Word: urbanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...catalytic mixing of people that fuels urban conflict also spurs the initiative, innovation and collaboration that move civilization forward. The late social critic Lewis Mumford once remarked that "the city is a place for multiplying happy chances and making the most of unplanned opportunities." Curitiba's mayor, Jaime Lerner, bases his whole approach to urban planning on this idea. "If life is the art of encounter, then the city is the setting for encounter," he says. Curitiba has multiplied the chances for encounters by providing its citizens with an abundance of pedestrian walks and parks. Even the bus terminals make...
...understand why Brazilians would migrate to Curitiba, but why do people keep streaming into a Kinshasa or a Karachi, Pakistan? What is the irresistible lure of the megacity? To the outsider, a neatly swept native village in Africa, Asia or Latin America may look more inviting than a squalid urban squatter settlement. But until recently even the most wretched city slums have offered better access to paying jobs, more varied diets, better education and better health care than what was available in rural communities...
...rapidly they are expanding. Estimates of Mexico City's population vary from 14 million to 20 million, depending on whether demographers calculate the figure according to the 1990 census (which some believe drastically undercounted), or whether the number is determined by estimates of water use. Still, the fastest urban growth is in those areas that are poorest and least prepared...
...that invades the human brain, used to be transmitted primarily by improperly cooked pork. Now people are getting the disease from vegetables grown in fields irrigated by water containing effluent that flows into the Tula River from Mexico City. Brinkmann estimates that more than half of the 300 million urban poor in the developing world are in a permanently weakened condition because they carry one or more parasites...
...threat of disease is heightened by urban pollution. Brinkmann notes that in industrial countries, as much as 50% of the population will suffer from a rash or other skin disease during the course of a year, compared with maybe 2% in the 1950s. "Is this an indication that pollutants have weakened human immune defenses, leaving city dwellers more vulnerable to otherwise benign diseases?" the epidemiologist asks. Many of the effects of environmental degradation are far from benign. In Upper Silesia, Poland, indiscriminate dumping of toxic wastes has so poisoned the land and water that 10% of the region's newborns...