Un nuevo equilibrio urbanorural
Translator: Gisela Giardino
Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Cities are a wonderful invention.
They’re kind of super capacitors
of energy and resources
that have been enhancing
human capabilities over the centuries.
But it is often forgotten that,
at the origin of the cities
there is agriculture.
From birth, cities were possible
because food production
grew in such a way that it allowed
for a part of the population
to stop working in the fields
and begin to work in other activities,
which have been foundational
to our civilization.
Between the cities and the fields exists,
for thousands of years,
a cycle that mutually enrich
each other on both sides.
And that when it’s virtuous
it renders benefits for all,
but when it loses its harmony,
it creates problems for all as well.
From this perspective, as a historian
in architecture and cities
I’d like to share with you
my point of view
on one of those problems:
Precarious settlements.
I think it’s appropriate to rethink this
because, even though
for at least a century
experts, international institutions,
non-profit organizations,
popular organizations, intellectuals,
political parties and so many others
have been making proposals on the subject
and acting on the subject,
the population of these
precarious sectors of the cities
has continued to grow anyway.
In my opinion, what happens is that
we’ve been looking at the tree
without seeing the forest.
That is, we focus our attention
in the settlements themselves
without noticing that these are part,
along with urban development,
food production and, therefore,
the whole territory,
of a cycle that unifies them.
To understand this cycle
it is useful to think
that at a pole there is the rural world
and in the other, the urban world.
And precarious settlements are
the tensions between the two poles.
When technologies are improved
at the rural pole
the need for labor decreases
and part of the population
is expelled into cities.
If cities can offer them stable jobs,
these migrants will integrate
to their operating structures,
including access to a home.
Finally, they will end up becoming
permanent residents.
The problem is that,
if cities are not in a position
to offer those stable jobs,
migrants will become
permanent residents anyway,
because they will find in them
elementary and scarce resources
to survive,
to which the benefits
of urban life are added.
The cost is that, as they are not
integrated into the system
they will be forced to live
in precarious,
insufficient, marginal conditions.
Now, in a way or another,
cities will have increased
their population
and this growth in population
will demand from the rural pole
new advances in technology
to produce food
and so the cycle begins again
with more power.
The accceleration of this cycle
in the last 50 years
explains that it’s no longer about
urban developments.
These are mega urban developments.
I mean, gigantic agglomerates
estimated to, in 10 years,
probably double in size.
Most of them located in countries
that already go through very severe
habitational crisis,
therefore with a large part
of their population
living in precarious conditions.
To fuel this growth
in urban population,
that has multiplied in the
last decades,
a production system
of industrialized food has developed
which at first glance
seems like a solution,
but it actually constitutes
an acceleration factor
which is added to ancestrals
desertification processes
that pushes field workers to
the cities to speed up this exodus.
This process shows the fact that
one hectare cultivated
with the advanced methods
from the food industry,
generates a thousand times more value
that same hectare
cultivated with ancient methods.
The problem is that most of the
countries in Africa, Latin America,
with a lot of farmers,
they continue to produce
in the old-fashioned way.
We can see this process in Mexico.
After signing the Free Trade Agreement,
in Mexico, the maize that until then
was cultivated anciently
and in community,
was replaced by an avalanche
U.S. cheap grain.
As a result, thousands of producers
lost their sources of work.
You don’t need to be too
subtle to notice
the relationship between that
and the fact that every day
thousands of migrants try
to cross the border into the U.S.
Many of them probably
will find employment,
being a rich country as is the U.S.
They’ll even access some kind
housing, however modest.
But that’s unthinkable
in poor countries
who already have these problems
in Asia, Africa and Latin America,
and who are in no position
to offer those precarious jobs.
The paradox is that with that
growth of the cities,
migrants end up becoming
new consumers
of the global industrialized agriculture.
They insist on proposing solutions
such as housing plans
or, in recent years, granting
title of ownership of the land
or the construction, or to urbanize
precarious settlements.
This is not a solution
because it boosts the cycle,
and that boosts feeding
through industrialized agriculture
with the ecological, environmental,
demographic, biological disasters,
we’re living today
due to that kind of processes.
That’s why I think
it’s a mistake to consider
precarious settlements
as a problem.
They’re not in themselves.
They are symptoms, expressions
of an imbalance in the cycle,
one of these conditions
of the unbalanced cycle.
The solution, therefore,
requires facing the issue
of territory as a whole.
A few years ago I was lucky to be invited
to an event in the city Chengdu, China.
To my surprise, the bus
that came to pick us up at the hotel,
instead of taking us to downtown
left us on a pumpkin plantation.
And in the middle of that plantation
I came across a newly opened building
of a super sophisticated arts center.
There I confirmed that there existed
concrete ways and actions
to build new relationships
between the countryside and the city.
This type of actions,
as I could check over time,
are not reduced to that example.
There are many others.
There are currently many efforts
which are very advanced,
to develop agricultural methods
called regenerative agriculture.
It’s a kind of agriculture
that generates more jobs,
treats the earth better,
has very good yields
and applies new technologies.
Urban agriculture
and peri-urban agriculture.
The use of information systems
to recover old production systems
to cultivate crops
or old livestock production,
very diversified.
Telework.
The possibility of carrying out
activities remotely.
The location of the headquarters
of US technology companies
not in big cities but
in small towns and cities.
We just need to look at the system
of territorial balance in Germany.
Back to China,
the numerous new universities
built in the middle rural villages.
If my hypothesis is correct,
the urban housing deficit could
stop constituting, over time,
a great concern.
One of the main concerns.
Because potential inhabitants
of settlements
and many of today’s settlers
would have alternatives
to find new ways
to survive and flourish,
integrated with other sectors
of society in a balanced territory.
It’s not a utopia.
It is necessary to address the issue
territory as a whole
and to dare work in that direction.
I am convinced that recovering
the harmony of the urban-rural cycle,
that has been existing
over millennia, it is possible
and it’s just up to us.