Our planet has urbanized over the past half-century even faster than originally predicted by the Club of Rome’s startlingly Malthusian 1972 report, simply and forebodingly titled The Limits of Growth. When the report was first published, there were barely eighty-six cities in the world with populations of more than one million, thirty-seven years later there are four-hundred, and by 2015, there is expected to be over five-hundred.[i] The scale and speed at which global urbanization has taken place is unparalleled by any other period of growth in human history, and the population explosion in today’s Third World alone utterly dwarfs that of Victorian Europe’s.[ii] Economic consensus is funereal in its proclamation that there exists no formal or singular solution to curbing population growth or to the problem of sustaining and locating it in the long run. In fact, after 2020, cities will have become the receptacle for nearly all future population growth, and indeed only the mega-slum will likely remain as the most fully franchised solution to housing the twenty-first century’s surplus humanity.[iii] This seemingly inevitable course of socio-cultural evolution is incisive in its critique of the effectiveness of past and present attitudes towards urbanization and will affect the progression of twenty-first century design and planning theory in ways both subtle and profound. Patrick Geddes may have understood the direction of this course of development best when he declared in resignation, “slum, semi-slum, and super-slum…to this has come the evolution of cities.”[iv]Yet while strategies towards procuring efficient and sustainable models of urban growth are in no way simple or absolute, they are by no means abstract either. The past three decades have been devastatingly irresponsible in their approach towards proactively confronting the burgeoning problems of strained urban infrastructures, transportation, housing and employment, deferring enduring intervention to the liability of speculative technological breakthroughs. While this general attitude has proven to be misguided, it is nonetheless understandable, especially when considered in a dominantly Western context. That is, the seemingly limitless potential of our technological innovation and the velocity at which the latter half of the twentieth-century has evolved technologically has in fact given us good reason to assume that the unstoppable process of technology evolution will “naturally” find solutions to any and all of our problems, wittingly or not. The history of man is hung unapologetically on a timeline of invention and discovery and our dependence on technology is certainly not unique to the twentieth century. What is unique to our modern history however is our seeming over-reliance on techno-evolution to help us problem solve and to sustain future growth. In fact, Western models of urban growth solidified rapidly into socio-political dogma in the century between 1860 and 1960, during the acme of technological optimism. So palpable was the West’s technological confidence during this time, that in his 1949 inaugural address, President Harry Truman proudly leveled the idealistic background against which the great innovations of the second half of the twentieth century would develop when he remarked:
“For the first time in history, humanity posses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of [destitute] people…I believe that we should make available to all peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life…Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.”[v]
Over twenty years later, after American technological prowess had sent a man to the moon, the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pronounced:
“For the first time, we may have the technical capacity to free mankind from the scourge of hunger [and poverty].”[vi]
However the daunting realities of the twenty-first century have emasculated these virile proclamations into impotent platitudes, and despite the undeniable technological wherewithal of our time, the majority of the world’s population still lives in squalor. What slum urbanization has in fact come to represent, is a reactionary typology of development that confutes the “self-indulgent technological binge”[vii] of the late twentieth-century and disproves the mid-twentieth century’s prescriptions for a development paradigm based on industrialization programs and policy reforms. While there is likely no one, single, autonomous, causative factor in the rapid over-population of our planet’s cities and of the startling prevalence of slum-sprawl, their shorter term catalytic progression can be located in the natural fall out of the Victorian industrializing epoch, the rapid and irreversible bipolarity of the geopolitical marketplace during the Cold War and the near instantaneous digital-revolution of the past three decades which has super-imposed perceptions of “Time Square-style commercialization”[viii] on the homemade built environments of the Global South. These “homemade” responses to urban survival, in spite of the aforementioned onslaught of globalization, have proven to be both inevitable and even “effective” in so much as they are worth more than just acknowledgment, and serious study and more nuanced intervention may in fact lead not only towards legitimization of these “informal” developments, but may also inspire more appropriate solutions to First World urbanization conflict as well.
The Global Precipitation of Homemade Cities
During the era of late Victorian Imperialism, the forcible incorpor
ation of the brimming subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa into the global market, entailed the famine deaths of countless millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from their native tenures. The inevitable result of course was a new class of rural peasants, socialistically termed the “semi-proletariat,”[ix] lacking any long-term security in subsistence. The twentieth-century thus became an era of chronic rural uprisings and peasant wars, not epochal urban uprisings as classical Marxist theories had anticipated.[x] The loss of subsistence and the resultant “proletarization” precipitated the dissolution of traditional forms of work, governance and production which was unable to translate into formal society. However, this informal style of self-directed “development” and relocation was certainly not anomalous, and in fact has many historical antecedents. In Europe, Naples for instance, even more so than Dublin or East London was a sterling 
exponent of informal economic development and construction. In Naples, a “chronic super-abundance of labor”[xi] was harnessed into a catalytic spectacle of informal competition and growth. Today there exist thousands of cities that have followed the Napelese model, and their increasing economic informality within the global economy has become un-ignorably formalized in the growing prevalence of peri-urban slums. The metastasizing growth of these types of settlements has not ebbed or even changed in pattern or efficiency since the Victorian era of industrialization, rather it has only been exacerbated by the fall out of twentieth century international conflict and the resultant rise of an American-dominated First World.
“For the first time in history, humanity posses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of [destitute] people…I believe that we should make available to all peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life…Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.”[v]
Over twenty years later, after American technological prowess had sent a man to the moon, the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pronounced:
“For the first time, we may have the technical capacity to free mankind from the scourge of hunger [and poverty].”[vi]
However the daunting realities of the twenty-first century have emasculated these virile proclamations into impotent platitudes, and despite the undeniable technological wherewithal of our time, the majority of the world’s population still lives in squalor. What slum urbanization has in fact come to represent, is a reactionary typology of development that confutes the “self-indulgent technological binge”[vii] of the late twentieth-century and disproves the mid-twentieth century’s prescriptions for a development paradigm based on industrialization programs and policy reforms. While there is likely no one, single, autonomous, causative factor in the rapid over-population of our planet’s cities and of the startling prevalence of slum-sprawl, their shorter term catalytic progression can be located in the natural fall out of the Victorian industrializing epoch, the rapid and irreversible bipolarity of the geopolitical marketplace during the Cold War and the near instantaneous digital-revolution of the past three decades which has super-imposed perceptions of “Time Square-style commercialization”[viii] on the homemade built environments of the Global South. These “homemade” responses to urban survival, in spite of the aforementioned onslaught of globalization, have proven to be both inevitable and even “effective” in so much as they are worth more than just acknowledgment, and serious study and more nuanced intervention may in fact lead not only towards legitimization of these “informal” developments, but may also inspire more appropriate solutions to First World urbanization conflict as well.
The Global Precipitation of Homemade Cities
During the era of late Victorian Imperialism, the forcible incorpor
ation of the brimming subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa into the global market, entailed the famine deaths of countless millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from their native tenures. The inevitable result of course was a new class of rural peasants, socialistically termed the “semi-proletariat,”[ix] lacking any long-term security in subsistence. The twentieth-century thus became an era of chronic rural uprisings and peasant wars, not epochal urban uprisings as classical Marxist theories had anticipated.[x] The loss of subsistence and the resultant “proletarization” precipitated the dissolution of traditional forms of work, governance and production which was unable to translate into formal society. However, this informal style of self-directed “development” and relocation was certainly not anomalous, and in fact has many historical antecedents. In Europe, Naples for instance, even more so than Dublin or East London was a sterling 
exponent of informal economic development and construction. In Naples, a “chronic super-abundance of labor”[xi] was harnessed into a catalytic spectacle of informal competition and growth. Today there exist thousands of cities that have followed the Napelese model, and their increasing economic informality within the global economy has become un-ignorably formalized in the growing prevalence of peri-urban slums. The metastasizing growth of these types of settlements has not ebbed or even changed in pattern or efficiency since the Victorian era of industrialization, rather it has only been exacerbated by the fall out of twentieth century international conflict and the resultant rise of an American-dominated First World.In fact the brutal onslaught of neoliberal globalization since the apex of the industrial revolution would not be matched in socio-economic or cultural resonance until the 1960s and ‘70s when the central conflict of world politics quickly became defined as the “West versus the rest.”[xii] The bipolarization of the geopolitical marketplace during the second half of the twentieth-century was unapologetic in its alienation of de-colonized territories, and in its rejection to interact with Non-Aligned States. From this emerged a kind of “solidarity movement” or “Third Worldism,” which grew to be resentful if not martyrial in its active rejection of First-World free-markets and Second-World socialism. The socio-economic result of course was a painful and rapid process of “economic involution”[xiii] that kept many N.A. States from developing sustainable forms of governance, infrastructure and employment because the nascent economies had no access to foreign capital, no access to markets for their natural resources and no institutional models to build natural employment. Such remains the status quo in many of these regions today and even with the ideological dissolution of Cold War entrenchment, Third Worldism continues to compel the countries of the Global South into passive recipients of Western policy, technology and “aid.” Indeed the end of the Cold War and the abolition of the Containment Order set a new global stage at the end of the twentieth-century, where America’s hold on world power seemed unshakeable and where there seemed hope of improved global solidarity. But America’s unipolar moment lasted at best through the 1990s. The post-Cold War Peace-Dividend was never converted into a new, global, liberal order under the pioneering initiative of the United States and the socio-economic indigence of the Global South remains as unfettered and quarantined today as it did during the Cold War era. The sustained and growing marginalization within regions of the Third World is similarly evidenced in the increasing scale and velocity of the barrios and favellas of Lima and Buenos Aires, the chawls of Mumbai and the shanty-towns of Burundi and Ghana. All were stoked by the same brand of biopolar marginalization during the twentieth century and all seem to have developed both formally and behaviorally, in uniquely similar ways. The bearing distinction between marginalized peri-urban development today can only be observed in their capacity to absorb, internalize and even capitalize on the phenomenal new brand of post Cold War globalization that has enveloped our planet in the new century.
The clichéd “giant-logo land”[xiv] perception of both industrialized and Third Worl
d cities alike has become the familiar face of globalization today, and the image which has been most vociferously lauded as the most assured strategy to improving the socio-economic utility of the Third World. Anti-neoliberal resistance has argued that the global monoculture these images purvey has threatened to destroy the values and traditions of ancient cultures with abrupt speed and irreversible efficiency. While a valid point and perhaps even true, the concern, and at times even preoccupation with multi-national and NGO dominated theories of globalization distracts from the more pervasive reality that the monoculture that neoliberal opponents object to was already set in motion well before the modern incarnation of capitalism was given permission to globe trot. Urban development patterns, construction practices, jobs and infrastructures all began to coagulate into a similar urban and socio-economic typology during the Industrial Revolution. What anti-neoliberals are observing and objecting to today is a particular aesthetic of the globalized third world that is sustained by obsolete Sony gadgets and tattooed with Coca-Cola billboards. The shocking reality is that the homogenized aesthetic is only the most obvious evidence of globalization today, not the most systemic. The marginalized developments of the Third World began their amalgamatio
n when the Industrial Revolution initiated a surplus of urban labor, which quickly forced the excess out of the epicenters of the cities and into the unsettled peripheries. This Diaspora of labor prompted the development of peri-urban settlements that all came to rely on the same forms of urban, industrial refuse and that were populated by the same types of disenfranchised individuals. What has changed today is not the causation, pattern, or sentiment of slum settlements, but only the velocity and texture of the growth as a result of the digital-revolution of our time, which has fiber optically connected all corners of the globe to every, eager impulse and innovation.Techno-Slums: The Twenty-First Century Urban Typology
The coarse mechanism of neoliberal globalization since the mid-twentieth century, whil
e in many ways analogous to the merciless processes that shaped the Third World during the Victorian era, has grown into a brutal and paradoxical era of hyper-evolutionary techno-progress where the same products and processes that have marginalized so many are the very devices that have come to sustain them. In fact, in many peri-urban settlements, the very tools, technologies and mechanisms that have modernized the formal world, disenfranchise all too quickly sizeable portions of the Third World’s work forces because many are unable to interface with those tools and are thus unable to enter into the modern sector. These “devices of wonder”[xv] however end up making their way from formal obsolescence to informal reinvention often with reliable regularity, feeding the burgeoning growth that has come to circumscribe the modern world’s “cities of innovation.” Consequently, there is little explicitly observed distinction between the functional, symbolic, pragmatic or aesthetic qualities of the peri-urban built environment. The peri-urban slum is in a constant and aggressive state of construction, where buildings are erected, added on to, repaired or replaced according to refuse “availability,” and more specifically according to the natural and rapid cycles within the modern sector of technology displacement. Foreign Policy Magazine estimates that there is anywhere from “between twenty and fifty million tons of electronic waste (E-Waste or IT Waste) produced globally every year, most of which ends up in the developing world.” The regularity, quantity and diversity of electronic waste have given the Third World village a valuable, albeit dangerous new building resource and even new potential sources of income. The peri-urban slum has evolved over the past several decades as a startling and critical palimpsest of the formal world’s techno-evolutionary cycles, where structures are unabashedly erected out of an efficient composition of mud, stone and wood, integrated with circuit boards, car doors, engine blocks and keyboards. Crude mud bricks are employed frequently along with the remnants of twenty-year old radios, obsolete “Walk-Men,” three-year old laptops, and first generation iPods. The twenty-first century slum is thus in many ways, an incisive and unapologetic documentation of both the formal world’s technological prowess and of its irresponsible shortcomings.
The urban and geopolitical implications of the twenty-first century techno-slum, while sobering, have become un-ignorable. If left unfettered and marginalized, the cities of the future are likely to grow into even crasser, more contrived metropolises of digital and mechanical displacement, rather than the grand spectacles of glass and steel envisioned by earlier, more romantic generations. Instead of cities of light soaring into the heavens, the twenty-first century city will “devolve” into painful reminders of historical socio-cultural revolutions and economic bubbles, where the inhabitants sit in squalor amidst the very products that were once lauded as the indisputable savors of their economic indigence.The Failures of Past Interventions and the Promise of the Future
So how can “a place be so ugly and violent, yet [be so] beautiful at the same time?”[xvi] A gnawingly existential question in any context, Chris Abani’s query into the aesthetics and behavior of slum ecology is both abstract and absolute in its answer. While the public, neoliberal perception of slums is understandably one of pity and disgust, the “beauty” latent within slum ecology is found in the settlements’ endogenous innovation and blunt critique of exogenous policy. John F.C. Turner may very well have understood the ecological paradigm of slum settlements best when he concisely concluded that:
“A new school of the built environment [is needed]: not to create a new organization, but to establish the fact that there is such a school and that it exists by virtue of many scattered individuals and a few groups from small organizations. The medium of the school is [an] international communications network.”[xvii]
Turner’s prescription may seem humble but it is nonetheless formidable in its
rejection of pedagogically ordained housing solutions and Cold War era policy initiatives. The unreliable success of such twentieth century housing policies and Marshall Plan-style aid programs prompted institutions to develop more specific aid programs that focused on implementing financial packages and technology transfers designed to induce a laconic form of industrialization instead of encouraging developing countries to participate actively in their own development discourse. This has been the convoluted and ineffective logic that has validated innumerable development programs over the decades and permitted organizations like the World Bank and IMF to allow the same cherry-picked lot of multinationals to bestride the globe with sarcastically humanitarian grins. Admittedly however, the origins of this perverted pedagogy did have reaso
nable promise during the idealistic decades following World War II, when citizens from around the world seemed to admire the industrializing prowess of the West and aspire to an American lifestyle. Even Soviet citizens couldn’t deny their admiration for American technology and entrepreneurship, many even naming their children after John Deere and Henry Ford, [xviii] and it prompted the Soviet Union to improve their communist utility with even more aggressive industrialization programs. Even today, the meteoric rise of China in the twenty-first century geopolitical arena is fueled by a dated and unsustainable incarnation of American industrial-capitalism that may very well “put the last nail into the coffin of the postwar European [economy]” as many today fear, but will ultimately fatally contract.[xix] The systemic problem is that development models like these are dangerous and unsustainable because they are not born of the exclusive will or vision of the people in those regions. They do not allow the people the opportunity to discover, reinvent, fail and succeed on their own. They are development models that rely on copying what the West has built for itself in a context and at a time that does not demand it and that cannot sustain it. It is a synthetic, appliqué model that has deceptive short-term success and irreversible long-term consequences. However there exists great promise in many areas of the global south and while many examples of effective self-sustainability remain all too obscure, there is valuable inspiration to be gained from them. The Dutch billionaire software developer, Guido Van Rossum, once said in response to Nicholas Negroponte’s “One Hundred Dollar Laptop Program” that giving computers to Third World communities is simply “the twenty-first century equivalent of sending Bibles to the colonies,”[xx] because it is insisting upon people a product that will not satisfy any immediate needs or encourage a socio-economic mentality of self-reliance. Van Rossum’s observation is pointed in its implicit verdict that simply making products more affordable for third world populations is not going to have any significant affect on rallying the markets or the people out of poverty because it is the exact same type of appliqué, policy-based initiative of the past, merely laundered behind twenty-first century technological prowess. Most likely if Negroponte’s program every made it over seas, the machines would be sold by the recipients for money or scrapped and used for another more immediate application as we’ve seen so many countless times before. Turner clearly understood the ineffectiveness of that type of paradigm in articulating his vision for a more “appropriate architecture” of development. He understood that the most beneficial contributions developed markets could make to the favellas, chawls and corticos of the Global South was not giving it their equipment or adopting a Western socio-economic mentality, but simply giving the communities demonstrative support and advice in their endeavors to engage the cultures and work towards some level of integration and legitimization. Turner understood better than anyone that it takes a sense of urgency to provoke new ways of thinking and it takes a unified will to act on that thinking. The Third World is lacking in neither innovative thinking nor collective will, but insistent and absolute technology placement programs and financing initiatives touted by neoliberal institutions have kept that ingenuity from effectively conquering Third World poverty and development for decades.
Notes:
[i] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, New York 2002.
[ii] Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. Verso Publishing, New York, New York, 2006. Pg. 2
[iii] Davis, pg. 2, 201.
[iv] Quoted in Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. New York, 1961 pg. 464.
[v] President Harry S. Truman, January 20, 1949
[vi] Henry Kissinger. Speech to the World Food Conference in Rome, 1974.
[vii] Weisman, Alan. Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT. 2008. Pg. 172
[viii] Black, Maggie. The No-Nonsense Guide to International Development. The New Instrumentalist, 2007.
[ix] Davis, pg. 174
[x] Davis, pg. 174
[xi] Davis, pg. 175
[xii] Mahbubani, Kishore. “The West Versus the Rest.” The National Interest. Summer 1992, pgs. 3-133.
[xiii] Stiglitzs, Joseph. Whither Socialism? 1994
[xiv] Black, pg. 60
[xv] Stafford and Terpak. A tongue in cheek synonym for high-tech devices.
[xvi] Abani, Chirs. Graceland. New York 200, pg. 7
[xvii] Turner, John. Housing by the People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. New York , 1976 pg. 158.
[xviii] Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, New York, NY, 1996, pg. 272
[xix] Friedman, Thomas. Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a New Green Revolution and How it Can Renew America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY, 2008. Pg. 50-58.
[xx] Guido Van Rossum, in an interview posted on Caslon Analytics Volkscomputers
[i] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, New York 2002.
[ii] Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. Verso Publishing, New York, New York, 2006. Pg. 2
[iii] Davis, pg. 2, 201.
[iv] Quoted in Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. New York, 1961 pg. 464.
[v] President Harry S. Truman, January 20, 1949
[vi] Henry Kissinger. Speech to the World Food Conference in Rome, 1974.
[vii] Weisman, Alan. Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT. 2008. Pg. 172
[viii] Black, Maggie. The No-Nonsense Guide to International Development. The New Instrumentalist, 2007.
[ix] Davis, pg. 174
[x] Davis, pg. 174
[xi] Davis, pg. 175
[xii] Mahbubani, Kishore. “The West Versus the Rest.” The National Interest. Summer 1992, pgs. 3-133.
[xiii] Stiglitzs, Joseph. Whither Socialism? 1994
[xiv] Black, pg. 60
[xv] Stafford and Terpak. A tongue in cheek synonym for high-tech devices.
[xvi] Abani, Chirs. Graceland. New York 200, pg. 7
[xvii] Turner, John. Housing by the People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. New York , 1976 pg. 158.
[xviii] Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, New York, NY, 1996, pg. 272
[xix] Friedman, Thomas. Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a New Green Revolution and How it Can Renew America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY, 2008. Pg. 50-58.
[xx] Guido Van Rossum, in an interview posted on Caslon Analytics Volkscomputers
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