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Future Slum: [Image: New flats, part of the AHMM master plan in Barking, England, specifically cited by the BBC as being so small that they're mere slums in the making; via Building Design].

‘Are the gleaming new apartment buildings of the past decade the inner-city slums of tomorrow?’ the BBC asks this morning in an interesting, if insufficiently argued, opinion piece about the state of private housing in England.
New, privately developed apartment complexes there – the exact same apartment complexes of visual interest to architecture magazines such as the one for which I work – might, in the end, simply be too small and too cramped to become anything other than the slums of tomorrow.
Affordable now, ghettoized later.
The problem, the essay argues, is that there are no real minimum space standards for private housing developments in England. Tiny flats suitable only for single men and women, or for weekend getaways, are filling up valuable land in city centers – which is great for the duration of a real estate boom, but which might have sociologically frightening future implications.
‘Alone in the UK,’ the BBC points out, ‘Scotland does have legislation on minimum sizes for homes in the commercial sector. Northern Ireland has rules on social housing – while in England and Wales many local authorities also have size regulations for affordable housing. But none of this covers private sector developments.’
One point, by no means minor, that goes totally unexplored comes from the BBC’s own table of apartment space data. There we see that the average apartment size in Italy is actually smaller than the average apartment size in England.
So why all the scare talk about future slums and ghettos? Is there a legitimate concern here that smaller living spaces might become crime-infested labyrinths when the economy dries up – or is this simply fear of other forms of social organization?
Nuclear families living in several comfortable rooms = good.
Single men and women living alone in small apartments = moral hazard.
In any case, I thought suburbs were the next slums?
In fact, it’d be interesting to do a kind of comparative slum futurology: to see what building types different countries and cultures fear will become the ‘next slum.’ What does it say about you, politically? On the left, perhaps, you think it’s the suburbs, waiting to be taken over by wildcats and gangs; on the right, you think it’s affordable housing.
But who’s got the data on their side?”

(Via BLDGBLOG.)

Did the Saudis do it again?:

By Tom Philpott

Oil prices have plunged by a third since June. What happened?

Damned if I know. This is an extremely murky market. Information about supply is notoriously patchy. As for demand, people are writing dissertations about the mentality of mega-fund managers who plunge into securities like oil futures one day, only to bail en masse another.

But from from Wednesday’s New York Times article, there are two factors driving the fall in oil prices:

1) The Saudis have opened their taps.

‘We have worked very hard since June to bring prices to where they are now,’ [Saudi oil minister] Ali Al-Naimi told reporters Tuesday morning. ‘We have been very successful.’ Mr. Naimi was referring to a pledge Saudi Arabia made in June at a meeting of producers and consumers in Jeddah to keep pumping at full throttle to bring prices down. The kingdom is producing about 9.5 million barrels a day, 600,000 barrels a day more than its official OPEC quota.

(On Thursday, Naimi announced Saudi Arabia would maintain its higher-than-quota pumping in defiance of a recent OPEC decision to cut production.)

2) Demand in the developed countries is falling, partly because of slow or negative economic growth, partly because of consumer cutbacks in response to high prices.

What strikes me is this seems like the same old oil market: Prices are tied directly to economic growth, and the Saudis have the power to push down prices just by opening their taps. Not so long ago, peak-oil zealots were assuring us that the Saudis no longer had to capacity to push down prices. Well?

We’ve been down this road before. In past times of heightened prices, when words like ‘conservation’ and ‘renewable’ started to get kicked around in developed countries, the Saudis merely flooded the market (cheered on, no doubt, by many of the same folks now knocking around the White House). The last time this happened, we got the SUV.

Falling oil prices complicate things across the political spectrum. If prices keep plunging, what does that do to the GOP’s ‘drill here, drill now’ strategy?

More importantly, what does it do to the green agenda? Rhetoric about the ‘end of cheap oil’ has driven much of the push behind everything from renewable energy sources to local food in recent years. What happens if oil settles in for a while at, say $50 per barrel?

Meanwhile, the OPEC nations themselves seem nervous about the prospect of a crash. Interestingly, Iran, Libya, and Venezuela — all of whom are more or less hostile to the U.S. — are pushing for production cuts. Good thing our dear friend Saudi Arabia is telling them to go to hell!

I think the message here is that the oil market is not our friend. We can’t count on ever-escalating oil prices to bail us out on climate change, or rebuild robust local economies. These critical tasks are going to require hard political organizing no matter what, and they may have to take place in a climate of cheap(ish) oil.

(Via Gristmill.)

PRIVILEGE AND POVERTY IN VOGUE INDIA:

Abby K. sent me a link to this New York Times article about the August issue of Vogue India. The issue has sparked controversy because of a fashion spread that shows poor Indians modeling extremely expensive brand-name accessories, such as this child modeling a Fendi bib that costs around $100 while being held by a woman prominently missing teeth:

Or this one of a barefoot man, also missing teeth, holding a Burberry umbrella that costs about $200:

From the article:

Vogue India editor Priya Tanna’s message to critics of the August shoot: ‘Lighten up,’ she said in a telephone interview. Vogue is about realizing the ‘power of fashion’ she said, and the shoot was saying that ‘fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful,’ she said.

I’m not sure where to even begin with this one. The objectification of the poor, who are used as props in a fashion magazine aimed at people very different from them? The oblivious discussion of the ‘power of fashion,’ while ignoring the issue of how much these luxury items cost relative to average incomes in India? I’m especially struck by the way that the inability to spend $200 on an umbrella is no longer seen as a privilege because ‘anyone’ can ‘carry it off’; it’s not about having $200 extra dollars, it’s about having the mindset to know you can carry these items and won’t make them look ugly or tacky, apparently. There’s a complete denial of privilege and power having anything to do with wealth,  social stratification, or any inequality more consequential than some people maybe worrying that they won’t ‘make’ fashion ‘look beautiful’ (which in and of itself is an interesting idea-it’s not whether the fashion items make you look beautiful, it’s what you do for them).

Compare to other interesting fashion spreads here, here, here, here, and here.

Thanks, Abby!

(Via Sociological Images.)

From the unfolding saga of “how Canada can suck ever more oil from the ground” we get this little news item:

Canada and Mexico should accelerate efforts to import temporary Mexican energy workers to alleviate the skills shortage in Alberta and other provinces as oil sands development ramps up, top North American CEOs will recommend today.

It’s mildly amusing that the most heavily Republican Conservative region of Canada is so desperate for workers that Mexicans are apparently necessary. But the facts are that there’s very little in the way of opposition to major developments in Alberta. Both provincial and federal levels of government have historically favored a strategy of growing the tar sands as rapidly as possible. The low-ball estimates see Canadian oil production tripling by 2020, with all the increase coming from the tar sands. And if something as trivial as “wages” or “willing bodies” is keeping the precious, precious crude from flowing, then it’s clearly time to bring in replacements.

It’s not so much that everyone loves the idea of defiling cubic kilometers of land and water to keep U.S. cars running, it’s that nobody has any strong vision of an alternative — selling Americans raw materials is kind of what we do up here, and it’s a tough habit to break.

Originally from Gristmill on February 27, 2007, 11:31am

50,000 protests last year over pollution in China. Even the inward-looking U.S. press seems to be picking up at least weekly stories on the latest Chinese environmental accident. The New York Times has a nice piece highlighting the challenges of enforcing environmental regulations while the drive for economic growth remains king.

Originally from Gristmill on September 5, 2006, 3:16pm

archived video and web chat of the OnHollywood panel I participated in the other day. You decide if we were funnier than Tom Green.

Originally from unmediated on May 8, 2006, 2:02am

Akin to something crossed between the grassroots filmmaking of
Kids with Cameras
and the participatory-culture of the
Border Film Project
,
MAQUILAPOLIS
, or “City of Factories”, is a self-produced documentary made by (and about) the female workers in Tijuana’s sprawling maquiladora assembly factories.
Shot on digital cameras distributed to a group of promotoras (community-based activists) after a six-week technical training and story-telling workshop, the film follows and “meets women who are each dealing with the hardships of environmental toxins, labor rights abuse, infrastructure and housing issues”, and, among other things - women’s rights.
Filmmaker Vicky Funari, and artist Sergio De La Torre, collaborated together with the women’s organization Grupo Factor X in Tijuana, to organize and help the workers adapt the camera to their daily lives. Through a series of intimate narratives and teamwork, the documentary assembles a portrait of a community managing to create “liveable solutions to the complexities of life in a globalized city“.

Sergio is a friend of a good friend of mine (both of whom are doing great work), but I have to say, this looks like a fascinating project - and I can’t wait to see it. The film “approaches the workers as experts who can provide us with keys to our common future” the website reads, “inviting them to co-author their own story on videotape.” And, isn’t that what it’s all about: communities coming together to bring their own stories to the forefront of larger debates, empowered by grassroots artistic collaboration?
Though I haven’t seen it yet, I will venture to say, what sounds most promising about Maquilapolis besides any poignancy of what it reveals about the maquiladoras themselves (or the real-life cultural impact of “globalization” on the Mexican side of the border), isn’t just the cinematic experience the film leaves behind, but, rather, what it has already gone on to establish with this community of workers for the future. The women continue to use the cameras today as a sort of fixed apparatus for recording and relaying the ongoing struggles and visions of their daily lives, symbolically empowered by their use of the very consumer products they assemble in the factories. The filmmakers are actually looking for additional funding to host an editing workshop in hopes of encouraging more people to become active in the day-to-day documentary story-telling of their plight playing out along the border.

[Image: Tribeca Review of
Maquilapolis
, 04.13.06.]

With all the vitriolic attention on immigration spit out in the media these days, distorted by gross exaggerations of the border being the number one threat to U.S. national security, the time for a genuine depiction of US/Mexico border geopolitics — made (and told) by the people central to the confluence of hardships there — is crucial to our understanding of why, and how, we should seriously consider addressing the region.
In short, the hype over how the maquialdoras were going to boost the Mexican economy has hardly panned out, nor has this industry at all helped to alleviate the pressure of illegal immigration to the United States. In the last 20 years the US/Mexico border has been the fastest growing population of any border region anywhere in the world. There are 12 million illegal immigrants estimated living through out the U.S., but the numbers also suggest approximately 12 million people have migrated to the southern border in that same time, driven by an explosion in consumer goods manufacturing and import/export markets, which have made the 2000 mile stretch the most densely populated geography between any neighboring First and Third world nations. An additional 10-15 million are predicted to crash the border zone by 2020.

[Image:
Bridging Troubled Waters in Ambos Nogales


by Miriam Davidson, 1998.]

According to Tyche Hendricks in the
SF Chron
, “The largest concentration of maquiladora jobs is in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, followed by Tijuana, just south of San Diego. Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, is third in maquiladora employment.” He goes on to write that Reynosa employs “more than 92,000 workers in 200 factories [that] produce everything for the U.S. market from distributor caps to candy canes. Those jobs have made border cities into magnets for workers from the interior of Mexico, where government support for subsistence agriculture has evaporated. The largely American-owned factories, which first arose in 1965, now employ nearly 1.2 million people.” There are approximately 3,500 plus maquiladoras currently operating along the border today.
The failure of the maquiladoras is largely in part because they are essentially legitimized slave factories as opposed to any kind of viable economic alternative for Mexico’s grossly lopsided economy. From what I’ve heard, the average wage of a worker is around $95 a week, and that’s working overtime. Further, neither country’s labor policy has served in any way to discourage exploitation on either side of the fence, but rather has had the opposite effect. “These massive cross-border flows occur by design” says Douglas S. Massey, “under the auspices of the North American Free Trade Agreement. But at the heart of NAFTA lies a contradiction: Even as the United States moves to promote free movement of goods, services, capital and information, we as a nation somehow seek to prevent the movement of labor. We wish to create a North American economy that integrates all markets except one: that for labor“.

[Image: Maquiladoras, by Ingolf Vogeler.]

Those concerns have also been compounded by transnational companies shopping around the globe for competitive exploitable labor, and recent moves have taken many of the jobs to labor markets in Asia. This article reported that roughly 226,000 workers, in a relative short period of time between 2000-01, were laid off by these foreign companies as massive shifts of maquiladora portfolios left Mexico. The author says, “And where do you think all those people went?”
To further show that the maquiladoras have not helped to reduce the influx of illegal immigration, Hendricks cites a U.S. report showing that the number of people working in these factories along the border still continues to rise, as do the number of factories themselves. From ‘90 to ‘05 Maquiladora jobs in Mexico have increased from 454,432 to 1,174,234. So, it is not entirely unobvious to assume that the constant increase in the number of factories crowding the border and the people they employ are in some part responsible, if even perhaps indirectly, to the surge in the number of border-crossers.
Massey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and co-author of the book “Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Age of Economic Integration,” has stated, “Instead of viewing Mexican migration as a pathological product of rampant poverty and rapid population growth, we should see it for what it is: a natural byproduct of economic development in a relatively wealthy country undergoing a rapid transition to low fertility in close association with the United States.”

[Image: Many of the homes in Chilpancingo are made out of packing crates the workers buy from the maquilas, 2002.]

To make matters even worse, while the debate remains polarized between a conservative agenda seeking to convert the issue of immigration into one of national security (in order to contract billions of dollars into militarizing the border), and the left, who at least emphasizes the issue as a complex permutation of our own labor policy and practice - the other great concern (which seems to get less and less attention) is the swelling environmental crisis that consumes the region in nightmarish swaths of habitat degradation and catastrophic waste-disposal.
As most of us know, environmental justice is generally linked to economic and social justice. So, it can be the least bit surprising to attempt an explanation of the overwhelming poverty that has piled up along the border and the issue of mass illegal immigration in terms of the environmental consequences systemic to the institution of exploited labor that has defined the border.

[Image: Community members built this makeshift bridge across the river of run-off that divides the two sides of Chilpancingo, 2002.]

The state of roads and sewage infrastructure in most border cities “is sliding toward desperate,” says UC Berkeley Professor Harley Shaiken, an expert in labor and trade. “The maquilas are paying minimal if any taxes, and the result is an infrastructure that is inadequate to the growth taking place.”
According to a friend of mine, Chris Nelson, who is focussing on environmental policy enacted around the border, “Approximately 11% of all the trash in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley landfills in 2002 came from maquiladoras.” Meanwhile, Tijuana is an environmental disaster. Nelson proposes an overall strategy of cleaning up the border as a way to begin restructuring the transborder economy of the region through mutual civic projects that incentivize environmental responsibility, and by bringing forth comprehensive and progressive socio-economic transformation programs through “operationalizing industrial ecology”.

[Image: Ecoparque, an experimental water filration/irrigation project on the steep hillsides of Tijuana.]

Anyway, more on that later. In the meantime, if you get a chance to go see the documentary – do it. Here’s the schedule of dates. And, if you have any spare cash, don’t be afraid to donate. And, if you do manage to see this, shoot me an email, or comment here, because I’d love to hear responses to this. If I get chance to see it, I’ll post a review here. Stay tuned.

Originally from Subtopia on May 11, 2006, 9:26pm

The on-line magazine “Display and Design Ideas” has a feature article up that postulates “the coming boom in green retail,” exemplified by this wine section in a Giant Eagle. It’s an excellent overview article, and well worth your while to read in full. One paragraph really jumped out at us. “Membership in the nonprofit industry group USGBC has grown more than 1,000 percent in the past four years, currently including more than 5,500 member companies and organizations. Further, the annual U.S. market in green building products and services has grown to $5.8 billion, representing 34 percent growth from the previous year. During the past four years, more than 229 million sq. ft. of commercial building space, which includes retail builds, has been registered or certified under LEED”. TreeHugger has been on this trend as well. Check out here,an earlier piece,…and here….here…, and here.

Originally by John Laumer from Treehugger on April 27, 2006, 7:30am

I’m probably preaching to the choir on this one however, it’s nice to see this information coming from a well respected economic blog.

Via The Prudent Investor
Based on the latest reports in the Washington Post the US government is increasingly applying methods that until a few years ago were mainly associated with the Nazi and other totalitarian regimes. Sorry for the harsh words towards the government and its operatives of an otherwise mostly wonderful people, but the long string of scandals that has been engulfing the US leaves me no other choice. Link