Jeremy Smith April 19
I’m sitting here in London with fingers crossed - on Friday I’m due to fly to Chicago, a city I haven’t been to since I hitch-hiked round the States, um, quite a few years ago… I keep looking at the web to see what mood the Icelandic Gods are in, and whether they will relent in time to let me fly.
My reason for travel – our world organisation of cities, UCLG, has its Executive Bureau meeting there, at the invitation of Mayor Daley, and I am helping with the planning of UCLG’s City Leaders Summit, hosted by Mexico City in November.
Meanwhile I have been watching the amazing BBC TV documentary “Welcome to Lagos” which looks at the hard and enterprising lives of that mega-city’s poor, including the scavengers on the city’s rubbish dumps… an echo of the dust heaps evoked by Dickens in “Our Mutual Friend”, plus a practical demonstration of how to live the EU’s waste hierarchy (reuse, recycle…). Some think today’s Lagos is the reality of tomorrow’s city, and that we should accept and celebrate this. I am not convinced by this argument, however much we admire the resilience of the Lagos-ians, and the commitment of their mayor.
