I'm looking forward to starting as a columnist for Ghananian multimedia publication Infoboxx. Check out my first piece, "Building Cities Without Slums" here. See an excerpt below.
Slums are not a phenomenon of the developing world. As the Industrial Revolution created millionaires in cosmopolitan New York City, London and Paris, it also generated vast legions of urban poor. But with smart policymaking, these cities were able to enhance their residents’ quality of life. Whitechapel, once the poster child for Dickensian London, is now home to Whitechapel Art Gallery. In 1845, Victor Considerant wrote: “Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, pestilence and sickness work in concert, where sunlight and air rarely penetrate.” The Paris of today, a centre of art and refinement, was the product of Emperor Napoleon III and Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s expansive and ambitious public works programme.
With sufficient political will, the same is possible for African cities, where over 200 million people live in slums.