Cities must not only be committed to a war on modes of private transportation fueled by fossils, but also build neighborhoods that are less like suburbs and more like slums. In this short paper, “Slums as the Model for Future Projects,” Anna Papova presents a sketch for this kind of thinking…
While the mainstream view on the slums describes them as places to escape from and to destroy as soon as possible, more and more people look at slums in a different way. What if we analyze the slum and approach it as a self organized system that contains both flexible participatory input and a defined structure? Research on relocation of occupants of slums to housing projects shows that most of them are not satisfied with the move and would have preferred to have stayed in their homes. This means that people actually like to live in slums and there must be a reason for it. The squatter cities can teach us much about future urban living.
Because the solutions to many of our problems are already in the world, our eyes must be as open as our imaginations. The crucial flaw of 20th century communism is that its thinking was almost completely informed by the 19th century faith in progress. And so instead looking at the world that was present to it for answers and ideas, it turned to the future, to nowhere, to utopia. Communism was something you went to, something that was in the distance, on the horizon. Urbanism must not make this mistake. The city we want is here already: bikes, service sharing, urban farming, and…
