The Other Americas

by Tony Chavira

Did you know that today over half the world's population lives in cities? With an estimated one billion people living in slums, innovative solutions are needed to provide sustainable urban housing for the poor. This problem is exacerbated in Latin America, where according to UN Habitat, over 80 percent of the region's population now live in urban areas. To that end, the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs is co-sponsoring an initiative with the Government of Brazil that focuses on sustainable development for the urban poor across the Americas.

—Emma Kelsey, U.S. Dept. of State Blog

Think for a moment about the world. All of it. Whip out GoogleMaps if you can’t see it clearly in your head. Now take a long, hard look at just how much of the world is not covered in city. There are deserts, tundra, forests, plains, farmland, mountains, and a ridiculous amount of ocean. Only about 30% of the earth’s face is covered by what we might define as “land.” Of that landscape, roughly 3% is covered by towns or cities. That means that less than 1.25% of the entire earth is covered in development and housing.

And yet, more than 50% of all people live in that space, while the other half of the human population lives on the other 97% of available land.

This obviously doesn’t mean that those who live in cities don’t live well though. There’s a reason we romanticize New York, Paris, Toyko, Mumbai or Los Angeles as unique destinations, filled with the potential for new and exciting experiences. In fact, even when we travel to more “exotic” locations, we think about where we are relative to city spaces. Kilamanjaro is near Nairobi. Phoenix is near the Grand Canyon. You get to Machu Picchu by first arriving in Lima. The Egyptian pyramids are close to Cairo. You don’t fly from Los Angeles onto a runway next to Stonehenge, you fly to London. Cities are places to congregate, and their organization is universal simply because all cultures need to organize themselves in ways that help people get along.

But not all cities are organized in ways that are efficient, useful or healthy for those living in them. Though most cities can be seen as democratic spaces, in many cases they are organized in ways that benefit the few in spite of the many. Bunker Hill, for example, is only a very small part of the city of Los Angeles. But dramatic resources are allotted to this small space, in spite of whole areas of North, South, West and East Los Angeles that could desperately use the funds.

This inconsistency in how we allocate our resources is much more pronounced when you visit the Global South. Cities like Sao Paulo, Brazil are trapped in many ways by lack of organization for planning initiatives that would more than likely benefit everyone. Whatever people built ages ago dictates how people use the city today, even if it makes it incredibly difficult to reinforce policies that the Brazilian government really wants to utilize, like rainwater conservation or wind power. Worst of all, homes are built in completely unsustainable ways both in terms of their upkeep and their environmental impact.

Whenever we’re stumped for an illustration for urban issues, we like to use Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis.

 The Human Development Index is this nifty (but sad) tool that clearly presents just how differently we view development here versus countries which really need basic infrastructural stuff like water, access to food, and basic shelter. They figure out how to determine where countries stand using a few key statistics: level of education, average life expectancy, and per-capita GDP (which can basically represent standard of living). Just a cursory look of their human development report map should point out that there’s a huge disparity between developed and undeveloped areas. Generally speaking, countries in the northern hemisphere are noticeably more developed than those in the southern. Why this is the case is more long and complicated to answer than the answer for how it can be fixed, but we know one thing for sure: until recently, there’s been little focus on how to change these countries’ development style to better accommodate people living in their villages and towns. And when cities have no urban planning, they become gigantic messes when you start introducing stuff like new homes, restaurants, or cars, planes or trains.

We can already see a huge disparity in the styles of homes in the Global South (not including Australia, really). We have so many codes and rules for designing and developing a structure that it’s almost absurd, except that without these rules an earthquake could very well come along and wreck everything in one fell swoop. Many buildings in the developing world just don’t, though. They have no foundations, no electrical or mechanical systems, and they’re made of simple, sometimes dangerously fragile or toxic materials. Slums in Mumbai are structurally unsound. Three-story buildings in refugee camps have no underlying structure. Most homes made of shipping crates are simply lined up in a row, and when floods hit, they’re hit hardest. There’s no underground sewage system, there’s no water or gas, and whole communities run on as much electricity in a week as two suburban American homes might use in a day.

With all of this in mind, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas, Ashoka International and the U.S. State Department recently announced a housing challenge: how to create affordable, sustainable and thoughtfully-integrated homes in Latin American cities. This is part of a two-pronged attack on the badly-organized and unsustainable city planning of years past in Latin American cities, but also part of a bigger and more looming concern: that over 80% of the population is Latin America lives in a city. But many cities there were never structured to manage these capacities. Instead, people live in subpar homes and structures popping up rapidly as the cities expand to accommodate jobs in completely unsustainable ways, both economically and environmentally.

The other prong of this plan is a bit longer-term: cities, governments and academics have begun to develop a network of urban planners who will work to put best practices into, uh, practice. They will share and work to integrate information, utilize strategies and tactics which have been proven to work, and develop new spaces and homes with policies that take structural growth and economic integration in mind. Instead of just building more slums.

Overall, I’d say that the initiative’s compelling and exciting. It has a great goal and a vision that looks so far ahead that, if it works, it’ll actually change the way dense areas are planned throughout the world.

But we really won’t see the effect of this approach and program any time soon at the policy level, and it may be even slower to pick up unless actual developers in Latin America decide to get on the ball and follow the curriculum. Worse, there’s an even larger problem that this plan will have to address before it even begins to get visionary about the future of planning in the Americas: what to do about infill and displacement. Infill is the process of actually filling in the space between places, and so far development in Latin American cities treats infill completely differently than it does in the U.S.A. A simple way to think about it would be this: U.S. cities have a culture which had not favored density for cities over the course of the past 70 years. So there’s a lot of space to fill up, and how that’s done can be strategized and achieved one step at a time.

But many Global South cities were designed to be dense, cramming in as many people as possible in difficult conditions simply because the people living there just need jobs. They’re poor. So the only way to pull of smart infill would be to completely renovate the structures, and that means displacing people (one way or another). How this plan seeks to tackle that will be the biggest challenge we will see in our time for urban planners in the developing world, but it needs to be addressed far before we start holding competitions for what the newest, greenest homes are going to look like.

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