steven johnson onthe challenge of the megacities

Steven Johnson (of "Emergence" -one of my favorite books on understanding cities) continues his Urban Planet blog for the New York Times with a look at the challenges of today's megacities --comparing them to the challenges of victorian age London (which he documents in his new book "The Ghost Map").

He cites Robert Neurwith's "Shadow Cities" -and rings a bell of hope for today's urban agglomerations -and pretty much echoes my own reasons for feeling positive about Metro Manila.

If London could transform itself so dramatically in a matter of decades, there’s at least reason to hope that the megacities of the developing world can do the same. They have populations 10 times the size of Victorian London’s, but they have one crucial advantage: most of the problems they face we already know how to solve. The Victorians had to invent a whole set of institutions — and learn from a long list of scientific breakthroughs — in order to make large-scale metropolitan living into a sustainable practice. But now we know how to prevent cholera; we know how to build sewer systems and water-treatment plants; and we can identify and track emerging diseases with an accuracy that would have astonished the scientists of the 19th century.

Read the rest of Johnson's article via NYT here (subscription). - Whole article after the jump.

December 12, 2006, 10:28 pm
The Challenge of the Megacities
By Steven Johnson

I began these posts with a look back at the squalor and terror of London 150 years ago, a city literally drowning in its own filth, ravaged by disease, and haunted by a scavenger class living off the refuse of the city — a group so large in number that had they broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth largest in England. My trip to London last week brought yet another reminder of the immense progress the city — like most other cities in the developed world — has made in a relatively short time. The air and water are far cleaner; the killer epidemics of the Victorian age have been vanquished; life expectancies have doubled; and overall standards of living are significantly higher than they were in the 1850s.

But something else has changed since then. London was the largest city on the planet back in 1854, but now it is on the smaller side, as world cities go. (It ranks in the mid-teens, depending on how you define its borders.) Many of the cities that now top the charts — Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Mumbai — have as much in common with Victorian London as they do with the modern version. London’s hundred thousand scavengers are a mere footnote compared to the massive shantytowns that have exploded at the margins of today’s megacities.

These squatter communities have been built on land that is, technically speaking, illegally occupied — without official title deeds, electricity, running water or waste removal systems. (Underground economies providing all these services have started to develop, however.) In such places, the waterborne diseases — including cholera — that plagued the Victorians are still rampant, thanks to miserable public health and sanitation resources.

The squatters worldwide now add up to a billion people, and some experts project that by 2030, a quarter of the world’s population will live in shantytowns. This is not entirely reason for despair. As the writer Robert Neuwirth argues in his extraordinary book “Shadow Cities,” shantytowns are places of dynamic economic innovation and creativity. Some of the oldest ones — the Rocinha area in Rio de Janeiro, Squatter Colony in Mumbai — have already matured into fully-functioning urban areas with most of the comforts we’ve come to expect in the developed world. Improvised wood shacks have given way to steel and concrete, electricity, running water, even cable television.

If London could transform itself so dramatically in a matter of decades, there’s at least reason to hope that the megacities of the developing world can do the same. They have populations 10 times the size of Victorian London’s, but they have one crucial advantage: most of the problems they face we already know how to solve. The Victorians had to invent a whole set of institutions — and learn from a long list of scientific breakthroughs — in order to make large-scale metropolitan living into a sustainable practice. But now we know how to prevent cholera; we know how to build sewer systems and water-treatment plants; and we can identify and track emerging diseases with an accuracy that would have astonished the scientists of the 19th century.

This is reason for both hope and for shame. Cholera itself is so easily treatable that, in controlled laboratory experiments the United States, test subjects can be safely infected with the bacterium. And yet water-related diseases including cholera still kill up to 5 million people a year worldwide, many of them in squatter communities. The hope lies in the fact that we know how to stop these deaths. The shame is that we haven’t actually managed to do it yet.

Image credit: S. Johnson in London, via stevenberlinjohnson.com