Many Blog Posts are Emails To Academics: Urbanization Politics of Agbogbloshie

This is an email I just sent to a European graduate student, who is attempting to do a major research (thesis?) paper on Agbogbloshie.

I always have taken time to encourage researchers. It is part of my "fishing for swordfish, surrounded by perch" philosophy of blogging. The blogs are ignored by most people, because most people don't have the bandwidth to really focus on them, or to do a deep dive, or review ground already covered.

But these emails and blogs reach people who are truly concerned, and who ultimately discover that there is an almost sinister systemic manipulation of "do-gooders" empathy to accomplish monetary gains. I usually talk about the Western (and now Asian) lobbies - Big Shred, Planned Obsolescence, and Charity Industrial Complex.  But in this morning's email to the Swiss based graduate researcher, I like to remind us that Africans have Agency, even if some of their agency is systemically marginalized by the desire for shiny white consciences. 

In Accra, Ghana, it's the land value stupid. Agbogbloshie, for decades (IMF and World Bank papers go back to the 1960s) has been an urban scrapyard next to the Old Fadama slum.  If you want to know what is ultimately going to happen, read about the Kowloon slum in Hong Kong. All the "recycling" story is just using BAN propaganda to leverage demolition and expulsion of some of the most valuable real estate in one of the richest African urban centers.

It's not about you, or your old computer.

Cultural Gulfs in Emerging Markets 8: Tooth Repair in Kowloon's Walled City

33,000 people
8,000 homes
1,000 businesses
2.8 hectares

That's 1.2 million people per square kilometer (Manhattan is 27 thousand per square km)

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating 18 minute video (Greg Girard and Ian Lambot) documentary on Kowloon's "walled city", the slum which formed outside of Hong Kong, as rural peasants and refugees sought shelter in a place that was closer to Hong Kong's growing economic power in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s.  It was condemned in the late 80s and torn down in the early 90s, as Hong Kong became too prosperous, land values increased, and people became embarrassed and self conscious of the towering slum, which typically housed four families to an apartment.

This fits with the "Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets" blog series.  There are equivalents to Kowloon's walled city today, counterparts in Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa, Lima, and Mexico City.

The move from spacious rural poverty to dense urban poverty is a mind trip, an incredible social and cultural shock.  It explains the demand for hundreds of millions of SKD televisions (small TVs made from reused USA computer monitors in the 1990s-early 2000s).  It explains the growth of internet, ten times the rate of growth in nations earning 3,000 dollars per year as in the "developed world"

The documentary begins with some of the "bad jobs" the walled city became known for, and the early "poverty porn" (before the term) in kung fu movies and Jean Claude Van Damme and Jacky Chan films.

During my life, living and working with people who know these city-slums intimately, bringing my family close by or inside these places, or to eat with families who once lived in these places and have now moved up on on, I'm sad that there has been so little documentation of the "tinkerers blessing".   The WSJ documents heroin and opium trade, prostitution, and primitive dentistry (a form of repair)... though it does later briefly allude to how good the dentistry became, how the dentists progressed.

Laptop repair and cell phone repair is a form of bloodless dentistry.

Enough, click to watch.