This weekend, I skipped the Michigan-Ohio State football game to go to the Global Visionaries Symposium put together by the MCA and Bruce Mau’s Massive Change campaign/exhibit. It was well worth it. I’ll be posting notes from the conference over the next few days.
Squatter cities
Stewart Brand — Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog
* Underpopulation will be a larger problem than overpopulation
* Every week, there are 1.3 M new people in cities.
* Globalization shifts power to cities
* When people think things are going the wrong way, they act selfishly. They stick to themselves, only fend for themselves and their families. On the other hand, when people feel we are commonly progressing towards something, they have a tendency to share and give!
* Nations have concrete boundaries, whereas cities are nodes that allow people to pass through freely. As a result, we’re starting to see cities emerging in importance as connectors– they are the place where people come to for culture.
* Population experts believe that the world’s population will level off at 9 billion in the 2040s
* Why are people leaving the rural areas for the cities? According to Kavita Ramdas, of the Women’s Global fund, city life offers women choice. Whereas in a rural environment, the man forces the woman into a particular role, urban environments offer market labor and choice for the woman other than homemaking. Though anyone is upwardly mobile, women have the most to gain from moving to this environment.
Brand continued to speak about what he called “squatter cities”
* Squatters = dominant builders in today’s cities. Rocinha is a large favela in Rio Di Janeiro. Its informal infrastructure is astounding.
Here’s one that I found particularly interesting- a list of stuff squatters CARE about and DON’T care about:
Stuff squatters care about:
* Security of Tenure
* Location near work (I guess they’re thinking–who wants a 1.5 hr commute anymore when you can hop on the El/T/Bart/MTA?? 
* Water
* Sanitation
* Electricity — rural electrification is still way off in *many* developing countries. This becomes painstakingly evident when you stare at the dark side of the world and all the lights are on.
* Protection from crime — Now this I thought was interesting. I assumed there was more crime in an urban environment than a rural, but I was incorrect. Cities provide common services like crime protection to urban dwellers regardless of income but in the rural areas, there is no enforcement, so pirates run amok thieving and plundering without consequence.
Stuff squatters don’t worry about:
* Housing
* Unemployment
* Medical Care
* Starvation
* Phone Service
(Its crazy that we take all of this for granted here in the US)
* In squatter cities, there are a wealth of informal enterprises http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_economy.. Some of which are very complex. Some even use high technology (i.e. internet cafes, cell phone booths). I wonder what the government’s stance on these informal economies is.
* 60% of the employment in developing countries is in the informal economy.
* Innovation in this space abounds; Squatter cities, more often than not, are inherently green. This is because there is little waste. Products are reused, and then reused again after that. Talk about having a green citizen supply chain. Product design firms have a lot to learn from this environment.
* Burning Man, NV: Quintessential example of a squatter city scaling up.
* Everyone thought that the advent of the internet (and especially broadband) would allow people to live far away from urban areas and contribute to the economy. (Brand mentioned housing developments in remote areas in Montana that went unsold after long time). On the contrary, we’ve found that people in remote areas, as a product of their connectivity, have more interest in cultural centers, and thus a higher propensity to move there. So the internet is bringing people together (literally) more than bringing them apart.
* Utility and service providers have just started to understand how they can monetize services to squatters (in the past, squatters have just stolen electricity from power lines for instance). These providers have recognized that they need to gain the trust of squatters in order to serve them. Since squatters don’t have steady income streams, providers have innovated a token-based model to purchase electricity from them. This prevents theft of common services, and allows for greater market efficiency. How many BoP innovations could be enabled by a token-based revenue approach? My guess is quite a few!
* Running through my head: How does a legitimate government or well-intentioned corporation separate informal enterprises from illicit activities: human trafficking/drugs/prostitution? What’s the best way for government to engage with this black marketplace to try and collect tax revenue, and thus provide better infrastructure to these squatter cities?
Empty Cradle - Phillip Longman
Our Ecological Footprint - Williams E. Rees, Mathis Wackernagel (Author), Phil Testemale
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
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