slums win the LEED award - an update to "resourcefulness"

Speaking of informal economies bringing life to Turkish cities -- 

I read an article that's been on the top of my to-do "pile" (of browser windows) for at least a week: "How slums can save the planet."  I'd like to be more coherent than I'm likely to be on this subject, but I'm also so eager to get something out about it that I'm going to give it a shot.  

In the article, the author Stewart Brand argues that slums, in essence the densest and most basic urban conglomeration, are the most sustainable and least wasteful communities - the denser we live, the less opportunity we have to waste.  Which certainly is all well and good.  But what I liked was his thoughts on informal economies; he puts into words my thoughts about less developed countries being more resourceful.  

The homeless people who "live" in East Hyde Park occupy their days trying to bum money off of passers-by.  In Turkey, you saw no homeless people, for two reasons that I can tell.  

One, they spent their days being industrious - selling something on a street corner, collecting recycling, or making a home or some other produce to hawk on the sidewalks downtown.  In the US, there are such strict laws about selling things in public that there is no way a homeless person would be given a permit to sell anything on the street.

The second reason you see no homeless people in Turkey is because they make their own homes if they can't rent or buy one.  Gecekondu means "built in the night" and is the word for the structures that result from some loophole in Turkish law that says if at dawn there is a shelter and someone is sleeping in it, then it belongs to them.  Squatting is legal, therefore.  

None of this means squatters and gypsies and "homeless" in Turkey aren't ostracized, but that's a completely different post.  

Back to the article - unfortunately (in my opinion) Brand's arguments about slum-dwellers being the "Greenest" city-dwellers devolves into an argument for more sterile high-class soluntions for how to counteract our "developed" and wasteful lives by building green roofs and urban gardens.  Don't get me wrong - I love all of these probably more than the next person, I was just so excited about street-level entrepreneurship and resourcefulness that getting preachy was disappointing.  

Then, of course, there are the contradictions of crime and wealth - slums hold puzzling combinations of high crime and drug rates, as well as high rates of television and mobile phone ownership.  But again, that's perhaps another post, and one that Jan Chipchase, a thought-provoking inspiration of mine, would likely appreciate.