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Check-in to an alternative visual destination:
A journey into the margins of
contemporary cities
Get inspired from the MSF exhibition and prepare to make your own Urban Survivors! This summer while traveling anywhere on the planet spend some time focusing your gaze on people, objects, places, actions, ideas that depict or evoke the daily lives of people living under sub-standard conditions in urban settings.
Enter your photos into the project by posting them using the #myurbansurvivors hashtag. Share your own impressions, pictures or a link to Urban Survivors webpage using #urbansurvivors
Help raise awareness Urban Survivors by sharing the project with friends. Don’t forget to visit www.urbansurvivors.org and become immersed in a different audio-visual journey.
Could you live in just 3,5 m²?
Some people live in even less than 1 m², have no access to safe drinking water and sometimes share a toilet with even 100 people.
Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Athens International Airport invite the visitors at the airport to a “trip” into the margins of contemporary cities. A photo and multimedia exhibition at the “Art & Space” venue of the Departures Level, which is part of an ongoing project of the same name by MSF. It highlights the critical humanitarian and medical needs that exist in urban slums the world over.
The Urban Survivors takes the visitor on a “journey” through five
slums – in Dhaka, Karachi, Johannesburg, Port-au-Prince and Nairobi – where MSF is actively running projects. Featuring the work of award-winning NOOR photographers Stanley Greene, Alixandra Fazzina, Francesco Zizola, Jon Lowenstein and Pep Bonet, Urban Survivors lets the visitor discover more about the daily lives of people in these slums, the humanitarian issues they face and what MSF is doing to address these problems.
In 2009, humanity crossed a profound threshold. For the first time, more than half of the world’s population lived in cities rather than in rural areas. Many people made the move seeking greater economic opportunity, but rapid and sustained urbanisation has swelled existing slums, and spurred the creation of new ones in countries around the world. More than 800 million people now live in slum conditions. That is more than one out of every 10 people on the planet.
Through its work in urban settings throughout the developing world, MSF has first-hand experience of the impact that slum environments can have on public health. Slum residents live in a state of constant vulnerability. Pervasive pollution and unhygienic living conditions breed diarrhoeal and respiratory diseases.
Population density, the lack of proper sanitation, and the shortage of public health facilities mean that other communicable diseases – cholera, for instance – or severe weather can have devastating effects.
Slum inhabitants often must adjust to a life of poverty in a place where there is more violence and more crime, where they are marginalised and discriminated against. Women, children and undocumented migrants are particularly at risk. For most people living in these circumstances, daily life remains extremely challenging.
What’s more, the total number of people living in slum conditions is growing. Learn more: www.urbansurvivors.org
