Malaria and urbanization in developing countries

I had a chance to talk with Dr. Omumbo from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI)about the urbanization and malaria outbreak in developing countries.

She identified several determinants to malaria spread in an urban area:

1. Slum condition Infrastructure cannot catch up with the population inflow from a rural areas, which leads to deterioration of urban environment such as creating a slum. Thus, people at slum would face the poor sanitation condition, which leads to vulnerability to the risk of being infected by malaria. Specifically, dirty water conditions in slum is serious.

2. Demographic movement. Rural people, who is more infected by malaria, come to an urban area, which leads to the spread of malaria in an urban.

3. Urban expansion. Urban will expand to its surrounding area, whose land use is more prone to vector emergence. For example, a suburban area has a lot of rice field, where more mosquito can live.

NY Times: Cities Deal with Shanty Towns

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shanty towns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller homeless enclaves as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

Link to article.

Dharavi Slum in Mumbai -- Photo Gallery from National Geographic

The photo gallery below vividly portrays what life is for today's 1billion slum dwellers.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/05/dharavi-mumbai-slum/jonas-bendiksen-photography

Jane Jacobs and "Slumdog Millionaire"

As this evening's Oscar ceremony approaches, media outlets have been reporting on protests taking place in India, particularly in Mumbai's Dharavi area, over the title of the film widely believed to be leading the Best Picture race, "Slumdog Millionaire."

Most of the reports I've read suggest that people are protesting the use of the word dog, but in the following Op-Ed piece from today's Times takes issue with the word slum, evoking Jane Jacobs to describe Dharavi as "the ultimate user-generated city." Those of you who have read Jane Jacobs' book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, will find that many of the features of Dharavi described in the article are relevant to Jacob's text.

Taking the Slum out of "Slumdog"

Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi. Well over a million “eyes on the street,” to use Jane Jacobs’s phrase, keep Dharavi perhaps safer than most American cities. Yet Dharavi’s extreme population density doesn’t translate into oppressiveness. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering — Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state — including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city...

...No master plan, urban design, zoning ordinance, construction law or expert knowledge can claim any stake in the prosperity of Dharavi. It was built entirely by successive waves of immigrants fleeing rural poverty, political oppression and natural disasters. They have created a place that is far from perfect but has proved to be amazingly resilient and able to upgrade itself. In the words of Bhau Korde, a social worker who lives there, “Dharavi is an economic success story that the world must pay attention to during these times of global depression.”

City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development in the Global South

Date:
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm

Location:
Columbia University, Morningside Campus, 329 Pupin

Contact:
Amanda R. Christie, arc2140@columbia.edu

RSVP:
Register

Event Description:
Speaker: Edgar Pieterse, Director, African Centre for Cities, Professor, School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, University of Cape Town

The Earth Institute, the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD) and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) present "City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development in the Global South," with Edgar Pieterse, Director, African Centre for Cities, Professor, School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, University of Cape Town. Open to the public.

In the past two decades, an urban revolution has taken place in the Global South. The problems surrounding this influx of people - slums, poverty, unemployment and lack of governance - have been well-documented. In his new book, Pieterse argues that to solve these problems there is an urgent need to encourage radical democracy, economic resilience, social resistance and environmental sustainability folded into the everyday concerns of marginalized people.

Edgar Pieterse is also a founding director of Isandla Institute; an urban policy think-tank where he continues advocacy oriented research work. His publications include: Voices of the Transition: The Politics, Poetics and Practices of Social Change in South Africa (2004), Democratising Local Government: The South African Experiment. (2002) and Consolidating Developmental Local Government: Lessons from the South Africa Experience (2007).