Shadow City

Discussion

Mark Whitaker et al. :

"Current smart cities by themselves are unable to handle up to 3 billion people by 2050 potentially living in the ‘Shadow City,’ the unofficial slum communities around the urban areas of the world that are growing now (Neuwirth, 2004) However, smart regions can be seeds for starting to address social and environmental externalities of the ‘shadow city’ that the world is developing.

The Commodity Ecology Mobile platform by enfranchising these ‘smart regions’ can address material handling problems of ‘Shadow Cities’ as they begin to arise as well. There are two scenarios about the future, one pessimistic and one optimistic.

For the pessimistic scenario, picture one future for the year 2050, in which a handful of tiny, rich, urban, and green-living populations enjoy their late 20th century ideas of a ‘smart city’ in the year 2050 yet by then surrounded by the 21st century’s inequalities of massive rural slums of “gray” material degradation and misery without services. Without policy change, this “tiny green city and majority gray slum world” is the current track of the world regarding urban, environmental, and service infrastructural conditions for the year 2050.

Currently, people in rural hinterlands of the world increasingly keep moving to be users of large city infrastructures and social services and are in the process affected by externalities of such cities. For this scenario, without changing our developmental path, it is expected we will live in a world with an estimated 3 billion living in slum conditions without land tenure rights in unplanned and legally unrecognized communities around urban sites by 2050 (Neuwirth, 2004). Neuwirth writes that the “‘shadow cities’ of the future” are here now. Over one billion people from 2004 lived in “unauthorized” urban slums, where the sole governmental action toward them is the attempt to knock down their homes and infrastructures and to deny them official citizenship status or urban services. Some of the billions “jumped,” and some were “pushed.”

Some moved to the growing city in their region. In contrast, others were “pushed” from economic shakeout from globalized development that destroyed their desired local capacities to sustain themselves regionally and economically.

laudable attempt to humanize these slum dwellers in the eyes of the "official city" people and their governments. However, we suggest we can do better: extending a hand to them in ‘smart regions’ is an idea or technical capacity that failed to exist in 2004 as Neuwirth was writing, given then the low levels of distributed access to mobile ICT networks. This is entirely different by 2019, even for sub-Saharan Africa, and mobile ICT network coverage will continue to grow into the world's less developed areas. A 'smart regions' model employing the Commodity Ecology Mobile platform’s view of more civic deliberation on a circular economy is the best hope for the future of these ‘shadow cities.' "

(https://scholar.kyobobook.co.kr/article/detail/4010028079805)