Cities 07

Growing up I always knew in my mind that there were places in the world where poverty was commonplace. One of my mother’s favorite sayings was that “you do not know what starving is! Go live somewhere where food is scarce so that you will appreciate my good home cooking.” I have always loved my mom’s cooking, but still poverty was only a vague threat in my mind rather than a reality. This is, of course, until I went to downtown Milwaukee in high school to volunteer my time in order to work in a soup kitchen and a free clothing store in the middle of winter to see the “other side” of life. That time that I spent working with the homeless of Milwaukee was mind-opening for me. Since then I have read about and seen pictures of slums all over the world, most of them rising out of once great urban centers and segregated from the rest of the community for a myriad of reasons.

Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums really painted a picture of the part of the world we, as Americans, rarely see. Hard numbers were presented about the world’s largest poverty centers across the globe. Slums were divided into groups like Inner City and Outer City set-ups where various classes of impoverished individuals (i.e. squatters, renters, etc.) settle in patterns. These impoverished individuals represent the bottom of the barrel that is society in general.

So that lead me to my next question: I can see how historically slums came around, but how do nearly a billion people worldwide end up in this low state? My background is in anthropology, so as I see it, poverty did not exist when we were hunter-gatherers as groups were based on family and a history of trust within a group, so everyone worked for survival of the group. Then, when agriculture started, much more of our time was spent cultivating the plants we needed to survive, and poverty only existed as farmers who could not provide for their families, which often meant starvation. After that time, colonialism seemed to have the biggest effect on poverty ever seen on Earth. As boundaries were forced on fluid nations, lifestyles were immediately expected to change. Poverty became a new concept as some refused the changes and some accepted them and used them. And now, today, we have the Planet of Slums that Mike Davis wrote of.

Of course, it is not nearly as simple as that, but in seeing the cause of poverty, can we not take steps to fix those causes and work toward a world where living conditions are acceptable to our healthy survival? I know, it is wishful thinking, but it is at least a start towards a better future. I find it interesting that since I think about life in the Paleolithic and early Neolithic where life styles were so different from what they are today, it almost seems like a better life, where people really were free and “poverty” was not even an issue. Surely we can find a way to blend how life was then with now to work against what we have become.

(obviously Mike Davis made me angry)