the new metropolitanism?

Stewart Brand, the famous founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, has a piece in last month's Prospect magazine about the current state and future promise of slums in the world's mega-cities. A preponderance of the world's population already lives in cities. Each month, more than two million people move from rural poverty into the slums of mega-cities like Lagos, Nigeria or Mumbai. It would seem ironic that the founder of a magazine almost wholly devoted towards revivalist agriculture and social techniques would therefore write a paean to the slum, but here he is:

The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

It is a well-known truth that cities like New York and Tokyo are the most energy-efficient cities in the world. What reason do we have to object to the new urbanism, then? Brand suggests the European bourgeois' essential distaste for the new city with the examples he cites in order to defend this new notion of city-dwelling:

In Bangkok’s slums, most homes have a colour television—the average number is 1.6 per household. Almost all have fridges, and two-thirds have a CD player, washing machine and a mobile phone. Half of them have a home telephone, video player and motorcycle.

The insight and the horror which Brand only alludes to is this: While the educated classes fret about how to somehow lessen the plight of poverty on the masses of our fellow-men, the impoverished are quickly learning to get used to a way of life that would seem intolerable a generation ago. The "pod" hotels in Japan evoke such horror in us is that they illustrate the emerging view of prosperity in the world: a television and several other electric appliances seems enough to satisfy anyone. Whatever happened to appreciating nature, having a large house, plenty of exercise, and clean air?

When I was living with a host family in Qingdao, I noticed the decrepit honeycomb apartment block in which they lived. My host father worked in a factory several miles away during the week and was only home on weekends. What horrifies Americans and Europeans so much about this coming future is exactly this: my host father seemed perfectly content to sell his middle age to backbreaking work in a factory in exchange for an apartment with a dishwasher, washer and dryer, television, flush toilet and cement partition. When I asked his wife and daughter what they thought about the government, they had nothing but praise: look at how much their lives had changed in the last ten years!

Brand writes that

if [cities] are overall a net good for those who move there, it is because cities offer more than just jobs. They are transformative: in the slums, as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan, and with it everything the dictionary says that cosmopolitan means: multicultural, multiracial, global, worldly-wise, well travelled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane.

The fundamental stumbling block for the American or European mind in accepting this new vision of urban existence is the essential lack of dignity therein. And this is not to say that humans must somehow adapt to a life without dignity. Rather it is to say that the essentially western project of technological and civilizational progression implies a logical contradiction. Conceptualizing human prosperity in terms of material comfort requires the abandonment of freedom, liberty, and dignity–values which we thought were essential to happiness in human enterprise.