This is what it’s all about. When there is no real home for people, they will improvise and new urban worlds will be created.  I’m only half way through this book (regrettably usually where I put them down and start something new, for no reason in particular, just because – perhaps I need an iPad 🙂

In Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, Author Robert Neuwirth travels the world to explore the largest squatter communities out there, and find how how they came to be, and how they continue to survive and thrive. These modern cities are not filled with tents, they’re filled with community boards, restaurants, home-grown social services and a new way of life; often ignored by the cities governments that surround them.

‘Neuwirth gets the lowdown on the low life by becoming a resident of four of the most happening squatopolises: the thriving extralegal pockets of Istanbul, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Rio. His ghetto epiphanies include impeccable civility, self-organizing local governments, bustling economies, modest crime rates, and squatter millionaires.’ – Josh McHugh,Wired

Cinematographer Doug Emmett suggested Maximum City to me when I gave him a quick pitch about the Gatecrashers. It was right on. Thanks Doug.  I can highly recommend this book.

This is what the  The New Yorker had to say:

Modern Bombay is home to fourteen million people, two-thirds of them packed into neighborhoods where the population density reaches one million per square mile. Its official name is now Mumbai, but, as the author points out, the city has always had “multiple aliases, as do gangsters and whores.” Mehta, who lived there as a child, has a penchant for the city’s most “morally compromised” inhabitants: the young Hindu mafiosi who calmly recollect burning Muslims alive during riots twelve years ago; the crooked policeman who stages “encounter killings” of hoods whose usefulness has expired; the bar girl, adorned with garlands of rupees, whose arms are scarred from suicide attempts. Mehta’s brutal portrait of urban life derives its power from intimacy with his subjects. After clandestine meetings with some of Bombay’s most wanted assassins, he notes, “I know their real names, what they like to eat, how they love, what their precise relationship is with God.”
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

I’m starting a Glossary here in the Garage. I’ve decided to break it up into real world; where I’m going to pull words from all the reference reading I’m doing, and Palomar City, where I’m going to plug in some definitions for in-world items you might come across on the blog. This will hopefully find it’s way into a wiki in the near future.

In conjunction with the Glossary, I’m going to start a Reading List. I read about one book a year, and usually only half of it. So don’t worry, that list is not going to be too intense.

Here are the first two entries in the Reading List.

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World

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Currently Listening To: Algodón Egipicio “El Ingenio Humano”