It’s become a bit of a cliche nowadays to evoke Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities when describing the poverty, injustice, violence and unequal access to resources that characterise many cities around the world. Strictly speaking, Dickens was writing about and comparing two different cities before and during the French Revolution: Paris and London. When Mike Davis references Dickens in his powerful book Planet of Slums, he is describing the notorious slum of Tom-all-Alone in Dickens’s Bleak House rather than A Tale of Two Cities.
However, Dickens also described the inequalities within each city and was a strong champion for social justice. Davis captures the inequalities of Dickensian proportions in cities when he writes that ”…the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.” (p.19)
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso Books, 2007
John Lorinc in his book Cities also describes the persistent internal divisions in urban areas: “In the megacities of the developing world, we see a much more entrenched variation on the theme of two-tier urban citizenship. Shanty towns, populated by millions of desperately poor people who have flocked to the big cities looking for work, are routinely denied access to basic municipal services, even though these communities occupy land within the urban region and represent a large portion of the urban population. Meanwhile, affluent residents often live in heavily guarded compounds… policed by private security forces” (p.14).
John Lorinc, Cities, Groundwood Books, 2008
Essential reading therefore is the recently published Sao Paulo: A Tale of Two Cities, brought out by UN Habitat as part of their Monitoring of Urban Inequities programme: ”São Paulo’s disparities stand out starkly in the everyday reality of the commute to work. As long queues of poor from the periphery wait for buses at dawn to take them to their predominantly unskilled, low-paid work, the wealthy use slick personal vehicles, often with drivers and armour plating. Some few super-wealthy and corporate travellers are known to take an estimated 70,000 private helicopter flights each year across São Paulo to escape traffic jams and insecurity. Their passengers look over the honey-combed medieval chaos of the favelas and then weave among the hundreds of high-rise, exclusive buildings of the central business and residential districts.” (p.13)
Usefully, it doesn’t just describe the problems but looks at possible urban policy solutions. Download the report from Zunia Knowledge Exchange here.
Sao Paulo: A Tale of Two Cities, UN Habitat
