Trans(actions) : Trans(acciones)

image by UNDP : borrowed from creative commons

By now, many people have begun to forget about the situation in Haiti. As an urban planning student from the Caribbean, I’m constantly thinking about what the future holds, especially now that immediate relief projects are slowly moving towards reconceptualizing and rebuilding efforts. But my mind is severely overloaded these days as I get set to take my doctoral exams in urban sociology, transnationalism and development.

In order to soothe my tiring mind, I often surf the blogosphere in search of short, interesting articles that can help me keep up with what’s happening outside my window and contextualize many of the theories that come my way. This morning I found an interesting report from NPR’s Planet Money on how small enterprises have been flourishing in the tent cities of Port-au-Prince. It’s quite brief, so I urge you to take five minutes and watch it.

Thinkers like Weber, Durkheim, Park, Castells and others have provided fundamental texts on how cities develop and what types of social relations are forged. Some of their ideas serve as starting points for explaining how Haitians are moving forward. Nevertheless, urban resilience needs new theories. There are some smart people already working on this issue, but I think development and urban scholars might find important lessons in situations where state presence is minimal, the physical environment has been reduced to rubble and the informal-formal duality is almost nonexistent.

Here’s a link to the report:

The Pedicure Economy in a Haitian Tent City