Frederick Kwesi Great Agboletey
Glasgow, Scotland
Organising Functional Communities in Urban Slums
It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the
full reality of man’s proper stature--and that the rest will betray it. It is
those few that move the world and give life its meaning--and it is those few
that I have always sought to address. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not
me or The Fountainhead that they will betray: it is their own souls.
AYN RAND New York, May 1968
How can financial limited city councils, municipalities or national governments functionally structure urban slums with inadequately equipped population, who by dint of their disposition, lack education, infrastructure, civil amnesties, and economic strength to change their circumstances find themselves ensnared in unfavourable living circumstances in an era of human intellectual and technological growth where those social handicaps could be easily alleviated?
Or on the reverse how can urban dysfunctional communities that from their genesis were not planned to accommodate large human gatherings according to any specified intentions to support such population by any sustainable long term purposes be re-designed to support large populations in more humane conditions?
For developing African nations who must face the question of how to deal with growing urban slums, there is the unresolved question of how soon will these nations begin to address and resolve the socio-economic demands of urban slums and how can these nations stem the growth of urban slums before they become uncontainable social problems.
Developing nations, especially in African nations will have to resolve to deal with urban slums in a practical manner involving intensive investment over long term to ensure first and foremost that these neglected members of a nation become cultivated through required provisions to make each and every individual human being in these slums functional assets to their nations and secondly to ensure that the resources invested in restructuring these areas of urban decadence yields profitable returns that will ensure that the investment made by city councils, investors and governments yields long term returns.
How does a nation restructure decadence in significant portions of its urban landscape and address inevitable social adjustment concerns?
There are presently no worthy of mention social welfare support systems in most developing nations of Africa, so there will certainly come a time when governments have to address how to reconstitute and actively enable re-employment of redundant, physically and mentally able population in planned communities who have lost their employments and incapable of supporting themselves through viable and sustainable long term self employment become nationally destabilising influence.
Primarily there are only three segments of population for employment consideration, those in training and education, those already employed, those being placed for employment whether short term or permanent and those who are incapable of employment who by their disposition become a core group for employment generation. This is an inevitable problem if existing states of urban growth are permitted and permeate the overall system and ought to be anticipated given that these nations have in due course successfully developed an effective education and life term training programmes that enable effective transfer of skills to reequip out of employment labour.
Within the context of urban regeneration schemes paripassu employment creation and management, there is a need to first define what exactly an urban slum is, and the standard dictionary definition is - A district of a city marked by poverty and inferior living conditions –
Given that standard definition by what standards does a nation define poverty among a defined grouping in a specified territory? One can only assume that there will be variations depending on what criteria are construed by city planners as acceptable dwelling standards in a particular nation.
What constitutes inferior living conditions in a particular nation, is determined by access to a calibrated standard daily fare across a section of the population in the absence of which, those who lack the specified standard thereof, fall within inferior living conditions.
What other criteria will constitute defining elements of urban inferior living conditions? What level of education is required, by what standards are the qualities of rendition of education facilitation measured to fall within inferior or superior quality? These and many other factors can only be defined from within a particular society or nation set against general guidelines specified by the United Nations and only then can a nation, a city council or municipality authority begin the process of how to construe constructive, realisable projects for restructuring a community and in its realisation stabilise that community to be a long term self sustaining part of a larger urban entity.
Speculatively, one can list and hope to develop a list of what makes a community viable and superior in terms of fundamental factors that exist and define that community. The list of course is open to further development but certain fundamentals are unavoidably identified in most or all stable and socio economically functional urban communities.
Given rapid progress in internet growth any one can view within Google maps a functional urban community and compare what facilities exist there and what is not accessible in an urban slum and begin to make an appreciation of what it takes to create a successful planned community, at a very elementary level of construct.
The beauty of human creativity is that creativity finds different forms of expression adding to the overall forms of varied expression that specie collective intellectual creativity is capable off.
Among defining hallmarks of functional modern communities one can reckon on choices available in terms of access to verifiably good educational institutions from crèche to University level, with a fairly larger proportion of the population assumed to be fairly well educated, choice is the main determinant of what level of education an individual aspires to rather than limited access to by far limited access where education is a determinant of community planning.
There is a fairly good health system in place with unhindered access to all the communities’ inhabitants from womb to grave irrespective of individual economic condition.
A strong centre of moral regulator necessarily exists either through the church, traditions that are commonly shared and respected in terms of social interactions supported by a legal system that comprises an effective police service, a trusted and respected court system. In some instances strong family links ensure that traditional perspectives on proper behaviour are respected. However, this could have limiting influence.
Stable communities are those where adults are for the most part in gainful employment activities and contribute to their domestic support needs as well as generating taxes through those activities for the maintenance of their communities.
In all nations there are development plans that attempt to anticipate population growth and ensure that there is a good balance between nature and humanity to ensure that communities grow and remain worthy dwellings for humans. When those plans are not properly enforced and improved upon that is when disorganised and disordered developments create an urban distortion leading to slums.
Who is responsible for urban development?
There is one fact that remains central; that urban development plans require either direct investment by those constructing on the land or a mediatory role of a central authority in providing infrastructure. Beyond and above the provision of those infrastructures is more importantly maintaining them to ensure long term existence.
From the perspective leadership, who coordinate and ensure implementation of major developmental projects be they public leaders or leaders of industry engaging in major projects. There must be a certain acceptance that humans have a value that increases proportionally and yield overall greater value to their communities depending on how much the community invests in preparing them to be intelligent manipulators of mental properties and physical objects that can be modified and moulded to yield a desirable value from a potential consumer base, which process generates resources for maintaining that community’s survival and further growth and development.
Effective organisation of large numbers of people into planned and regulated systems are by all considerations the most effective approach to maximising land and resource use, as well as enhance management of groups of populations by accurately earmarking and making predictions as to how to manage growth and efficient deployment of resources to ensure that living quality remains at or above an expected desired level.
Implementing planned settlements ensure a community to accurately account for its human development by accounting for each and every member’s developmental and growth needs within a carefully planned scheme that aims to maximise human value and its contributions to community growth and long term development.
As to who is responsible for designing and developing urban slums into modern, planned communities, one can anticipate national development plans that will incorporate private sector contribution as and when available, however, initial impetus is at governmental level in defining what constructs are deemed acceptable and enforce implementation through implementable regulation.
By organising communities along carefully planned lines, the needed materials and services required to build and maintain these communities become regulated and well managed formal employment sectors integrated into a well planned national economy.
Having identified the undermentioned core essentials (open to addition of service provisions deemed as essential) necessary for stable communities, one could then propose that demarcating land areas for urban development’s and ensuring that provided services are integrated into the designated communities with sufficient room to cover existing population and expected growth for a projected period will ensure new and more modernised communities in place of existing urban decadence.
· Well planned accommodation, flats, housing units or co joined single or two story structures
· Parks and green areas
· Civil amnesties comprising, hospitals, clinics,
· Education facilities, crèches, day care centres, training centres, secondary education and tertiary education facilities
· Commercial properties, shops, shopping centres, kiosks, banks,
· Civil security, police stations, private security agents
· Sports centres, libraries, galleries, entertainment centres
Having listed these prime components of what facilities are required for a functional modern, planned community, and then comes the second more important issue of how to blend the mix for sustainability.
This is easily resolvable through well referenced cornerstone of modern community developments, which is to set a number of centralised facilities in a central location at various vantage points in a community preferably within cycling distance of majority of households to encourage environmentally friendly access to these central points.
When eventually a community has gone through the various stages of being planned and financial resources found to begin building, with adequate input made to ensure that 100% of all resources needed for equipping that community comes from within the nation, and manufacturing industries and services providers and administrative offices are integrated to ensure socio-economic sustainability comes the long term prospects of creating employment through well structured maintenance departments.
From Infrastructures to Functional Self Sustaining Communities
Modern communities in urban settings are service oriented, consumer based aggregation of humans who are least likely to be engaged in primary cultivation or raw material resource mining. They are mainly a target market for rural agriculture and create economic bases around service provision employment activities supporting primary industries nationwide, light manufacturing and assembly (which necessarily has to be co-opted into original development plans for these communities to be employment generating sponge human resource absorbing entities are essential to engage a fairly significant number of community adult dwellers).
Once a government identifies a mass of poorly housed populace and plans a trajectory of investment benefiting these targeted grouping by investing in these hapless gathering, long term projection will require that providing the physical infrastructure to house the human constituents is just the first phase of a long term project to enhance value and imbue economic strength to ensure that the designated community is provided with those value generating facilities and activities that will ensure long term self sustenance.
Some of these provisions will have to directly planned and implemented, other activity sets will arise through individual talent development to provide services that have economic potential and mass patronage, on the other hand will be those that must be induced through agile community management while others will be imported values that have found socio-economic benefit elsewhere and are strategically deemed to have possibility of adding value in that community.
It is evident in well planned, functionally successful communities that people live in these communities with a seeming sense of pride in their orderly existence, the human spirit seems to soar in a sustainable pride and heave a sustained breath of relief in enjoying the benefits of its intellectual capacity to rise from chaos and disorder to simplified, organised existence that maximises community value.
One could easily asset that it’s a combination of successful communities aspiring to excel at the edge of deploying human creativity to enhance quality of life and in succeeding make great nations. A well governed nation thus seeks to continue to develop planned communities that are grounded in idea development coalesce to define great nations and to become revered national assets in the long term. Thus the value of a nation is imbued in its collective human aggregate.
The essential role that cultivated human intelligence plays in sustaining planned communities cannot be over emphasised. The higher educated a populace is, the more and varied tastes they acquire creating a consumer base that has more potential to absorb production within the community under consideration while expanding the cope of productivity and commercialisation as a result of increased and increasing diversified tastes to meet by the manufacturing machinery.
Through education the populace senses of awareness are broadened to enable more creative and diverse approaches to adding value to that community. For emerging communities and yet to be implemented communities in developing countries, this is an aspect of engaged community management that cannot be under estimated in terms of how to structure stable and long term expanding productivity in communities.
An effective community management strategy requires a creative outlook beginning from maximising natural endowments of a community’s location to become a planned environment that can attract internal tourism if well developed and in the process creating a fairly significant employment base through direct maintenance of these designated location, natural parks as well as through secondary activities related to providing supportive services to enable these natural endowments to be preferred areas where locals and non locals want to visit for a break from their mundane activities.
For example a community located in a coastal location will want to designate all lands within a specified distance of the coastal strip designated tourist and sports zone, which can then be slightly engineered to heighten the location’s attraction as open spaces where people can walk, cycle or relax in the scenic ocean environment. Left totally unmanaged as dirty beaches and undeveloped patches of urban public spaces these will not entice attraction of locals and non locals and until changes are made whatever benefits and values these locations afford community development funds remain under utilised.
In developing communities there is a need for a fundamental understanding that socio-economic work creation is a standard requirement to complement structural developments in an attempt to improve quality of life for previous slum locations. Adult humans must necessarily be employed earning their keep to remain stabilised and consider their existence meaningful. Just as the physical constructs they inhibit their employment creation needs must be creatively planned and realised within these communities.
Organised production of 100% processing of all that a community consumes at one level of the various stages of product manufacturing implies that a community is not a consumer based community but creates employment by processing a part of any identifiable unit of product consumed within that community. While it might seem altogether impossible for communities who have known only import and direct consumption, to re-assert that idea, take for example the fact that agro products imported from farm producers are re sorted and packaged by retailers which is a process that creates green product employment for grocers, extending the logic of the argument that the essential role of employment creation in planned communities becomes desired reality, enabling skill acquisition and technical knowhow at some level of knowledge development.
Irrespective of global free trade agreements there is nothing that requires a nation’s community to undermine their essential relevance and employment generation by being wilful consumers of fully processed products, undertaking to purchase products at a less than complete levels for local assemblage the fruits of global intellectual development is made accessible to a global market while allowing development in acquisition skills in edge of technology manufacturing.
Within existing underutilised infrastructure re-organising of urban areas can increase imbued values and add a wider dimension to land use and nation development for example within the construct of a well known area of Accra, Winneba and Cape Coast in the coastal strip of Ghana in West Africa one can easily see a major development of Winneba as a planned urban settlement for Workers with light industrial areas and enough room to allow a patterned transfer of slums dwellers who will be dislocated from their dwellings when these slums are being reconstructed in the general area of central Accra.
By developing light urban railway systems and over and underground electric train systems, easy interconnection will allow significant employment creation while allowing long term economically viable and reliable transport network for these coastal strip with a fairly high collective population density. With a spreading out of settlements come added room for private sector investment to provide complementary services to enrich life experiences in these communities, again expanding available scope of employment avenues.
Cape Coast could be a designated centre of education adding to its existing central focus of secondary and tertiary education, the central slums areas can be developed to be a modern city centre of a significant aggregation of secondary and tertiary institutions and by changing the underutilised Ghana National Secondary school to become the Unified Services and Forces Institutions, these particularly unique location can become a training and youth development group of institutions enabling a facility for training and education for youth from cradle to full term employment while allowing re-entry for further skill acquisition as a permanent management and non management skill acquisitions across a broad framework of activities.
By incorporating managed hostels, advanced training facilities and spaces, this allows an environment where large numbers of people bound for training and skill acquisition upgrades to complement an ever growing need of employee skill developments from petty such as life savers, cadets, nursing to innovative employment sectors as nursery teachers, old age nursing and home management programmes etc.
Komenda, its natural touristic Atlantic coast and its shattered fort could easily be further developed to become an international conference and holiday resort allowing shared holiday and conference facilities for the multiple institutions that could benefit from a beach resort for its academicians and a conference that would generate fairly significant employment servicing centre and a global destination on the African continent for educational conferences and educational exchange services, this could easily project that region and the plethora of education and service institutions from a local to an international perspective extending overall value nationwide.
These examples, randomly chosen for emphasising an idea, only explore the viable notion that progress and development can only come through idea development and extending the collective vision beyond accepting states of decay and redundancy as inevitable when in reality by increasing activity frame from a different perspective a large part of the adult population can be employed creating long term value for a designated region and its future populace.
City and municipalities councils also need to know that as a society becomes ever more capitalistic and driven by private sector investments they as managing authorities have to diversify by providing centralised service centres as revenue generation sources over and above taxation and increase their value worth with regards to the communities they manage and supervise. There is nothing of lesser value than a supervising body that cannot increase value worth of community quality of life over which it has management responsibility other than tax collection which pays for complacent non innovative staff.
Urbanisation may attract increasing migration as increase in sustainable employment is enabled but governments have to improve agro production in rural areas by creating agro mechanical pooling stations where combined agricultural production by small scale land owners can create aggregated interest groups that pool resources to easily access and hire agricultural equipments to alleviate those routine aspects of agricultural production that is more productively catered for through mechanisation.
By pooling resources for hire such municipal and district mechanised provisions can increase yield and enable improved rural infrastructure to compensate increased planning in choked urban locations by enabling access to equipments that cannot be acquired by individual farmers but by being provided from a central national resource allows mechanised farming at an affordable cost while creating long term employment at local centres responsible for operating and maintaining these equipments.
The Value of Cultivating Life
Every nation has creative potential locked in its uncultivated population, a raw unminted resource with many minds gifted to perceive unique awarenesses that can easily change the course of their people and all of humanity. Education and training as other civilisations have shown is the path to approximating that state of mind where those resources can be loosened for mutual benefit.
Developing nations have by comparison hitherto the lowest and poorest quality of education and thus have contributed the least in potential breakthroughs that push human progress forward. These nations owe it to themselves to begin to invest in their populace by creating that desire enabling environment where the mind is positioned and disposed to push boundaries of human achievements.
Far too many youth have been given no alternative than to labour in pitiless and low yield harsh labour to sustain themselves when the possibility exists for them to be equipped to increase their overall value to their communities and nations. Planning communities and accounting for their populace is a definitive step forward to enabling this essential investment in humanity. The initiative will only come from within and rarely from without.
The worst forms of development are pro excessive capitalist biased orientation that squeezes all wealth and benefits from the nation’s shared resources enabling development for those who own capital without taking into consideration a socio-economic orientation to prepare those who lack to be adequately positioned to be intellectual resources. It is akin to an ideology that welcomes a total lack of appreciation of underutilised human resources and allows being wasted generation after generation minds that are potentials unharnessed.
When a nation’s development lacks philosophical orientation such a nation might develop peripatetically without calling forth into proper perspective the need to associate growth and development with creating integrated value for a community self sustenance through a balancing effort that not only highlights a part but the whole in a carefully orchestrated balancing act where progress in all sectors keep the system on an even keel.
A philosophical orientation to development means calling forth the need for not only large estates by how such estates can be designed to be fully contained communities that provide the essentials of human existence in defined territories. It is only exceptionally great leaders who understand that the ultimate true value of nation is in its intellectual capacity that is capable of discerning value from what the masses perceive as dust and waste that bears in their unique intellectual acuity the utmost riches of that nation and its people and creating the appropriate environment for discovering ever so many of those rare resources has direct implication for increasing that nation’s overall wealth.
Given that creativity is randomly distributed among any collection of human gathering and finds unpredictable occasions for expression given appropriate circumstances, maximising opportunities for its expression goes far beyond a humanistic desire for improving the welfare of those economically deprived. Much as this basis for social development is worthy as an ideological framework for development. However, it also draws into question the simple consideration that those ahead by way of development and technology have so far outpaced those in very basic stages of development that no amount of probable development in lifting the collective mind set will enable the lesser developed to catch up since its benefits will pass down from higher evolved cultures better disposed to project creativity from a higher stance.
Then again it is just an argument. It is still leaves unanswered the critical question how a nation has to invest in improving the quality of its slum dwellers short of these abandoned needy clawing their way from despair to success, as self generated effort no matter at what cost to the overall nation?
Under this consideration it is worthwhile to seek a preferred alternative to be the way forward.
However given that education has an intention of aggregating knowledge from the most current perspective for transfer, the very purpose of education is to share the increasing understanding of humanity from one location to another in a global effort to spread the knowledge and make planetary existence a constantly improving environment, and thus making education a functional tool for enabling a jump in awareness from a prescient point of relevance.
Aesthetic Factor
As a nation develops it reaches a point where the collective identity of that nation’s character begins to desire aesthetic beauty in all its public places, which means that a primary activity of that nation is to define its success in how well organised its urban and public places are. It is an indication of a state of achieved intellectual maturation.
Functional urban planning implies that beyond visual appeal community managers can easily introduce new technology and improve their overall area management activities by reducing and altogether eliminating shadow residences who escape in the detritus of urban decay as prevails in slums ensuring that whatever income targets are set with regards to investment in the community can be achieved through easy access to all population in given area.
While there is little doubt that in the course of time as increase in knowledge and concurrent population increment induces more efficiency in land use and will accordingly force a course for change in urban planning in many zones of unplanned urban population concentrations, presently the issue of urban developments in Africa represent this description of the massive and architectural edifying basilica of our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro in Ivory Coast, in West Africa. An exact same reflection of urban development in the middle ages in Europe - The basilica was met with some controversy globally when construction began. The lavishly built basilica sits in the middle of the African bush in an impoverished city where only a minority of homes have running water and adequate sanitation. The cost of the basilica doubled the national debt of Côte d'Ivoire, but many of the country's Roman Catholics are proud of the church.-
The issue begs the question of who will create viability of progressive growth in such urban settlements. The argument per se is not against the relevance of the basilica but it highlights a persistent issue of continental development, which is how can planned communities integrate growth in functional design of such communities, given that these population aggregations must create internal self sufficiency borrowing and adapting infusions from a global resource potential?
African communities can only configure a prominent export market as only a less than significant portion of their drive for their light industrial and service growth, given that dominant forces define the existing market to an extent, yet in addition to pursuing a contained community development platform as part of their developmental drive their still remain the possibility that just as emerging markets as South Korea and other Asian economies have replaced and continue to displace old world manufacturing leaders and forcing them to substitute an exportable service segment to drive their export leadership by engaging in some emergent form of lean manufacturing that employs constantly developing knowledge to reshape their community economies and consumption through more effective planning of producing their daily needs and widening unexplored employment generation in due process they can easily be in position of presenting competitive products to a receptive global market by first excelling in their localities and serving prescient local needs.
Creating decent environments where people can fulfil meaningful existence is quite different from utopic ego trips where large towns are built from ground up with an expectation they will be filled. Redeveloping urban slums is a requirement of government’s responsible for improving quality of life to design and provide replacement dwelling places for chaotic, urban slums which were all temporarily settlements that have gained an undesired permanency and must necessarily be replaced if municipalities are to enable efficient provision of the basic essentials of hygienic communities equipped to sustain meaningful existence for its populace. The intention is among other things to streamline productivity within these communities to enable a well planned realisation across community of preparing and ensuring proper integration of the human resources in that community to sustainable community sustaining productive engagements that enable medium and long term self sustainability to such communities.
If a community has in place the productive machinery to produce or process all or most its consumer needs either by sharing productive costs and markets with adjoining defined communities, what this implies first and foremost is that the altogether critical need of how to engage adult populations creatively is being catered for, it also implies that goods ranging from basic domestic consumer products from white consumer electronics and electrical machinery through to school chalk boards have a recurrent market from start off. By encouraging assembly where full production is not a feasible option, a margin of consumption has an element of local productivity attached. Productivity thus is redefined to meet local needs rather than abstract non applicable global templates where fully manufactured goods are dumped.
A typical slum in a developing country scenario is a clearly demarcated area with clear cut borders of dense population structured with rudimentary materials mainly placards, cardboards, old aluminium sheets and rags, it has by definition no recognisable formal sanitation, water delivery, sewerage management or for that matter any form of organised community management. It is as long as it exists, an apparent excuse for demolition delayed.
As land use need increases and internal prosperity of inhabitants increase, there is emergence of more permanent structures however since its emergence is without plan, format or underlying consideration for proper layout, it never quite escapes its chaotic origins, no matter how long these settlements exist, or are excused, inevitably they never quite maximise land use unless of course congestion and poor standards of living conditions qualify for optimised land use.
In developing communities from slum areas, there is a need to take into consideration a holistic development that intends to restructure living states from an inclusive perspective earlier defined in the article. It is a patch of sick portion of an urban reality that has to be identified for its abscess inflicted on the urban unit, and healed by isolation, drawing resources from the surrounding healthy landscape.
There is of course nothing wrong with diagnosing urban affliction as a distasteful sickness that must be healed and brought to a level of healthiness that enables the whole to be functionally healthy. The longer they are allowed to remain the more complex healing becomes and the more likely it’s potential to spread the blight of urban decadence increases. While richer neighbourhoods can decide to ignore the lack close by, crime and frustrated aggressions of despair therein arising are certain to inflict a cost that cuts deeper than monetary cost.
Beyond the Pale
When a nation seeks funds for development they are often stuck in a cycle of limited ideas that delay project take off not realising that a global market exists for nations to sale their urban slums to corporate bodies all over the world who tend to generate incredible long term profits by rebuilding and managing the populace therein.
Giant corporate bodies exist globally with enough resources to contractually acquire and manage the long term prospects of defined urban areas in need of redevelopment, with a ready population of consumers, workers and can turn these potentials into long term profits for these governments by creating viable internal economics that harness potential human value and turn it into real profits. They can elevate quality of life in these defined urban territories given their closeness to larger population centres over the long term, contracts of a hundred years that enable four or more generations can become a source of knowledge development and intellectual export in addition to allowing these contractual investments to allow intended growth environments to generate running long term profits for investors and the nation.
When an area is contracted inclusive of its original inhabitants, intuitive corporate community developers are likely to project developmental provisions far in excess of existing number of urban dwellers, they will make room for future growth and create internal value to attract external interest to participate in the renewed environments whether as visitors, tourists or investors and since they are committed to long term investment protection will continue to creatively enable human resources utilisation that will increase internal growth of that community with a potential for exporting aspects of its values at a cost to other external communities and to an international market. In the long run success in community management implies that it’s a centre of natural attraction in which community inhabitants will prefer to live in.
The implications of this notion when taken up implies that successful cities and mega corporate bodies can humanely invest in a portion that in most nations is ideally situated but lacking rudimentary facilities with significant underutilised potentials. When organisation’s or individual invest in public spaces their primary intention in to maximise appeal for unhindered participation while managing negative background interference and by eliminating their destructive intrusions continue to increase participation of the general public in these public domains.
Thus by developing beach fronts and putting in place profit generating services, an investor will expect that the more persons who visit these locations the more likely will participation in services like restaurants, hiring bicycles, umbrellas etc. increase.
Now when there is investment in a slum regeneration the emergent community may not have all the trained personnel to effectively provide labour for managing the community and its service needs. The funding organisation may have to outsource essential service need providers outside the community while it begins the long term process of developing internal human potentials. By employing non community dwellers, a measure of success will not only be in retaining them and incorporating them as community dwellers but enables the project by its very employment creating nature attracting talent that may settle and add to its overall resources in the long term.
When a community is defined as contained it has an operational definition of how contained it is measured by what degree of external dependence it requires for its self sustenance. In the 1960’s the American Aluminium company built a dam and an aluminium smelter in a West African coastal location, the planned township that evolved around this massive company is a rudimentary contained community that absorbed local raw labour with a few management leaders from the American owned corporation to create a functional self sustaining community which continues to exist today. During the project execution thousands of jobs were created for the American company over a medium term and the idea is still tenable when considering job creation for redolent industrially developed giant economies in relapse.
Certain communities all over the world have excelled in community management and have by now attained the degree of sophistication in community management to venture further afield and take care of defined human gatherings who stand to benefit from such expertise and who stand to profit by such engagement from a purely business perspective.
It is an assumption that at its precepts assumes from the same basis as arguing that a national government has direct benefits from investing in its slums population where they can management rights to areas of population density in need of reconstruction and redevelopment to improve overall quality of life with an intent to benefit directly from such investments over and above social responsibility to the people who live in these settings.
These communities or corporate bodies have the ability to purchase long term management access to areas of urban decay in clearly demarcated zones within large third world countries and manage these properties over the long term. A sort of positive reverse colonialism that benefits nations and creates sustainable profit based on creating stability through community management. It is not expected that many will excel at this innovative suggestion but its possibilities are without limitation so long as it is based on increasing human value and attracting “extero-community” interest.
In essence it is a parcelling out of land with a resident population that a nation or city lacks the resource to invest in. It is contracted out to external management bodies or community development organisations with a defined intent that enables organisations who can to increase value therein by up taking their reconstruction both socially and civilly.
The added benefits are unlimited depending on what and how investing bodies potentially orient their reconstruction strategy to take full advantage of a large population easily positioned to become a profit generating consumer base. When a contained community develops a tram transport system as an inter community transport by extending its services to city centres and agreeing to link with existing transport hub or nonexistent transport hub will by one single aspect of a holistic activity set make extra long term profit far above any project expectations for interested parties integrating networks into a potential feeder system.
Regulating Stability
In a certain city as a drive to maintain quality of municipality owned accommodation, which were mainly large blocks of flats, project management decided to change fridges and electric stoves every decade and renew internal structures such as bathroom and carpets every decade, while there was an underlying sense of maintaining project quality.
Renovations on such a grand scale were built into the rent structure and ensured customer satisfaction that project quality will remain as high as at point of initial occupancy, the underlying importance of this maintenance routine was to ensure that the manufacturers of these products all of which were local were ensured a guaranteed stream of orders for so long as those massive projects were maintained year after year. How a community construes and realises viable employment sources is a creative realisation of the forward thinking planning strategist.
Community inhabitants must be given choices that enable life term sustenance within a planned structure realised and stable enough to ensure multiple generational sustainability of that community. It must also take into consideration the reality that viability has a shelf life after which the process begins again with a different era’s awareness contributing to restructuring from ground up. This means that most community projects will undergo overall reconstruction sometime four or five generations after intial construction.
If for example an American, Brazilian, South African or German corporate body purchases management and regenerating interest in a slum area and in order to ensure a more effective mail delivery signs a contract for mails delivered within that designated management area to be specially configured within their originating sources mail system, it might enable a competitive option for local mails within a poorly managed systems that has its mail stolen or unaccounted for, it thus begins to attract “extero-community” participation by increasing hiring out of post boxes and extra mail delivery enabled through that community’s specially designated postal system. It thus introduces an alternative and a coercive force for improving competitor efficiency introducing forces of overall system improvement which hitherto could not be conceived. Of course at its core is the very essence of pitching a business proposal to potential partners who literary have to be led to discern the worthiness of an enterprise that they can but barely grasp and to whom understanding is a revelation.
What exactly is revelatory about a seemingly forsaken grouping of an emerging civilisation that is sidelined by its own planetary grouping, teased of all things modern, poorly educated, bedraggled masses and easily mistaken for a sad forlorn aggregation of objects of a failed grand social experiment have as a profound basis for wealth generation?
These urban slums do not exist for lack of internal material wealth but they persist for lack of a corrective internal instigated mechanism that will turn around forlorn existence by maximising a creative, element of humanity that poor governance has been unable to turn into nation’s growth engine. The full productive capacity and capabilities of urban slum dwellers is stunted by existing factors that attenuate full human potential development as capable in any era of human civilisation. By introducing management processes that eliminate squalor and add the inducements that tease out creative and productive capacities their true values are enabled. Any human labour that is lost to a nation through economic migration belongs to these underutilised categories, only they have found an escape route from desolation, at least for some.
At this point it would seem that city councils and municipalities of growing cities would come to an awareness that certain locations by attracting large populations are a source of unlimited riches for city administrators for so long as they maintain their central roles as commercial and business centres. With that awareness these city councils will have long began the effective strategy of streamlining habitations and ensuring that zoning laws are properly developed and maintained. They would also have began actively purchasing and repossessing slum lands located in choice areas and begin higher quality dwellings and work places that would maximise their long term investments.
It is also obvious that certain older estates would be repurchased to redevelop as high rise settlements with far higher return on investments as far as land use is concerned. Yet, in most African countries there seems a lack of initiative along these lines.
One reason why these government departments are not making delivery on their expectations mainly is because they lack financial viability and more importantly lack awareness that in extreme capitalist societies as most African economies are developing to reflect they will eventually be competing for resource generation with a ruthless private sector in due course. The control of urban turf will be at the centre of this profit driven fight for land utilisation.
Those aspects of nation that need the directional benefits of leadership are hardly those that are privately being managed by the middle class of successful citizens, hardly, these have shown their capability, those that need leadership’s coercive influence are those despairing elements of society, who are barely clinging to meaningful existence, these important segment of society need to be infused with a new hope for life and adding value to it from a myriad perspective. Those who condemn illiteracy, poverty and human despair and would rather pretend it is not a problem requiring solution have every right to exercise and believe in their negative opinions of humanity, however leaders in every sector of society cannot afford themselves such an excuse, these are areas of a society where a leader’s success or otherwise are determined.
One of the benefits that developing countries have that the developed did not quite have and must not fail to utilise to their benefit is the fact that there is a adequate historical data and information that predict pretty accurately certain outcomes given certain circumstances in human states and enable preferred solutions.
Given these reference materials that ought to guide leadership decision it is foolhardy to assume that history repeats itself, of course the second time as tragic-comedy. The greatest honour the planet can pay to the millions who lost their lives and lived through easily resolved sufferings is to employ the lessons therein arising to prevent such undesired outcomes from ever wasting a resource as rare as human life.
If anyone, deluded or otherwise desires inspiration as to the value of the individual human life and as to how rare and valuable earthly life is, all they have to do is raise their heads up to the night sky and know and appreciate that there are more heavenly bodies in the universe than their will ever be number of humans living on earth at any point in time and very few of them contain anything close to earthly life.’
There will always be differences among humans, even for those who receive the same wage for similar tasks there is a difference in how they chose to live their lives, it is only expected that no two humans can have similar dispositions, therefore arguments forwarded for improving the collective whole to enable those lagging behind to be positioned to improve their quality of existence and become more productive in the process is not an attempt to level society by a certain criteria of equality.
There is no equality in nature, nature is diversified and it is that diversity that allows the specie to thrive, however we can put our collective intellect to enable an altogether better quality of existence through pooling our collective resources in promoting the overall quality of life of the specie and its circumstances. What most people want is enabled opportunity to live their lives as humans rather than squatting in conditions worse than animals would prefer when there is so much intellectual resource to opt for better choices.
Just as all students in a boarding institution would share similar facilities irrespective of their backgrounds and show different skills and dispositions with an intent to add value by different degrees with an expectation of what passes for justified progress and attainment by a generic rule of application likewise the nation must create communities that exalt the quality of life or enable those who have the resources to do so.
When humanity is afflicted and there are solutions within means of implementation that only a nation and its administrative machinery can implement then it becomes a requirement for resolution or alternatives for solutions to forthcoming from that end. By pretending that these problems are acceptable while the deprived suffer a quality of existence that degrades the human intellectual capacity for problem resolution is simply unacceptable; it is officiating tyranny and ignorance. Human societies must be cued to be constantly improving, seeking for areas within the society where the collective resources can enable drastic and subtle improvements. When these does not occur and those who expect these changes do not see alterations, then immediately, the human spirit has failed its primary obligation of protecting the specie from harmful conditions, such situations thus becomes inhuman and therefore untenable. It is indeed a terribly depressing conception that in many instances men are capable of profound inattentiveness to the sufferings and afflictions of their fellowmen when so much possibility exists in their collective power to alleviate and heal these sufferings.
Communities in urban settings must celebrate the human intellect and those in rural settings be havens of peaceful coexistence with nature. Urban slums is a planetary cry for socio-economic system readjustment, a deep resonating plea for help never quite finding utterance yet emitted in the groans of those circumstances have given no choice but to dwell in these dismal states.
Every average minded person understands that not all women ought to desire to have thirty pairs of shoes or every man have a suit for each day of the year, yet there is a certain muted acceptance that it is sacrilegious to the human spirit that every child cannot enter a decent place of learning that enables ease of knowledge acquisition as a preparatory step to adding value to the collective human state.
How this is enabled is only through planned communities that are integrated with system requirements needs and provisions that sustain a chain of sustainability that sustains highest quality facilities for the community.
It is cruelty permitted and tolerated when everyone turns a blind eye to situations that ought not exist and assume that it will eventually change, change is a proactive process of radically replacing non viable states with a perceived desired end state in some human affairs. When that proactive engagement is not instigated by a source of influence then it is only conceivable to accept women and children carrying piles of bricks on their heads when a simple substitution of wheel barrows at cost less than the eventual cost of human debilitation and early deaths resulting from such permitted abuse of the frail physical structure of humanity is permitted for lack of proactive change.
In disorganised communities without proper accountability for individual constituents, it is easy for weak, neglected and endangered persons to be overlooked by reorganising and ensuring that every community member has an identification card that allows the community’s management body to easily monitor and account for individual well being. The potential for individual neglect is thus reduced if not eliminated altogether and help can be properly coordinated and made a problem solution for those individual who need system help to be properly integrated into a productive redemptive system.
“When we realize that the strength of the Infinite is our strength and that the strength of the Infinite is limitless, we must come to the conclusion that we are capable of doing anything that the living of a great life may demand.” ~Christian D. Larson - The Pathway of Roses
