weburbanist.com. December 2014. City officials spend a lot of time and energy worrying about how to keep homeless people off public furniture and out of certain common areas, when they should be considering how to better manage the issue of homelessness in general. One area of focus is homeless housing, whether simply meeting the immediate needs of people who live on the streets or providing a more long-term, forward-thinking transitional living spaces. These 14 designs for homeless housing provoke thought as to how we can meet the needs of disadvantaged people living in our own communities, and ensure that the situation is only temporary.

Read more: http://weburbanist.com/smart-sensitive-solutions/

 

sustainablecitiescollective. July 2014. Millions of people live in slums in Asian cities. The Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) has been running a program to try to upgrade living conditions for these people that has proved itself to be massively effective and at little cost. How has it done this?
Its Asian Coalition for Community Action Program (ACCA) has been running for five years in 230 cities in 19 countries and it is now possible to see its achievements. It works at the grassroots; the people living in the slums are the ones who plan and implement the projects, tackling problems of land, infrastructure and housing at scale, working in partnership with the local governments and other stakeholders.

It is amazing what they have achieved with the small budget that they have been given. The total budget over the five years was just $14.5 million but with this they have:
completed 150 big housing projects (for just up to $40,000 each)
set up 98 city-based community development funds
got 400,000 community savers to invest $30 million in them
completed 1635 small upgrading projects (for about $3000 each)
conducted citywide surveys in about 200 cities
creative collaborative partnerships with local governments in 190 cities
conducted 35 community-led disaster rehabilitation projects in 11 countries.

Read more: http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/david-thorpe

newgeography.com. July, 2014. Every few years the ideals of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city utopia are resurrected in an attempt by the UK government to create new communities, and address the country’s housing crisis. Sometimes this takes the form of new towns or eco-towns, and sometimes proposals for an actual garden city are put forward – as in the last budget.
Rather than just rolling out this romantic terminology, we should take a closer look at garden city ideals and how they can be adopted to make the proposed Ebbsfleet development a success.
Several years ago my colleague Michael Edwards presciently forecast the current problems in the Thames Gateway where Ebbsfleet falls, with a dominance of private development that does little to provide for local employment and walkable communities.
He outlined the need to return to funding principles similar to the garden city model, where development trusts retain freeholds on the land. This model, based on investment in infrastructure and services, is a fundamental principle that shifts from short-term returns to a long-term relationship created between the collective or public landowner and local inhabitants.

Lessons From History
Despite the fact that the garden city was a highly influential model throughout the first half of the 20th century, ultimately leading to the establishment of some key settlements in the UK, US and elsewhere in the world, it has had few genuine successes. After World War II, similar utopian dreams of creating model communities, with decent housing surrounding a well-designed centre, met with the reality. British reformer William Beveridge famously summed them up for having “no gardens, few roads, no shops and a sea of mud”.

Read more: http://www.newgeography.com/content/004396-urban-renewal-needs-more-garden-city-stamp-take-root

SFI’s Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability research effort is creating an interdisciplinary approach and quantitative synthesis of organizational and dynamical aspects of human social organizations, with an emphasis on cities. Different disciplinary perspectives are being integrated in terms of the search for similar dependences of urban indicators on population size – scaling analysis – and other variables that characterize the system as a whole.
A particularly important focus of this research area is to develop theoretical insights about cities that can inform quantitative analyses of their long-term sustainability in terms of the interplay between innovation, resource appropriation, and consumption and the make up of their social and economic activity. This focus area brings together urban planners, economists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and complex system theorists with the aim of generating an integrated and quantitative understanding of cities. Outstanding areas of research include the identification of general scaling patterns in urban infrastructure and dynamics around the world, the quantification of resource distribution networks in cities and their interplay with the city’s socioeconomic fabric, issues of temporal acceleration and spatial density, and the long-term dynamics of urban systems.

Read more: http://www.santafe.edu/research/cities-scaling-and-sustainability/

Aart van den Beukel, eerder eigenaar van koffie & bagel barretjes in Amsterdam, levert publieke toiletten aan de sloppenwijken van Accra, Ghana. Van het menselijk afval uit de toiletten wordt compost en biogas gemaakt met een biogascentrale. “Met het biogas leveren we vanaf volgend jaar stroom aan de locale energiemaatschappij. Daarmee is het businessmodel rond.”
“Geld verdienen aan publieke toiletten in sloppenwijken is niks nieuws. Vaak zijn de bestaande toiletblokken eigendom van gemeenten en soms van ondernemers. Mensen betalen 10 cent per keer aan de toiletjuf. Daarvoor krijgen ze 4 velletjes wc-papier en mogen ze gebruik maken van een rijtje smerige wc’s, uitlopend op een open riool.”

“De toiletblokken worden slecht onderhouden en niet (goed) schoongemaakt. Toch maakt 70% van de bewoners in de sloppenwijken van Accra er gebruik van. Ze hebben geen eigen wc en wonen zo dicht op elkaar – zo’n 240.000 duizend mensen op 4 km2 – dat er weinig alternatieven zijn. Dat veroorzaakt natuurlijk allerlei ziektes. Kinderen zijn continu aan de diarree.”
“NGO’s hebben eerder nieuwe toiletblokken neergezet, maar dat gaat vaak mis vanaf het moment dat ze worden overgedragen aan gemeenten of lokale franchisenemers. Die investeren het geld liever in andere zaken dan onderhoud.”

Lees verder: http://www.grensverleggers.nl/wc-blok-als-goudmijn/

Zie ook (Dutch & English): http://www.safisana.org/nl/ 

Safi Sana collects toilet and organic waste from slums. This waste is used to produce organic fertiliser and green electricity. Safi Sana is a social venture offering this package of services to (local) governments. With our products we serve a growing demand for affordable and effective fertiliser products and a demand for renewable energy. We also offer governments an innovative solution for the massive waste problems in cities in developing countries.

izindaba.info. 2014. Juni. Verlassen wir dieses Europa, das nicht aufhört, vom Menschen zu reden, und ihn dabei niedermetzelt, wo es ihn trifft, an allen Ecken seiner eigenen Straßen, an allen Ecken der Welt. Ganze Jahrhunderte hat Europa nun schon den Fortschritt bei anderen Menschen aufgehalten und sie für seine Zwecke und seinen Ruhm unterjocht; ganze Jahrhunderte hat es im Namen seines angeblichen ‚geistigen Abenteuers‘ fast die ganze Menschheit erstickt…. Also, meine Kampfgefährten, zahlen wir Europa nicht Tribut, in dem wir Staaten, Institutionen und Gesellschaften gründen, die von ihm inspiriert sind. – Frantz Fanon, Die Verdammten dieser Erde.

Warum interessiere ich mich für das Leben in Kinshasa, obwohl ich kein Afrikanist, kein Urbanist und kein Entwicklungshelfer bin? Mit dem Voyeurismus der Slum-Touristen hat es etwas gemein, nämlich Neugier. Aber vor allem anderen geht es mir, wenn ich mich für die Neuzusammensetzung der Subjektivität in einer afrikanischen Metropole interessiere, um ein neues Terrain der Kämpfe im globalen Kapitalismus. Das Kapital des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts kolonisierte und vernichtete die Bauern und nationalisierte / normierte / rationalisierte gleichzeitig die metropolitanen Gesellschaften. Jetzt, im frühen 21. Jahrhundert, subsumiert das Kapital nicht nur die Gesellschaft, nicht nur die normierten Subjekte, sondern auch die Subjektivität der Einzelnen als Produktivkraft und eröffnet damit ein neues Terrain für den prozessierenden Widerspruch zwischen Wert und Nicht-Wert, zwischen der werthaltigen metropolitanen Subjektivität und den peripheren Störkräften, die eine Subjektivität des Nicht-Werts entfalten könnten. Dass dies eine Antwort auf die epochale Krise der industriellen Wertschöpfung und der Moderne ist, soll hier nicht weiter erörtert werden. Der neue Antagonismus hat seinen Ort in den Köpfen der Menschen hier wie dort, wie auch in der Ausbildung sozialer Gegenwelten auf den drei Kontinenten. Es geht also zugleich um neue Subjektivität und um neue Formen sozialer Bewegungen im globalen Kapitalismus. Ich halte an der Auffassung fest, dass das Kapital ein (globales) soziales Verhältnis ist, mit zahlreichen unterschiedlichen Facetten und Kriegsschauplätzen. Es gibt kein Außerhalb mehr. Einer dieser Kriegsschauplätze ist Kinshasa.

Weiter lesen: http://www.izindaba.info