When the Bough Breaks...: Our Children, Our Environment by Lloyd Timberlake & Laura Thomas

Author:Lloyd Timberlake & Laura Thomas [Timberlake, Lloyd & Thomas, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849710022
Goodreads: 14499955
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Opposite Children help to bail out their shantytown home near the beach in Port au Prince, Haiti, after a high tide flooded it. Mark Edwards/Still Pictures

This is the worst land not only because it is the most dangerous and least healthy, but because it is the worst in terms of building or rationally governing a city. The growth often occurs precisely where it is hardest to reach the new homes with roads, sewers, schools, health care and all other amenities. This is the sense in which the poor have no power; they often do not officially exist in the eyes of the city administration, except perhaps as a problem, and a community to be evicted when necessary.

Urbanization is death to children. Some of the reasons are covered in other chapters of this book, such as the high rates of infectious diseases and pollution. But the phenomenon of Third World urbanization deserves at least cursory treatment in its own right, because it is where the worst of two worlds – the world of underdevelopment and poverty and the world of rapid industrialization – meet and combine the damages of both.

CHILDREN IN CITIES

During the reign of Queen Victoria, the overall death rate among the British population declined from 22.2 deaths per 1,000 in 1851–60 to 18.2 per 1,000 in 1891–1900. This improvement must have had to do with improved diets, sanitation, water supply and so on. However, the infant death rate was actually higher in the closing years of Victoria’s reign than it had been in the beginning, accounting for about a quarter of all deaths in the nation. In 1907–10, in the borough of Bermondsey in south-east London, 135 infants out of every 1,000 born died in their first year, a rate equal to the infant death rate of Bangladesh today.

Anthony Wohl, who provides these figures, also offers an explanation: “As the century progressed, more and more children – and certainly a higher percentage of the total number of children in the nation – were being born in towns. In the early 1890s, when the infant death rate for England and Wales as a whole was around 153, the 28 largest towns had an average infant death rate of 167 . . Z’60

Today rapid urbanization in the developing world seems to have played a part in increasing the risk of children’s early deaths. When Europeans were moving to cities there was rapid industrialization, economies were buoyant, and they were moving to opportunities for employment. In most Third World cities today, there are far more people competing for fewer jobs in economies which are stagnant or declining. A child born in a Third World squatter settlement lacking safe water and sanitation is 40–50 times more likely to die before reaching the age of five than one born at the same moment in a wealthy nation.61

Crowding compresses and multiplies the effects of the obvious problems. Water may be hard to get in many rural areas. But in many cities, sewage flows untreated into the rivers; and the poor get their drinking water directly from those rivers.

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