To get a flavour of Stewart Brand’s iconoclastic thinking, check out this reprint of his anaylsis of New Urbanism here.
A taste:
Squatters already have inspired some Green practices. There should be many more to come. ….
… shopping areas could be more like the lanes in squatter cities, with a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6 p.m.,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the renowned former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.” In the thousands of squatter cities in the world, a billion creative people, most of them young, are trying new things unfettered by law or tradition.
Squatter cities are Green. They have maximum density—a million people per square mile in Mumbai—and minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi variously called a matatu (Kenya), dala-dala (Tanzania), tro-tro (Ghana), jeepney (Philippines), tuk-tuk (Thailand), tap-tap (Haiti), maxi-taxi (Romania), etc. (Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, Jan Chipchase from Nokia found that people leave their lights on all day.)
In most slums recycling is literally a way of life. …
The takeoff of cities is the dominant economic event of the first half of this century. Among all its other impacts will be infrastructural stresses on energy supply and food supply. People in vast numbers are climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder—from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat, and soy to the high protein of meat—and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of such aspirations will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince people to stay in their villages did….
Peasant life is over unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it.
[Click map for large, high-resolution version.]
The demographic literature refers often to the “bright lights” phenomenon that draws people to cities. Thanks to military satellite imagery, those lights are now visible to us from space. The night side of Earth, these decades, displays a dazzling lacework of light on the continents, with incandescent nodes at the metropolitan areas and a bright tracery of transportation corridors between them. That web of light is the sign to any visitor that they are approaching not just a living planet, but a civilized planet.
To register for Stewart Brand’s lecture at SFU Woodward’s (Wong Theatre) on October 4 at 7 pm, go here.
Japan (Tokyo esp. but all over really) is one of the few “developed” countries that is doing a great job of nook and cranny type retail, restaurants and bars in their cities. The country is literally littered with 3 seat noodle shops, bars in the back room of someone’s Tokyo house and other retail oddities in shape and style.
Much of Asia is like that I think, but Japan is really the only highly regulated jurisdiction where it’s encouraged and desired.
Gord’s email announcement of the Brand event reminded me of something I’d long ago forgotten. Gord wrote that Brand
“…thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol, so in 1966 he campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumoured satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He distributed buttons — for 25 cents each — asking, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” In 1968, a NASA astronaut made the photo public, and in 1970, not coincidentally, Earth Day began to be celebrated. Brand explained that the image “gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space.”
I remember the button vividly (At least the event of the button.). I was a student and someone (presumably Stewart Brand) was standing at the corner of 116th and Broadway (main entrance to Columbia) and gave me out one. I don’t remember having to pay for one, though I may have. Nor of course did I have any knowledge of the guy who (presumably) gave me out the button. It was only decades later did I — “BINGO!” — see the connection between Brand’s the button and the Whole Earth Catalog.
I also recollect that I was stumped by the question — I was a teenager and it was too allusive and obscure for me. But I do absolutely remember receiving one — it was striking — and considering the time and location, the button was freighted with sinister government overtones of something to hide.
I’ve emailed to my old roommates asking if they have any memory; I wonder if the button came up at our vigorously-debated dinners and what it meant.