Robert Neuwirth spent two years living in squatter cities on four continents to research his amazing book Shadow Cities. He captures the shantytowns where a billion people live now, and where three billion (a third of humanity) are expected to be living by 2050.
Why you should listen to him:
One of the most profound trends of our time is the mass migration of the world's population into urban areas. As of 2005, close to 70 million people were migrating to cities each year, resulting in a billion squatters (one in six people on Earth live as squatters). A troubling trend? Perhaps not, argues author Robert Neuwirth.
Deprived areas around big cities -- call them barrios, favelas, slums or shantytowns -- are super-concentrations of urban poverty, to be sure. Life there is hard: no water, no transport, no sewage. But looking at them from the inside brings a surprising perspective. Living in the squatter cities of Rio, Nairobi, Istanbul and Mumbai, Neuwirth discovered thriving restaurants, markets, health clinics, an unconventional real-estate market, and truly effective forms of self-organization.
His vivid descriptions and frank admiration for the ingenuity and innovation he encountered force us to rethink assumptions about community, poverty and the shape of 21st-century cities. Our challenge, Neuwirth says, isn't to end poverty or control populations, but to engage and empower the residents in these "cities of tomorrow."
New: See Neuwirth's recent video from Lagos, Nigeria, presented at Postopolis! 2007.
"[Neuwirth shines] an investigative lens into areas of urban life that have seldom been described before."Reason magazine
