Stewart Brand hopes the Environmental Ism movement will change its attitudes in 4 areas: Population Growth, Urbanizat Ion, genetically engineered organisms (GmFood), and Nuclear Power.

[David Roberts] scratches at some of the items.

Update: Tim O Reilly blogs a recent talk by Stewart focusing on the Urbanizat Ion ideas.

Jul'2006 - Brand on Urbanizat Ion again.

• New squatter cities usually look like human cesspools and often smell like them... But the squatter cities are vibrant. Each narrow street is one long bustling market of food stalls, bars, cafes, hair salons, churches, schools, health clubs, and mini-shops of tools, trinkets, clothes, electronic gadgets, and pirated videos and music. What you see up close is not a despondent populace crushed by PoverTy but a lot of people busy getting out of poverty as fast as they can... Two recent books have penetrated the clouds of wrong theory about squatter cities because the authors spent time actually living in the shantytowns... Contrary to a common assumption, the UN researchers and [Robert Neuwirth] found that the wretched quality of housing in squatter cities is never the main concern of the inhabitants. Indeed, when governments and idealistic architects provide Public Housing, those buildings often turn into the worst part of the SluM-s. The people who build the shanties take pride in them and are always working to improve them. The real issues for the squatters are location - they want to be close to work - and what the UN calls "security of tenure." They need to know that their homes and community won't suddenly be bulldozed out of existence. Another piece of conventional wisdom that turns out to be wrong concerns crime. Far from being the hotbeds of criminal activity that everyone assumed, the squatter cities are often victimized by criminals from outside, because they have no protection by government police.

• This migration, "on the whole, acts to alleviate poverty in both the urban and rural sectors," wrote geography professor [Ronald Skeldon] in 1997. He explained that the urban "informal sector, with its capacity to create an almost infinite variety and number of activities" and its "considerable potential for Self Organization... can create a dynamic economy and society."... Thus the bottom line in the UN report: "Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic PoverTy reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city."

• "The provision of water standpipes (Clean Water) may be far more effective in enabling WomEn to undertake income-earning activities than the provision of skills training."

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