"I don't drive a car to work, I take the public transport, just like most other Londoners. I don't even think about it (driving a car into the city). The public transport is the fastest and most convenient way to get around. I have a car parked in my home, which I keep just for the fun of it. It's a type of car that I'm trying to ban, because it has a big engine. But it doesn't really matter. I can't really use it to go anywhere."
Migrants are more skilled and often more reliable and hardworking than British workers, and are fuelling the country's economic growth to the tune of £6bn a year...To put things into perspective is this excerpt on urbanization and migration, taken from the Address given at Commonwealth Youth Forum Opening ceremony by Dr. Anna Tibaijuka, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Migration to urban areas takes place not because of real opportunities for better wages and livelihood but due to the expectations of such opportunities... In other words, people move or migrate not because they will be better off, but because they expect to be better off.Let us not forget that without migrants, Jakarta would not be Jakarta as it is.
Unchecked flows of rural poor seeking better lives have exerted an unbearable strain on Africa's capitals...
But then we know that migration has historically improved the well-being of individuals and humanity as a whole. Just think how many countries and cities around the world were founded by migrants. Or today, how many economies are driven by the energy and initiative of new-comers. Let us not forget that what we call the “New World”, namely the Americas and Australasia was populated by immigrants from Europe.
No one has ever paid more attention to the streets and sidewalks of New York City than William H. Whyte... Whyte's work, which was eventually published in his book City, was full of fascinating ideas about architecture, urban design, and the importance to a city of keeping street life vibrant. It was also a paean to the urban pedestrian.
"The pedestrian is a social being," White wrote. "He is also a transportation unit, and a marvelously complex and efficient one." Pedestrians, Whyte showed, were able, even on crowded sidewalks, to move surprisingly fast without colliding with their neighbors. In fact, they were often at best when the crowds were at their biggest...
New Yorkers mastered arts like "the simple pass," which involved slowing ever so slightly in order to avoid a collision with an oncoming pedestrian. They platooned at crosswalks as a protection against traffic. In general, Whyte wrote, "They walk fast and they walk adroitly. They give and they take, at once aggressive and accommodating. With the subtlest of motions they signal their intentions to one another." The result was that "At eye level, the scene comes alive with movement and color - people walking quickly, walking slowly, skipping up steps, weaving in and out in crossing patterns, accelerating and retarding to match the moves of others. There is a beauty that is beguiling to watch."
What Whyte saw - and made us see - was the beauty of a well-coordinated crowd...
Pritchett, a development economist and practiced iconoclast, has just left the World Bank to teach at Harvard and to help Google plan its philanthropic efforts on global poverty. In a recent trip through Chaurmuni [in Nepal], he praised the goats as community-driven development at its best: a fast, flexible way of delivering tangible aid to the poor. “But Nepal isn’t going to goat its way out of poverty,” he said. Nor does he think that as a small, landlocked country Nepal can soon prosper through trade.
To those standard solutions, trade and aid, Pritchett would add a third: a big upset-the-applecart idea, equally offensive to the left and the right. He wants a giant guest-worker program that would put millions of the world’s poorest people to work in its richest economies. Never mind the goats; if you really want to help Gure Sarki, he says, let him cut your lawn. Pritchett’s nearly religious passion is reflected in the title of his migration manifesto: “Let Their People Come.” It was published last year to little acclaim — none at all, in fact — but that is Pritchett’s point. In a world in which rock stars fight for debt relief and students shun sweatshop apparel, he is vexed to find no placards raised for the cause of labor migration. If goods and money can travel, why can’t workers follow? What’s so special about borders?
Yes, unfortunately the idea is still not popular. So how can I help, Lant?
PS: here are other articles by DeParle on border crossing: Jobs Abroad Support ‘Model’ State in India (Kerala), and A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves (Philippines).
A new Jakarta bylaw on 'public order' will fine you up to Rp 20 million (~$ 2,000) if you give to beggars, street vendors, street performers, etc. Also, motorcycle taxis and bajajs are illegal, and bicycles and transvestites are put at a disadvantage. The reason for the Perda no.8/2007 is to 'safeguard Jakarta's image as the nation's capital'.
With this level of service quality, how can we expect the middle class to start using public transportation? This photo was taken at the Polda Metro pedestrian bridge, some time last month.
One year after the slow and painful eruption of Mount Merapi in Central Java, surrounding communities must continue to face danger. This time, the danger is not high-profile and does not attract media interest. However, it is no less severe in the long run.
So sand mining is now hot. Jalin Merapi reports: nowadays, on a given day, loads of trucks and day laborers work to mine and transport sand. However, as day laborers may get a good deal of Rp. 50,000 ($5) per day, and the mining companies make a huge profit, the local residents are suffering.Solving traffic jams is not a priority. In London, Paris and New York, there are also traffic jams and nobody says that they have to build more roads. The citizens are well aware that if they don't want to be caught in traffic, they will use public transportation. It gives them faster mobility.
So just let all the people suffer in the traffic jams until they leave their cars at home and use public transportation. City administrations should focus on improving the quality of their public transportation instead of investing in new roads. If you have a democracy, roads should be allocated first for public transportation.
In the nineteen-eighties, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semi-permanent distress. It was an assumption that bred despair: if there were so many homeless, with so many problems, what could be done to help them?Then, Dennis Culhane discovered something that "profoundly changed the way homelessness is understood":
Homelessness doesn't have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. "We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly," he said. "In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back... The next ten per cent were what Culhane calls episodic users. They would come for three weeks at a time, and return periodically, particularly in the winter... It was the last ten per cent—the group at the farthest edge of the curve—that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it's this group that we have in mind.This last ten per cent includes Murray Barr, a chronic homeless from Reno, Nevada, who - although a nice person - had severe drinking problem that that costed the state one million dollars in "all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors' fees, and other expenses..."
because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it.A small portion of society is bound to need help/support from others, anyway. If we could just identify who they are, and not just lump them all together in our self-made categories, we may actually be able to solve the most important part of the problem (if not the whole problem).
While some cities are attempting to drive immigrants out, others are welcoming them with open arms. As a Wall Street Journal writer asserts, "All booming American cities are immigrant cities."Here's my favorite quote, though:"The fate of a two-year-old war on illegal immigrants declared by the mayor of tiny Hazleton, Pa., a former coal town, is now in the hands of a federal judge. He will rule by June on Hazleton's Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which penalizes local businesses and landlords who employ or rent to illegal immigrants."
"During the nine-day trial that concluded last Friday, Mayor Lou Barletta argued that some 10,000 undocumented immigrants have ruined Hazleton's quality of life...Yet business owners and landlords argued the opposite -- that immigrants had revitalized Hazleton's moribund economy, filling once-vacant apartments and patronizing once-declining businesses."
"In other cities the verdict is already in: Immigrants have significantly improved the quality of life in many of America's most successful cities. Take Flushing, Queens."
"All booming American cities are immigrant cities. It's practically tautological. Cities that welcome immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- tend to have vital economies that expand exponentially as immigrants open new businesses, fill vacant jobs and move into declining neighborhoods."
In the 1960s Flushing was a wasteland, those same storefronts boarded up and the sidewalks empty -- so derelict that the area was designated in the city's 1975 federal community development block grant application as eligible for urban renewal money. Then came the Chinese immigrants, first in small numbers, then in great waves, through the 1980s and '90s. Long-time city planning official Sandy Hornick summarizes the 1970s as "back when we were trying to figure out what to do with Flushing before Flushing figured it out for itself."Apparently, immigration is back to being a hot topic. Maybe because we're approaching the one-year commemoration of the big rallies against Bush's proposed immigration policy. Here's something from The Guardian, a few days ago:
New York would lose around 100,000 residents a year if overseas immigrants were not filling the void, the census bureau figures for 2000 to 2006 show. Los Angeles and Boston would also shrink without immigrants, threatening their economies and property markets.It's a pity that many Indonesian urban planners still view urban in-migration (i.e., people coming from the villages into the cities) as a liability rather than asset.
If the Government can provide interest rate subsidy of 3%, then that will bring the interest rate down from currently 14% to 11%.Hey, 11% is quite close to the 10% that Ciputra wanted. Last year, the big real estate mogul said that if he gets 10% rate, he is "willing to invest whatever it takes to build low-income flats in Jakarta."
