Slumming It

"The city is our ark in which we might survive the environmental turmoil of the next century. Genuinely urban cities are the most environmentally efficient form of existing with nature that we possess because they can substitute public luxury for private or household consumption. They can square the circle between environmental sustainability and a decent standard of living. I mean, however big your library is or vast your swimming pool, it'll never be the same as the New York Public Library or a great public pool. No mansion, no San Simeon, will ever be the equivalent of Central Park or Broadway."

Mile Davis interviewed by Tom Engelhardt in “Tomdispatch Interview: Mike Davis, Green Zones and Slum Cities”

On Monday evening I went over to RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects) to see a talk by Mike Davis, the American cultural historian, political activist, social commentator etc. (you may remember me linking to his piece on Dubai in a post last year). Davis is in London all week doing a series of events on different subjects ranging from the future of the “New Left” to his new book: Buda’s Wagon: A Brief. History of the Car bomb.

The RIBA event was billed in different places as being about “Architecture and Climate Change” or his earlier book Planet of Slums. I was happy to hear about either, and it actually turned out to be about both and about much more. The issue of climate change was neatly folded back on to and revealed in the light of the economic hegemony of neo-liberal globalisation.

Having become pretty disillusioned with “leftist” politics and generally feeling that, while the intellectual analyses and critical techniques of Marxist and Socialist thought were still valuable, close association with these as part of a political programme was an ideological trap that kept us in a dualistic dead end – it was amazingly invigorating to be shaken about a bit by a serious hardcore mind from the Left.

The social and ecological strands met in an examination of the emerging “landscapes of inequality”, where resource depletion and climactic change are already causing the migrations and tensions over migration which many see as an unavoidable part of the global future. Davis focussed on the American South West, especially the US/Mexico borderlands – the area he is most familiar with – but also referred to the analogous spaces of the Mediterranean, and the near Middle East.

I went to the talk imagining that Davis would be outside the energy descent sphere and that I would be taking what he said and doing my own mental associations and analysis to assimilate what I learnt there with what I’m learning from elsewhere. It quickly became apparent that I wouldn’t be required to make the connections alone – “peak oil” and “peak water” rolled off Davis’ tongue with familiarity, he referred to suburbanisation and Kunstler, he could see what was coming.

When it came to the environmental issues, Davis reinforced what I’m increasingly learning: that the necessity for consensus in the IPCC report, and the lead in time on the data it is produced from mean that it reflects a “moderate” view far from the beliefs and predictions of many serious and significant climate analysts, and that new information is already radically reshaping our view of what might be currently occurring. Most significant is the rising body of opinion and data indicating rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves, concomitant sea level rises, the passing of several significant tipping points, and the possibility that, as Lovelock suggests, the Earth is adjusting to a new hot state – that we could be seeing the end of the Holocene.

After years of it being on my list of “to reads”, Davis’ compelling prose style has finally led to me picking up his “LA book” City of Quartz, which is excellent and I think that pretty much everything else he has written is going to have to follow… One thing I am especially interested in following up on, is encapsulated in the quote at the top of the entry. A lot of my current thoughts are about the possibility of Transition Cities - a scaled up version of the Transition Town idea. My gut feeling was that a city the size of London (let alone one the size of Bombay or Karachi say) could not effectively and sustainably function in a state of energy descent. Recent conversations and other inputs (not least Stewart Brand's "City Planet" lecture at the Long Now Foundation) have encouraged me to re-examine this supposition. I will return to this issue as my ideas develop.