Watching Kevin McCloud's Slumming It
It's come to the part where they talk about Mumbai's plans for the slum Dharavi, replacing the low-rise shanty-town with high rise blocks that will get covered in shit and graffiti and render people prisoners of themselves inside their own flats after their street-based communities and workplaces are reduced to rubble and replaced with real estate. So far the programme has shocked and awed, showing community-based pottery and recycling industries side by side with a stunning lack of sanitation and jawdropping working conditions. The point they've made quite well is that some improvements would help these residents no end, but they don't need their lives turning upside down and their work and homes ripping from under them, least of all when the proposed replacement is £sky high sky-rises and tenement blocks, and the residents likely either schlepping to factories on the other side of town, away from their families, to work the same long hours or, worst case scenario, retreating into hopelessness and crime. Or realising that they can't hope for any kind of life in their new circumstances, looking to a better life in a different place and becoming part of the Immigration Problem.
It makes me so unbelievably angry that developers continue to peddle their shit and write blurbs about shared community and modern living, and expect the world at large to be convinced by an architect's impression of a shiny glass and grass landscape, when we all know from recent history what the displacement of poor communities does, what happens when people who already have comparatively few opportunities are forced into the poorest and most inhuman standard of living. We're living with it in London and Birmingham and Glasgow and New York and Naples and it's shit. This kind of building makes people feral or scared or lonely or all three. People have to take responsibility for their own lives and behaviour, but jesus, is it necessary to back them into a corner or make things worse for them?
It makes me so furious that instead of just coming out and admitting what we all know, the inarguable argument that THIS WAY WILL MAKE MORE MONEY, they try to dress up this kind of stunningly insulting construction as something open and welcoming and altruistic. Just admit your real reasons, and challenge people to argue against you on those terms, ask them to propose an alternative that would be more lucrative and a better PR sell or shut the fuck up. It would be more honest and a lot less stomach-churning.
It makes me so unbelievably angry that developers continue to peddle their shit and write blurbs about shared community and modern living, and expect the world at large to be convinced by an architect's impression of a shiny glass and grass landscape, when we all know from recent history what the displacement of poor communities does, what happens when people who already have comparatively few opportunities are forced into the poorest and most inhuman standard of living. We're living with it in London and Birmingham and Glasgow and New York and Naples and it's shit. This kind of building makes people feral or scared or lonely or all three. People have to take responsibility for their own lives and behaviour, but jesus, is it necessary to back them into a corner or make things worse for them?
It makes me so furious that instead of just coming out and admitting what we all know, the inarguable argument that THIS WAY WILL MAKE MORE MONEY, they try to dress up this kind of stunningly insulting construction as something open and welcoming and altruistic. Just admit your real reasons, and challenge people to argue against you on those terms, ask them to propose an alternative that would be more lucrative and a better PR sell or shut the fuck up. It would be more honest and a lot less stomach-churning.