January 2006
Issue No. 386
Subscribe to NI
Give us your feedback!
The New Internationalist welcomes your letters. But please keep them short. They may be edited for purposes of space or clarity. Letters can be sent using our online form or directly to your local NI office. Please remember to include a town and country for your address.
Welcome to Squatter Town
By 2030 there will be over two billion squatters worldwide. Richard Swift reports on their attempt to carve out their own piece of urban space.
At the top of the hill
A poet’s view of from Rio’s favelas by Gabriela Tôrres Barbosa.
Words on the street from a globetrotters' phrasebook
Global squattertalk.
Architects of our futures
Robert Neuwirth tells what he learned from his two years of living with squatters on three continents.
The lease on life
Richard Swift meets the determined squatters of Bangkok who don’t know the meaning of the word eviction.
Snapshots from shantytown
A photo essay of squatter life.
A tsunami of demolitions
Africa’s squatters are up against ruthless state power. Andrew Meldrum reports on Harare and beyond.
Squatter citizens
Profiles from the frontlines: the politics of survival in some of the world’s grittiest slums.
News, views, and & voices
Currents
Reconstructing peace
Post-tsunami threat to Sri Lankan peace
Forgotten massacre
Forgotten fatwa on Iran's left
Renewables take off
Renewables take off
Worldbeaters
Does Africa any longer need Bob Geldof as its champion? After Live 8 many people are saying no.
Mixed Media
Music
Songs of the Volcano by Papua New Guinea Stringbands with Bob Brozman
Music
LDA v The Lunatics by Los De Abajo
Film
Brokeback Mountain directed by Ang Lee
Film
Head-On/ Crossing the Bridge directed by Fatih Akin
Book
Patterns of Protest by John Crabtree; Deadly Consequences by Jim Shultz
Book
Witness to AIDS by Edwin Cameron
Book
2 Girls by Perihan Magden
Polyp's Big Bad World - Jan/Feb 2006
Making Waves
The newly launched Latin American TV channel, teleSur, is offering a distinctive Southern perspective on the news – and is already causing consternation in the US Congress as a result. Meet its Director General, Aram Aharonian.
View from Montevideo
Travelling through Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico and the US, Eduardo Galeano is searched for ‘prohibited items’.
Essay: Empire Left & Right
The idea of empire has certainly made a comeback at both ends of the political spectrum. Richard Swift guides us through the troubled water from Hardt & Negri right through to Niall Ferguson – with a bit of graphic help from Polyp.
Letter from Lebanon
In the last of her monthly letters Reem Haddad returns to the murder that has obsessed her nation.
Join over 10,000 people just like you. Get e-mail updates about new content, issue alerts, contests, and more!
from
THIS MONTH'S EDITOR
‘That sounds really depressing’ – was the almost universal response when I told people I was going to spend time in the slums of Bangkok to research this issue. Yet that’s not what I found or how I felt. True, there were people with big problems living in very difficult circumstances. But there were also many people with the energy and enthusiasm to tackle these problems. The fashionable despair of the North is something people in the South can’t afford and don’t really understand. They struggle in often quite small and imperceptible ways but with big hopes to make things better. They come with wit and intelligence – often a delicious sense of black humour – to point out the injustices that hem in their lives. Yes, there are those so weighed down by their social burdens that they have given up hope, but they are (in my experience) by far the exception rather than the rule.
This issue introduces squatters from around the world who are struggling with slum conditions in order to build liveable communities. It offers you faces to see and straight talk to hear. After all, by a couple of decades’ time, over a quarter of us who inhabit this strange rock in orbit around the sun will be squatters. The experience of squatters will be more common than those with regular jobs, pension plans and mortgaged properties. If we are going to work together to build a more sustainable world, we had better engage with this reality.
This is also the double issue that the NI produces for the beginning of every year. As usual, it includes The Unreported Year: an alternative round-up of news over the past 12 months. And this time we’ve also included an extended essay on ‘Empire’. While this is a bit of a departure from the norm, it’s hardly disconnected from the issues faced by the squatters and slum-dwellers that you will read about in these pages. For it is Empire, in both its raw and subtler projections of power, that produces the psychotic inequality that squatters must struggle to overcome.
Richard Swift for the New Internationalist Co-operative
Voices from the margins:
Multimedia: video, podcasts, and more.
- Poetry Slam in Zimbabwe
- The House of Hunger poetry slam held in Zimbabwe in 2006, and organised by the Pamberi Trust, showcased young artists performing inspirational work on issues from corporate power to child soldiers. The video features four of the poets.
Published by Pambazuka News.
- Iranian women speak out
- 3 March 2007, London. Women's rights activists marched through the English capital last week to celebrate International Women's Day with a protest against the misogyny of the Islamic regime in Iran and the threat of invasion by the US. Hear the voices of Iranian feminists Azar and Leila Parnian and the sounds of the demonstration as it passed through the heart of the city. Click here to learn more about the campaign.
Produced by Heidi Bachram.
- Raised Voices audio:
- Benny from West Papua on Corporate Power
- Vinayan from India on agriculture
