Word: slum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first time he can remember, India's richest film-maker is having trouble with his math. Specifically, how 600,000 goes into 175. The first figure is the population of Dharavi, Asia's most populous slum, which he's currently exploring. The second is the number of hectares Dharavi covers in Bombay, an area half the size of New York City's Central Park. In a different life, Shekhar Kapur spent seven years crunching numbers as a corporate planner for a multinational oil company. He surveys the tiny one-room lean-tos where teeming families live shoulder to shoulder...
...water is what seeps out of cracks in the pipe. Which brings Kapur to other difficult digits. Like 150, the number of working toilets in Dharavi. Or 20, the number of years Kapur gives Bombay before it divides forever into rich and poor, high-rise city and low-rise slum, where 25 floors up there's water for Jacuzzis but down below there's barely enough for life...
...countryside with little industry to support them as organic communities. The world is littered with failed cities, where urban planners overlooked residents' needs and incomes. In the Brazilian capital of Brasilia, for instance, the sprawling urban center was designed for easy car transport but now teems with slum dwellers too poor to afford even bicycles. As Shanghai tries to address the needs of its own multiplying population, some are worried that the same mistakes could be replicated in the city's planned satellite towns. "Each of these [foreign-themed] towns wants to follow the model of quick development," says Zheng...
...Baghdad has doubled in five years (to about 1 million), and the capital is booming. Streets are jammed with American cars, creating a monumental traffic problem that the Development Board's new bridges over the Tigris have not begun to solve. The board's bulldozers are flattening 300 slum houses and bazaar shops to open a new freeway through the city center. Now that the floods have been stemmed, the city is spreading beyond the dikes where handsome villas are rising for the new, well-to-do middle classes ... France's Le Corbusier will build a sports stadium...
McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories skews a little trashier but in the best possible way. It has the promiscuous atmosphere of one of those speakeasies where socialites slum with gangsters in an effort to mutually increase everybody's street cred. Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates mingle with the likes of Stephen King and Poppy Z. Brite. The results are remarkably pleasing. Atwood contributes a delicious, melancholy first-person piece about what it's like to be a young girl who turns into a yellow-eyed, red-clawed monster. Mitchell, who was short-listed for this year's Booker...