Gentrification

The always-interesting Economist's View reprints Tom Slater's fine piece about the hosing-out (or just "hosing") of poor people. A commentator points out, rightly, that it harkens back to the Urban Renewal "slum clearance" programs of the 50s and 60s. He's quite right, but I suspect it is much older: poor people are a nuisance, they are expensive, and they smell funny. Likely that the non-poor have been trying to push them off the planet for a long time.

An interesting counter-story is the way in which poor people have a way of not staying hosed, but of popping up again--think of the (now quite lively) "City of the Dead" in Cairo, the overnight barrios that pop up around South American cities, the gecekondu that litter the hillsides in Turkey (ready to tumble down, it would appear, in the next earthquake) or the numberless multitudes just asleep on the street in Mumbai.