Quotes On Slums Improvement
Using stereoscopic camera, magnesium flash powder, and riveting language, the Danish- born onetime crime reporter seared bleak, iconic images of New York’s low- income neighborhoods into the American consciousness. Though today Riis is almost universally celebrated—new biographies continue to appear—he helped set housing policy on a course that would prove tragically misguided. The Myth Of Sisyphus And Other Essays Summary. In particular, he inspired a range of government policies that viewed slums as bleak wastelands that transformed their residents into paupers and criminals and therefore had to be radically changed or eradicated. The problems that Riis and the housing- reform movement sparked are still relevant today, since slums, unlike many ills that worried nineteenth- century social reformers, remain very much with us. Indeed, their scale in the developing world dwarfs that of Riis- era New York. Persuasive Essay Definition. The United Nations estimates that in 2.
As Planet of Slums author Mike Davis writes, residents of the new slums constitute the “fastest- growing and most unprecedented social class on earth.”The harrowing descriptions of the conditions in Third World slums in a tide of recent books on the subject, including Davis’s, are in the Riis tradition. But the books’ overall assessments and reform prescriptions often are decidedly not. A relative consensus has formed about how best to address the new slums’ problems, and surprisingly, it appreciates what the UN calls the “positive” elements of slum life, shaped by a population characterized not as oppressed and helpless but as resourceful and creative. Journalist Robert Neuwirth, for instance, extols slums as places where “squatters mix more concrete than any developer. They lay more brick than any government. They have created a huge hidden economy. Some, especially in the developed world, are once- affluent neighborhoods gone to ruin; others were once public housing.
But most are gigantic, tightly packed concentrations of flimsy shacks and shanties that rural migrants have built on the outskirts of cities—what the UN calls “vast informal settlements that are quickly becoming the visual expression of urban poverty.”Most of these settlements are in the developing world. Of the 9. 24 million slum dwellers worldwide in 2.
Asia, in such cities as Mumbai and Kolkata in India and Karachi in Pakistan. Another 1. 87 million lived in Africa, in places like Cairo, Durban, Johannesburg, and Nairobi. And 1. 28 million lived in Latin America and the Caribbean (famously, in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and S. Only 5. 4 million were in developed countries. Research Essay Proposal Sample here. The UN blames the massive migrations from rural areas either on population growth that the countryside cannot sustain or on economic prescriptions said to emphasize commercial agriculture over small farming, thus driving the poor off the land.
However, slums also existed in other parts of London. Osama Bin Laden Essay. However, all these ventures were inadequate for the improvement of the living conditions of the poor. Do My Essays. Amid the challenges of booming urbanization, residents of the world's five biggest slums are battling to carve out a place in the cities of the future.
Whatever the cause, this “urbanization of poverty” has resulted in the large- scale erection of primitive forms of shelter, either on public land or on private land owned by absentee landlords. Water, sanitation, and other utilities are usually lacking, making the incredible overcrowding even harder to bear. One doesn’t forget visits to such places. When, during the late apartheid era, I traveled through black townships outside the beautiful seaside city of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, I met families living in what reportedly were converted Boer War–era British- built huts with dirt floors. Water poured only from a communal tap, and there was no electricity. UN official Naison Mutizwa- Mangiza recalls his first trip to Nairobi’s Kibera, Africa’s largest slum and home to 7. There is the poor physical quality of the environment, overcrowding, houses so close together, tin- roofed, walls often of mud, with just a very small window.
City Mayors examines plans to remodel and redevelop Dharavi. Dharavi is not like other Indian slums. The psychological toll of slum living in Mumbai. Extreme Thinking About Slums and Slum Dwellers.
Quotes On Quality Improvement
Catalog Record: Slum habitat : Hyderabad slum improvement project. Slum habitat : Hyderabad slum improvement project / edited by H.U. From the magazine Slums of Hope For displaced peasants, the world’s vast urban ghettos are a gateway to a better future. Kibera and other slums developed throughout Nairobi. Kibera slum was established in early 20th century, and has grown ever since on public lands, around.
Dharavi: Mumbai's Shadow City - As Mumbai booms, the poor of its notorious Dharavi slum find themselves living in some of India's hottest real estate. Improving conditions for Mumbai’s slum workers. Slum Improvement - A project to improve the physical. Portal for consumers to receive quotes on renovation and home Improvement projects directly.
But it is the smell from lack of sanitation that hits you in the face. You have to jump over numerous small trickling drains, filthy and filled with smelly water mixed with other types of waste, including feces.
There are no toilets; people use plastic bags in the night for defecation and then throw these out in surrounding dumps and streams.”Riis’s Manhattan, even at its roughest, was never that squalid. True, some 2. 0,0. Central Park. And certainly the Lower East Side was terribly crowded.
But even the worst Orchard Street tenements were actual buildings, not tin- roofed shanties with dirt floors. For Riis, the slum’s biggest problem wasn’t population density, lack of sunlight, or even disease. It was what it did to the character of its residents. Slums were “nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half a million beggars to prey upon our charities . A better living environment, it was felt, would produce better people. Riis himself promoted the “model tenement”: privately built apartments for the poor, constructed to higher standards made possible by investors’ willingness to forgo normal profits. No wonder Riis has wound up cast in the company of heroic reformers of the Gilded Age and early Progressive Era, such as Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell.
In his new biography, Tom Buk- Swienty gushes: “Riis forced Americans to confront the squalor of immigrant conditions, and he demanded that those immigrants not be treated as second- or third- class citizens.”But this uncritical view ignores how Riis’s environmental determinism led, gradually but inexorably, to the advent of large- scale public housing, which would have destructive unintended consequences. Public authorities and idealistic architects would demolish the slums and replace them with publicly financed and operated buildings that—or so it was hoped—would uplift, not degrade, by providing a clean, cheerful, well- lit environment. With terrible irony, the replacement housing itself gradually became a blighted locus of social problems, but for seldom- understood reasons. Conventional wisdom still blames the projects’ design mistakes (the high- rise architecture criticized by Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman) and so- called concentration of poverty. Maggie A Girl Of The Streets Essay there. So the government keeps looking for the public- housing philosopher’s stone. HOPE VI projects, pushed by the Clinton administration (and perhaps to be revived by President Obama), replaced “distressed” public housing and mixed the middle class and the poor in indistinguishable townhouses. HUD’s Moving to Opportunity program uses housing vouchers to relocate public- housing residents to middle- class suburban neighborhoods.
Such approaches still assume that an improved environment—one where poor families have both sufficient amenities and better neighborly examples to emulate—will somehow inspire uplift, and thus they continue the Riis reform impulse. All such bestowed benefits, however, turn out to discourage beneficiaries from behaving constructively—saving money and accumulating assets, say, or making the prudent life choices, such as marriage and education, that truly help households “move up” to better neighborhoods. In other words, improved housing is an effect, not a cause, of the bourgeois virtues that Riis held dear. That so many Americans could rise from slums into the middle class shows, moreover, that the Lower East Side was filled with such virtues. The neighborhood was a beehive of effort, including that of immigrant entrepreneurs who built and ran apartment buildings.
In Riis’s book, writes Czitrom, “the complex day- to- day negotiations and textured lives of tenement dwellers simply disappear into a riot of pathology.” Czitrom quotes historian Jared Day, who described “the tenants who scraped together small sums to buy leases; they were the grocers, butchers, boarding house keepers and barbers who pooled their resources . But in a dynamic economy, it turned out, he had things exactly wrong. New York’s Tenement House Museum now refers to its historic building, tellingly, not as slum housing but as an “urban log cabin”—a starting point for upward mobility. This is also how we should think of the sprawling new slums of the developing world: not as doomed, deforming environments but as the low- cost housing built for (and by) displaced, formerly rural, people drawn into the modern urbanized economy and energetically aspiring to a better life. In Hong Kong—hardly impoverished but a powerful magnet for China’s rural poor—I was once taken to the top of one of the city’s ubiquitous four- story apartment buildings.
There I found one of Hong Kong’s 5. In the event of a stairwell fire, they could escape this high- rise shantytown only by jumping off the roof. Problem Solution Essay Topics Ideas. But aspiration was abundantly evident, too: I saw school uniforms neatly laid out on tiny mattresses and a kitchen table with a hot plate. In the South Africa township that I visited, similarly, one saw plenty of shacks, but also larger, self- built homes with their own Honda electric generators.
The Economist captured this atmosphere of activity and hope in a December 2. Dharavi, a Mumbai slum. Dharavi had “maybe a million residents crammed into a square mile of low- rise wood, concrete and rusted iron,” yes, but its residents were also “thriving in hardship.” Small “hutment” factories, for instance, exported leather belts directly to Wal- Mart. Dharavi, the magazine observed, was “organic and miraculously harmonious.
They include everything from hairdressers and bars to welders and furniture makers. These informal sprawls, for all their problems, may well prove to be a source of new products—and refinements and improvements of existing products—helping to fire future economic growth. Jane Jacobs envisioned this transformative churning in her landmark book The Economy of Cities—a process in which the poor, making the best of their circumstances, create substitutes for expensive imports and eventually develop superior products for export.
Project MUSE - Extreme Thinking About Slums and Slum Dwellers: A Critique. This article confronts two recent sets of thinking on slums and slum dwellers—the optimism that inadequate shelter can somehow be resolved in the near future and the opposing naysayer view warning of some kind of apocalypse. Neither line of thought is entirely wrong. Without the implementation of appropriate policies, the growth of festering slums continues to be an inevitable occurrence. The heart of this paper warns against over- generalization of the urban housing crisis: a phenomenon afflicting most journalists and increasingly academics too. To inject some objectivity into this pressing discussion, current lines of fashionable thinking about the proliferation of slums, access to land by the poor, infrastructure policies, social and residential segregation, privatization, property rights, and slumlords will be challenged and contested.
The paper will also denounce the recent resuscitation of the word .