PLANET OF SLUMS Mike Davis .... Koolhaas and his students came to realize that all of Lagos was like this. The book they published, "The Lagos Project," presents dozens of examples of the city's mash-up economy: the world's largest markets for used electronics and auto parts; unfinished public housing taken over semi-legally, the units rebuilt in jury-rigged expansions by the residents; a never-completed butterfly highway access ramp converted into a cantilevered village by informal colonists, complete with market stalls and a church. Koolhaas coined the term "flexscape" to denote large indeterminate structures, like highway overpasses or abandoned freighters, which can be creatively reappropriated and made to serve changing local needs. He came to see the city not as a dystopian nightmare or ruin, but as a giant hive of recombinant, sometimes cannibalistic creative energy. Lagos is often termed "unlivable" by Westerners and even by its own inhabitants; but as Koolhaas pointed out, 12 million people live in this unlivable city, and somehow, on their own terms, they make it work.
Davis does acknowledge the views of such slum enthusiasts. In the 1970s, in particular, social scientists in Latin America wrote of "slums of hope," where families staked an informal claim on open land and built a shanty in the expectation of gradually working their way up the income ladder, into the middle class. But he invokes these optimistic progressive visions of the slum in order to dismiss them. Davis argues, rather trenchantly, that the rising inequality associated with globalization and the neoliberal economic policies of the Washington Consensus have sawed through that income ladder. The very fact that slums are growing much faster than the urban population overall is proof that the "slums of hope" are mostly hoping in vain. .... http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/03/14/davis/ _______________________________________________ in-enaction mailing list http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/in-enaction + Architexturez collaborative at http://portal.architexturez.org/
