Defiant Imagination

The age of the global city

There’s a very interesting article in the September/October issue of Foreign Policy in which International Relations expert Parag Khanna discusses the evolution of our world toward an age of the city.

Khanna points out that cities have always been acting as focus points for civilizations (think Venice or Changdu.) However we’ve never lived in an age where mega-cities acting as centres of power are emerging in all areas of the world. In fact, Khanna argues that the future will not be about nation-states but about global cities.

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Doug Saunders: Arrival City

Another investigation into the world of slums has been published. Doug Saunders, from the Globe and Mail, is the author of Arrival City, in which he describes his experience in these vast and poor urban areas populated with thousands of people who often have relocated from the countryside. Although I haven’t had the chance to read it, I have gone through an excerpt published on Sep. 25 in the newspaper, accompanied by an article summing up his findings.

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Jane Jacobs on slums

Conventional approaches to slums and slum dwellers are thoroughly paternalistic. The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so. To overcome slums, we must regard slum dwellers as people capable of understanding and acting upon their own self-interests, which they certainly are. We need to discern, respect and build upon the forces for regeneration that exist in slums themselves, and that demonstrably work in real cities. This is far from trying to patronize people into a better life, and it is far from what is done today.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.