Slumming it with Kevin McCloud - catch it!

If you have missed the past two evenings of Slumming It with Kevin McCloud in Dharavi in Mumbai (Channel 4) then I urge you to catch it on the internet. It's not easy television! I challenge you not to go through the entire rainbow of emotions and human angst and questioning with him and not to feel completely wrung out by it. But it raises the most important questions for the next few years.

On the last Friday of the Summit a representative from the Bolivian delegation came to Christiana (Bottom Summit) . He was pleased at the agreement that had been reached a short time previously at the Bella Centre on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD). Some young people asked him quite angrily for more detail and less rhetoric as this issue has extremely serious consequences for some indigenous peoples* and major implications for large-scale land re-use. He became quite angry briefly as well and challenged them to consider how much their ideas reflected white colonial thinking.

Dharavi is shocking in terms of sanitation, disease, health and safety and exploitation but the most heart-breaking thing is that sometime soon the whole square mile could be bulldozed. A proportion of the million or so people - those who live on the ground floor with proven 'tenancies' for 10 years, while there seem to be no plans for the remainder - will be rehoused in concrete boxes in densely packed high-rise flats. The contrast between the known problems of such estates over 5 decades and the colour, vibrancy, joy, resourcefulness and crime-free community of the many neighbourhoods, each with very unique characters that have evolved organically and that Kevin McCloud experienced first hand (complete with rats, industrial chemicals, syringes amongst hospital waste and chest infections) is poignant.

What is community? Who really understands civilised behaviour and co-existence? What leads to the greatest joys?

These are the challenges of the next 5 - 20 - 50 years, answering these questions together, listening to those who genuinely understand community and joy, learning from them and giving them small hands up in the basics of sanitation, clean water and to some extent but not too much our forms of education. But also taking taking taking from them what they know at every level about how to live this life, to be, to share, to care and then applying it in our own families, friendships and communities. Not to mention listening to our own older people.


* I have just discovered that the Forest Peoples' Programme is based 'down the road' in Moreton in the Marsh in Gloucester. Their newsletter does not contain updates from Copenhagen yet but the pre-Summit one is excellent:-

http://www.forestpeoples.org/documents/enews_dec09.shtml