Dip Out

I am not sure if I am a Town Donkey or a Country Donkey. Categories are more useful questions than answers. I like being able to dip in and out of intensity, and calm. Skye is an island up at the top of Scotland. A place of calm. To dip out. But now it is known as a place to escape, and Skye (ha)s a limit. Venice is a place of intensity famous for its hustle and bustle, but now also struggling with so many people coming to see Venice that it isn't really Ve(ry)nice. Sometimes we destroy the things we love. We need to create some buffers to hold the things, places, people, and moments, we love. To let it be without packing in as much as we possibly can. To allow gaps and spaces. To breathe in, and out. Deeply.

Town Mouse v Country Mouse

Aesops's Fables

Entry Ticket

When I stopped working for money in 2014, I had to dramatically cut my expenses. The reality is working is expensive. In the line of work I was in, I had to live in a Global City (London). Rent is more expensive where everyone else needs to be. There is the cost of commuting and the cost of looking the part - suits, etc. You tend to be time poor - so less home cooked meals from scratch, and more paying other people to do things for you.

An overlooked expense is the 'Entry Ticket' cost of your circle of friends and colleagues. In London, a pint of beer will cost around £4 or £5 minimum. A fairly standard meal with a friend will cost at least £20-30 if you are being frugal. 'Thinking in Rands' was really hard when, as a Soutie, I returned to the UK from South Africa.

I am very conscious of the idea of Conspicuous Consumption. In South Africa, 80% live below the Living Wage level (R3,807), 55% of people live on less than the Upper Bound Poverty Line (R1,138), and 40% live on below the Lower Bound Poverty Line (R758) (africacheck.org). As a Soutie, it is easy to say the "Entry Ticket" in the UK is higher. Those figures in pounds, depending on the exchange rate, are about £200 a month for a living wage, about £60 for the upper bound poverty line, and about £40 for the lower pound.

So it is difficult to meet a friend for dinner in London, and spend less than 40% of people in South Africa live on for a month. South Africa is famous for its inequality. The 'World Champions'. But the World is equally unequal to the most unequal country in the world. We just think, and justify, locally. In a connected world, you can send £40 to someone in South Africa in less time than it takes to drink a £5 pint. And South Africa is not even close to the poorest country in the World.

Even after stopping work, there were various expenses I couldn't cut... and remain connected to my community. The Entry Ticket prices remain. My family is scattered on each side of a big pond. I have friends all over this rock we live on. I don't want to not see them again.

I am thinking aloud. This is not something I have solved. I like the idea of being a 'Half Hearted Fanatic'. There is no point in being a martyr. That is quite selfish in fact. To be the most use to people, you have to look after yourself. You also have fixed expenses you have no choice but to pay without the tough decision of cutting yourself off. Equally, we need to chip away at the poverty in the world. My chosen focus is learning about Universal Basic Income, and Community Wealth Funds. I was able to empower myself by building sufficient Capital to pay myself a Basic Income. Sufficient Capital to free my Labour. This Basic Income allows me to focus on issues that are difficult to communicate, and hard to monetise, but close to my heart.

Money itself is smoke and mirrors. What really matters is the difference between what we create and what we spend. Reinvestment and building. If you earn £10,000 a month and also spend that, you are as far from Financial Security as someone who earns R3,800 a month, and spends that. Perhaps further because reducing your spending has "Entry Ticket" costs. In theory, you can move to a cheaper country. In theory, you can move out of your neighbourhood that has become increasingly expensive to live in. In theory, you could quit your job and go live in an Ashram and teach Yoga. Spend next to nothing completely inconspicuously.

But gaining Financial Security is not a simple case of picking a new life from a menu. It is a tough, social, and emotional journey. It is a communal journey. It is about asking tough questions about how we spend our money. Tough questions about how we spend our time. Tough questions about what we expect of people, and what we offer. I believe the tools are there to solve these challenges. The hardest questions are internal ones. Why if the tools are available do we spend so much time shouting at each other? Why are we trying to burn things down rather than build things up?

I believe the way to end Poverty is directly. If we can figure out how to finance the bare minimum to allow everyone to participate in society. To participate in a connected, interdependent society. This is not a Utopian Ideal. We have a painful history of Imperialism, Slavery, Mercantilism, Nationalism, Feudalism, Fascism, Communism, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, and various other ideological feuds to learn from. We are slowly building institutions, laws, and constitutions that treat people better and make us work as better Custodians. We fail. We learn. We change. We cooperate.

We can look around the world at Best Practices. We can learn from each other. We can get better at listening. The tools are here. The intent is here. We are getting better at communicating. We are getting less prejudice. Our eyes are being opened to the people beyond our horizons we are connected to.

Let's take what we have learnt, and build.

Cairo

Cairo, which now has a population of 9.5 million, has long been an important global city. It managed to avoid Europe's late middle ages stagnation, but being a key trade city, got hit by the Black Death more than 50 times between 1348 and 1517. This reduced the population to between 150,000 and 300,000. Then a new route around the Cape of Good Hope was opened which allowed spice traders to avoid the city. When the Ottoman Empire took control, Cairo became second fiddle to Constantinople/Istanbul. Napoleon arrived in 1798 and the population was still just 300,000. The joint British/Ottoman forces defeated the French in 1801. Although the British left, immense debt was built up in the public works to build modern Egypt. This was used as a pretext for British invasion in 1882. By the end of the 19th century, just 5% of the population were European, but they held most of the top Government positions. World Wars, Cold War, Energy Crises and rising Nationalism came next. Being an important city is volatile.

Cairo Citadel

Istanbul

Hagia Sophia

Istanbul was once known as Constantinople and Byzantium. Its commercial and historical centres, and two thirds of its population, are on the European side of the Bosphorus Strait (which separates Europe and Asia, there, a little further North you have make up other play play divisions). Istanbul is the world's 7th largest city proper. It was founded in around 660 BCE as Byzantion, and reestablished as the Imperial Capital of Rome by Constantine (the first Roman Emperor to claim conversion to Christianity) in 330 CE. It stayed the Capital of the Byzantine Empire after the fall of the West, and became the capital of the Ottoman Empire when it was conquered in 1453. The population of the city has increased tenfold since the 1950s, as migrants have come to the city in search of a better life.

Istanbul

Manchester

For a relatively small island, the United Kingdom has a lot of flavour. People can tell from accents which city others come from even though these cities are neighbours. While language pulls us together, people clearly value signals of where they are local. Manchester is the second largest city in the UK. It's unplanned urbanisation was on the back of a textile boom which lead it to become the world's first industrialised city. Before industrialisation, most of us would have been 'different but rural'. The underlying sounds of our lives would have rhymed. Cities bumped up the extremes. Wealth and poverty. Boom and bust. The cities population peaked in 1931 at 766,311 (530,300 now, with 2.7 million in Greater Manchester). Manchester lost 150,000 jobs in manufacturing 1961 and 1983. Creative destruction, or just destruction, depending on whether you landed on your feet. In times of change, local is something you can cling to.

Manchester Montage

Lagos

One way of looking at the current political tensions is a shift from Left-Right, to Local-Global or Rural-Urban. The first was an ideological conflict. The new way doesn't need to be. It is easy to forget how dramatically the world has changed in the last couple of hundred years. Industrialisation, urbanisation, travel, and massive reductions in child mortality have put the rules we live by under tension. The metropolitan area of Lagos has a population of about 21 million people. The largest city on a continent that has been turned upside down. Cities are a natural place to go to try get on your feet. The population of Lagos increases every year by about 275,000 people per year. Rural areas lend themselves to conservatism. A place to retreat to what you know. Where we feel comfortable. Cities force edgy change where we discover what we don't know. Today's Lagos, like today's Dhaka, Tokyo or Jakarta is where we go to be part of the change.

Karachi

Now one of the 10 biggest cities in the world, the area surrounding Karachi has been inhabited for millennia. It only became a fortified settlement, and the seeds of a city proper, in 1729. The growth was spurred by becoming a major seaport connected to an extensive railway network. At the time of the Partition of India in 1947, the population was still 'only' around 400,000. It became the primary destination of Muslim immigrants from India in the 50s and 60s. Pakistan has not had a census since 1998 (at which time less than 10 million lived in Karachi), but the population is estimated to be anywhere between 15 and 24 million people. An estimated 45,000 new migrants settle in the city every month. It is a melting pot of people from all over Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

Delhi

Delhi Map

The National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT) is both a city, and a union territory of India. Almost 17 million people live there, and the urban area which extends beyond the NCT is home to over 26 million people. Delhi is home to an estimated 23,000 US$ millionaires, but half of the population live in slum areas with inadequate provision of basic services. Reading that reminds me of the challenges facing Cape Town. I love the idea of 'sister cities'. At city level - politics becomes less abstract given the obvious contrasts, and real world implementation challenges. Delhi is sister city to New York, London, Moscow, Ulaanbataar, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Seoul and Fukuoka. The bigger things get, the more abstract they get. When it comes down to conversation, and listening, we can start to taste the common ingredients.

Chongqing

Chongqing Skyline

Chongqing Municipality

Chongqing is one of five National Central Cities in China. The populations of cities are difficult to measure as they grow more organically than countries without the constraints of borders. The Metropolitan Area includes those in the less populated commuter belt. For Chongqing, that includes 52.1 million people. The urban/rural definition is fuzzy and based on population density and infrastructure. Chongqing's has 36.7 million people. The 'City Proper' is more clearly defined by legal, or political, boundaries. By that definition, only 8.5 million people live there. In 1950, the world's urban population was just 746 million. By 2007, more than 50% of us were living in cities. The Chongqing municipality was created as a merger of 43 counties in order to spearhead China's western development.

2015 World Urbanisation Map