70 Economic dimensions and socio-cultural patterns
system. Once we passed a higher spot with a tiny school, a playfield, and a
‘‘ waterschool-bus” with six seats. Children’s education was a priority for the
squatters in this community.
Finally, anamazing sight appeared on the main river channel, a line of per-
haps a thousand large plastic soda-bottles strung together. From a point on the
farshore the bottle line projected diagonally across and upriver, leaving only a
narrow space for boats to get by. Day and night, month after month, the line
of bottles caught other plastic bottles floating down the river, the discarded jet-
sam and flotsam from upriver communities in the urban region. I could see two
men at the far-shore point gathering in the valuable floating plastic bottles and
tossing them into a truck. None would be wasted; urban resources provide jobs
and income. Adversity, basic values, and ingenuity had created an active social
community among apparently unrelated immigrants, right in Rio.
Still, this site and others with informal communities are environmentally
among the worst for buildings and human settlements (Perlman 1976 , Main
and Williams1994,State of the World’s Cities2006). Normally caring organizations
and individuals, along with government agencies, attempt to provide limited
social services to the people. Occasionally governments forcibly remove or try to
eliminate such communities, sometimes with social or political repercussions.
Occasionally better housing, or incentives for it, is created on a better site near
jobs. However, pressure builds to recolonize the original difficult site, unless a
widely recognized and policed land use of value to society is established on the
site. Especially in the rapidly growing cities of developing nations worldwide,
informal communities are covering large areas. Effective answers remain elusive.Transportation in urbanization
Outward urbanization responding to population growth and opportu-
nity is the norm in history. The social implications ofsprawl(Figure3.3)havegen-
erated much discussion (Jenkset al.1996, Gordon and Richardson 1997, Daniels
1999,Bullardet al.2000,Benfieldet al.2001,Getting to Smart Growth2002,
2003,Frumkinet al.2004,Burchellet al.2005). Not knowing your neighbors,
alienation, scarce meeting places, little walking, mostly vehicle driving, no place
to play, inconvenient for the elderly, unsafe, no time to volunteer, and commu-
nity organizations that wither, are familiar refrains for life in sprawl areas. A
societal priority for planning and design that directly addresses sprawl and such
issues remains embryonic, though global climate change might become a cata-
lyst(McCarthyet al.2001,Gore2006).
Several key dimensions of transportation, one piece of the big puzzle, are
helpful here. Providing alternative modes of transportation, such as rail transit,
buses, car driving, walking, bicycling, etc., is widely recognized as a key way