Luís M. A. Bettencourt
speaker
816 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Luís M. A. Bettencourt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So a lot of our work at the moment has to do with informal settlements or slums, particularly in developing cities.
So it's not our cities here, but there's a parallel history here too, but probably too long to tell.
And so there are a lot of poor people that are coming to cities and living in what
we would identify as poor circumstances.
You can ask, we're doing actually a survey about this, why are you there?
Isn't this a terrible situation to live like this?
Most people say, no, no, no, I like it.
I live much better than I lived in the village, and my life can improve.
So we have to try to understand if this is a permanence condition or a temporary condition where people are acquiring, not to say it's perfect, but acquiring more agency and more possibilities, more pathways to improve their life.
That's one aspect of it, which is more the individualistic perspective.
But the other aspect of it is that in cities, we invented historically a lot of the social supports, which mean that being poor in a city is typically not being completely unsupported because there's social services.
I'm going to rattle a list.
And of course, there are insufficiencies about this in every city.
But there are social services, there are shelters, there's public housing.
There are a bunch of things that allow you, there are public spaces, there are streets, you know.
So there are things that you can enjoy and have that are not mediated by money.
Right.
You don't have to have money to get them.
You know, this goes back to the Romans and the Greeks.
They already had some mechanisms.
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