city, still surrounded by poverty in the form of beggars and pavement dwellers but now also by five-star deluxe hotels, expensive restaurants and bars frequented by international financiers, Bollywood celebrities and the multitude of others who are attracted to the city’s booming economy.
This is by no means a unique situation. Cities all over the world demonstrate stark inequalities between their richest and poorest inhabitants. Although in the developed world in many cases poverty is made invisible by pushing it to the peripheries of the cityspace the inequality remains. David Massey, the sociologist, has said we are now living in an urban “age of extremes.”
The question is: what is it about the city that creates sustains and speeds up these extremes? This implies that there is something specific about urban agglomerations that although attracts a human mass at the same time divides and segregates them. To answer this we must view the city as a socio-spatial construct rather than as a mere container for human activity. By this we mean that the city’s spaces, inhabitants and infrastructure are vitally involved in its own development. In fact, Henry Lefebvre has stated that “the development of society is conceivable only in urban life, through the realization of urban society.”
We must also look at the geohistory of the city – the way the city’s geography has changed over time – and how the most recent advances in ICT and their resultant effects on the city’s infrastructure has vitally changed the geography of the traditional pre-1960s city landscape. Going back to Lefebvre’s statement it is important to digest and explain exactly what he means. The density of the urban agglomeration creates a stimulus to innovation which results in the creation of ideas, goods and processes that are more than the sum of what a similar number of individuals could create in a less dense, geographically dispersed space. Jane Jacobs, the famous late twentieth century New York -based urban sociologist, called this the “spark of city economic life.”
The interdependencies created by this density also produce synergistic solutions. However, it would be wrong to see this socio-spatial analysis of the city as fixed in time. The city’s geography has progressed in many ways since Lefebvre wrote his pioneering work “The Urban Revolution” in 1970. The postmodern metropolis no longer has a single peak-density urban centre. We are increasingly seeing “Edge Cities” such as Orange County in California, implicitly and explicitly linked to its larger, older neighbour Los Angeles, but with its own vital economic, cultural and social life. In addition the footprint of major cities is increasing exponentially due to the forces associated with globalization.
Not only do we have to look at the city in its regional context, but also increasingly in a global one. Saskia Sassen, the Columbia University based academic, identifies a new phenomenon – “The Global City” – a growing collection of cities virtually linked by the sophistication of the new information and communications technologies. It is these information and communication technologies that are changing the geography of the city as we speak. They have enabled a speeding up of time and of change, called “time-space compression” by David Harvey, and have been integral to the restructuring of the post-industrial urban landscape. The cities with the most globalised networks are witness to the most inequality and this is true in the developed and developing world. At one extreme these networks enable and expand the wealth of the top layer of professional human capital who control these linkages and at the other end massive internal and international immigration towards these wealth creators rapidly swells the growing underclass of the postindustrial city.
Graham and Marvin in their work “Splintering Urbanism” have called the city a “socio-technical hybrid.” This is very clear when we look at the fragmentary forces that are shaping the city as we know it today. On the one hand social forces of liberalization are making our cities more diverse: in the developed world many have thriving gay districts, rising numbers of distinct immigrant communities (Greater London’s foreign born population is now at 30% of the total – the highest in its history) and pockets of urban gentrification where the yuppie is steadily reclaiming the inner city traditionally assigned to the poorest in society. On the other the new information and communication technologies are encouraging and facilitating the sharp increases in spatial inequality that are increasingly evident in the urban environment.
How are they doing this? The answer is multi-faceted. In the main they have de-homogenized the provision of infrastructure services. By reducing costs of provision they allow new entrants into the market which has expanded the range and quality of infrastructure services, and also, on the positive side, supported the development of technologies which can facilitate new low-cost solutions to problems such as irrigation and sanitation in developing countries. At the same time as liberalization is unbundling traditionally integrated infrastructure networks from their former dichotomy of public vs. private provision, the new ICTs have enabled them to splinter further and new entrants to participate in competition over the contestable segments of the unbundled networks. For example in the gas sector resources, treatment, transmission pipelines and local distribution networks can be owned and operated by different entities.
Although increased competitiveness and provision of options to the consumer is generally seen as a good thing, this does have many implications on the socio-spatial fabric of urban life. Polarity of public/private provision has disappeared. We now see a multitude of options for provision of infrastructure services. Informal provision is on the rise particularly in developing countries. Where poor communities, such as the Dharavi slum community, have no access to formal infrastructure networks such as water pipelines, ICTs have facilitated the rise of private water vendors although these often charge between 20% to 2000% higher than normal public tariffs imposing significant costs on the most disadvantaged in society.
In addition, and most heinously, ICTs enable the bypass of traditional municipal life by the richest in society, exacerbating economic segregation and inequality. Local bypass systems include parallel infrastructure networks such as skywalk pedestrian systems linking malls, corporate office centres and entertainment complexes. These “total environments” including cultural, employment, housing, leisure and entertainment facilities often designed by “starchitects” such as Foster or Gehry, e.g. the controversial Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, New York, facilitate a socio-spatial “apartheid” in the metropolis where the wealthy literally retreat from city life into privatized cocoons. They are often highly policed by CCTV and private security guards to exclude any unwanted elements in society. Two cities indeed.
This is not just happening in the US and Europe. In Jakarta, Mumbai, Lagos, Johannesburg and countless other cities in the developing world, a new urban landscape is being created for the rich that allows them to secede from traditional metropolitan life with their own privatized, unbundled infrastructure. Graham and Marvin also identify systems of “glocal bypass” which allow new infrastructure networks to facilitate the globalised interactions of these local valued users. Networks such as the Heathrow Express rail link, expensive toll-roads, specialized water treatment, and energy provision are all based around the concept of connecting these most valued users to the rest of the world.
What does this mean for the rest of society? The unbundling of infrastructure and increased competition and innovation seems to favour the globalised and wealthiest citizens of our urban environments. While the rich benefit from continuous high speed internet access on wireless, portable devices able to operate from their time-shared private jets, 60% of the world’s population does not even have a telephone. The decline of traditional manufacturing means that many people are living on or below minimum wage in highly insecure, unskilled jobs: Robinson and Harris, noted urban sociologists, identified in 2000 that approximately 30% in the core developed nations and 50% on the periphery are structurally excluded from productive, secure, consumption expanding activity. A vast mass of humanity is becoming superfluous. The UN disparity index between the richest 1/5 and poorest 1/5 in the world has increased from 30:1 to 1983 to 74:1 in 1999. Today it continues to increase.
As Vladimir Illich Lenin wrote in 1901 “What is to be done?” Spatial inequality is not going to disappear. In many ways it is inherent in the capitalist system. However, we must improve our systems of democracy, our regional planning policies and our public provision of infrastructure to prevent the exclusion and enormous poverty burden implied by the growing inequality in our urban societies. (Picture 1: Bandra residential, commercial and leisure complex in Mumbai)(Picture 2: The Dharavi slum in Mumbai)
Bibliography
Davis, M “Planet of Slums” Verso Books, London (2006)
Graham, S. and Marvin, S “Splintering Urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition” Routledge Press (2001)
Harvey, D. “Social Justice and the City” Edward Arnold Publishers, London (1973)
Harvey, D. “Spaces of Global capitalism: Towards a theory of uneven Geographical Development” Verso Books, London (2006)
Lardner, J. and Smith, D.A. “Inequality Matters: the growing economic divide in American and its poisonous consequences” The New Press, NY (2005)
Lefebvre, H “The Urban Revolution” Minnesota Press (1970)
Sharma, K “Rediscovering Dharavi” Penguin Books, India (2000)
Soja, E. “Postmetropolis: critical studies of Cities and Regions” Blackwell Publishing (2000)
Sorkin, M “Variations on a Theme Park” Hill and Wang (1992)
