My students are looking at poverty and oppression this week in the urban context. Students can pick from:
Surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in Argentina, a highly polluted river that brings the toxic waste of tanneries and other industries, a hazardous and largely unsupervised waste incinerator, and an unmonitored landfill, Flammable’s soil, air, and water are contaminated with lead, chromium, benzene, and other chemicals. So are its nearly five thousand sickened and frail inhabitants. How do poor people make sense of and cope with toxic pollution? Why do they fail to understand what is objectively a clear and present danger? How are perceptions and misperceptions shared within a community?
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
In a review from Reason:
There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up by Lance Freeman
In this revealing book, Lance Freeman sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: how does gentrification actually affect residents of neighborhoods in transition? To find out, Freeman does what no scholar before him has done. He interviews the indigenous residents of two predominantly black neighborhoods that are in the process of gentrification: Harlem and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. By listening closely to what people tell him, he creates a more nuanced picture of the impacts of gentrification on the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of the people who stay in their neighborhoods.
For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities
AbdouMaliq Simone
Among government officials, urban planners, and development workers, Africa’s burgeoning metropolises are frequently understood as failed cities, unable to provide even basic services. Whatever resourcefulness does exist is regarded as only temporary compensation for fundamental failure. In For the City Yet to Come, AbdouMaliq Simone argues that by overlooking all that does work in Africa’s cities, this perspective forecloses opportunities to capitalize on existing informal economies and structures in development efforts within Africa and to apply lessons drawn from them to rapidly growing urban areas around the world. Simone contends that Africa’s cities do work on some level and to the extent that they do, they function largely through fluid, makeshift collective actions running parallel to proliferating decentralized local authorities, small-scale enterprises, and community associations.
On African cities you might want to look at Ryszard Kapuscinski’s brilliant “The Shadow of the Sun,” not to be confused with the Bruce Willis African movie with the same name. RK makes the argument you mention about how the cities’ seeming confusion masks organization and often high functioning, except that he ups the ante: he says that in their operation they often outperform First World cities, esp. considering how cheap they are to build using only the materials of the poor. RK is also a spectacular writer who deserves even now to be better known.
“Why do they fail to understand what is objectively a clear and present danger? ”
Maybe they understand but can’t go anywhere else.