Can Technology Save the Cities of Developing Countries?

Abstract

The word technology continues to be used in vague ways. For the layman, technology is the way we do things with tools and machines, a blend of capital, and embodied knowledge. Dictionaries specify that it has to be practical and aim at material production. For years, economists defined technological change residually as a rise in production that cannot be explained by added inputs. Effects of variations in scale and in composition of output were later withdrawn from the residual, leaving technology a miniresidual. Clarence Ayres spoke of technology as tool-using behavior, something with empirically verifiable effectiveness, hence easily developmental if free inquiry were allowed. In the 1 940s he still saw the physical aspects of tools as preeminent, not only in the production of goods, but also in the conditioning of communication and organization[Ayres 1944]. During the 1950s, however, Ayres shifted toward the view that symbols and organization, or even symbol-organized activity, could themselves be either technological or ceremonial, just as an artifact could be either a tool or a fetish. What mattered was the possibility of improvement