chaiwithlakshmi# – The Myth About Urban Indian Slums

While most of us may think that urban slums have electricity and toilets of some sort, they don’t. And there are nearly 35000 such slums in India. It may be hard to believe, but the population from these slums is an active contributor to the country’s economy and a highly effective participant in the urban work force! It is time that this population wasn’t turned a blind eye to.

Taking a step in the direction of inclusion and development is a small team from Australia – Pollinate Energy. They are creating affordable products for lighting and electricity. Soon, they hope to create products for sanitation and cooking too.
In this video, I catch up with Ben and Monique from Pollinate to understand their efforts, what’s it’s meant to work in Indian slums and their vision for the business.

This video was filmed at Sankalp Summit in Mumbai, India. Sankalp is an Intellecap initiative. Discover more at http://www.sankalpforum.com

Americans At Work Series ~ Bookbinders (ca.1961)

Shows the work of bookbinders and the final steps in the process of manufacturing printed books. From the “Americans at Work” series.

University Of Pennsylvania Museum Of Archaeology And Anthropology Films

In its 120-year history, the University of Pennsylvania Museum has collected nearly one million objects, many obtained directly through its own field excavations or anthropological research. Three gallery floors feature materials from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Bible Lands, Mesoamerica, Asia and the ancient Mediterranean World, as well as artifacts from native peoples of the Americas, Africa and Polynesia. This collection on the Internet Archive represents a portion of the motion picture film collection housed at the Museum. Please note that cataloging and identification of subjects will progress over a period of time

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology holds copyright to these films. Please contact the Penn Museum Archives at 215-898-8304 or at photos@pennmuseum.org to request permission to reproduce this footage.

Enjoy: https://archive.org/details/UPMAA_films

Gemma Solés – Five Must-Watch Videos About Urbanization In Africa

Urban Africa, May 2014. It’s unnecessary to say that African urban populations are growing and urbanisation is becoming one of the most important and highly topical concepts in the management of African cities. There are many books, reports and papers on African urban issues but less audiovisual material. Here’s a selection of the best videos from around the web.

The platform for African thought leaders Talking Heads produced, earlier this year, The Future of Africa Cities. In it, Prof. Edgar Pieterse, Director of the African Centre for Cities reflects on the theoretical and practical entanglements that rapid urbanization engenders for a precarious present, and a potential future in African Cities. He raises critical questions around sustainability, innovation, creativity, and knowledge production.

See more: http://www.urbanafrica.net/blogs/urbanization-africa-video-roundup/

Prof.Edgar Pieterse, Director of the African Centre for Cities and Urbanist reflects on the theoretical and practical entanglements that rapid urbanization engenders for a precarious present, and a potential future in African Cities. He raises critical questions around sustainability, innovation, creativity, and knowledge production.

Louise Scholtz On The Lack Of Social Housing In South Africa

Urban land is of symbolic significance in South Africa because it is land that people of colour were historically denied access to. But the historically privileged still own, occupy and enjoy the best urban land.
The question is, why hasn’t our government been able to unlock well-located land in urban areas to provide housing for the people who need it most?
The historically disadvantaged continue to live on marginal land on the peripheries of South Africa’s cities and the apartheid city remains untransformed.
Both The South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS) and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung South Africa Office (FES) wish to promote discussion about the transformation of the apartheid landscape in an effort to foster social cohesion in South Africa’s still largely racially and economically segregated society. The organisations co-hosted a panel discussion to interrogate the issue on 17 April 2014.

The event was opened by Renate Tenbusch, Resident Director of the FES South Africa office and the panellists who spoke at the event included, Mark Napier: Principal Researcher at the Built Environment Unit of the CSIR and co-author of the book, “Trading Places: accessing land in African cities”; Thembani Jerome Ngongoma: Member of Executive Committee of Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack dwellers’ movement); Louise Scholtz: Manager at World Wildlife Fund South Africa and leader on joint project with National Association of Social Housing Institutions; and Kate Tissington: Senior Researcher at the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa.

Overall, as a result of the contributions of this panel as well as questions and comments from the floor, it became clear that there is stasis, a lack of imagination and a lack of political will to house the poor and to transform South Africa’s apartheid cities. Much of this is happening within a highly corporatized free market environment where municipalities would rather sell off their land for short-term profit than invest in the long-term sustainability of their cities for inhabitants and future generations. Rent collection and maintenance of rental housing stock are activities that South African municipalities simply do not want to burden themselves with.
Talking about the availability of rental and social housing stock in South African cities, Louise Scholtz argued that there is a worldwide trend towards home ownership, which is affecting the availability of rental stock negatively.

In South Africa, municipalities have sold off much of their rental stock because they are unable to manage their housing stock. However, rental housing is important in South Africa because it provides flexible options to people, and in this country where people are employed in elementary occupations, they need that flexibility to move to where the jobs are.
Scholtz said that it was difficult to determine exactly what rental stock government owns because it is scattered across departments and nobody is accountable or takes ownership of the issue.
The creation of rental or social housing stock provides an opportunity to restructure and reconfigure the apartheid city and address historic inequalities, she concluded.

Belinda Jack ~ What Is Reading

Neuroscience is beginning to explore what happens when we read by monitoring the areas of the brain that are stimulated while we read. Do these findings matter to the Humanities? Is there neurological evidence that the brain responds differently to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing? How we read clichés will be examined, as well as what the experience of re-reading tells us about reading first time round?

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 1,500 lectures free to access or download from the website.
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