Well said and summarised, Fred. I like the notion of 'urban immune deficiency'. Marls's notion that people should understand the principles of building safety as the do dental hygiene is also intriguing. Putting them together, I come back in my mind to lack of investment in public education. In our Tanzanian work on climate change, whether or not groups of fishers, pastoralists or farmers mention this or that specific veterinary, water, pest or soil issue, the ALL prioritise education as important in providing enhanced and secure livelihoods in the future for themselves a parents/ grand parents and for their children and the community at large. Remittance income from educated children is vital in their livelihood systems. However, also seen as vital is access to new knowledge. So in urban systems suffering neo-liberal inspired and justified privatisation and disinvestment in education (K-12 and beyond, as well as adult literacy and livelong education opportunities), the chance of a shift in consciousness consistent with Marla's analogy are remote.
All the best,
BEN
-----Original Message-----
From: "Dr. Frederick Krimgold" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Nov 29, 2013 6:34 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: accountability<[log in to unmask]> Aside from favoring Ben’s suggestion for recycling Guantanamo, I heartily agree with Marla. We need to endorse and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of building safety regulation where it exists and work for the evolution of collective survival oriented regulation to limit uninformed or unethical behavior on the part of individual builders, developers or investors. The Washington consensus of the ‘80s that prescribed privatization and deregulation as the cure for all that ails the world has left communities without capacity for collective self-defense and severe urban immune system deficiency. Building and land use regulation policy and strategy has been devoid of innovation or intellectual development for many decades. It is not enough to resurrect or propagated the top-down bureaucratic regulatory models of the “developed” world. We need to evolve mechanisms of collective urban survival. The mis-application of Darwin’s theory to justify reckless individual greed at the expense of collective survival is ultimately suicidal.Agreeing with Tony, regulation for community safety is clearly a cultural issue. However, this cultural capacity has to evolve as rapidly as the complexity and hazard of the urban environment.Fred----------------------------------------------------Dr. Frederick Krimgold
Director
Disaster Risk Reduction Program (DRR)
Virginia Tech
Advanced Research Institute (ARI)
900 North Glebe Road, Room 5014
Arlington, VA 22203 USA
Main: 571-858-3300
Direct: 571-858-3307
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: www.ari.vt.eduOn Nov 29, 2013, at 1:29 PM, Marla Petal <[log in to unmask]> wrote:It's indeed a positive sign that this calamity has so dramatically highlights the fundamental flaw of doing away with construction oversight, in popular consciousness.However, "naming and shaming" suggests that these failures can be blamed on someone, and then they can be punished and can be forgotten. Like evil in general, risk is quite a bit more banal, and way too widely constructed, for symbolic gestures to fix.I think I'd weigh in on the "Stay in and fix it!" side. Particularly since he seems to be rather respected and accomplished in other regards, I'd rather demand that he stay and fix it. And further, that we need to focus much more on the details of public knowledge required for safety in the built environment. We need to boil down the key features of disaster-resilient construction into language that every school child can learn, right alongside why to brush your teeth and exactly how. I think that in order to begin the cultural sea-change needed, it's time to step away from the sidelines with our theoretical formula of vulnerability risk and jump right into the nitty gritty details of knowledge that everyone needs for safety.
Dr. Ben Wisner Aon-Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, University College London, UK & Sokoine University of Agriculture, Morogoro, Tanzania & Environmental Studies Program, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, USA "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."