Learning from the 'informal city'

Slums are becoming tourist destinations, there is ‘slum tourism’. Why? There is so much innovation happening there in the midst of resource crunch, that’s why!

Developed nations can learn directly from developing and emerging economies how to create innovative solutions from limited resources and challenging environmental requirements. There are projects such as that in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya – often cited as the largest slum in Africa – where a community cooker designed by local firm Planning Systems runs by burning waste: members bring their collected waste in exchange for use of the cooker, to cook a meal or boil water. Green energy initiatives, from biogas from human waste to solar schemes are many. Many off-grid, micro-generated renewable energy are happening in the slums.

But championing slum innovations tends to romanticise the conditions, and ignores the poverty, crime and disease that slum inhabitants face daily.

In 2010, the UN estimated that 830 million people lived in slums worldwide, and predicted the number to rise to 900 million by 2020. In Latin America, almost 80% of the population live in urban areas; in Dhaka, Bangladesh, an estimated 3.4 million people live across the city's 5,000-plus slums. These are huge numbers living in dangerous conditions.

Yet people like Alfredo Brillembourg, Columbia University professor, feel that the formal city cannot survive without the informal city. “… in the slums I discovered a whole new social geography … I began rethinking my whole profession, unlearning what I had learned, and then re-focused on adaptation and reuse and using scarcity as a resource."

It became his life work to not only improve the conditions within slums, but to highlight the aspects that function better than the formal city around it. "Number one: slums are more resilient," he explains. "Why? Because they work in approximation, they work organically, they grow and adapt together. Number two: they produce less trash than the regular city. They use fewer resources.”

He isn't the only urbanist who argues that while improving the conditions must come first, the innovations that arise from slums should not be ignored. Others see slums as symbolising both the individual and the collective. “Composed of incredible individual effort, [the houses] retain this incredible sense of community because they are connected in incredible ways. This cohesion, the new urban village, is the greatest innovation that I see coming out of what you call a slum, but they call their home."

Learning from adversity has always been advocated. And while improving the slums, if we can pick a few lessons in living with less, why not?

Peak of all things

The global mining, oil and gas industries have expanded so fast in the last decade they are now leading to large-scale "landgrabbing" and threatening farming and water supplies, according to a report in The Guardian.

"The catalogue of devastation is growing. We are no longer talking about isolated pockets of destruction and pollution. In just 10 years, iron ore production has more than doubled, coal has risen 45% and metals like lithium by 125%. Across Africa, Latin America and Asia, more and more lands, rivers and aquifers are being devoured by mining activities.

"Industrial wastelands are being formed by vast open-pit mines and mountain top removal, and the poisoning of water systems, deforestation, and the contamination of topsoil," says the report by the Gaia foundation and groups including Friends of the Earth International, Grain, Oilwatch and Navdanya in India.

The dramatic increase in large-scale mining, clearly seen in places such as the Amazon for gold and oil, India's tribal forest lands for bauxite, South Africa for coal and Ghana for gold, is being fuelled by the rising price of metals and oil. These have acted as an incentive to exploit new areas and less pure deposits, says the report.

"Technologies are becoming more sophisticated to extract materials from areas which were previously inaccessible, uneconomic or designated of 'lower' quality," it says. "That means more removal of soil, sand and rock and the gouging out of much larger areas of land, as seen with the Alberta tar sands in Canada."

Economies are getting better at reducing the intensity of the use of raw materials but the sheer increase in their absolute consumption is now staggering, say the authors. According to the US Mineral Information Institute, the average American will use close to 1,300 tonnes of minerals in a lifetime.

Not good! For sure, but is anyone going to stop? Especially today when our lives are so closely wedded to umpteen gadgets woven out of all those metals!

Where do we go from here?

Since we are in a thinking mode, let us take a relook at Mckinsey's study on Mobilising for a resource revolution.

From 1980 to 2009, the global middle class3 grew by around 700 million people, to 1.8 billion, from roughly 1.1 billion. Over the next 20 years, it is likely to grow by an additional 3 billion, to nearly 5 billion people. The world has never before witnessed income growth of this speed and magnitude: China and India are doubling their real per capita incomes at about ten times the pace England achieved during the Industrial Revolution and at around 200 times the scale.

Can business and government leaders, not to mention consumers, move with the speed and scale needed to avoid a period of dramatically higher resource prices, along with their destabilizing impact on economic growth, welfare, and political stability?

Going by the report, market forces, and the innovation they spark, could ride to the rescue in the 21st century too. Their research on the supply- and-demand outlook for energy, food, steel, and water suggests that without a step change in resource productivity and a technology-enhanced expansion of supply, the world could be entering an era of high and volatile resource prices. Nothing less than a resource revolution is needed.

The report places much confidence on technological know-how bringing on the needed supply expansion and productivity rise. However, while supply expansion is mooted, it is also noted that this will mean more deforestation, more water consumption and more emissions! So, the question is, is this a wise solution? It simply prolongs the apocalypse.

Resource productivity should be the better option. Among the 15 such points listed, are improving energy efficiency in buildings, bringing on next generation vehicles, cutting food waste and developing high-strength steel! Yes, queer as that may sound, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, estimates that high-strength steel would reduce the weight of steel columns and steel beams by about 32 and 19 percent, respectively. Qube Design Associates has developed advanced reinforcing bars that weigh 30 percent less than conventional ones.

Government challenges will be many, including working across ministries as resources will be such that they span the range from agriculture, industries, water, energy, forestry and urban development!

The report also feels fiscal regimes in many countries provide a disincentive to the productive use of energy, land, and water resources by subsidizing them to the tune of more than $1 trillion per year. Replacing these subsidies with market-based prices would improve the attractiveness of resource productivity opportunities to private-sector investors.

Alongwith all these options it would be prudent to adopt a conservation approach to resources. If one believes in saving for the future...

Resource Revolution

Why do we humans need revolutions to wake us up? Sadly, we do. And now, going by what most of us know, but vindicated time and again, and now by a report from McKinsey, without a resource revolution, we all face the prospect of damage to global growth, welfare, and the environment.

Not to despair, the new McKinsey report Resource Revolution: Meeting the world’s energy, materials, food, and water needs shows that the resource challenge can be met through a combination of expanding the supply of resources and a step change in the way they are extracted, converted, and used. Such resource productivity improvements, using existing technology, could satisfy nearly 30 percent of demand in 2030. Just 15 areas, from more energy-efficient buildings to improved irrigation, could deliver 75 percent of the potential for higher resource productivity.

Meeting the resource-supply and productivity challenges will be far from easy—only 20 percent of the potential is readily achievable and 40 percent will be hard to capture. There are many barriers, including the fact that the capital needed each year to create a resource revolution will rise from roughly $2 trillion today to more than $3 trillion, with additional capital requirements to pursue climate change and universal-energy-access agendas.

Policy makers should consider action on three fronts: unwinding subsidies that keep prices artificially low and encourage inefficiency; ensuring that enough capital is available and that market failures are corrected; and bolstering society’s resilience by creating safety nets to help very poor people deal with change and educating consumers and businesses to heed the reality of future resource constraints.