Word: urbanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first modern urban apocalypse could easily have started at 7:18 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1985. That was when an earthquake measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale rocked Mexico City. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless, water mains broke, the threat of epidemics loomed, and the government fumbled helplessly in dealing with the crisis...
...awakening of self-reliance in the urban poor is a global phenomenon. In Karachi, architect Akhter Hameed Khan rallied the people of the Orangi district around a self-help initiative to upgrade their sanitation. With 800,000 residents from five of Pakistan's major ethnic groups, the neighborhood is periodically racked by violence. Still, working lane by lane, beginning in 1980, Hameed Khan and his co-workers in the Orangi Pilot Project proved to the district that with a tiny investment ($40 a house), it could install its own sewerage system. Since then, roughly 70% of the 6,347 lanes...
...decision to give squatters title to plots of land. In return, the new landowners agreed to help build footpaths, improve drainage and reduce garbage. "Instead of thinking of themselves as temporary boarders, the poor began to look at their community as their home," says Josef Leitmann, a World Bank urban planner. "A simple change in psychology produced a change in physical surroundings...
...cities obviously need more money. In many countries the help that urban areas receive from the national government has dwindled steadily. Moreover, during the past decade, foreign aid shifted more and more to rural problems even as people moved to the cities. Now, with urban areas producing half the world's income, and governments nervous about restive urban populations, agencies such as the World Bank have begun to focus more on cities once again...
...historical cycle of urban growth and collapse will be hard to break, but hope can be found in the stubborn self-reliance shown by people in some of the world's poorest cities. Like the cumbersome bumblebee that flies in the face of aerodynamic theory, the megacities will have to defy gravity and invent a sustainable future for themselves. Since the fate of the world is entwined with the fate of its cities, humanity has no other choice...