sha_slum

These set of articles made me realize the wide variety of ways this topic is approached, because it affects so many. Angel Benjamin's article almost argues for the slum typology, approaching it as a series of myths or social preconceptions that have led to the miscasting of the slum as "bad" or "inefficient". The statement about families having "no stake" in the large housing projects and how they are "often hostile to them" was a nice encapsulation of the failure of the Corb sort of city. ( I actually got a sense of the article tying back to a more crass article I read sometime last week, Nussbaum's "Are Designers the Enemy of Design?", especially when I was reading reasons 5 and 6, Completeness and Professionalism. It seemed to tie me back to what I've been thinking about all semester, and now I can describe it: is myspace a slum of the internet? Are we as designers squeamish of the visual atrocities while we forget the new ownership that arises from Nussbaum's "democratic design"? )

The other articles all provide differing perspectives and perceptions on the inhabitants of the slum. Planet of Slums inhabits an almost completely statistical approach. Mike Davis's voice is almost absent, and only surfaces in a few locations "but I think most urban newcomers'..." and when he compares the population of slum-dwellers with the population of the world in 1844. I wish there was a mediating article between the Planet of Slums sort of barrage of numbers with the Colors Magazine personality -- a New Yorker "The Apartment" for slums, using impossible numbers and making them real, or at least a little easier to grasp. The same sort of anonymity persists in the UN Habitat article, consistently referring to inhabitants of slums as a vague "they", never referring to people in quantities less than 300.

In that sense the Janice Perlman article is a relief, a softer look at some of the reasons Angel Benjamin proposes, almost as a way to do what Angel Benjamin proposes -- shifting our perception of slums. She, like Benjamin, consistently uses "our" and "we" to include (or implicate) the reader in this discovery of the misconceptions of slums. It is sad, though, that the only article that really sets aside "they" in favor of people is the Colors Magazine article.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2007/03/are_designers_t.html