There's been a Facebook conversation about Tivoli Gardens (in west Kingston), a modern development replacing a notorious slum.  It's going to require some effort to transpose critical parts of the conversation here. But just a small note to myself:

The new development (which epitomizes many of the shortcomings that could be expected) is presented by its originator as the inevitable solution to the horrible squalor it replaced. My main point, however, is that, as much as being an act of foresight and mercy, the development is an expression of ideas of modernity that were then sweeping Jamaica but also the entire westernized world.


TIVOLI GARDENS

Mr. Seaga might be the most intelligent politician in Jamaica's history (with an intelligence far above my own), and he describes the squalor of Back-O-Wall so eloquently that he almost has me as a believer in his solution (as he has in much else that he has done). I believe, however, that there are glaring shortcomings in that solution. I could get easily lost in the wilderness of issues around governing a country, or about the sad state of the world. So I'll try to be brief, while congratulating the ex-PM on his herculean effort to better his constituency. The vision for Tivoli was the vision for "progress." The world keeps getting better if you simply supply it with modernity--roads, electricity, piped water, gutters, flush toilets, sewers, high rises, and so forth. A lot of these supposed solutions have been installed globally in the last half century...but the world is not getting better, it is getting worse. Since Tivoli was built, in a mere 50 years, 60% of the world's wildlife has vanishes, and human population has more than doubled. So we have a depleted natural world and an over-abundance of people, myself included. Even if crime has subsided in Tivoli (and I don't know if it has), crime has not subsided around the nation. If the Tivoli model had helped to slow crime around the nation, that would be a plus. But national crime levels seem to have risen faster rather than slower in the last 50 years. Something is wrong with the model based on progress, and we would be better off knowing what it is, and what to make of it.