A long time ago, when I was a columnist at the Las Vegas CityLife, my editor called me up one day and asked if me if I ever wanted to find out what was in the storm drains under the city. And because I have notoriously poor self-preservation skills, I grabbed a Mag-Lite and headed on down.

What I discovered was that hundreds of people live in those storm drains, beneath these neon-lit streets. Some of them are junkies or gambling addicts or winos. A lot of them are crazy, though it’s hard to tell if madness drove them into the drains or if it found them down there in the dark. Whatever the case, there are a lot of them.

And they survive down there. They pilfer materials from construction sites or the dumpsters behind Home Depot and they build themselves shelters, even tiny houses. They build shelves out of cinderblocks and two-by-fours to hold whatever possessions they’ve managed to keep for themselves. They build beds on stilts, so that when the rains come and flood the drains they don’t get washed away. They survive, and dismal and frightening and miserable as it might be, they make a space for themselves, in a filthy, dirty, spooky place that would look to most of us like the penthouse level of Hell.

That is my definition of innovation.

via Inspire Talk.

HT Minh-tue