Robert Neuwirth – “The 21ist Century Medieval City”
June 13th, 02005 by Stewart Brand
World squatter reality
Humanity is urbanizing at a world-changing pace and in a world-changing way. A billion squatters are re-inventing their lives and their cities simultaneously. One of the few to experience the range of the phenomenon first hand is Robert Neuwirth, author of SHADOW CITIES: A BILLION SQUATTERS, A NEW URBAN WORLD. He took up residence in the scariest-seeming parts of squatter cities in Rio, Nairobi, Istanbul, and Mumbai. They vary profoundly. What Neuwirth found in the new “slums” is the future via the past. Hence his title:
“The 21st-century Medieval City,” Robert Neuwirth,
For his talk “The 21st-century Medieval City,” Robert Neuwirth took an overflow audience to “the cities of tomorrow…
Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary
This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 11:01 am and is filed under Seminars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted on May 28th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Thinking About Squatters…
Robert Neuwirth has been lecturing me and although I haven’t finished hearing him out, I have already started thinking about a very interesting project. That project would be jumpstarting the lowest of the low income housing projects. In other words,…
Posted on June 4th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Its quite interesting. As an architect interesting in the subject of urbanism I find in shadow cities a potential inspiration for our world. One thing strike me, people in slums dont have any debt. They can live only from they have. rest of us live from the future. Borrowing money, resources, food, air, soil from future generations. And after that scientists are talking about sustainebility. But what to sustain?
I believe that the fundamental issue here is to live only from we have now. We can use only blanket to cover ouself as big as we can pay for. Even though people are not equal, many of us are using for our life much more than we actualy need. Its a ilusion that created by idea of modernity that lead us to the presenrt crises.
I would like to look more closely into the slums economies and organisational structures and learnd from it. Is there any chance to get more insides?
Posted on October 20th, 2008 at 5:12 am
The 21st Century Medieval City…
When we think of medieval cities, we assume it was something like this:
(image: Siena, from wikipedia)
while, at that time, it was more likely to be something like this:
(image: Rio de Janeiro, from wikipedia)
This is the thesis of Robert Neuwirth, w…