Planners, architects, designers are “always” trying to create places that enhance sustainable ways of living, ways that are more environmentally sound, more economical, or more conducive to the building of community. Today we talk a lot about high-density and walkable neighborhoods, transit oriented developments and mix use, waste and water management schemes, self-organized and resilient communities. Neighborhoods that include new, modern-stylish designs and sophisticated technologies have become the new model for achieving sustainable urban development and are trying to be replicated/exported all over the world.

However it seems to me that there is the dubious assumption that making an area, garden or building look nice will go hand in hand with more sustainable and eco-friendly living. This has been shown in a recent research (Just Environments  : Politicising Sustainable Urban Development) where it is argued that today sustainable urban development decisions are mainly based on the believe that more gardening, tidiness, recycling and eco-technologies will solve our environmental problems, ignoring deeper unsustainable societal structures. In short this means that one can live in a nice, green and tidy neighborhood but still live live in a very environmentally unfriendly way (with airplane use, car use, high levels of energy intensive consumption, etc).

So if this is true, are there any other models than the multibillion-dollar neighborhoods with all the so called features of urban sustainability?

Recently I found an article by Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian, showing how all the trendy “features” of sustainable urban design (high-density and walkable neighborhoods, transit oriented developments and mix use, waste and water management schemes, self-organized and resilient communities) can be found in a very different context. The examples of sustainable neighborhoods are not new and innovative areas in Scandinavia, Germany or the US but in the neighborhoods of the world’s poorest inhabitants. In the so called Slums, Favelas, Ghettos.

picture from digitaljournal

As said by Stewart Brand “to a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. However for biologist like me, they look organic. They are unexpectedly green, they have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi”.

Of course living in Slums has many problems and I don’t mean that we all should live in them to become more sustainable. But there are many lessons that can be incorporated in to new urban developments (the Self-Generative Community or Rem Kolhass’ book and documentary “Lagos, How it works”).

Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian argue that if we look beyond the poverty issue, slums can serve as an example of humanity in its most resourceful, responsible and aware of its surroundings. Is in it this what we are trying to achieve in sustainable urban development?