Life & Wisdom Quote by Stewart Brand

Brand’s provocation flips the usual pitying gaze. “No unemployment” in squatter cities sounds like praise until you hear the clang of it: the absence of unemployment doesn’t mean the presence of decent jobs. It means everyone is hustling because not working is not an option. In the informal city, labor isn’t a category on a spreadsheet; it’s survival infrastructure - selling food, hauling water, wiring electricity, minding children, repairing phones, building rooms one sheet of corrugated metal at a time. Brand’s line is a rebuke to the clean moral geometry of “formal economy good, informal economy bad.” He’s insisting that what looks like chaos is actually a system with relentless incentives and local intelligence.

The subtext is classic Brand: pragmatic, techno-ecological, allergic to romantic despair. By framing squatter cities as places where “everyone works,” he nudges readers to see them not as failures of modernity but as its default setting under mass migration, housing scarcity, and uneven growth. It’s also a subtle critique of development policy that treats informal settlements as temporary blemishes to be erased rather than durable urban forms to be serviced, legalized, and upgraded.

Then comes the blunt demographic shove: “One-sixth of humanity is there.” The statistic is doing rhetorical work, yanking the topic out of the charity lane and into geopolitics. When he adds “soon…more than that,” the warning lands: this isn’t a marginal problem. It’s a forecast. Ignore these cities and you misread the future; understand them and you’re forced to rethink what “work,” “city,” and “progress” actually mean.