Week 9: Contested Cities

Heavy reading this week; not particularly uplifting. Both Havery's and Shatkin's pieces reminded me of my undergraduate outrage at privatization of public services and commodification of basic human necessities (think expensive bottled water).
Shatkin's piece on planning the privatopolis brought to mind my worries about the charter movement in public education in the US. Charter schools, in a way, are a first step towards privatizing universal public education. Charter schools receive per pupil funding from the local government, but are not beholden to the local educational system. They also raise large amounts of money from local and national non-profits, in some cases giving them a financial leg up over traditional public schools. The notion that public charter schools will compete with local schools so that all schools will improve or shut down some how ignores the fact that competition inherently creates winners and losers and in the case of education the loser schools will harm the unlucky children who had no other option than to attend their neighborhood school.
I firmly believe that the market should not decide the fate of basic services: education, health, water, air etc. City planning in the hands of private developers places makes decisions about those basic human issues the responsibility of business men and women who are first and foremost after a profit, not just a better world for all mankind. Worrisome.

Week 8: Segregation & Decline

Harvey's Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography provided an explanation to why the global financial sector crashed and how systemic risk, a new concept to many economists, is a basic and fundamental element of Marx's understanding of capitalism.

According to Harvey (an Marx), capital must be able to grow otherwise there will be a crisis and the magic growth number of the past hundred years has been a 3% average world wide (with some places growing more, others less, and some shrinking). If we accept that capital needs growth to survive (which I feel pretty comfortable with) then we must figure that at some point there is a limit to that growth, at which point the system comes to a screeching halt and falls apart.

I recently had an discussion with my husband about how even though the fed has been holding down interest rates banks still aren't lending at normal rates and that this is holding down economic growth. I bristled at the truism that economic growth must come from access to debt because it was the debt mentality that got us into the mess we're in today. After a bit of back and forth I said, yes...yes, I know that our current system runs off of debt, but imagine we're on mars and we're setting up a completely new system - is that how you'd choose to structure it? The answer was no, because, when you live in a world of spatial limitations and resources limitations, why would you want to function in a way that inherently exponential and unstable...in systems modeling we've got ourselves in a positive feedback loop. Not how I'd organize the world.

Week 7: Mega Cities

That 60 minutes exposé on the Chinese housing bubble was VERY interesting. I can't help but wonder, why don't squatters come in and take over, French style (a la Jeudi Noir)?

For a little background on Parisian squatters http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12135687

Nezar's "Urban Informality, a new way off life" shines a little light on that question for me and also helped me understand my frame. As a Latin Americanist, I understand informal housing and labor in the Latin American context: organized and politically pushy (think FMLN in El Salvador or PT in Brazil). So to read about the middle eastern approach of "redress" was a bit of mental shift for me.

That citizens who were acting agains the state in some way (by illegally occupying land or not following code) by trying to sneak a settlement in and then pretend it was always there and is legitimate is really fascinating to me, because it implies implicit cooperation on both sides.

Which brings me back to China. I would assume that a homeless rural migrants staging a political movement around occupying vacant housing owned by China's middle class would not go well for them; perhaps a bit of a non-starter. That leaves the sneak technique, but since the exposé suggested that informal residents were just packing up their bricks and leaving, I have to imagine that the state or maybe the property owners have a system to prevent squatting - i.e. does not have implicit cooperation.

Which begs the question. Where are those people going with their bricks?