Word: slum
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...Shock leads to a sense of urgency. Last week, when India's powerful Planning Commission argued the case for opening up the retail sector to foreign investment, it pointed out that China had benefited from the same move. When government officials launched a controversial slum clearance drive earlier this year in Bombay, they said they wanted to make the city more like Shanghai. This combination of envy and fear seems most intense in the one place where it has the least reason to exist: Bangalore. India's software companies and call centers, after all, have a huge head start...
...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...
...where the chief alleviators of misery are cockfighting, illegal gambling machines and drugs. For a brief time at least, Dizon was one of its more fortunate sons, working as a photojournalist at a local paper called the Freeman. It was an impossibly glamorous job by the standards of the slum, but also a dangerous one. When he was gunned down last November, at the age of 30, Dizon became the fifth Filipino journalist to be killed that month, and one of 15 murdered around the country...
...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...