"Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave had twenty-three sons, and she named them all Dave?" So wrote Dr. Seuss in one of his most charming books.
Pastor Julius and his wife Irene are not quite there yet -- they are only at twenty-two now, if one counts only the orphans, not their own children or grandchildren. And theirs are both boys and girls, each with a separate name. But the twenty-third could arrive at any moment there is a family crisis or parental death by AIDS in Barcelona, the township where they live near Cape Town, South Africa.
How can I translate "township" into U.S. English? "Slum" is the closest word, but all the slums I grew up with were housed in several story buildings, with walls and windows and roofs. These were all once solid and whole, no matter how badly broken or maintained currently. In Barcelona, the standard house is built on dirt, of corrugated metal -- walls and roof -- with window and door openings cut through. It shares walls on both sides with the next shack, and all are clustered around a maze of dirt roads. It is the size of my outdoor tool shed. Our local guide says the dirt road looks better than the last time he was there. Maybe the city has packed it down with a roller. We are grateful it is not raining.
The people in Barcelona reached here through a different history from those in the U.S. slums I know. African Americans came by force, into a system that tore apart their families for three centuries. Then they were dumped into the places European Americans didn't want any more. Add discrimination and exploitation, including by organized crime, and you have a lot of the history that makes a U.S. slum what it is.
I don't know how long Barcelona has been on the Cape Flats, along with Khayelitsha, Guguletu, and the other townships there. But there are formal highway signs leading to them from the big N2 near the international airport. Pastor Julius tells us he was already afraid of Barcelona long before his first contact there in 1993. It is not a temporary place -- it is an established feature of life in South Africa.
It is clear what forces in South African society created Barcelona: apartheid and its related policies and attitudes. But what forces maintain it? I would nominate unemployment as the prime factor -- over 50% youth unemployment in South Africa according to one person we talked to, and surely higher in the townships. In turn, ethnic discrimination lies behind the distribution of jobs: black townships are visibly flimsier and more marginal than "coloured" or Indian suburbs, all of which are still heavily segregated even seventeen years after the end of the official system, and none of which compares to affluent white Cape Town or Stellenbosch.
OK, back to the technology. What can nanotechnology do for Pastor Julius, Irene, and the twenty-two orphans? South African scientists are working on improving a number of technologies in their compound: longer-lasting paints to keep the places where the children sleep fresh and unpeeling; capsules that would dispense TB drugs over a longer period of time, bypassing the usual hard-to-maintain treatment regimen; simple commercial water filters for the city system, to kill bacteria that might come out of the tap Pastor Julius paid to have installed in the property; and tea bag filters the orphanage could use (one liter at a time) if the city water went bad for a while. I am sure there are others we have not encountered yet in our interviews. Most of the technologies were not designed for or with the township, but they could produce benefits there anyway.
And technology has already brought significant benefits to the area. Under one of the world’s most successful electrification drives, electric lines were installed in Barcelona after South Africa’s democratic transition, and the orphanage has two feeds onto the property. They get some electricity per person free under a government subsidy program. Nanotechnology will almost certainly produce a lot of incremental change in the electric system they are connected to, including increased efficiency in transmission lines; lighter, stronger wind turbines as a renewable energy source; better batteries to store energy from solar power; etc. Because of nanotechnology, the environment will be cleaner somewhere in South Africa, and someone will make more money, or pay lowered prices, as a result of the increased efficiency.
But Barcelona and the orphanage are unlikely to feel even a trickle down from those benefits, because they are already at the subsidized bottom of the system. Technological advance will make someone else a little richer and leave them poor. They need jobs first, nano later.
Can we re-design innovation to create a different outcome?
Author is Susan Cozzens, Associate Dean for Research, Ivan Allen College, Professor, School of Public Policy, and Director, Technology Policy and Assessment Center, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Pastor Julius and his wife Irene are not quite there yet -- they are only at twenty-two now, if one counts only the orphans, not their own children or grandchildren. And theirs are both boys and girls, each with a separate name. But the twenty-third could arrive at any moment there is a family crisis or parental death by AIDS in Barcelona, the township where they live near Cape Town, South Africa.
How can I translate "township" into U.S. English? "Slum" is the closest word, but all the slums I grew up with were housed in several story buildings, with walls and windows and roofs. These were all once solid and whole, no matter how badly broken or maintained currently. In Barcelona, the standard house is built on dirt, of corrugated metal -- walls and roof -- with window and door openings cut through. It shares walls on both sides with the next shack, and all are clustered around a maze of dirt roads. It is the size of my outdoor tool shed. Our local guide says the dirt road looks better than the last time he was there. Maybe the city has packed it down with a roller. We are grateful it is not raining.
The people in Barcelona reached here through a different history from those in the U.S. slums I know. African Americans came by force, into a system that tore apart their families for three centuries. Then they were dumped into the places European Americans didn't want any more. Add discrimination and exploitation, including by organized crime, and you have a lot of the history that makes a U.S. slum what it is.
I don't know how long Barcelona has been on the Cape Flats, along with Khayelitsha, Guguletu, and the other townships there. But there are formal highway signs leading to them from the big N2 near the international airport. Pastor Julius tells us he was already afraid of Barcelona long before his first contact there in 1993. It is not a temporary place -- it is an established feature of life in South Africa.
It is clear what forces in South African society created Barcelona: apartheid and its related policies and attitudes. But what forces maintain it? I would nominate unemployment as the prime factor -- over 50% youth unemployment in South Africa according to one person we talked to, and surely higher in the townships. In turn, ethnic discrimination lies behind the distribution of jobs: black townships are visibly flimsier and more marginal than "coloured" or Indian suburbs, all of which are still heavily segregated even seventeen years after the end of the official system, and none of which compares to affluent white Cape Town or Stellenbosch.
OK, back to the technology. What can nanotechnology do for Pastor Julius, Irene, and the twenty-two orphans? South African scientists are working on improving a number of technologies in their compound: longer-lasting paints to keep the places where the children sleep fresh and unpeeling; capsules that would dispense TB drugs over a longer period of time, bypassing the usual hard-to-maintain treatment regimen; simple commercial water filters for the city system, to kill bacteria that might come out of the tap Pastor Julius paid to have installed in the property; and tea bag filters the orphanage could use (one liter at a time) if the city water went bad for a while. I am sure there are others we have not encountered yet in our interviews. Most of the technologies were not designed for or with the township, but they could produce benefits there anyway.
And technology has already brought significant benefits to the area. Under one of the world’s most successful electrification drives, electric lines were installed in Barcelona after South Africa’s democratic transition, and the orphanage has two feeds onto the property. They get some electricity per person free under a government subsidy program. Nanotechnology will almost certainly produce a lot of incremental change in the electric system they are connected to, including increased efficiency in transmission lines; lighter, stronger wind turbines as a renewable energy source; better batteries to store energy from solar power; etc. Because of nanotechnology, the environment will be cleaner somewhere in South Africa, and someone will make more money, or pay lowered prices, as a result of the increased efficiency.
But Barcelona and the orphanage are unlikely to feel even a trickle down from those benefits, because they are already at the subsidized bottom of the system. Technological advance will make someone else a little richer and leave them poor. They need jobs first, nano later.
Can we re-design innovation to create a different outcome?
Author is Susan Cozzens, Associate Dean for Research, Ivan Allen College, Professor, School of Public Policy, and Director, Technology Policy and Assessment Center, Georgia Institute of Technology.
