Tag Archives: urbanism
Silvia Moreno-Garcia explains the origins of “Biting the Snake’s Tail”
So, did you read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest Futurismic story, “Biting the Snake’s Tail”, published here yesterday? Well, you should – go do it now.
One of the great joys of author blogs, for me at least, is getting an insight into how stories came to be – to find out what inspired them, how they progressed from initial idea to finished work. Silvia has written a post that opens a door on “Biting the Snake’s Tail”, which takes place in a near-future iteration of Mexico City:
It was two years in the making. I wrote the first half of it after dreaming two parts of it: the detective walking through the rainy streets with the dog and the murder. In the original, the murder took place at a public bath house and the victim was a gay man.
When I was a kid and there was no water (yep, this was a problem in Mexico City even years ago) for the day, we sometimes went to the public bath house in Santa Julia. This meant paying a few pesos and you got a bit of soap, some shampoo and access to a shower area. I remember we took our own towels, but towels might have been supplied at a cost. Last year, when I was in Mexico City, water issues were pretty bad. About 5 million people (a quarter of the city) was suffering from a drought and predictions for 2010 were that even the ritzy neighbourhoods would be affected. Think a third of the city without water this year, taps running dry for many days at times.
Having been lucky enough to visit Mexico City, I know it’s the sort of place where stories wait for you around every street corner. Ludicrous wealth and grinding poverty live cheek by jowl, and history howls hungrily from beneath layered and crumbling facades of modernity… much like any big city, I suppose, but they don’t come much bigger than El D. F., and that history is marbled with conflict and the struggle to survive for as long as records have been kept. [image by alex-s]
For a privileged Euro like myself, Mexico City was a real eye-opener; I’ve been fortunate enough to have travelled a fair amount in my life, but few places have affected me quite so deeply. Travel is fatal to prejudice, as Mark Twain once said… I wonder if visiting new places in fiction can have the same effect? I certainly hope so – after all, as energy costs continue to increase, it’s going to be the only form of long-distance travel available to the vast majority of us… and there’s more than enough prejudice to go round.
The other sort of hacking: Baltimore’s ghost taxis
Dovetailing neatly with yesterday’s article about innovative low-budget urban living in Detroit comes a piece on Baltimore’s “hacks”- illegal and unlicensed taxi services provided by anyone with a car to anyone in need of a budget ride across town [via MetaFilter; image by Marcin Wichary].
… a booming economy built around people in Baltimore’s African-American community who prefer to call or flag down drivers like Doug to taking public transportation or licensed taxicabs. There are no statistics on hacking, no academic studies. Yet, as anyone who travels city streets and encounters the finger-wagging hack hail knows, it is a pervasive part of life here.
It is also a somewhat controversial part. Hacking is illegal, a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500 and up to six months in jail. And it has a reputation as a dangerous practice, for both riders and drivers. Although Baltimore Police Department spokesman Officer Troy Harris says that police records “don’t have a category for occupations of homicide victims,” accounts published in The Sun indicate that over the past decade as many as 13 Baltimoreans have been killed while driving hacks. And since hacking itself is illegal, many lesser crimes that might occur in the process–carjackings, robberies, assaults–likely go unreported.
Why has this dangerous and illegal activity become such a part of Baltimore culture? Most reasons given by those contacted for this story can be summed up in three words–convenience, money, and race.
It’s a long article, but worth the read – y’know, the sort of journalism they keep telling us that the internet will kill off. Hacking sounds a lot like the ‘van’ system found in Latin American cities, a grey market that grows around the demand for public transport infrastructure among those living on the margins of society, whether geographically or politically. From the sound of it, hacking in Baltimore is too ubiquitous to be effectively shut down by the authorities without a vast expense of time and money, and its close connection to the African-American demographic means that to do so would probably amplify the problems of discrimination that hacking circumvents. The article points out that the city authorities have too much on their plates with other more serious crimes to spend time on a hacker crack-down (arf!), but one can’t help but wonder if there’s an element of turning the blind eye in that attitude – after all, any street-level economic activity that’s been running for a few decades is evidently driven by genuine need, and producing an official fix for the problem is going to be much harder work than trying quietly to contain it.
What fascinates me about stories like this are the way they tear off the veneer of “respectable”corporate capitalist economics to reveal illicit person-to-person transactions running in much the same way as they must have done since the dawn of commerce itself. I know it’s not fashionable to talk positively about the power of the marketplace right now, but you can’t deny the tenacity with which people will find a way to make a fast buck from the absence of a certain service or product. The question is, how much of the crime associated with hacking would be prevented if the authorities took a more laissez faire attitude and deregulated the business, allowing hacks to compete directly on price and safety with ‘legitimate’ taxis? This strikes me as the sort of small economic ecosystem that could thrive with the introduction of a reputation currency.
Detroit: the new frontier?
Last time we mentioned Detroit here, it was in the less-than-cheerful terms of it becoming a growth region for private security patrols, and the web is full of similar stories charting the Motor City’s decline in lucid hand-wringing detail. But what if they’re ignoring the positives in favour of those apocalyptic headlines and photos?
Aaron M Renn at New Geography makes the point that the city’s administration seems unwilling to face up to the extent of the problem, but also highlights the pioneering atmosphere that Detroit’s “urban prairie” is nurturing. The withering of local government leaves spaces of opportunity for innovative approaches to low-budget living to take root… and while the living ain’t easy, the make-do attitude of the American pioneer spirit seems to be making a return [via Warren Ellis].
Urban agriculture projects are gathering pace; out-of-town artists are moving in, attracted by the low housing prices and the blank-canvas vibe of a city that’s been all but abandoned by consumerism. [image by jessicareeder]
In most cities, municipal government can’t stop drug dealing and violence, but it can keep people with creative ideas out. Not in Detroit. In Detroit, if you want to do something, you just go do it. Maybe someone will eventually get around to shutting you down, or maybe not. It’s a sort of anarchy in a good way as well as a bad one. Perhaps that overstates the case. You can’t do anything, but it is certainly easier to make things happen there than in most places because the hand of government weighs less heavily.
What’s more, the fact that government is so weak has provoked some amazing reactions from the people who live there. In Chicago, every day there is some protest at City Hall by a group from some area of the city demanding something. Not in Detroit. The people in Detroit know that they are on their own, and if they want something done they have to do it themselves. Nobody from the city is coming to help them. And they’ve found some very creative ways to deal with the challenges that result.
Imagine for a moment that this trend continues – might Detroit become some sort of independent city-state, a mildly anarchic rough-and-ready town where the price of freedom is a willingness to work hard for yourself and with your neighbours? How many more cities in the Western world might go the same way as manufacturing becomes increasingly outsourced overseas and/or roboticised? How will national governments react to these places – will they abandon them to the whims of their new residents, or struggle to control them in the face of diminishing tax revenues and the spiralling costs of law enforcement?
I’m not naive enough to imagine Detroit becoming some sort of hippie utopia, but I think it has the potential to become a new type of post-industrial city – but that will depend on a lot of different factors. Should the government be involving itself more closely in these early stages, or will a hands-off wait-and-see approach prove more effective?
Required reading: mapping the favela
Via Chairman Bruce, here’s some required reading for anyone writing near-future fiction that involves a favela as a setting… and given the way the world is becoming urbanised, a near-future story that doesn’t feature a favela can probably be considered to have something missing from it! It’s an article from 2008 in the Harvard Design Magazine, titled “Resisting Representation: the Informal Geographies of Rio de Janiero“, and it’s well worth the half hour or so it’ll take you to read it. Here’s a brief sample:
Rio de Janeiro is a city with a population of just over six million in its central urban areas, of which, according to officials, an estimated 20% are residents of favelas. These favelas vary enormously in size and character. These urban islands, like those of the earth’s waters, have formed according to several genealogies and geologies. Some, like continental islands, share a history and underlying structure with those around them, as if they have collectively broken off from a land mass. Others, like volcanic islands, seem to develop independently and suddenly from more isolated and turbulent forces. Still other favelas, like coral atolls, build slowly on an underlying urban structure. These metaphors show how favelas differ in their relationship to their surroundings—their seemingly insular status belies the fact that submerged structures tie them to the city.
Read on for more details about the utilities and transport infrastructures that enable favelas to exist, and the socioeconomic pressures that ensure they keep growing and multiplying in spite of all attempts to curb the expansion. [image by anthony_goto]
And as an added bonus, here’s a game-changing technology to drop into your fictional favela – Contraptor is the name of both an organisation and the open-source rapid prototyping system it has designed and built. Like a more sturdy and diverse answer to the RepRap, in other words – an affordable way to put the means of production into the hands of pretty much anyone with a few hundred dollars and an internet connection [via Fabbaloo]. You’ve got your setting, you’ve got your novum – and you’ve got a thousand stories waiting to be written.