Author name: Indovance Blog

The 2009 Oscar winner for best picture, Slumdog Millionaire, may have introduced Hollywood to the ragpickers of Mumbai, but that city’s scrap-heap squalor is all too common everywhere else. In 2003, the United Nations reported that almost 1 billion people—about one-sixth of humanity, and a third of all city dwellers—lived in the slums of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the number was projected to double by 2030. Planning can’t keep up, so people ad-lib housing, often illegally, in the space they can find on urban fringes.

I love big cities, but I often find small cities more compelling. The dispiriting and encouraging aspects of urbanism are more immediately juxtaposed, often heart-rendingly so, but the disparity between them seems bridgeable. Surely, this place can be made to work, if only. Hudson, N.Y., a settlement of 8,000 residents two hours north of Manhattan, is a two-square-mile snapshot of America’s urban disparity. Its main avenue, Warren Street, is a stunner; it looks as if eight very charming blocks of Brooklyn left the big city a century ago and moved to Columbia County.