The slum dwellers’ Nobel Peace Prize nominee
He missed out to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, but Jockin Arputham’s nomination is a landmark for the grassroots. In nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, grassroots activists usually compete with politicians. Few of the latter, however, have spent their adult lives searching for peaceful solutions to conflict. Among nominees for this year’s prize, one […]
The houses were made of cardboard
Worldwide, one billion people live in slums. By 2050, it might be two billion. India has the world’s second largest slum population, after China. In 2009, the government launched a plan for a ‘slum free India in five years’: since then, slum growth has continued unabated. Mumbai has more than nine million slum inhabitants, up […]
The Once Great City of Havana?
The US journalist Michael Totten has written an article for World Affairs about the Cuban capital, Havana. Titled The Once Great City of Havana (no question mark) it pours scorn on Cuba’s efforts to rehabilitate what is by far the biggest surviving old colonial city in the Americas. Anyone who has been there knows there […]
Book Review: Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
If you have ever worried that we might be concreting over south-east England, this book could be a useful antidote. The problem is not in Greater London. If anywhere is being concreted over, it’s Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo and the many other southern cities that have grown tenfold in just fifty years.
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on