slums
lborkowski | December 6, 2010The Pump Handle and Casaubon's Book are writing posts this week about the global trend of urbanization. More than half of the world's population now lives in cities, and this shift has implications for the health of the planet.
I grew up in suburban Delaware, and my first experience with urban living came in college when I spent a month on a study abroad trip to London. I fell in love with the Tube, the neighborhood markets and pubs, the profusion of cuisines, and the array of theatrical performances listed in Time Out magazine (it was the nineties, and we relied on the paper version). I…
lborkowski | November 4, 2010The United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-HABITAT, is tasked with promoting "socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all." The agency's new executive director, former Barcelona mayor Joan Clos, gave his first formal address to the UN General Assembly and outlined some of the priorities for improving settlements in the coming the years.
Clos started with some good news: between 2000 and 2010, the lives of 230 million slum dwellers were improved - an achievement that exceeds the Millennium Development Goal target of…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2010tags: Education Innovation in the Slums, education, technology, poverty, slums, curriculum, philosophy, learning as a productive activity, Charles Leadbeater, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
Charles Leadbeater went looking for radical new forms of education -- and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera, where some of the world's poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn. And this informal, disruptive new kind of school, he says, is what all schools need to become.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the…