Spring 2011: Cities

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3LETTER FROM THE EDITORwww.tyglobalist.org

Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities. An urban experience is no longer a dream for most, but the daily reality. Not surprisingly, much of the recent urbanization has occurred in the developing world. In the next 20 years it is estimated

that the urban population of the two poorest regions of the world, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, will double. But population growth in the developing world has brought new challenges: Some 70 percent of the people in African cities live in slums without modern sanitation and ba-sic infrastructure. Urbanization’s political, environmental, economic, and organizational chal-lenges have been met with innovation in some places and complete failure in others.

our focus section on the rise of the city attempts to provide new perspectives on the different ways that urban life is shaped by a city’s structural and social constraints and the manners in which citizens construct environments to fit their changing needs. Catherine os-born reports on the efforts of Jakarta’s marginalized communities to resist eviction from urban spaces designated by the government for redevelopment, while Nicolas Kemper examines the prospects for revitalizing the city of Cairo in light of recent political developments. Transporta-tion is one of the most important facets of city life; Sanjena Sathian investigates the growth of bicycling as a means of transport rather than a hobby in European cities. other articles look at the ways new types of cities are emerging to fit the needs of specific countries: diana Saverin fo-cuses on attempts to build an ecocity in the Negev desert in Israel, while Cathy Huang explores russia’s efforts to develop a technology hub to rival Silicon Valley.

Beyond the urban experience, however, lie political and social conflicts that go deeper than any street grid. Emma Sokoloff-rubin reflects on her time working with youth from the world’s conflict zones at Seeds of Peace International Camp. Sibjeet Mahapatra had the chance to speak with larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, about the issue of healthcare as a human right. In Ghana, Sophie Broach highlights the problem of first World e-waste poisoning children in the Third World.

As always, the publication of our magazine would not be possible without the support of numerous private and public supporters, including the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and the Poynter fellowship at Yale. We would especially like to thank Hull’s Art Supplies and Claire’s Corner Copia for their sponsorship of our 8th Annual International Photo Contest. Make sure to check out the stunning winning images from this year’s competition in this issue, submitted by Yale students featuring people and places around the world. And don’t forget to keep track of our ever-growing web presence at tyglobalist.org. Thanks for reading.

All the best,

Jeffrey Kaiser Editor-in-Chief, The Yale Globalist

ON THE COVER:A map of the world; each circle represents a

country’s urban population proportional to the rest of the world.

(Design by Eli Markham & Raisa Bruner)

Journalism advisory BoardSteven Brill, Yale Dept. of English

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editors-at-largeAngela Ramirez,

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44 the yale globalist: spring 2011

5TABLE OF CONTENTSwww.tyglobalist.org

CONTENTSSpring 2011 / Vol . 1 1 , Issue 3

FoCuS: Cities

The Yale Globalist is a member of Global21, a network of student-run international affairs magazines at premier universities around the world.

POLITICS & ECONOMY 6 | Exporting a Toxic Problem

First World electronic waste poisons the Third World with recycling gone wrong. By Sophie Broach

8 | A Conversation with Larry CoxAmnesty International USA’s Executive Director talks human rights and health care. By Sibjeet Mahapatra

CULTURE10 | Kung Fu Commerce

The historical Shaolin temple opens to the world in unconventional ways. By Alec Baum

PERSPECTIVES 12 | When Students Go on Strike

What Italy taught me about the power of protest. By Anna Kellar

13 | On Mobility, Trust, Breaking News, and Going HomeThoughts on Seeds of Peace. By Emma Sokoloff-Rubin

PHOTO CONTEST 17 | 8th Annual Globalist Photo Contest Winners

10

2413

6

24 | Jakarta’s ‘riverbank People’From the poor to the powerful, residents of indonesia’s capital are fundamentally at odds over land use. By Catherine Osborn

28 | Living on WaterDutch floating homes are redefining man’s relationship with water. By Luke Hawbaker

30 | Revitalizing CairoNew plans promised to rejuvenate Egypt’s urban core, but at what cost? By Nicolas Kemper

34 | Creating Cycling CulturesBicycling as a means of transportation rather than a hobby is exploding in European cities. By Sanjena Sathian

36 | Russia’s Venture Capital AdventurePlans to build a technology hub in Russia may rival Silicon Valley. By Cathy Huang

38 | The Land of Milk, Honey—and High Rise Backyards?

Developing an ecocity in Israel’s Negev desert proves to be a real challenge. By Diana Saverin

66 POLITICS & ECONOMY the yale globalist: spring 2011

Carcasses of obsolete comput-ers and discarded cell phones dot the charred landscape of an electronic waste dump in Accra, Ghana. Acrid chemical

smoke saturates the air and refuse floats in murky pools of water. despite this hos-tile environment, groups of children are also part of the landscape, picking gingerly through the bits of smoldering plastic and metal that litter the ground.

In Ghana, the illicit dumping of elec-tronic waste—e-waste—has created an en-vironmental crisis. According to estimates released by the United Nations Environ-mental Programme, the world generates as much as 50 million metric tons of e-waste per year, most of it produced in the United States and other developed countries. for these countries, shipping unwanted elec-tronics abroad to developing nations has emerged as a cheaper, easier alternative to complying with stringent e-waste recycling standards at home.

The Basel Action Network, or BAN, an

NGo devoted to stopping “the effluent of the affluent” from polluting poor regions, estimates that 80 percent of the electronics that users trust to purported recyclers end up in African and Asian countries. “for a long time, the Environmental Protection Agency was not on our side and was pro-moting export as a solution to the e-waste problem,” said BAN founder Jim Puckett.

The first World solution to the e-waste disposal question has contaminated the air, land, and water in countries like Ghana. Mike Anane, the president of the league of Environmental Journalists and a Ghanaian citizen, commented on an e-waste dump-site near Accra: “Now there are no fish in the lagoon or river, in these wetlands that once served as a source of livelihood for many fishermen.” Electronic goods contain a veritable cocktail of hazardous materi-als, such as phthalates, chlorinated dioxins, brominated flame-retardants, and heavy metals like mercury, lead, and cadmium. These chemicals seep into the high water tables and abundant surface water in wet-

lands, endangering local drinking water and tainting crops and livestock that may be consumed by people far from the imme-diate vicinity.

While many are unwittingly affected, scavengers, often children, deliberately bring themselves into direct contact with this debris, seldom aware of the hazard-ous consequences. E-waste contains pre-cious raw materials; a cell phone’s scrap value is roughly one dollar. Boys, typically aged four to 18 and from poorer regions in Ghana, flock to coastal dumpsites to exploit these forgotten resources. Without sophis-ticated recycling machinery, they manually dismantle old electronics, melting away plastic with fire to expose valuable copper wiring.

doctors in the areas around the Accra dumpsites have reported children with el-evated levels of lead in their blood and re-spiratory problems linked to fumes from burning plastics. “Seven-year-olds have ap-proached me saying, ‘I can’t play football; I can’t run as I used to.’ People have told me,

Exporting a Toxic Problem

First World electronic waste poisons the Third World with recycling gone wrong.

By Sophie Broach

Boys in Ghana burn e-waste to melt away plastic and expose valuable copper wiring. (Greenpeace International)

‘My brother had to go home because when he spit, he spit blood,’” Anane said.

“old electronics have lead and mercury, known neurotoxins, which impact many basic building blocks of life: learning, walk-ing, talking, and motor function. other ha-logenated compounds when burned, can form dioxins, which are known carcino-gens,” said Casey Harrell, a senior cam-paign specialist at Greenpeace Internation-al. Compounding this problem, widespread infectious disease and poor nutrition weak-en these children’s physiological defenses, exacerbating the effects of contact with e-waste.

The volume of e-waste generated by developed countries continues to increase, fueled in large part by a first World ob-session with getting the latest gadget. “Cheap international shipping, a massive rise in the use of electronics, the absence of strong laws banning the exportation of e-waste to developing countries, and the lax enforcement of many that do exist, have created a perfect storm for e-waste exports to thrive,” Harrell explained. Western cor-porations, which are not required to prove their electronics are still functional, can ex-port junked, useless goods under the guise of donating the items for re-use.

Many lightly used electronics do find new owners in Ghana, but most of the im-ported devices—Anane estimates 80 per-cent—are utterly beyond repair; second-hand dealers abandon these in growing e-wastelands. Here Anane has encountered electronic waste from high profile institu-tions, universities, and hospitals. “Even the U.S. Congress, even the U.S. Environmen-tal Protection Agency!” he exclaimed.

The U.S. government has not flouted its own laws by allowing federal computers to poison Accra because no such laws exist to regulate the flow of e-waste. Meanwhile, Ghana has ratified the Basel Ban, which prohibits the shipment of hazardous waste to less developed countries. With its large harbors, though, enforcement has proven difficult. The European Union has also ad-opted the ban and may soon require elec-tronics to be tested for functionality prior to shipping.

“The U.S. is no longer a global leader on most environmental issues; believe it or not, we used to be,” Harrell lamented. American inaction on the e-waste problem epitomizes this decline.

Some forces in America have been

lobbying against any sort of trade bans whatsoever. When asked if he favored legislation to address the e-waste issue, Mike Watson of dell’s global electronics take-back program replied, “We strongly believe producers should be accountable for their own brand at end of life. Beyond that, each producer should be allowed the flexibility to innovate and create market-driven solutions.”

despite such obstacles, the United States is making small improvements. In August, EPA Chief Administrator lisa Jackson announced that preventing irre-sponsible management of e-waste was one of the EPA’s top six global priorities, and in November, President Barack obama estab-lished an interagency task force for respon-sible electronics stewardship. “Companies like dell and HP have agreed that they will stop exporting not-working computers, and Apple may soon be on board,” Puckett re-ported.

These companies also have the capa-bility to target the problem at its source by producing non-toxic electronics, but federal legislation will likely be required to make this transition. Corporations have been reluctant to market products as “toxin-free” for fear of making the rest

of their “toxic” products look bad. “They don’t want to compete with themselves,” Puckett explained. The British design firm Kinneir dufort invented revive, a phone that can be disassembled and updated with new parts as they emerge, but it hasn’t hit the market yet. Most companies, though, don’t share such a recycle-centric vision. Instead of paying to recycle products in the United States and Europe or reengineering

them with fewer toxins and more modular designs that would facilitate part replace-ment, many companies transfer these costs to people in the developing world who pay by losing their clean air and drinking water.

Ultimately, consumers must play a criti-cal role in reform by limiting consumption and entrusting obsolete items to certified recyclers. As Anane asserted, “The onus rests with the developed countries to stop these shipments.” Every day we in techno-logically advanced nations talk on our cell phones, sit with computers in our laps, and stare at TV screens. Now we must begin to think about what happens to these items after we discard them.

Sophie Broach ‘13 is a History major in Pierson College. Contact her at

[email protected].

7POLITICS & ECONOMYwww.tyglobalist.org

Seven-year-olds have approached me saying, ‘i can’t play foot-

ball; i can’t run as i used to.’ People have told me, ‘my brother

had to go home because when he spit, he spit blood.’

—Mike Anane, president of the League of Environmental Journalists

An e-waste dump in Accra, Ghana. (©2009 Basel Action Network)

88 POLITICS & ECONOMY the yale globalist: spring 2011

larry cox is the executive director of amnesty international usa and a 35 year veteran of human rights activism. He began his career as a hu-man rights defender in 1976 as the inaugural press officer for Amnesty international usa, and following stints at the rainforest Foundation and the Ford Foundation, he returned to amnesty in 2006 as its executive director. under his leadership, amnesty has begun to campaign for com-plete, non-discriminatory access to health care around the world. often

analyzed from an economic perspective, the issue of global access to health care is viewed less frequently through a human rights lens. many of the situations that amnesty has traditionally addressed represent relatively straightforward violations of civil and political rights; health care is particularly complex from a human rights perspective because there is little consensus on whether it qualifies as an inalienable right. siBJeet maHaPatra spoke to cox about his views on health care and the wider landscape of economic, social, and cultural human rights.

Q: Amnesty USA’s Demand Dignity campaign asserts that “Health Care is a Human Right,” presumably based on statements presented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Interna-tional Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and documents from the World Health Organization, to name a few international standards. Why should we

consider health care a human right, and not a privilege or a commodity? A: The basic notion behind human rights is that every human being has the right to dignity and freedom. And those things which threaten dignity and freedom are what we call human rights violations. The emergence of the Universal declara-

tion of Human rights was related to two worldwide catastrophes. one of course was genocide in World War II and all the horrors of Nazi Germany, and secondly, there was the worldwide Great depression in which people were deprived of basic necessities, like housing, like jobs, and like health care. So long before the Universal declaration, you had the president of the United States, franklin roosevelt, saying that people needed to have both freedom from fear—that would include the civil and political rights—but also freedom from want, i.e. basic economic, social and cul-tural rights. And that’s the idea that went into the Universal declaration; health care is a human right because people need it to be human. Without adequate shelter, with-out adequate food, and without adequate health care, it doesn’t matter if you have the right to speak out and express yourself, you’re not free and you’re not going to be able to live a life of dignity.

Q: One of Amnesty’s goals is to promote legislative action that ensures complete non-discrimination in access to health care. But discrimination seems unavoidable when considering how best to maximize the social value of limited resources. As an example, consider the landmark Soobramoney case in South Africa, a nation that has one of the only constitutions in the world to codify access to life-saving health care. Here, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that a

Q & A

A Conversation with larry cox

(Amnesty International)

“the basic notion

behind human rights

is that every hu-

man being has the

right to dignity

and freedom. and

those things which

threaten dignity and

freedom are what

we call human rights

violations.”

9POLITICS & ECONOMYwww.tyglobalist.org

man with chronic kidney failure could be refused expensive dialysis treatment on the grounds that those resources should be reserved for people who could actually be cured. Yet, his life would have been prolonged if the state had supported his treatment. How do you view cases like this?

A: The framers of the Universal decla-ration had to be realistic; it’s not a magic document and it doesn’t say that every-one has a right to total happiness or to perfect health. Those things are impos-sible for any government to guarantee or to be held accountable for. And it doesn’t say that a country which has very few re-sources has to guarantee the same level of health care as a country that is very rich.

This means that a government is not required to give to every one of its citi-zens the fullest, most complete health care available, but it does mean—and it says so very explicitly in the internation-al documents—that the government must have a plan for progressively trying to en-sure that every citizen has full access to the best available health care over time. That’s the primary difference between civil and political rights versus economic and social rights: With the former, there’s no time frame. You don’t say, “we’re only torturing 1000 people this year, and next year we’re only going to torture 900,” and “isn’t that progress?” But with econom-ic and social rights such as health care, because there are resource constraints, you can say, we’re guaranteeing health care to 80 percent of the population, and that by year X, we’ll be able to guaran-tee access to 100 percent of the popula-tion, so long as that plan doesn’t allocate those resources in a discriminatory way.

Q: As a follow-up, in Amnesty USA’s document on the Demand Dignity webpage, you do mention that the principle of non-discrimination encompasses not only factors such as gender, race and age, but also health status. And it seems like in this South African case in particular, this man is being discriminated against because the status of his health is that he has a chronic ailment as opposed to an acute problem.

A: Now we’re getting into the really fun part of all human rights, which is the very, very detailed analysis you have to make to decide if something is

really a violation. If, because he had a chronic kidney disease, he had been told, “we’re not going to give you any health treatment,” or, to raise it to a more massive situation, if people with HIV/AIdS are told that “we’re not going to give you any health care,” that would be an example of discrimination on the basis of your medical status. If you are being given health care but it’s been decided that you can’t be given all the resources available—because in the real world, that takes resources away from other people who also have certain health statuses, who you also don’t want to discriminate against—that’s a much more difficult and much more complicated medical decision that has to be made.

I don’t think we’re in a position to say that if someone has a disease which is incurable, or a disease treatable at great expense, that if a government instead says, “we only have these resources and this is the best we can do for you,” that this is inherently a human rights violation. It might be, and I’m sure there are lawyers out there who would make that case and probably did make that case in South Africa.

Q: Per capita and as a fraction of to-tal GDP, the United States spends more on health care than any country in the world. But we continue to report lower outcomes on indices such as overall life expectancy, with a strong differential across income levels. What can we do to make our health care expenditure more efficient? What can we learn from more effective systems in other countries?

A: This is a very important point be-cause it demonstrates that the right of access to health care is not simply a question of resources. Here you have the richest country in the world, the country that spends more on health care than any other country, that has terrible out-comes on health care and, more impor-tantly from a human rights perspective, extremely discriminatory outcomes.

I would say that a crucial step to-ward resolving this would be, first of all, for the United States to recognize that health care is a right. We don’t have that in the United States. We don’t recognize that there should be proac-

tive efforts to reach out to the poorest among us to make sure that they are getting health care, and you can see the results. Health care is not treated like a right but like a commodity, which means that, up until very recently in our health care system, those with money are able to get the kind of care that keeps them well and keeps them alive, and those with less money are not. The quality of health care here depends upon income and upon your ability to work the market.

And if we go back to this example of maternal health care, we find that the United States, the richest country in the world with the most spent on health care, is in fact 41st in the world in terms of rates of women dying in childbirth. There’s no way to explain that, except that our health care system is not geared towards people, it’s still primarily geared towards profit.

Q: We’ve just rung in a new decade. What do you see as the biggest challenges to ensuring global access to health care in the next 10 years?

A: The biggest challenge involves the people who are reading this interview. We know that the key to advancing any human rights is activism on the part of the public: on the part of people who aren’t experts, aren’t politicians, but who, if mobilized, can provide the pres-sure that will make governments take their obligations seriously. only a mas-sive global human rights movement can make global health care happen; we’ve seen that happen in the past on similar is-sues, including civil and political rights—the movement to destroy apartheid—and that’s what we’re working to do.

Q: Why do you care about this issue?

A: on a personal level, I grew up in a family that was poor. I saw firsthand what it means that because you’re poor, you’re not able to get the standard of health care that could keep you alive. I’m quite sure that my mother died prematurely because she wasn’t able to get the kind of treat-ment that not even rich people but just people who were significantly better off could get. And I’ve never forgotten that.

SiBjeet Mahapatra ’13 is in Silliman College. Contact him at [email protected].

1010 CULTURE the yale globalist: spring 2011

By standard measure, Andre Magnum is the prototypical American nine-year-old; he is incorrigibly blunt, tirelessly active, and invariably sur-

rounded by a maelstrom of lego bricks. He loves Star Wars and dreams of becom-ing a robotics engineer.

He is also a kung fu champion and the living legacy of a historical trend in mod-ern China.

“He knows a good deal of killing moves,” Andre’s father Kenn Magnum shared with me one afternoon. His tone carried a mix of pride and anxiety. “We remind him to play gently with kids his own age.”

A devoted student of kung fu since the age of three, the younger Magnum, who goes by “dre,” has come in first place in an astounding 31 kung fu competitions. When the leading kung fu schools in America could no longer support his blos-soming talent, the Magnum family made the decision to enroll their son in Tagou Wushu School. This renowned academy lies adjacent to what is debatably the most

hallowed locale in the kung fu world and the birthplace of Zen Buddhism: the Shao-lin Temple in Henan Province, China. By the time I met the Magnum men on a short trip to Shaolin in July, they had been living at Tagou for months and did not anticipate leaving any time soon.

“We were willing to do absolutely what-ever it took to support Andre in achieving his dream,” his father told me, “even if it meant leaving Phoenix to live in Henan. The Shaolin Temple is the true source of a powerful tradition.”

The commercialization of Shaolin kung fu culture that has profoundly affected the lives of the Magnum

family dates back to the end of Chair-man Mao Zedong’s Cultural revolution. desperate to invigorate the sputtering economy of a spiritually fatigued nation, Mao’s political successor and ideological counterpoint deng Xiaoping began seek-ing free market solutions to China’s finan-cial woes. To generate revenue, deng’s reformers looked to the same cultural cap-

ital Mao aimed to destroy. In 1981, the Cen-tral Tourism Bureau oversaw the produc-tion of the feature film “Shaolin Temple,” a box-office phenomenon starring eigh-teen-year-old Jet li in his breakout role. overnight, an industry was born. Shaolin became a favorite destination for Chinese and international tourists. Thousands of young Chinese boys ran away from home to study under the martial monks like those they had seen in kung fu films.

This massive surge in demand for kung fu education and tourism formed the ba-sis of a new economy in Shaolin. dozens of private kung fu academies sprouted up along Shaolin’s main drag. Nearby farm-ers abandoned their land to cater to the swarms of tourists, selling memorabilia, handicrafts, and snacks.

It was during the years of the kung fu craze that 23-year-old Matthew Polly made the decision to leave the ivy-cov-

ered walls of Princeton University for two years of training in the gritty barracks of Shaolin.

When Polly arrived in Shaolin in 1991, he expected to find a scene more similar to the one he had seen in Jet li movies: robed monks practicing tai chi against a tran-quil backdrop of forested mountains and breaking boards over their heads. What he found was far from serene.

“When I arrived, there were nearly a hundred monks, six major kung fu schools with hundreds of kung fu instructors instructing 10,000 young Chinese boys, dozens of lean-to restaurants to feed the tourist hordes, and several dozen cor-rugated-tin-roof shacks selling kung fu tchotchkes,” Polly, who now resides in New Haven, recalled to me. “It was one big tourist trap. The isolated monastery had been turned into the anchor for the Kung fu World.”

A decade after his first adventures in China, Polly returned to Shaolin to re-connect with the martial monks that had

Kung Fu CommerceUnder the leadership of a controversial new abbot, the historical Shaolin temple

is opening to the world in unconventional ways.By Alec Baum

Kung Fu pupils sit outside a clinic near Shaolin Temple in Dengfeng, Henan Province, China. (Courtesy Libbie Cohn)

11www.tyglobalist.org

become his close friends. once again, he was met with a Shaolin he did not expect to find.

“Where before there was hustle and bustle, building after building, there is now one big wide-open space with a few cinderblocks lying on open dirt,” Polly recollected. “When the grass grows back, it may very well look contemplative; right now it looks like it’s about to be turned into a huge parking lot.”

This was the Shaolin that greeted me when I arrived in Henan in July. As I learned from Kenn Magnum, the dramatic changes to Shaolin’s infrastructure that Polly witnessed in 2003 were carried out under the direct orders of the Venerable Abbot Shi Yongxin. Yongxin, or the “CEo Monk” as he is called behind closed doors, made it his primary ambition to bring or-der to the area surrounding the temple when he filled the role of head abbot in the mid-1990s. While the kung fu craze had put Shaolin back on the map, Yongxin feared that the bustling “Kung fu World” Mat-thew Polly had known, characterized by an overwhelming density of kung fu acad-emies and trinket shops, had the potential to cheapen the site’s touristic value. Worse still, Yongxin worried that the clutter had the potential to weaken Shaolin’s bid to be-come a UNESCo World Heritage site.

Harnessing relationships with influen-tial police and army contacts, Yongxin had thousands of local merchants and other residents forcefully removed from their homes in 2001. only the few most repu-table kung fu academies, Tagou included, were allowed to stay. This expedient use of eminent domain decimated Shaolin’s local population, which plummeted from around 10,000 to the hundreds. Massive renovations were made to the temple it-

self, including the installation of luxurious guest bathrooms valued at U.S. $430,000. Some celebrated this pricey temple clean up as a prudent investment on the part of Yongxin. The new and improved facilities have attracted foreign dignitaries for high-profile visits, and film crews frequently use the renovated temple’s façade for pro-ductions.

Yongxin’s more enduring effort, how-ever, has been to protect and defend what has become a Shaolin “brand.” In the past several years, the monastery has taken broad legal action against parties using the Shaolin name without proper permis-sion. Meanwhile, teams of official Shaolin monks have been sent all over the devel-oped world to establish ruthlessly com-petitive “kung fu culture centers.” These centers are often tax-exempt under for-eign law, including as registered 501(c)(3) organizations in the United States. In some cases, they are also not expected to observe minimum wage laws, seriously undercutting local competition. The Shao-lin brand has even begun to include its own line of products, including candies and plush dolls.

The reaction to the commodification of Shaolin culture has not been unanimously positive. In November 2009, hackers broke into the official Shaolin Temple website twice. The first time, the hacker posted a note in calligraphy that read: “Shao-lin evildoer Shi Yongxin, go to hell!” The second time, a forged letter was posted, allegedly from Yongxin himself, apologiz-ing for leading a crusade of materialism.

The abbot has been quick to answer these criticisms.

“Commercialization or industrializa-tion, or whatever term you use, is a path leading up to the truth of Zen,” Yongxin told the People’s daily in 2008. “My vision is that Shaolin will eventually become a source of consolidating Chinese people’s confidence and wisdom.”

last summer as I stood in line with Kenn and Andre Magnum at Shaolin’s visitor center, a mammoth concrete com-plex with jumbotrons running loops of white-robed monks doing spinning kicks, I remember feeling disappointed at what I can only describe as a spiritual thinness in the air. I now contemplate the effects of Shaolin’s commercialization on the lives of Matthew Polly, whose devotion to kung fu in the early ’90s would forever change his adult life, or the young Magnum, whose career success is largely due to instruc-tors trained in the hallowed Shaolin tradi-tion. But was Shaolin meant for Polly and for Andre? According to the Yongxin, the answer is yes.

“Shaolin culture should develop as so-ciety develops,” Yongxin said in an inter-view in 2006. “It must not stick to outdated thoughts and practices. rather we should open up to the outside world.”

If the towering box of trademarked Shaolin candies sitting on my shelf is any testament, opened up it has.

alec BauM ‘13 is an East Asian Studies major in Branford College. Contact him at

[email protected].

Kung Fu pupils at Tagou Wusu Academy clean the practice area after a long day of training. (Courtesy Libbie Cohn)

The sun disappears behind the horizon near the Pa-goda Forest, a series of structures commemorating deceased abbots of Shaolin Temple. (Courtesy Libbie Cohn)

CULTURE

When the Students Go On StrikeWhat Italy taught me about the power of protest.By Anna Kellar

in the ’60s and ’70s,

american students

occupied their univer-

sities just like their

compatriots in europe

did. Why, i asked

myself, does this

seem so inconceivable

today?

1212 PERSPECTIVES the yale globalist: spring 2011

I was listening to a lecture on the Cuban revolution when the chanting started in the courtyard outside. A young man with

dreadlocks and a bullhorn strode into the lec-ture hall at the University of Bologna in north-ern Italy. Within moments, the room had been taken over by more than a hundred student protesters.

The classroom takeover was part of student protests against the November 30, 2010 passage of the “Gelmini reforms.” These reforms, a se-ries of laws affecting kindergarten to the high-est reaches of academia, consolidate universi-ties, close departments, and reduce student presence in institutional decision-making. Italy faces a budget deficit, so the reforms are intended to make the public university system more efficient and competitive. Many students, however, say it leaves them with a weaker and more expensive education.

In the days and months following the vote, high school students went on strike and took to the streets, while university protesters oc-cupied landmarks like the Coliseum and the leaning Tower of Pisa. Police clashed with protesters in Bologna, and increasing violence across the country left dozens injured. for me, these scenes were strange and unfamiliar, like flashbacks to my parents’ stories of Vietnam-era protests. In the ’60s and ’70s, American students occupied their universities just like their compatriots in Europe did. Why, I asked myself, does this seem so inconceivable today?

When I posed the question to my mother, she suggested that American students feel that politics don’t affect them in the same way as when the draft fueled protests against the Vietnam War. In America, there are a wide va-riety of options for higher education. In Italy, the lack of alternatives to the public university system might mean that students are willing to fight to preserve the status quo. Still, consid-ering the level of political involvement at Yale, I’m convinced that apathy isn’t the reason for the absence of demonstrations.

despite the passage of Gelmini, the Italian protests have increased in strength through december and January, in what many see as a broader outpouring of frustration at high youth unemployment and lack of opportunity

after graduation. decades of deep ideological divisions and political corruption have eroded Italians’ faith that the government is repre-senting the voices of young people. “We have to protest,” said my roommate Giulia Silves-trini, a third-year education major in Bologna. “If we don’t, how would the government know that we don’t approve of what it’s doing?”

However, it’s possible that protests might make the situation worse. Critics of Italy’s wel-fare state say that the trade-off between qual-ity and equality is the reason that American universities rank better than Italian ones. The fight between entrenched interests makes it likely that if protests were successful in stop-ping Gelmini, the end result would be a stale-mate and no reform at all.

That situation sounds familiar in an Amer-ica still polarized by the culture wars of my parents’ generation. I think it’s healthy that students today are more interested in a practi-cal, cooperative approach than in slogans and ideology. We are the generation that protests through facebook and online petition because we believe in the power of communication.

Nonetheless, we should recognize that when our government disappoints us, some-times more is required than an angry facebook status. In Tunisia and Egypt, demonstrations by young people overthrew a dictatorship, and though Twitter and text messaging played a role, nothing replaced actually going out in the streets. demonstrations don’t have to be an-tagonistic. What would the civil rights move-ment have been without sit-ins and the march on Washington? There are nearly 280,000 peo-ple in the “No to Prop 8” facebook group; that’s wonderful, but it’s not enough.

The Internet is powerful, but nothing dem-onstrates commitment like a physical pres-ence in the streets. American students today are not the radicals that some of our parents were, but that doesn’t mean we are not politi-cal. By looking to Italy, we can learn to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

aNNa Kellar ’12 is a Political Science major in Say-brook College. Contact her at [email protected].

13PERSPECTIVESwww.tyglobalist.org

On Mobility, Trust, Breaking News, and Going HomeBy Emma Sokoloff-Rubin

on mobilityIn mid-July, a teenager I had worked

with for three weeks asked me if I knew where he was from. I thought Gaza, but I didn’t know for sure. I knew Mohammad was Israeli or Palestinian or maybe Egyp-tian. I knew he wasn’t afraid of heights, that he was 15 or 16, and that he was a whiz on the ropes course once he got over being too cool to play games. But I wasn’t sure that he was from Gaza, and the answer to his sec-ond question—“do you know what it’s like there?”—I knew for sure I didn’t know.

I don’t know what it’s like to live in Gaza, or Kabul, or Mumbai, or Jerusalem, or any of the cities the campers at Seeds of Peace

International Camp call home. Seeds of Peace deliberately brings together kids who have grown up to hate each other. As a counselor at the camp in otisfield, Maine, I wasn’t surprised to hear sharply contrast-ing stories about family histories and daily routines. What surprised me was realizing, through rest-hour conversations and heat-ed debates on the ropes course, how differ-ent each of my camper’s sense of home is from my own.

leaving home for three weeks on a visa secured by Seeds of Peace gave Mohammad only a momentary sense of possibility. He wasn’t the only camper who had left home for the first time this summer, or the only

one for whom the end of the sentence “I am from…” means not only the place he lives now, but also the place he expects to start a career and a family.

I have never felt bound to one place. Talking to Mohammad, who can’t leave Gaza, and deepa, a camper who wrote to me that she was “disallowed from applying to college abroad” because her parents be-lieve there’s too much important work to be done in India, made me realize how much I have been shaped by a breathtaking sense of mobility, how much my sense of who I am comes not only from where I am, but also from the fact that I choose to be there.

(Courtesy Kate Fitzpatrick, Seeds of Peace counselor)


on trustdalia: If you’re a soldier at a checkpoint

and someone tells you to shoot me, will you shoot?

dan: No.dalia: But if you were ordered to? Would

you disobey?dan didn’t answer dalia’s question. da-

lia is 15 and Palestinian. To her, checkpoints are routine. dan, like nearly every Israeli teenager, will serve in the army when he turns eighteen. I didn’t hear their conversa-tion. I didn’t hear dalia ask dan if he would shoot her. I didn’t see the look on dalia’s face when dan paused, or the one on hers when, minutes and conversations later, he answered.

dan: No, I would disobey.She said she didn’t believe

him, and the dialogue ses-sion ended, and they left the wooden cabin where every day for two hours, t e e n a g -ers from the Middle East who have taken enough of a chance on peace to come to a coexistence camp in Maine talk to each other.

Talking is harder than they thought it would be when they left home.

The day after dalia asked dan if he would shoot her, I led their dialogue group on the ropes course. I handed dalia a blind-fold and asked her to tie it over her eyes. I told her dan would take her hand and lead. After hearing from the dialogue facilitators about dalia and dan’s conversation, my co-facilitator and I decided to put kids who didn’t like each other in pairs and have them lead each other blindfolded. “Trust walks” are done in ropes courses across the coun-try. But though I helped plan it, I thought the whole activity sounded silly. What did leading someone through the woods for five minutes have to do with trust?

That was easy for me to say. I don’t trust everyone I meet to give me good directions, or to keep me safe from speeding cars or petty crime. But I trust that the people with whom I interact don’t want me to get hurt.

dalia didn’t grow up with that expec-

tation. Half of the teenagers in the group raised their hand when my co-facilitator asked at the end of the activity, who peeked? When I asked why, one girl said she didn’t want to get hurt. dalia said she p e e k e d at first, but after a few min- u t e s she started keeping h e r eyes closed, because dan hadn’t led her into a tree.

S o m e -t h i n g f e l t

d i f -f e r e n t

the next time we led

that group on the ropes course. The

kids I’d paired because they came from opposite sides of the conflict, or because they fought in the bunk or in dialogue, hadn’t suddenly

become best friends. one activity on a ropes course doesn’t do that. But the trust walk, which originally seemed silly, did change how dalia saw dan. She said in dialogue the next day that dan didn’t lead her into a tree, and that if someone told him to, she thinks

he wouldn’t shoot her.I don’t know if that’s true. I do know that

I asked more than I realized of dalia and dan and all the teenagers I worked with this summer. I asked them to do something that’s easy when you’ve grown up safe and scary when you’ve grown up knowing you have something to fear: close your eyes and let someone else take the lead. Trust some-

one else to keep you safe.

on Breaking newsAt the end of bunk cleanup in August of 2010, Saadia burst

into Bunk Three and said something to Amira

in Arabic. My co-counselor asked

them to speak in English,

Amira told her to go to hell, and

Amira and Saadia dashed out of the bunk.

I followed the two campers outside and learned that there

had been more casualties in Gaza, and a rocket had just landed in Jordan,

30 meters from a camper named dara’s home.

“It would be better if I were there,” dara told me after speaking to her parents on the phone, but she couldn’t explain why she wanted to be in Jordan right then. Maybe because if you’re not home you can’t know for sure that the people you love are okay, and more than safety, you want comfort and familiarity. Maybe because you feel guilty for being so safe when the people who matter most to you in the world are in danger, and it feels crazy to be waterskiing,

or cleaning Bunk Three, or talking about a conflict as your family watches it unfold.

does the safety of the Seeds of Peace campground feel scary at moments like this? It scares me that we spend three weeks helping kids feel safe, and then send them

i asked them to do something that’s easy when you’ve grown

up safe and scary when you’ve grown up knowing you have

something to fear: close your eyes and let someone else take

the lead. trust someone else to keep you safe.

(Drawing by Olivia Holter, Camper at Seeds of Peace)

15PERSPECTIVESwww.tyglobalist.org

excerpts from a camper’s journal: Hannah Sokoloff-Rubin, an American camper and sister of the author, de-scribes key moments at camp.


home to places where danger is often ines-capable. But the safety, even temporary, lets campers see a side of the violence they can’t at home: the way it affects people they’ve been taught to see as enemies. When vio-lence erupts in the Middle East while kids are at camp, they see reactions on each oth-ers’ faces and not just the news on TV.

An Israeli camper told me at the end of three weeks at Seeds of Peace that her polit-ical opinions hadn’t changed, but she under-stood better the feelings behind what “the other side” says and does. She had caught a glimpse of what was behind thoughts and ideas that made her want to scream and seen that some of the core feelings weren’t so different from her own: caring about her family, missing home, wanting to feel safe.

on going HomeSome Israeli campers had never met a

Palestinian. A Palestinian refugee from Jen-in whose bed was beside mine knew only the Israeli soldiers who sometimes stopped her from going to school. Israeli and Pales-tinian campers often pack their bags in bor-dering neighborhoods, a closeness that be-lies vastly different lives. Checkpoints often block the roads between campers’ houses.

My strongest memories from the two summers I spent at Seeds of Peace are of evenings in my bunk, trying to convince eight teenage girls to go to bed, or turning out the lights, waiting until the camp direc-tor thought my campers were asleep, and then sitting with them on the back steps, watching the reflection of stars in the lake. I remember nights when arguments about politics and land rights exploded, and ev-eryone went to sleep upset, and nights when arguments turned into conversations

about campers’ families, who they had lost, and how it felt to be here, living together be-side a lake in Maine.

I hope my campers remember those mo-ments, though I know that for them, bring-ing home memories of camp has not been easy. A Palestinian counselor told me that he didn’t tell his friends he had gone to Seeds of Peace until two years after his first summer as a camper there. He was afraid they would call him a traitor. Naira, a camp-er from Jordan, told me over Skype months after camp ended in 2009 that she didn’t know how to talk about her experiences at camp with people at home.

A camper from 1996 who returned as a facilitator in 2010 didn’t sugarcoat his “life after camp” speech on the last day of camp. “Being here will make your life harder,” he said to kids who were chosen for the quali-ties that will only make it more difficult for them to go home: they care about their communities and ask a lot of themselves. Possibility flourishes at camp. Counselors decide to lead a camp-wide swim across the lake, and they make it happen. Second-year campers want to organize interfaith dialogue, and they have each other and the counselors, and they make it happen. But campers don’t have the same resources at home. When a 15-year-old breaks down at camp because caring about “the other side” is so hard and goes against everything he’s been raised to believe, there are people there to say it’s worth it. When the same thing happens at home, there are people there to say, well, maybe what you started to feel at camp was wrong. Just be here. don’t worry so much about changing the world.

on the bus from the logan Airport to

the campground in otisfield, Maine, in 2010, Naira, who had been one of fifty campers selected to return for a second summer, told me she almost didn’t come back. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go through it all again, learning to live at camp and then go-ing home.

There are lively follow-up seminars in the Middle East and facebook pages with multi-lingual conversation threads, but I learned from campers that once you leave Maine, you’re treading on different ground. You sometimes feel like you’re letting down everyone you met at camp, like you haven’t changed anything. Even you—you’re not as changed as you’d imagined. You want to live up to whatever kernel of capability some-one saw in you that made them choose you for Seeds of Peace, to live up to who you felt you were there: more able to listen to peo-ple say things you hate, or more outspoken, fierier, more willing to say what you believe.

Two years after he returned from Seeds of Peace, the counselor who put away his Seeds shirt when he got home from camp started talking about his experience there. He told his friends about the friends he made. He talked about Seeds at school. He wears his Seeds of Peace shirt at home, and he’s glad he does, but it hasn’t been easy, and it won’t be easy for any 2010 campers if they choose to take that harder path. Then they have to figure out how to stick with their beliefs once they’re home, to work for peace without hurting themselves.

eMMa SoKoloff-ruBiN ’11 is a History major in Timothy Dwight College. Contact her at

[email protected].

(Courtesy Bobbie Gottschalk, Co-Founder of Seeds of Peace)

17PHOTO CONTESTwww.tyglobalist.org

The Yale Globalist’s

internationalPHoto ConteSt WinnerS8t

hA

NN

UAL

category: editor’s cHoiceThe Editor’s Choice winners were selected from two categories: person and place.

1st Place

Coca Cola Girl

Ava Socik, MC ’12

Hometown: Chicago, IL

A young Peruvian girl happily carries two Coca-

Cola bottles to her mother. July 2009

1818 PHOTO CONTEST the yale globalist: spring 2011

2nd Place

(Untitled)

Rahim Sayani, BK ’12

Hometown:

Dallas, TX

Taken in the winding alleys of rabat’s

residential district, this picture is more than

just a curious photo of a Moroccan woman. It

speaks to the reflective nature of this place.

June 2010

3rd Place

Sunset Over the Sahara Desert

Ava Socik, MC ’12

Hometown: Chicago, IL

The sun sets over the sandy dunes of the Sahara desert in mid-summer. July 2010

1st Place

Push

Florian Koenigsberger,

MC ’14

Hometown: New York, NY

The side streets of Barcelona are home

to as many tourists as they are weathered

grandmothers washing their laundry outside.

This shot happened very quickly as this seemingly

decrepit beggar-mother struggled by with her child

in its stroller, one wheel squeaking gratingly with

each push. June 2010

category: Person

2nd Place

Los Militares

Isaac Bloch, BK ’12

Hometown: Brooklyn, NY

The Colombian military conducts training exercises as snow falls on El Nevado de ruís, one of the tallest snow-covered volcanoes in the world with a peak of 17,400 feet.July 2010

www.tyglobalist.org

2020 PHOTO CONTEST the yale globalist: spring 2011

3rd Place

Massacre River

Catherine Osborn, PC ’12

Hometown: Austin, TX

As a backpack carrier crosses into Haiti from the dominican republic, boys play in the water of the border river. It was named for dominican dictator rafael Trujillo’s 1937 massacre of over 20,000 Haitians. March 2010

category: Place1st Place

(Untitled)

John Cheng, CC ’11

Hometown: Andover, MA/

Taichung, Taiwan

Three anonymous

extras take a break during

the filming of a Chinese

propaganda TV series. They are portraying 1910s

republic of China horsemen

suppressing a local rebellion in Inner Mongolia.

August 2010

21www.tyglobalist.org PHOTO CONTEST

3rd Place

5 A.M. Swim Beneath

Mount Assiniboine

Robert MacMillan,

BK ’12

Hometown: London, UK

on the final day of our stay at Mount

Assiniboine in Quebec, Canada, we took an

early morning plunge in Magog lake before

a 25-mile hike out to civilization. August 2009

2nd Place

Ohne Grenzen

Charlie Croom, SM ’12

Hometown: East Lansing, MI

Although the Berlin wall came down over 20 years ago, the west-side gallery remains, serving as a constant reminder of Germany’s past. local artists frequently paint the tiles with either historical reproductions or new creations. May 2010

2222 intro graphic the yale globalist: spring 2011

FoCuS: CitieS

a map of the world, by urban

population

23www.tyglobalist.org intro graphic

FoCuS: CitieS

Graphics by Eli Markham & Raisa BrunerData source: http://www.mongabay.com/cities_pop_01.htm

24 FOCUS: CITIES the yale globalist: spring 2011

Jakarta’s ‘riverbank People’

From the poor to the powerful, residents of Indonesia’s capital are fundamentally at odds over land use in the megacity.

By Catherine osborn

25www.tyglobalist.org FOCUS: CITIES

he first four times they were evicted from their homes in North Jakarta, the members of the Ke-bon Bayem community

resettled after just a few weeks. The fifth time, the city police brought guns. They had visited in the morning with a 24-hour eviction notice, and around 10 p.m. more troops arrived. Snipers began to perch on the highway overpass that looms over the neighborhood. When the eviction began at dawn, these soldiers’ rubber bullets caused less damage than the bulldozers that reduced the community’s homes to rubble.

This happened in late August 2008, ex-plained Kebon Bayem treasurer Asep sit-ting cross-legged on the floor of the new community mosque. Earlier that month, public order officers called Satpol PP had spray painted X’s on the doors of several homes to mark them for demolition. When the Satpol PP arrived on eviction day, their force numbered 8,000, double the number of families in the community at the time. Because it was a Sunday, would-be com-munity defenders from Jakarta legal Aid and the city government were not on call.

other members of the village, or kam-pung, listened as Asep, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name, told the story. When he paused to gather his thoughts, they offered additional details. Some men and women tried to resist the Satpol PP, but they were beaten. A few even had to be hospitalized. The residents fled, leaving their homes to be burned down by the officers’ firecrackers.

The workers in Kebon Bayem rebuilt “elsewhere” this time. for fear of los-ing their customer base in the area, the new location was on the opposite side of a concrete wall that used to border their community. This wall had separated them from railroad tracks and a drainage ditch where some homes now stand on stilts.

The city government’s official justi-fication for evicting Kebon Bayem was that it was an unregistered

community living in an area slated to be-come an urban green space. Its residents include vendors, trash collectors, mer-chants, and taxi drivers who are part of the 70 percent of working Jakartans em-ployed in the informal sector. This sector often lives in unconventional spaces: along

riverbanks, in fields, and under highway overpasses. Many of them came to the city in pursuit of economic opportunities more readily available here than in the country-side, part of the rural-to-urban migration trend currently reshaping populations around the world. By 2030, one-third of hu-manity will be living in an informal urban settlement. The livelihood of these work-ers is the dilemma of the urban future: City infrastructures are not evolving fast enough to safely accommodate so many people.

Jakarta Mayor fauzi Bowo knows his city’s informal sector—“the riverbank people,” as one activist called them—is a problem he must address. But Bowo has many problems. As Indonesia grows wealthier, multinational companies push to add more and more steroidal skyscrap-ers to the already super-sized downtown, and developers roll new apartment build-ings far into the suburbs. Jakarta has quickly become famous for its unforgiv-ing traffic. Under international pressure to make the city less congested, Bowo has announced a plan to increase the amount of green space in the city from less than 10 percent to over 30 percent by 2030.

This is an attractive concept to watch-ful Westerners, and Bowo is prepared to allow some dirty work to accomplish his goal. He claims the right to evict com-munities in would-be green spaces on the grounds that these people lack legal right to land. They, however, claim squatters’

rights and argue that the government needs to recognize their physical and eco-nomic inertia and move toward providing them the sanitation and basic services to which all citizens are entitled. The slogan on Asep’s shirt references the framework of their position: “Water is a human right.”

To this end, Kebon Bayem has a few strategies to maintain a strong communi-ty. furqon, the community leader, helped a friend paint address plaques for the new homes. other leaders also organized free job training and classes in reading, writ-ing, and reciting the Qur’an. residents of all ages can learn herbal health remedies, acupuncture, and traditional dance. They can attend forums on how to get proper identification documents and keep the community census in order to encourage aid and recognition in the future.

Kebon Bayem organizes in good com-pany. It learned its five-pronged approach of resistance—economic activity, educa-tion, health instruction, dance, and policy advocacy—from a local group called the Urban Poor Consortium (UPC). The UPC in turn shares strategies with its larger national network, UPlink, and its regional network, the Asian Coalition of Housing rights (ACHr). The Internet has made possible something that 20 years ago was unimaginable for the urban poor: an in-ternational network that provides strat-egy and publicity. ACHr is one of many such networks. The largest, called Slum/Shack dwellers International, is active in

T

Left: A resident of kampung Kebon Bayem is reflected in an irrigation ditch that runs through the spinach fields for which the community is named. Below: Kampung residents take a break in the new community mosque after a meal and a child’s haircutting ceremony. (Osborn/TYG)


23 countries across the global south and has caught the attention and funding of traditional aid groups like UN-HABITAT. dubbed “pro-poor development,” partner-ships like this could help fix the poverty alleviation establishment that many per-ceive as broken.

This new infrastructure of activism still allows for diverse tactics on the ground; for example, not every community uses puppet shows to preserve the history of eviction like Kebon Bayem does. These

specific strategies originated in the cen-tral UPC office, a short car ride from the kampung. Inside the office, giant maps on the walls outline different voting blocs and the history of land use in the city.

“We want each individual community to have self-reliance,” said Sampan, a UPC organizer who in past lives has driven a pedicab and run for Mayor of Jakarta. “The goal of the dances and plays is to de-velop a literature about the history of each community.” Maruli, another organizer, specializes in documenting human rights

abuses in the kampungs. He has made vid-eos for the UPC of nasty evictions in the neighboring city of Jogjakarta and of dam-age experienced by the urban poor during Jakarta’s annual flooding.

Between times of crisis, days are slow in Kebon Bayem. In the whitewashed ply-wood mosque, two religious figures puff cigarettes in the corner as one resident serves a steaming meal to men, women, and children sitting barefoot around the room’s edge. As a hot breeze drifts in after

the meal, the men of the community con-duct a ceremonial haircutting for a new child, who is blessed afterward.

later in the afternoon, several com-munity leaders duck beneath the concrete wall that separates Kebon Bayem from its old home. on the now vacant land, some residents have dug irrigation ditches to support the small spinach fields that gave the community its name. But beyond that, a swampy wasteland stretches for acres. It is not used by the public. on the far side, new real estate developments teeter,

seeming out of place.

Jakarta currently has 9.6 million peo-ple. It is rapidly growing and essen-tially unplanned, creating a landscape

of consumerism and classism gone awry. The newest buildings downtown look like set pieces from disneyland’s Epcot: the columns a little too large, the statues a little too flashy. Tour guide lucy Iskan-der is frank about the results of the city’s “mall culture”: The rich don’t mix with the poor in Jakarta if they can help it. “Public spaces are for people who can’t afford cars or motorcycles,” she said. “People who can might spend time at the Audi Club or the Toyota Club.”

Jakarta’s love affair with individual motor transport is problematic. It is the largest city in the world without a subway system, and the recently installed Bus rapid Transit lines are hardly a sufficient traffic fix. one frequent visitor said he and his family often abandon dinner reserva-tions when their ride to a nearby restau-rant passes the two-hour mark, instead opting to walk between deadlocked cars to buy food from vendors alongside the road. According to lucy, these vendors try to mimic commercial fast food. They meet a strong demand that the formal market does not, just as informal settlements house a growing population that the for-mal market does not. Jakarta is glutted with instances such as these in which the informal sector steps in to cover a formal market failure.

Indonesia as a whole has had stellar growth in the past 10 years, prompting some economists to proclaim it the new Brazil, russia, India, or China. But like the cars in Jakarta’s streets, corruption clogs the Indonesian national government, pre-venting the rising tide of wealth from af-fecting the poor—and especially the urban poor. “The trickle-down effect is abstract and utopian,” said humanitarian worker renar Berandi. “It doesn’t happen here.”

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. World Bank economist Michael Cohen believes the dense economic networks within cities, those of street vendors and bankers alike, remain “an untapped policy lever” for governments planning national stimulus packages. Many believe Indo-nesia’s large informal sector helped the country weather the global financial crisis better than some neighbors: People who lost their jobs could dip down into informal

A child from the kampung looks beyond the wall that encloses his community’s previous home. (Osborn/TYG)

Jakarta’s rapid growth is essentially unplanned, creating a

landscape of consumerism and classism gone awry. the new-

est buildings downtown look set pieces from disneyland’s

epcot: the columns a little too large, the statues a little too

flashy.


employment until prospects improved. Imagine, says Cohen, if the government injected money directly into the informal sector as a strategy for boosting the health of the economy as a whole.

Unfortunately, Mayor Bowo and compa-ny do not agree with this line of thought. They prioritize improving the city’s ef-ficiency before its equality. Proposals for plans to address Jakarta’s traffic abound; these include congestion pricing, mono-rails, and more parking lots at bus sta-tions. If these or similar measures are not adopted quickly, Jakarta will achieve total traffic gridlock by 2014. There is no official estimate of the new number of informal sector workers who will be living in the city by then.

Marco Kusumawijaya, a career ur-ban planner in Jakarta, has a very specific idea of how he would like

to see the city run more smoothly. “real dissemination of city plan documents to Jakarta’s residents will open a Pandora’s box: once they can see academic papers and read opinions about how space in the city should be used, they will be able to en-gage with the process,” he explained. His organization, the Citizens Coalition for Ja-karta 2030, is trying to realize this goal us-ing the city’s first freedom of Information Act, passed in April 2010. Under this act, it gained access to the city’s 20-year spatial masterplan and then conducted a citywide

survey in response. Their battle now is to get the city to accept their recommenda-tions. “The city is supposed to update the plan every five years, but the status quo is that it never really changes,” he explained.

Kusumawijaya said it was important for the Citizens Coalition to leave space for detailed responses to survey questions because “modern city planning should not underestimate the complexity of the city.” The survey went to people with a range of incomes and careers and included feed-back on everything from transportation to growth to disaster mitigation. “Cities like Singapore run smoothly because this planning process is very transparent,” he said.

So should Jakarta be more like Singa-pore?

“don’t degrade us!” exclaimed Ku-sumawijaya. “our cities in Indonesia are much more alive and more diverse. They contain paradoxical vitality within a cha-otic space.” But Kusumawijaya’s imagined Jakarta and lucy’s painfully real Jakarta of car and mall culture seem difficult to reconcile.

Nana firman, the other leader of the Citizens Coalition, agrees that Jakarta needs to cultivate its unique personal-ity. “Jakarta used to be known as a port town, a place of hope. Now the name of the city is not associated with that, just as the word ‘kampung’ has grown to refer largely to poor communities when it re-

ally means ‘place of origin.’” firman, too, believes that reclaiming pride in Jakarta requires reclaiming a political voice: “The government can’t use the fact that people are apathetic now as an excuse not to ask them their dreams.” She wants to be able to point to a group of documents and say, “this is the thought of the Jakartans.”

Jakarta is a small town when it comes to activism surrounding urban planning: Both Kusumawijaya and firman are well acquainted with Wardah Hafidz, the founder of the UPC. Kusumawijaya trusts the urban poor’s local knowledge and or-ganizing capacity, which he says could be used to revolt against society or to revolu-tionize it. “No successful social movement starts with the middle class,” he declared.

In addition to international recognition for her human rights work, Hafidz has re-ceived several arrest threats from Jakar-ta’s city government—reminders that de-spite the UPC’s significant achievements, it remains at the bottom of the city hierar-chy. Its members are battling a powerful history in Jakarta. for now, the story of space and power within the city depends entirely on which space you live in.

catheriNe oSBorN ’12 is a Latin American Studies major in Pierson College. Contact her at

[email protected]. Research for this story was supported by the

Pierson Summer 2010 Fellowship.

Asep and Furqon, second and third from the left, have encouraged Kebon Bayem residents to use the land from which they were evicted for small-scale spinach farming. Sampan, second from the right, provides organizational support from the UPC. (Osborn/TYG)


By Luke Hawbaker

ost homeowners living near water dread the prospect of flooding. If the rain pours and water levels rise, they are forced to steel themselves against inevitable dam-age or even evacuate. But some residents

living on the Meuse river in the Netherlands have little to worry about. Their houses float.

In 1993 and 1995, huge river floods marked a new chap-ter in the centuries-old dutch battle to ward off water. The 1995 floods alone displaced 200,000 people. According to Pier Vellinga, an initiator of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and one of the Netherlands’ foremost experts on the impacts of climate change, these floods had “a major effect on the vulnerability awareness of the Neth-erlands population and the government.”

With these disasters fresh in their minds, the dutch government, private companies, and individual home-owners set about reimagining man’s relationship with the water. Koen olthuis, a leading architect of floating struc-tures, was one of those individuals. His solution? “A new approach in which the best defense is offense. Not fighting the water, but living with it.”

The floating homes along the Meuse were born out of this paradigm shift. In 2005, the dutch government opened up 15 locations to what Peter Minnema, project manager for dura Vermeer Business development BV, called “adapted building techniques.” In doing so, they spurred dura Ver-meer’s most famous creations: the 36 amphibious and 14 floating houses of the town of Maasbommel.

The homes were intentionally built in areas where wa-

M

Dutch floating homes are redefining man’s relationship with water.

Living On Water

The floating homes on the Meuse River in Maasbommel, Netherlands are designed to rise with the river as it floods. (Courtesy Peter Minemma)


ter levels are frequently high, outside of the town’s protective ring of dikes. They can handle it. otherwise unassuming, the homes sit neatly ordered in a row, their identical shapes and curving roofs differing only in their varying shades of pastel blue, green, and yellow. However, the foundations of the homes—70-ton con-crete “hulls”—set them apart from nor-mal houses. When the water rises, they rise too. And they can withstand a rise in the water level of 5.5 meters, roughly 18 feet.

The residents of Maasbommel’s most unique homes provide a glimpse of what future river floods might look like. Now instead of panicking, moving possessions, or evacuating, the owners of these homes simply ride out the flood. When the water rises, two large mooring posts guide the home as it floats up from its spot on the riverbank. When the water recedes, the house nestles back down onto the bank.

“[Homeowners] enjoy their dynamic environment greatly and feel really con-nected to the water in the Meuse river. It feels really dutch in a way,” said Minne-ma. He also noted that the rest of the world has paid attention: “from 2007 on, these homes have been continually vis-ited by national and international press, administrators, and managers.”

This cultural embrace of floating struc-tures is something that olthuis comment-ed on as well. “This is a huge step in the dutch mentality,” he said, “not keeping everything dry, living on instead of un-der water.” The approach should benefit a country where two-thirds of the land lies below sea level. His architecture firm, Waterstudio.Nl, has devised a plan called “The New Water” to develop 1,200 houses, half of which will be floating. “We will let

water back into a realm that had been conquered from the water a few hundred years ago,” he said. It is a remarkable change in mindset.

More projects like this, said olthuis, “would make the complete dutch system

more flexible and less defensive. We live in an artificial country which is totally de-pendent on technical solutions. It is up to the new generation of engineers and ar-

chitects to use technical systems that are less vulnerable, less expensive and less defensive.” floating developments will help make those new approaches a reality.

The homes at Maasbommel and his company’s planned project are just the be-

ginning of what olthuis and others imag-ine. “A real floating city is now being de-signed for the Maldives, a country that is likely to be one of the first victims of rising sea levels,” he said. “By bringing in new technologies and development solutions, as well as floating agricultural and solar fields, they will become climate change in-novators instead of climate refugees.” As the world prepares to meet the challenges of climate change, the homes at Maasbom-mel provide a concrete example of success for those around the globe who have no intention of becoming climate refugees.

luKe hawBaKer ’13 is a History major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact him at [email protected].

the foundations of the homes, 70-ton concrete “hulls,” set

them apart from normal houses. When the water rises, they

rise too.

Water overflows the banks of the Meuse, but the homes and their residents stay dry. (Courtesy Dura Vermeer)

undreds of thou-sands of protes-tors gathered in Tahrir square, hurling stones and braving tear

gas, as they called for the end of the 30 year reign of President Hosni Mubarak. Cairo was in re-volt. And as the residents of the city that defines Egypt’s national identity shed the shackles of au-thoritarianism, they may be in the process of reshaping not only politics but also the city of Cairo itself.

Prior to the demonstrations, a small clique of government builders and private companies had drafted grand plans to revo-lutionize Cairo. The city was in need of repair. But they did not foresee the grass-roots revolu-tion that has rocked the country. The end of the political monop-oly could transform urban plan-ning in Cairo, a process that has lacked transparency and citizen-involvement for centuries. If the revitalization is ever to be real-ized, it will require a different approach to match the demands of a new Egypt.

The downtown area—the backdrop of the pro-tests—sits along the Nile,

removed from the old city in the east. This deliberate separation is the work of the Egyptian lead-er Isma’il Pasha, who ascended to the country’s throne in 1863. Isma’il, called the Magnificent for his focus on the moderniza-tion of the country, wanted to westernize Cairo and make it a great capital on the global stage. He sent Egyptian architects to

study in Paris, where they met Haussmann—Napoleon III’s urban planner and the builder of modern Paris—learned his techniques, and brought them back to Cairo. Straight streets, expansive central squares, and tastefully ornate Belle Époque apartment blocks rose next to the old city.

Today those streets are crammed with cars and ven-dors, strewn with trash, and overshadowed by a lumbering patchwork of overfly highways. The beautiful old buildings of Isma’il’s time crumble under the weight of new floors that have been sloppily added to their tops and exhibit the bleak adornment of 40 years of neglect. The pres-ence of a few restored buildings on a central square, Talaat Harb, only accentuates the decrepi-tude of their neighbors, con-trasting faded fascias with bril-liant white facades and jet-black wrought iron.

Cairo desperately needs im-provement on every level. Take parks: International urban plan-ning standards say a city should have between 12 and 18 square meters of green space for each resident. Vienna has 120. Cairo has 0.3. It has become clear to many that this style of urban growth cannot be sustained.

In the last few years, several private sector projects have emerged with the promise of

reinvigorating downtown Cairo. They plan to restore the centu-ry-old buildings to their former splendor, refurbish central Cairo by installing posh cafes and re-tail stores, open up parks and

3030 FOCUS: CITIES the yale globalist: srping 2011

HNew plans promised to rejuvenate Egypt’s urban core, but at what cost?

By Nicolas Kemper

Revolutionizing Cairo


A Belle Époque building from the era of Isma’il Pasha three blocks off of Tahrir Square, though still architecturally impressive, shows signs of neglect. (Kemper/TYG)

www.tyglobalist.org

boulevards, and build office skyscrap-ers. Al Ismaelia, a real estate consortium whose investors include members of Egypt’s new entrepreneurial elite, sits at the forefront of these projects.

Spurred in large part by a more dy-namic regulatory environment, Al Is-maelia began to invest in downtown Cairo. A more developed financial sec-tor allowed for the expansion of the loan and mortgage market, displacing what had been a cash economy and feeding a prolonged real estate boom. According to Karim Shafei, CEo of Al Ismaelia, “The existence of a solid stock exchange, the changes in the incorporation laws, tax laws… have all contributed to a financial boom that has created a much higher dis-posable income in the middle and upper markets. This has resulted in a boom in real estate demand.”

Al Ismaelia counts on that boom to sell downtown apartments. Having al-ready raised U.S. $67 million in capital, the consortium now owns 20 downtown buildings. Should it fulfill its plans of doubling its ownership, the conglomer-ate will own 10 percent of all downtown buildings—over a million square meters of real estate. The government owns an-other 50 percent and, for better or worse, has played a critical role in shaping the city that has come to define modern Egypt.

It is actually a loosening of previous government urban policy and rent con-trol laws that stimulated the current

downtown real estate renaissance. En-acted under President Gamal Nasser in the 1940s, the laws prevented landlords from raising rents by more than one per-cent a year. This was Nasser’s attempt to make good on his promise of equality and to provide Egyptians with affordable housing. By 2010, apartments under the rent control laws were priced at approxi-mately five percent of the market rate for similar units. Shafei noted that “most residential apartments pay between one and five U.S. dollars per month as rent. We’re talking 1,500 to 5,000 square feet

apartments at those rents.” Unable to recoup any investments,

landlords neglected basic repairs and let the buildings go to waste. To further com-plicate the situation, rates were heredi-tary: An apartment and its discounted rent would be passed down from genera-tion to generation. Afraid of losing their

special rents, tenants held onto apart-ments even if they moved elsewhere or abroad. Thus, despite chronic housing shortages in Cairo, 25 to 30 percent of the rent-controlled apartments have no inhabitants.

Progress has been slow. A law in 1996 and a subsequent 2001 constitutional court ruling nominally repealed rent-control but allowed current beneficiaries to pass on their privileges to one final generation. Today, though, just 10 to 15 percent of rent-controlled apartments have been privatized.

Al Ismaelia, however, has capitalized on a provision in the law that allows land-lords to buy out tenants and bring apart-ments onto the market before the end of the rental period. Shafei claimed that the company has been able to clear out 47 percent of its units and expects to reach 60 percent vacancy soon, significantly opening up the market.

The government, Cairo’s primary real estate owner, has an even more ambi-tious vision for downtown Cairo. A plan called Cairo 2050 aims to establish 53,800 acres of green space, 15 new metro lines, and two new railway centers, in addition to other drastic improvements to the city core, by that date.

one aspect of the design includes moving the Corniche, a highway that hugs the banks of the Nile, underground, creating room for sweeping parks, prom-enades, marinas, and restaurants.

All of these projects, however, run the risk of gentrification—or, as the Cairenes call it, “Zama-

lekisation.” Zamalek, a large island in the Nile near the center of Cairo, is also composed primarily of old Belle Époque

Sixty-five percent of Cairenes live in informal or illegally erected housing, such as the precast concrete tenements in the foreground. (Kemper/TYG)

international urban planning standards say a city should have

between 12 and 18 square meters of green space for each

resident. vienna has 120. Cairo has 0.3.


and Art deco buildings but is inhabited entirely by upper class Egyptians and westerners. Its coffee is overpriced, its restaurants are overly chic, and it boasts multiple supermarkets and a sports bar.

People downtown would like to avoid the fate of Zamalek and continue striv-ing for Nasser’s promise of equality. The faded splendor of the downtown area today accommodates the poor and rich alike. Its cafes host Egypt’s intellectuals, and it retains an organic spontaneity; a

dirty mechanic’s shop peacefully coexists on the same street as the corporate head-quarters of a national bank. 80 percent of Cairo’s businesses are downtown. While Shafei has promised to introduce subsi-dies for artists and other cultural attrac-tions, it is clear that the Al Ismaelia com-pany and others that dominate the real estate market will be the ones to define what constitutes culture in the Cairo of tomorrow.

“We believe that some activities need

not be located in downtown, such as small factories, workshops, warehouses, car repair... and we hope that such busi-nesses can be relocated to areas that are more suitable for the nature of their busi-nesses,” said Shafei.

Then again, the sheer disrepair of downtown Cairo has eroded its status as the home of middle class Egypt. diane Singerman, a professor at American Uni-versity in Washington d.C. and the editor of a series of books about urban issues in Cairo, argued that downtown, “was the heart of Nasserist Egypt. It was the mid-dle class hub,” but that now, “a lot people are abandoning that part of the city.”

Shafei admitted that in his 20 build-ings downtown he has only 30 residents. However he sees a dearth of affordable housing as natural, and his vision for urban planning diverges from that of the Nasser days: “I believe that formally planned Cairo is not the right location for affordable housing. Moreover, city centers in most developed cities hold the most expensive real estate; there is no reason why Cairo should be any differ-ent.”

All of these new developments, espe-cially larger scale government sponsored projects, almost inevitably cause consid-erable hardship for the poorer citizens of central Cairo. In an article published by Executive Magazine, rabie Wahba, the Middle East-North Africa program direc-tor of Habitat International Coalition, said the Cairo 2050 plan could lead to the forced eviction of over 2 million lower in-come residents.

downtown Cairo resident and oxford University research fellow lucie ryzova is concerned about who exactly these projects are intended to benefit. “The mega project of ‘Cairo 2050’ makes it look like quite a few inner city, low-income areas are meant to ‘disappear’ and give space to nice clean parks of entirely new upscale neighborhoods,” she said.

Part of the Cairo 2050 plan calls for cre-ating a 15,000 acre park in the four-mile long Arafa Cemetery, also known as the City of the dead. Its countless corpses and the hundreds of thousands of squat-ters who live among the tombs would be moved into new developments in the desert, leaving only the most historic and architecturally significant tombs.

The City of the dead’s residents share


This former department store symbolizes the decline and re-use of downtown Cairo. Its vast interior has been put to many uses ranging from a clothing store to a mosque. INSET: Sheds on the roof—even the dome itself—have been turned into informal apartments. (Kemper/TYG)

their plight with the 65 percent of Cairenes who live in informal housing—crude, ille-gally built apartment blocks that lack ba-sic utilities and infrastructure and are left vulnerable to demolition because of their tenuous legal status.

It is clear that while both the Egyptian government and companies like Al Ismae-lia have grand visions for Cairo, neither have consulted the Cairenes about the fu-ture of their city.

National politics and ambitions rather than local needs and inter-ests have come to dictate urban

planning in Egypt. “There are a lot of things that go on that are supposedly for the public interest but don’t include public participation,” said Singerman.

The scope of the new plans does not come as much of a surprise. Progress in Cairo tends to happen in reckless leaps and subsequent stumbles. The sheer centrality and density of modern Cairo inflates urban planning projects. The Greater Cairo area constitutes 43 percent of Egypt’s population, and almost every government ministry is headquartered in central Cairo. The city has almost no local government to speak of; the President ap-points even the governor of the Cairo Gov-ernate.

Egypt’s resources have rarely matched the grand visions of its urban planners; Isma’il’s edifices were indicative of a loose purse that left Egypt so bankrupt that its British creditors subsequently impounded the government, violently seizing power in 1882. The current plans could force the country into further economic priva-tion. According to Eric denis, a senior re-searcher at Paris diderot University, in the last 20 years, Cairo has seen the construc-tion or commencement of construction of 600,000 residential units for a middle class no larger than 315,000 families.

Special interests have also interfered in the revival of Cairo. A study conducted by urban planner david Sims found that funding for the new cities erected around Cairo—cities built by well-connected real estate developers—accounted for 22 per-

cent of the city’s housing budget, though only 2 percent of Cairenes live there.

for Al Ismaelia, the sheer immensity of downtown Cairo might prove most prob-lematic. ryzova expressed her skepticism: “Ismaelia might be dreaming of turning downtown into an elite enclave, but I don’t think that they can succeed.” She points out that the company owns only a fraction of total real estate and still has to con-tend with dozens of conflicting ownership claims.

The rise of capitalism in Cairo has brought the building boom full circle. rows of cranes tend to the

blocks of new villas, universities, and golf courses that stretch deep into the desert on the East and West sides of the city as Cairo’s new bourgeoisie attempts to capture and replicate Western suburbia. Sleek skyscrapers haphazardly spring up

as new tycoons assert their affluence in a skyline that still counts the great pyra-mids of Giza among its members.

Some believe, however, that the best solutions already exist. “It’s much better to improve communities that already have their social capital and organization than create brand new things from the imagina-tion,” said Singerman.

In Townhouse Gallery, a downtown in-stitution for art and culture, one project called “Model Citizens” attempts to see just what such a plan would look like. Af-ter hearing in 2009 that there were plans to convert their neighborhood Antikhana into a tourist hub, they built a scale model of the surrounding buildings. over the next few months, they interviewed 140 local residents, asking what kind of im-provements they wanted to see, and then updated the model to reflect those sugges-tions.

In light of recent developments in Egypt, the residents of Antikhana and all Egyptians may soon find themselves with more power to shape the future of their capital and their country. There is no question that the political transition in 2011 and the reforms to come will provide new avenues for popular participation in shaping the future of the nation. Newly empowered, the residents of Cairo must demand that their needs be met by the planners and businessmen responsible for the redevelopment of the Egyptian capital.

NicolaS KeMper ’11 is a Humanities and Inter-national Studies double major in Pierson College.

Contact him at [email protected].


According to the Cairo 2050 plan for redevelopment, hundreds of thousands of residents of the Arafa cemetery —or City of the Dead—would be evicted and resettled in the desert. (Courtesy David Kemper)

the mega project of ‘Cairo 2050’ makes it look like quite a few

inner city, low-income areas are meant to ‘disappear’ and give

space to nice clean parks of entirely new upscale neighbor-

hoods.

— Lucie Ryzova, Oxford University research fellow

FOCUS: CITIES


t is snowing mercilessly in Copenhagen. The skies have opened over Amsterdam and endless rain falls on the city. But despite the weather, the

streets of both cities are inevitably filled with bicyclists, suit-clad or sporting jeans, toting children or even Christmas trees. These are the ultimate havens of cycling in Europe and the world.

Across the Atlantic in New York City, it is Halloween night, and masses of bicy-cle-crazed people are packed together in the middle of the street. It is the night of Critical Mass, when bicyclists around the world gather on the last friday of each month to band together and ride through the streets, edging out cars and any other vehicles. They move in unison and without forethought of the path they’ll follow. They ride so that for one night of the month, the bicycles will overthrow the sedans and the minivans and the sports cars. They ride with no clear leader, letting their wheels carry them through the night, rebelling for the utopia they dream of.

But the masses in Copenhagen and Amsterdam are not the same as those across the pond. In some European cities, the bike-crowded streets are the norm. In most cities around the world, it is still a revolution waiting to happen.

Cycling fever has hit cities from Seonyudo, South Korea to Portland, oregon over the past two decades,

but the craze has gained the most traction

in European cities, where cyclists’ trans-portation needs can be integrated into compact cities and strong public trans-portation networks. As Asia struggles to keep bike culture alive in the face of en-croaching car-mania, and America fights a battle against seemingly indefatigable autophilia, bicycles are finding welcoming streets in Europe. But whether other cities around the globe can follow remains to be seen.

“It is absolutely necessary that [the world] shift from car centric cities,” said Bernard Ensink, the secretary general of the European Cycling federation. “Trans-port is more than 80 percent relying and depending on oil. Even if you would change all the cars into electric cars, you need the power to put in the cars, and you need the space to run them.”

But creating a bike friendly world is easier said than done. Though the fu-ture of sustainable cities may depend on incorporating bikes into transportation structures, actually building bicycling into the frameworks of cities is a challenge. Sprawling American cities, so dependent on highways for transportation and often lacking trains or subway systems, have been built to accommodate suburban driv-ers making their requisite ten mile com-mute to work. Asian cities, once bastions of cyclists, are getting richer, and today the streets of Beijing are more crowded with cars than bikes.

“There is a big threat in Asia because if they all decide to live the way European

people live we will have difficulty feeding them all and finding oil and natural re-sources for them,” said Chloé Mispelon of the European Cycling federation. “We can see the drawbacks of such developments.” Part of an answer to a petrochemical-de-pendent economy may lie in bicycles, but only if cities can make way for them.

Both Amsterdam and Copenhagen faced the threats of impending car culture in the 1960s and 1970s, but

these cities found ways to maneuver bikes back onto their streets. In Amsterdam, as the city threatened to sprawl into suburbs, city planners emphasized the importance of maintaining the historic city center and built bike paths into the tight old city streets and onto the canals. By the 1980s, this network of bike routes stretched to outer residential neighborhoods as well, and the combination of practicality, finan-cial sense, and personal fitness dictated that biking was the way to go.

like the dutch, the danish have long been known for traditions of bicycling, but it took top-down policy changes to keep cars from taking over Copenhagen. “Car-free Sundays” were instituted all over denmark in the 1970s to deal with the oil crisis, effectively banning the use of cars on Sundays and reducing oil consump-tion. Bicycling grew in popularity, until ultimately the citizens of denmark—not government officials trying to stave off the petroleum crisis—began to take owner-ship of cycling.

Creating Cycling CulturesBy Sanjena Sathian

Hordes of bikes are parked along the streets of Copenhagen every day, outside train stations and offices alike. (Courtesy Sarah Armitage)

I


“The big illustrations were tens of thou-sands of people demonstrating, wanting to get more bike lanes through the city, build-ing bike lanes and [bike] parking facilities, especially around train stations,” remem-bered frits Bredal of the danish Cycling Embassy.

Today, it is this very infrastructure that makes bicycling so prominent a feature in the everyday transportation of danes. In denmark, it is not uncommon to spot a massive bike rack supporting 50 or more bikes in a train station, and Bredal noted that many danes use a combination of bi-cycles and public transportation.

Now cities without a history of cy-cling are beginning to play catch-up.

florinda Boschetti is in the business of bringing the wisdom of cycling to the previously uninformed. She is the direc-tor of the PrESTo project, a European pro-cycling group. The initiative is one of many short-term plans to bring what Am-sterdam and Copenhagen built decades earlier to cities like Bremen, Grenoble, Tczew, Venice and Zagreb. But these new countries face an urgency that the dutch and danes never dealt with. These five cities represent different levels of commit-ment to cycling culture, and Boschetti will work with each one to institute concrete policy changes: building infrastructure for bicycling, promoting cycling behaviors at the individual level, and pushing for Pe-delecs, electronic bicycles, so cyclists can make longer bike trips. “Political will is important,” she said. “Cycling is a political issue and this is the main problem because other cities and countries don’t have the same 40 years [as the danes].”

Boschetti, like Bredal, emphasized the importance of integrating cycling into existing transportation structures. Cities

looking to become champions of cycling will need seamless transitions from train to bike or bike to sidewalk in order to stretch the distance that an average cyclist can reach and to prove to skeptics that cy-cling commuters don’t have to sweat and slog through 10 or 15 kilometer treks to work. Infrastructure ranging from bike lanes to racks must come first. Even after this first step, the mere existence of an in-tegrated transportation structure would prove to city dwellers that cyclists are safe and welcome on roads. The philosophy is simple: If you build it, they will bike.

But four decades after the danes and dutch made bikes a standard sight on their streets, building bike lanes and racks alone may not be enough. Boschetti agreed, emphasizing that PrESTo’s push for Pedelecs help contextualize the bicycle revolution to a modern age. Pedelecs al-low elderly cyclists and long-distance commuters, previously untargeted de-mographics, to make bicycling their main mode of transportation. The combination of potentially easier ways to travel and better infrastructure will, Boschetti hopes, bring previously low-level cycling cities to the “champion” status that Amsterdam and Copenhagen have achieved.

The term “Copenhagenize” has caught on within bicycling circles as being synonymous with revolu-

tion, and that is what it will take to sculpt bicycling paradises out of cities around the world. European cities have found a model that works in Copenhagen and Am-

sterdam, and for planners like Boschetti, who can work with compact city centers and already strong public transportation systems, a future full of cities around Eu-rope with a thriving culture of commuting cyclists—even of tourists on bikes—seems within reach.

In cities where drivers have grown up also bicycling, a mutual understanding about the importance of bicycle infra-structure has helped shape not only a city, but also a surrounding culture of cycling. And yet there is something distinct about the culture of cycling in Europe from that of American and Asian pro-bike groups: Most cyclists in Europe simply do not see any novelty in how they choose to get from one place to another. Mispelon reminisced that at an international bike conference in Copenhagen last summer, as represen-tatives from other countries sighed over the number of “cyclists” they saw on the streets, local Copenhagenites dismissed their wonderment, saying that they were not “cyclists,” but simply average people trying to get places quickly and easily.

Cyclists do not have to be activists. But unless cities around the world make bicycling painless, bikers will continue to have to fight for their rights. for now, in the sprawling streets of New York City and los Angeles and in booming Beijing and Bombay, the yellow taxis and Ambassador cars will keep on muscling cyclists off the streets.

SaNjeNa SathiaN ‘13 is in Morse College. Contact her at [email protected].

Bikes are a common sight to see along the canals and streets of Amsterdam. (Sathian/TYG)

t this year’s World Eco-nomic forum in davos, Switzerland, participating heads of state collectively winced as two powerful men from opposite halves

of the world shared an awkward moment. Michael S. dell, the iconic CEo of the com-puter company that bears his name, and Vladimir Putin, russia’s current prime minister, were contributing to a discussion panel when dell offered to help Putin im-prove his country’s information technol-ogy industry.

Putin retorted abruptly, “We are not invalids. We don’t have limited mental capacity.” This defensive stance is under-standable given russia’s former scientific dominance; many people still remember the russian Sputnik satellite that signaled the arrival of the Space Age. Even today, russian intellectual talent stems from a math and engineering-centric curriculum. russian scientists consistently conduct meaningful research. The problem is this research does not happen in their home nation.

Vladislav Inozemtsev, a russian econo-mist and sociologist, lamented that rus-sia’s brightest often view their ultimate career goal as emigration to countries with established informational technology industries and strong research universi-ties. richard M. Cooper, Harvard econo-mist and former consultant to the Council of Economic Advisers and the United Na-tions, pointed out that “a lot of russian tal-ent is essentially going to waste in russia, so the question is: Can you mobilize this outstanding human talent in a way that is economically or technologically produc-tive?”

The government believes it can. Ur-ban planners are currently hard at work in what is now an inconspicuous suburb of Moscow, noted only for the Skolkovo Business School. Much of the area now consists of dilapidated farmhouses and dusty storage garages, but in the coming months, the planners will draw up blue-prints for the creation of a technology city

modeled after Silicon Valley in the United States. This project, announced last year and now known as the Skolkovo Project, is not set for completion until december 2015, but it has already attracted many key partners in the information technology sector like Siemens, Nokia, Google and CISCo, among others. Viktor Vekselberg, the billionaire owner of the russian con-glomerate renova Group and co-director of the Skolkovo project, is confident that the project will entice innovation giants to invest in russia, a country historically as-sociated with collectivization, agricultural villages, and oil-export dependency. Vek-selberg believes that Skolkovo could be-come nothing less than “a launching pad for the country as a whole.”

Cultivating innovation The Skolkovo foundation is recruit-ing projects that fall into one or more of the five scientific priorities identified by President Medvedev: communications, biomedicine, space, nuclear power, and energy conservation. These industries

are, not coincidentally, those that flour-ish in Silicon Valley and lure thousands of russian graduates to emigrate each year. The young scientists who have earned of-fice space in Skolkovo so far are working on energy efficient construction materials, anti-hepatitis C drugs, cancer diagnosis tools, and nuclear toxicity sensors, among other cutting-edge tools and technologies. These researchers are part of a group of 16 grant recipients, selected from over 2,000 submissions, and will become the first res-idents of the new city of Skolkovo.

Alexander Povalko, a 23-year-old phys-ics graduate student, is a member of the federal Youth Committee, a government-sponsored group of entrepreneurs and scientists who represent russia’s young-est generation of specialists. He explained that international entrepreneurs must prove that their projects and companies are “innovative, in-demand, business at-tractive, and implementable with russian and foreign resources” if they hope to earn space in the streets of Skolkovo. Povalko spoke excitedly of the promise Skolkovo


A

President Barack Obama of the United States and President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia have both placed technologies high on the list of fiscal economic priorities. (Mika V. Stetsovksi at Flickr Creative Commons)

Russia’s Venture Capital AdventureBy Cathy Huang

of Skolkovo work from the perspective of free-market absolutism in which any gov-ernment intervention is seen as a harbin-ger of failure or inappropriate meddling in the free market.” Those critics have found plenty of evidence to fuel their claims. for one, the russian bureaucracy is often perceived as corrupt. Since Putin began his first presidency in 1999, the number of people in the russian bureaucracy has increased by two-thirds of the pre-1990’s number. This younger class of bureaucrat-entrepreneurs has been accused of market manipulation and racketeering. rogers, however, explained that “state investment in spurring the economy is quite common around the world, even in the West.” He made reference to Chinese state-owned companies, the recent U.S. bailout of GM, and decades of U.S. government support of Boeing. russia seems to be following this

example: the Skolkovo Executive Commit-tee is headed by none other than dmitry Medvedev, the current president of rus-sia.

fortunately for the Kremlin, its involve-ment in the project has yet to discourage private involvement. In fact, investors seem eager to collaborate with the very institution whose policies are respon-sible for a large part of the russian brain drain. rafael reif, the provost of the Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology, which has contributed to the development of the Skolkovo project, said that the school looked forward to “exploring whether op-portunities exist for MIT… to conduct edu-cational and research activities that are consistent with MIT’s mission and may contribute meaningfully to the russian government’s strategic initiative.”

looking aheadSo far, local and international support makes Medvedev’s ambitious vision seem attainable. The russian government, however, must remain realistic. “This is a very decentralized world and the amount


a lot of russian talent is essentially going to waste in russia,

so the question is: Can you mobilize this outstanding human tal-

ent in a way that is economically or technologically productive?

—Richard M. Cooper, economist

holds for researchers: “These scientists are brilliant and they’re unafraid. Here’s an opportunity for them to grow their proj-ects at minimal costs. They don’t have to worry about finding an audience or mar-ket later on. That’s been taken care of.”

The Skolkovo foundation emphasizes that no physical factories will be built in Skolkovo and that the city will draw its wealth from meaningful research. Culti-vating an idea can often prove more fruit-ful—and profitable—than actual manu-facture, as the theory goes. But how will the Skolkovo foundation and President Medvedev entice foreign investors to sow seeds in the new city? Any investor is ex-empt from paying the federal Value-Added Tax and any income tax until his profits exceed 10 million rubles—or about U.S. $335,000—a year and turnover exceeds 30 million rubles—about U.S. $1,000,000. The

Executive Board also promises to refund all customs duties paid during investor import.

Cooper noted, however, that tax holi-days are “marginal, at best.” He argued that an attractive economic environment is about more than saving money. Skolko-vo scientists won’t want to continue their work if they can’t raise their families and find recreational opportunities. To ad-dress this concern, the foundation is put-ting together competitive benefits pack-ages. The technology hub will operate as a regular residential community with plenty of after-hours additions. The hope is that if russia is able to provide a stan-dard of living for these scientists rivaling that on the U.S. West Coast, fewer bright minds will hop on planes and take their ideas elsewhere.

a team effortConcerns extend beyond the initial chal-lenges of recruiting investors, though. Yale Professor of Anthropology doug rogers, who specializes in russian eco-nomic history, believes that “many critics

of leverage that any government gets out of it is very limited,” Cooper cautioned. “If leverage is what the russians have in mind, that’s a real long shot. If what they have in mind is using their talent locally and producing some useful ideas, that’s really a more modest idea.” After all, the nations whose technological capabilities russia strives to emulate are also working hard to further their progress. President Barack obama urged the United States in his January 25, 2011 State of the Union ad-dress to remember the “Sputnik moment” and re-invigorate education and innova-tion. And with China spending as much as 12 billion dollars monthly on new energy technologies, russia isn’t merely playing “catch-up” with this project: It is throwing itself into the middle of a long-existing and highly dynamic technologies race.

Backers of the project must remem-ber that the Silicon Valley didn’t become iconic in a matter of months or years. And though Sputnik was a crowning techno-logical achievement for the russian peo-ple, its physical presence in the skies was short-lived. The first earth-orbiting artifi-cial satellite fell from space when its trans-mitter batteries died three months after the satellite’s launch. While russians may hope that Inozemtsev’s observation of the russian brain drain can be reversed in the coming years as big names in technology find valuable office spaces in Skolkovo, the players in the Skolkovo project must stay ahead of the competition to ensure that this project won’t run out of fuel.

cathy huaNg ’14 is in Morse College. Contact her at [email protected].

A sample of the corporations who have already partnered with the Skolkovo project. (Photo used by permission from Alexi Slitnikov of the Skolkovo Foundation)

FOCUS: CITIES


or thousands of years, Eretz Yisrael, “The land of Isra-el,” was a purely religious concept, its borders outlined in the Book of Numbers. Since the transformation

of the land from a spiritual abstraction into the modern state of Israel, its grow-ing population and economy have placed enormous stress on the nation’s natural resources. In response to these environ-mental challenges, visions of a futuristic and ecologically efficient urban terrain on this land have developed—visions that could preserve it for future generations. Alma, an Israeli company aiming to create the first “ecocity” in Israel, is working to make such a vision a reality.

“Just imagine being able to go any-where in your city, in all its work, cultural, and recreational capacities, in ten min-utes,” remarked Yedidya Sinclair, direc-tor of communications at Alma. “Imagine that each apartment unit will have green space attached to it. Imagine even the 20th story will have a backyard for kids to play in and space to be able to grow vegetables. Imagine, all of this, with no cars, and run completely by renewable energy.” Such vi-sions are enticing in a country plagued by water shortages, desertification, and unre-liable access to oil.

The leap from idea to reality hinges on much more than the conceivability of high-rise backyards. obtaining land in Is-rael is far from simple. for one, the Israel land Administration controls 93 percent of the nation’s land, and is slow to give out permits for its development. obtaining a permit for a single house can take two to three years, and the last new city built in Israel, Modi’in, received government permission over 25 years ago. Secondly, historical claims to every inch of terrain between the Mediterranean and Jordan have resulted in ongoing tensions between Israelis, Palestinians, Bedouins, and other groups. Ideological conflict has been exac-erbated by the depth of historical impor-

tance: layers of history literally live in the ground, complicating contemporary con-struction.

Above ground, the pressures of mod-ern Israel must also be taken into account. Israel has the highest population growth in the developed world on a plot of land smaller than New Jersey. In an effort to preserve the remaining open space, a law

prohibits the construction of new cities. To fill the needs of a growing population and address environmental concerns while acting in the bounds of this law, Alma aims to extend and develop land around an ex-isting city to create a “city-sized neighbor-hood,” said Sinclair.

While Alma waits for the govern-ment’s green light, other groups building in Israel have taken a

different approach. Ayalim, a Zionist or-ganization building student villages in or-der to develop rural areas of Israel, adds neighborhoods to existing cities, but it for-goes one of the trickier steps: government approval. Instead, the company just builds. According to Ayalim employee Karmit Ar-bel, “Technically we sit on land and don’t pay for it… we are working really fast, and the Israeli bureaucracy is not working as fast. Eventually we’ll be established on paper by the government.” But building a city without permits has its challenges: “In dimona, we technically are not legal, and you cannot be connected to the sew-age if you are not legal,” said Arbel. “Even-

tually, we raised millions of shekels to just build our own sewage so we could go on.”

Beyond the bureaucratic difficulties, Sinclair emphasized less tangible chal-lenges inherent in building such a city: “[one] is to create a planned city which works and feels like a real pulsating or-ganic living entity as successful cities do because of their history. The challenge

with creating a planned city is to replicate that kind of organic living quality.”

Technological barriers exist as well, but Israel more than most countries is prepared to overcome such challenges. The country has a higher number of start-ups per capita than any other nation in the world. Pioneering firms are developing efficient water and energy systems for an ecocity. for Sinclair, the culture of innova-tion in an ecocity does not conflict with Israel’s ancient history. “It will be incred-ibly exciting to integrate the city design of the future with architectural styles that are native to Israel, where some of the old-est cities in the world have grown up,” he noted.

Visions for this ancient land have con-stantly changed throughout history, and some have been more successfully real-ized than others. But projects like this ecocity highlight the very real promise that still thrives in the modern land of Is-rael.

DiaNa SaveriN ’13 is in Berkeley College. Contact her at [email protected].

F

The Land of Milk, Honey—and High Rise Backyards?

By Diana Saverin

imagine that each apartment unit will have green space attached

to it. imagine even the 20th story will have a backyard for kids to

play in and space to be able to grow vegetables. imagine, all of

this, with no cars, and run completely by renewable energy.

— Yedidya Sinclair, director of communications at Alma

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