If information is a weapon, let's make it a fair fight
Jogi Panghaal said something interesting with respect to the work I did for banner site upmystreet.com; in India, the recently passed Right of Information act has led to the publication of a vast array of local statistics, and this in turn is revitalising local democracy, as people now turn up to public hearings of local bureaucrats armed with knowledge. I'm not sure we ever achieved so much at upmystreet except to fuel Britain's grubby house-price mania, but this is what we had in mind, and it's great to hear that it's working somewhere.
## Slums as centres of innovation
Solomon Benjamin, an ex-architect, spoke about the research he's been doing comparing economic and innovative activity in Master Planned vs 'slum' neighbourhoods, and the results are startling.
Solly finds that rather than being areas of high unemployment, slums are hotbeds of innovation and economic activity. Small firm clusters with high degrees of specialisation (auto parts, cabling, lighting) exist that create their own capital equipment and machinery, adapt highly rapidly to changing markets, develop highly skilled employees and generate large amounts of cash, functioning largely without access to credit. He then goes on to contrast this with what happens when the master planners clear a 'slum' (often literally giving the land to one of India's large conglomorates like Tata) to build a modern business park full of 'techno coolies' like call centre workers, and that almost all these measures of wealth (distribution), innovation and skills decrease dramatically.
:
Slums that have existing on a site for upto 50 years, can be cleared by the master planners because the do not appear on the 'official' maps. Geography is used as a tool of corporate power against the slum dwellers.
Solomon is quite rightly critical of some of the unthinking assumptions of the GIS crowd, but I believe that if knowledge is a weapon, then this is one battle where the balance of power is redressed by arming both sides, You certainly cannot take geographic knowledge away from the Master Planners, so the only solution is to take it back for ourselves.
Community mapping applications could legitimise these areas by literally putting them 'on the map'.
Finally, Solly says, in the battle between the 'slum' dwellers and the corporate taking over the land, when the resistance is high (brilliant placard: "We want water, not beer") and the usual corporate lobbying tactics fail, then it's time to bring in the **well-meaning middle class activists **to finish the job off. Ouch.
## Used in India
-
Accompanying the conference was an exhibition entitled 'Used In India' - the theme was the ways in which technology is adapted and hacked in the subcontinent: My favourite examples: The cellphone repair university - because a phone here are too valuable to throw away when they break. It's part of a wider trend: unable to afford (and sometimes it's just not available), support and repair contracts for hardware, backstreet industries reverse engineer the products and create a parallel servicing industry. No doubt this is criminal behaviour in WTO/patent and DCMA terms, but this IPR-free copy/hack culture (called juggard locally) is brilliant.
Another idea was that the LED has replaced the role of gemstones, and natural shiny things in Asian religious iconography. I've seen this first hand at a shrine in Vietnam; after a 3 hour trek up a mountain to visit a temple in a cave, the buddha at the top of it was covered in blinkenlights. Well, why not?