friedrich engels said in “the condition of the working class in england”, in 1844, that the onward march of manchester’s slums meant that the city’s angel meadow district might better be described as “hell upon earth”. today, similar earthly infernos can be found all over the emerging world: from brazil’s favelas to africa’s shanties. in 2010 the united nations calculated that there were about 827m people living in slums—almost as many people as were living on the planet in engels’s time—and predicted that the number might double by 2030.
1844年,friedrich engels在《英国工人阶级状况》一书中说道，曼彻斯特贫民窟的稳固发展意味着这座城市的angel meadow区最好可能被描绘成“人间地狱”。今天，在所有的新兴市场上我们都能找到相似的人间地狱：从巴西的favelas到非洲的shanties。2010年，联合国计算出大约有8.27亿人生活在贫民窟—这个数字几乎与恩格尔时期全球人口数目差不多—并且预测到2030年该数字将翻倍。
last year vijay govindarajan, of dartmouth college’s tuck school of business, along with christian sarkar, a marketing expert, issued a challenge in a harvard business review blog: why not apply the world’s best business thinking to housing the poor? why not replace the shacks that blight the lives of so many poor people, thrown together out of cardboard and mud, and prone to collapsing or catching fire, with more durable structures? they laid down a few simple guidelines. the houses should be built of mass-produced materials tough enough to protect their inhabitants from a hostile world. they should be equipped with the basics of civilised life, including water filters and solar panels. they should be “improvable”, so that families can adapt them to their needs. and they should cost no more than $300.
去年达特茅斯学院tuck商学院的vijay govindarajan连同一位市场专家christian sarkar在哈弗商业评论博客上发布了一项挑战：为什么不利用全球最优秀的商业想法为穷人造房子？为什么不将让那么多穷人生活破灭的窝棚换掉，一起从容易坍塌和着火的纸板和泥泞中搬出来，取而代之以更加经久耐用的建筑？他们规定了几点简单的指导原则。房屋建筑需要使用大批量生产的材料，并且材料需要足够坚固以保证居住者的安全。房屋需要安装有文明生活的基本设施，包括水过滤器和太阳能板。房屋应该具备“可改进”性，以便家庭能够按照自己的需求进行改动。并且每个房屋造价不能高于300美元。
mr govindarajan admits that the $300 figure was partly an attention-grabbing device. but he also argues that it has a certain logic. muhammad yunus, the founder of grameen bank, has calculated that the average value of the houses of people who have just escaped from poverty is $370. tata motors has also demonstrated the value of having a fixed figure to aim at: the company would have found it more difficult to produce the tata nano if it had simply been trying to produce a “cheap” car rather than a “one lakh” car (about $2,200).
govindarajan先生表示300美元这个数字是一个引人注目的点。但是他也辩解道这个数字是有逻辑可循的。grameen银行的创立者muhammad yunus计算得出，刚刚从贫困中挣脱的人们所拥有的房屋价值平均在370美金。塔塔汽车也表示了有一个具体数字做目标的意义：如果公司只是一味的去生产一辆“便宜的”汽车而不是一辆“一万卢比的”汽车（折合约为2200美元）将会觉得更加困难。
the attention-grabbing certainly worked. the blog was so inundated with positive responses that a dedicated website, 300house.com, was set up, which has attracted more than 900 enthusiasts and advisers from all over the world. on april 20th mr govindarajan launched a competition inviting people to submit designs for a prototype of the house.
引人注目显然是起效了。博客上尽是积极的回复，并且还建立了一个专门的网站300house.com，该网站在世界范围内吸引了超过900名狂热追随者者和建议者。4月20日这天g先生发布了一项比赛，邀请人们提交房屋的设计样稿。
why has a simple blog post led to such an explosion of creativity? the obvious reason is that “frugal innovation”—the art of radically reducing the cost of products while also delivering first-class value—is all the rage at the moment. general electric has reduced the cost of an electrocardiogram machine from $2,000 to $400. tata chemicals has produced a $24 purifier that can provide a family with pure water for a year. girish bharadwaj, an engineer, has perfected a technique for producing cheap footbridges that are transforming life in rural india.
为什么一篇简单的博客文激起了如此的创意风暴？显而易见的原因在于“节约创新”—这是快速消减产品成本并且还能传达如此棒的价值的艺术—是当下所风靡的。通用电气已经将心电图设备的生产成本从2000美元降到了400美元。塔塔化工生产出了一种24美元的净化器，能够为家庭提供一整年的纯净水。一位工程师girish bharadwaj完善了生产廉价天桥的技术使得印度郊区生活发生了翻天覆地的变化。
another reason is that houses can be such effective anti-poverty tools. poorly constructed ones contribute to a nexus of problems: the spread of disease (because they have no proper sanitation or ventilation), the perpetuation of poverty (because children have no proper lights to study by) and the general sense of insecurity (because they are so flimsy and flammable). mr govindarajan’s idea is so powerful because he treats houses as ecosystems that provide light, ventilation and sanitation.
另一个原因是房屋是一个反贫困的有效武器。简陋的房屋会引起一系列问题：疾病蔓延（因为没有配置卫生及通风设备），贫穷永相伴（因为孩子没有合适的灯光学习）以及没有安全感（因为房屋十分脆弱且易燃）。govindarajan先生的想法很给力，因为他将房屋视为提供光，通风和卫生的生态系统。
numerous innovators are also worrying away at this nexus of problems. habitat for humanity, an ngo, is building durable houses of bamboo in nepal. idealab, a consultancy, is on the verge of unveiling a $2,500 house that will be mass-produced in factories, sold in kits and feature breakthroughs in ventilation, lighting and sanitation. philips has produced a cheap cooking stove, the chulha, that cuts out the soot that kills 1.6m people a year worldwide. the solar electric light fund is demonstrating that you can provide poor families with solar power for roughly the same cost as old standbys such as kerosene and candles.
许多创新者还担心除此以外的一些事情。一个非政府组织--仁人家园在nepal建造了经久耐用的竹屋。一家咨询公司i很快就会公开一种造价2500美元的房屋，该屋子将会由工厂批量生产，论个销售并且在通风，光照和卫生方面有所突破。飞利浦已经生产了一种廉价炉灶，chulha消除了煤烟—每年世界大约有一千六百万人死于煤烟。solar electric light fund公布能够为贫困家庭提供太阳能，成本与传统的煤油和蜡烛差不多。
profits and other problems
利润以及其他问题
these thinkers, like the advocates of the $300 house, must solve three huge problems to succeed. they must persuade big companies that they can make money out of cheap homes, because only they can achieve the economies of scale needed to hit the target price. they need to ensure sufficient access to microloans: $300 is a huge investment for a family of squatters living on a couple of dollars a day. and they need to overcome the obstacle that most slum-dwellers have weak or non-existent property rights. there is no point in offering people the chance to buy a cleverly designed house if they have no title to the land they occupy. solving these problems will in turn demand a high degree of co-operation between people who do not always get on: companies and ngos, designers and emerging-world governments.
这些思考者，诸如300美元房子的倡导者，必须解决三个大问题才能取得成功。思考者必须使大公司相信自己能从廉价房屋中赚钱，因为只有他们才能产生必须的经济规模以便达到目标价格。思考者还需要保证获取小额贷款的便利性：300美元对于一个住在茅屋每天只有几美元生活费的家庭来说是一大笔资金。并且思考者还需要克服障碍：绝大部分居于陋屋的人都少有或者没有产权。如果他们没有自己的土地那么提供他们购买一个设计精巧的房屋的机会也就毫无意义。解决这些问题反过来则需要2个不那么友好的人同心协力：公司和非政府组织，设计师和新兴世界政府。
however, the exciting thing about the emerging world at the moment is a prevailing belief that even the toughest problems can be solved. and a similar can-do moment, in the late 1940s, offers a striking historical precedent for the application of mass-production techniques to housing: as american servicemen flooded home after the second world war to start families, levitt & sons built levittowns at the rate of 30 houses a day by mass-producing the components in factories, delivering them on lorries and using teams of specialists to assemble them.
然而，在新兴世界令人兴奋的是当下他们普遍的信仰是认为无论多么棘手的问题都能被攻破。20世纪40年代末期是一个相似的积极年代，那是个将大批量生产技术应用于建造房屋的令人惊异的历史开创性时刻：2战后被洪水淹没家园的美国军人们重新开始生活之时， levitt & sons在工厂里生产批量部件，用大货车运送并且找专业团队组装，以每天30所住房的速度建造起了levittowns城。
some emerging-world governments are beginning to realise that providing security of tenure is the only way to deal with the problem of ever-proliferating slums. and big companies that face stagnant markets in the west are increasingly fascinated by the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid”. bill gross of idealab reckons the market for cheap houses could be worth at least $424 billion. but in reality it is worth far more than that: preventing the earth from becoming what mike davis, a particularly gloomy follower of marx and engels, has termed a “planet of slums”.
一些新兴世界政府开始认识到解决不断增加的陋屋的唯一办法就是提供财产安全。在西方面对死气沉沉市场的大公司越来越被“金字塔底部的商机”所吸引。idealab的bill gross估算廉价房的市场价值可能至少达到4240亿美元。但是现实生活中其价值远远不止这些：防止地球变成马克思和恩格斯的狂热阴沉追随者mike davis描绘的样子—“茅屋世界”。