Slum, shantytown, bidonville, barrio, favela, and urban village — each of these terms carries social, historical, and linguistic particularities. But satellite imagery gives us a common lens through which to view them.
Every day, 300,000 people are being connected to electricity through efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 7): “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.” For them, new access to electricity comes with a host of new data harvesting by electricity meters, appliances, and payment tracking.
Three weeks into my trip to Rwanda this summer, I checked in to my last Airbnb. It was a lovely home in Kimihurura, a popular neighborhood for expats in the capital city, Kigali. My host greeted me and invited me to sit out on the back porch of the home as the late afternoon sun streamed through the trees surrounding us. He was a middle-aged French Canadian who worked in…
Currently, there are upwards of one million Rohingya refugees living in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. For all the talk of moving the Rohingya elsewhere, such as Bashan Char Island, or repatriating them to Myanmar, it is almost certain that they will remain where they are for an indefinite period of time.
金盆村 (Jinpen village) is a spectacularly beautiful place in the lush forested hills of Western China, with freshly paved mountain roads winding through steep terraced fields. The fields are filled with all types of crops – ranging from rice and corn, to radishes, greens, cucumbers, tomatoes, sunflowers, lotus, and even crayfish.
As a scholar changing disciplines from aerospace engineering to international development, I realized the only way to gain experience was to get involved in the community on campus.
Symposium: UC Berkeley, April 10 – 12, 2014 Flying out to San Francisco, the hills look like waves of mountains, rolling toward inland California farms. Situated within this amazing landscape is one of the world’s most innovative communities working on inclusive and sustainable energy. Numerous universities, start- up entrepreneurs, financiers, technology companies and consultancies address distributed and affordable energy markets in myriad countries. In less than two weeks, prominent researchers…
A first lesson, taken strictly from ecological economics and its use of thermodynamic laws, is very telling about the history of resource exploitation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Energy quality and energy surpluses often determine the development of social and cultural patterns, and the unidirectional character of energy can dictate the economic and social arrangements through which wealth accumulation occurs in society.1,2 Consider the unidirectional flow of water (and…
Sustained growth lies at the very heart of the current mainstream economic paradigm. Is that so that it seems almost evident that it will happen naturally because of technological innovation so it’s not questioned nor challenged. Technological advancement, in this context, is the result of the endless entrepreneurial pursuit of profit maximization to provide returns for an equally endless capital accumulation. This pursuit, in turn, is the only path to…