Exploring the Preconditions to Design
The Blacksmith Institute, an NGO that maps pollution around the world, published a list of the 10 most polluted places in the world. It is quite encouraging the Brazilian city of Cubatão, which I wrote about here and which was considered to be the most polluted city in the 80s, does not longer appear on the list.
More: Blacksmith Institute, Treehugger
In the poorer areas in Brazil’s cities, you might run into an image as is shown above: streetlights with numerous cables attached to it. Gatos (cats) have been at work here, tapping electricity illegally from the city grid in order to light their houses. Of course, this is a crime, and the criminals are traced easily just by tracing the cables from the streetlights into the houses.
In Rio’s favela Rocinha we would be talking about 150.000 energy thieves. But the power company prefers to talk about potential customers instead, and is acting accordingly. It is trying to convince the slum residents to install a meter to get charged for the energy. Strange as it may seem, the pragmatic approach paid off, as in the first three years the energy company reported to have saved 210 gigawatts, enough to power 100.000 houses for a year.
Once again I’d like to quote Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil in this context: “The Brazilian government is definitely pro law, but when the law does not apply to reality, the law has to be changed. That’s not new. It is civilization as usual”
Sources: Shadow Cities – Robert Neuwirth; We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin – Wired Magazine
The route lead us through vast fields of soy and sugarcane and along the route we were trying to spot some wild animals. We did meet some, like wandering groups of emu’s, toucans passing by and an ant eater trying to hide for us. Soon it became clear to us that we had most chances to spot the animals in the messy roadside bushes, rather than the road shoulders along the soy and cane fields. I might be rather obvious but for an urban dweller like me it was quite a revelation to realize that these vast fields of crops had little to do with nature or diversity. Instead, it was monoculture on a large scale, with no place for animals. These were just to be found on the small and isolated parts of ‘wasteland’ in between the enormous fazenda’s (ranches), or at the spots where the terrain was too steep to cultivate.
Also, along the road shoulders, we would meet many dwellings made of wasted wood or clay with roofs made of palm tree leaves. These were the homes of the landless workers, usually working on the fazenda’s as day workers. The landless workers fight for the right to cultivate land, usually radically, embracing communism, this way alienating themselves from mainstream politics.
We just met another car every half an hour while we moved on and my mind started wandering. Mono cultural and large scale agriculture seemed to result in an imbalance for both man and beast at Brazil’s countryside. It would be interesting to know what small scale agriculture would mean for both problems. The rural workers would be able to cultivate land individually and independently. Similarly the bushes at the small pieces of wasteland would be distributed more equally, which would stimulate animal diversity. Diversity is nature’s strategy to survival and provides flexibility through interdependency. Any fluctuation in the environment, for example as a result of climate change, could be dealt with. It would make Brazil’s nature less vulnerable, as well as its rural social fabric.
It proves the statement of William McDonough when he says all sustainability, like politics, is local.
To be continued…
Picture: Blue sky, green soy, red dust. A crossing with signs for fazenda’s in Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state.
In this and this post I mentioned that governments in Brazil on local and federal levels are facing problems in relation to poverty only in unsustainable ways. I need to make an addition to this comment. Yesterday president Lula announced a governmental program (PAC) that will invest in the infrastructure of the country on several levels to stimulate development. This includes the slums, that have already become shadow states out of reach of the government. Lula´s comment:
“If the state doesn’t fulfill its role and does not provide (adequate) conditions for the people, drug traffickers and organized crime will.”
It seems that an alternative will be provided for poverty and violence to the slum dwellers. It provides sustainable development in addition to the repressive police actions and the Zero Hunger program, which can only be considered as temporary programs to bridge the current situation, while building on structural solutions.
Looking at the site It seems to be an ambitious program. Let´s hope it will not appear to be too ambitious.
Gilberto Kassab, the mayor of Sâo Paulo, has decided to ban all commercial ads from the public realm. It is a decision that can be considered either foolish or visionary. Foolish, because visual polution is the least of the problems the city has to deal with. Traffic jams, air pollution, water pollution, insufficient water management which leads to regular floodings, carjackings, prison upheavals, slum violence, all these problems seem to be much more urgent that an occasional advertisement on a building.
But there is another interpretation. São Paulo can be considered the materialized market economy, unplanned, organic, chaotic, polluted. Consequently, it is a city that was built by capital, not by humans, a city hardly fit to live in. In this metropole of about 20 million inhabitants there is just one reasonable public parc to provide some breathing space, Ibirapuera, but the typical refuge for the Paulista citizens are the shoppings, which are usually overcrowded on Sundays. Unsurprisingly the first hit for Ibirapuera on Google is the shopping that was named after the parc. Consequently it is a city that I experience to be suffocating. The many ads that scream to you from the buildings (curiously, predominantly about plastic surgery) just add to this impression. In this context, the decision of the mayor is a small but certain first step to make the city more liveable and human. In this context the decision of the mayor is a visionary one.
Allthough I like to focus in this blog on the positive, and try to avoid politics as much as possible, sometimes it is necessary to make an exeption, especially when negativity and politics intersect.
Last week, Lula´s government decided to resume the construction of a third nuclear reactor at Angra dos Reis, which had been put on hold since the 1980s because of security issues and a lack of funds. As I mentioned before, Brazil´s only commercial nuclear reactor has been haunted by problems eversince it was built, but even though the ambitious plans of the government provide in the construction of eight new reactors by 2030. One of the main arguments is a future lack of water, as Brazil is largely dependent on hydro electricity . But for a country that has currently about 20% of the planet´s clean water within its boundaries, this can hardly be an argument. Instead, the desintegration of the hydro electric network (which I already mentioned here) as a result of commercialisation is more likely to be the problem. Nuclear power cannot be regarded sustainable, not only because of the numerous accidents that have occured at Angra, but also because the generation of nuclear energy does not form a closed system. In sustainability, the output of one system should be fit to be used as the input for another system, or in the words of William McDonough, Waste = Food. But with our current state of technology, nuclear waste cannot be reused. Therefore nuclear energy is not sustainable.
One of the biggest successes of Lula´s government is the Zero Hunger program, providing the country´s poorest a minimum income to stay alive. As poverty is widespread in Brazil, the program has made the government extremely popular. But even though the program is very necessary, it is not sustainable. As in the case of Angra, it does not form a closed system, as it does not generate output. An educational program for example would eventually result in tax paying professionals, taxes that could be used for new investments. In contrast, the Zero Hunger program can only be seen as a temporary solution in addition to structural investments like an educational program. But programs of such kind have not been initiated upto now.
Lula´s government has been the first that has been formed by the people and not by the elite, and so the government had been provided a historic chance to build a sustainable society. It all started off promising, as could be seen for example with the introduction of an open source program as a new model for development (as I commented here). But the man responsible, Sergio Amadeu, has resigned desillusioned as Lula´s special adviser. Instead of executing a visionary policy, the government relaxes and enjoys its re-election, to borrow the words Marta Suplicy, minister of tourism. (She spoke these words to airliner passengers that had been stranded as a result of an air traffic controllers crisis that has been unsolved since September last year. More on the passivity of the government is discussed in this article of The Economist.)
It seems the government is loosing momentum but there is still a light in the dark. Like in Israel, numerous scandals have been surfacing lately in Brazil about corrupt politicians. This is not necessarily negative. Like the Israeli author Amos Oz said: “sewers just stink when they´re cleaned up“. Corruption has long been deeply rooted in Brazilian society. If Lula´s government will be able to deal with this problem, it will all have been worthwhile.
Though I generally regard favela´s (slums) as grassroots neighborhoods being designed by its inhabitants and therefore potentially sustainable, there´s also a shadow site. This is shown by an action of the police of Rio de Janeiro last week on the Complexo do Alemão (German Complex), one of Rio´s poorest neighborhoods, in order to gain controll over drug trafficing activities. 44 Kills were reported up to now, and Human Rights Watch is asking critical questions about the attitude of the police of Rio.
I already mentioned before that the situation in Rio is comparable to a small scale civil war according to UN standards. The intensity is made painfully visible on this website, which counts the wounded and killed in the favela´s of Rio. Though last week´s action is exeptionally intense (problably related to the upcoming Panamerican Games in Rio within two weeks), it is typical for the way the local government deals with the problems in the favela´s. Sadly, there are hardly alternatives presented to the inhabitants in the form of social programmes or infrastructural investments. This results in a pressure cooker situation, where there is no way out to the citizens, and no alternative except for violence. We can only hope this tendency to violence is temporary, and that the focus will shift to sustainable solutions once the Panamerican Games are over.
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