Boredom in a Globalized World

At the center of the city of Kashgar, on the far western edge of China, is a city of twisting streets lined by mud and brick buildings dating back centuries, to when Kashgar was a trading post along the Silk Road. The Chinese filled in a moat to create a ring road back in the 1980s, and built a highway through the middle of the historic center a few years later, but this historic urban core remained largely intact until recently. Today, Party officials in Beijing have issued a death sentence to historic Kashgar, citing earthquake-preparedness as an excuse for removing the largely Muslim population and leveling the neighborhood house by house as the residents leave.

I've never been to Kashgar; and yet, I find this news deeply disturbing. Reading a recent New York Times article about the Kashgar "redevelopment" on the heels of Katia's post about the planned clearance and "redevelopment" of Dharavi yesterday got me thinking about the effects that clearance projects have on the sociocultural fabric of our cities, and wondering what local changes might signal in the broader context of globalization.

China and India are the undisputed leaders of the pack in the developing world; anyone looking to learn about how globalization will affect cities in our rapidly globalizing world should look no further than the massive metropolises of these rising giants. Slum clearance is the name of the game in cities of all sizes in both of these countries; in places like Kashgar, such projects break up ethnic and cultural enclaves, spreading their tightly-knit populations across the sprawling, newer areas on the edge of the city. Drew's post on Monday pointed out the danger in not making room for smaller, less commercially-viable artistic and cultural scenes: when the grassroots scene dries up, the entire city's cultural cachet declines. Or, as Richard Florida likes to quote Jane Jacobs as saying, "When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave."

What happens to a globalized city when it becomes boring? Could the decline of cultural diversity eventually undermine growing economic centers? Looking beyond the effect of cultural shifts on cities, what happens to a country in a globalized world when that country becomes boring?

As they become more economically established, India and China are edging in on the cultural and economic dominance of the United States and the EU; what happens to the West once these two juggernauts are operating at full tilt? It's possible that everything will go smoothly. It's also highly unlikely. And with plenty of countries lining up for their chance at some record-growth years (think: Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Vietnam, Malaysia), it's the West that's getting increasingly "boring," to extend the metaphor.

Perhaps that's why the destruction of a place that I've never seen is so disturbing to me: in a globalized world where cities are the new neighborhoods and countries the new cities, the cycle of cultural turnover could eventually make entire regions irrelevant at a pace we've never seen before. It's important to remember that, while many cities are benefitting greatly from the effects of globalization, there is something to be said for keeping some aspects of culture local.


(Photos from Flickr users nakamamin and sake.vanderwall. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Participatory Design in Poor Communities: Beyond the Rhetoric

"Participatory design" seems to be the mantra of the current generation of urban practitioners working with low-income populations. There is growing consensus that local communities should be involved in projects that affect them, both for the sake of their efficacy and with an eye to inclusive cities and governance frameworks. You'd be hard-pressed nowadays to find a development agency pamphlet, municipal government plan, or urban design curriculum that didn't pay homage to "participation."

Although the rhetoric all sounds pretty, the way in which the concept is understood varies widely. In bare-bones cases, it may mean simply keeping users informed about a project. At other times, it may involve getting majority consent. in other situations, designers may study the needs of users and incorporate their interpretations into the project. Going further, there may be processes of community consultation of varying depth. Participation can also involve inclusion of civil society and, less often, grassroots leaders in advisory or decision-making capacities. Much less often, participation means working in-depth with local groups at some or all stages of a project, from design to implementation to post-construction work.

The model of participation employed hinges in part on design professionals' understanding of the role of the architect in such projects. Is it to innovate and present people with what the professional considers a better space? Is to study and interpret local conditions? Is to to balance user needs and desires with considerations of design, engineering, costs, regulations, etc.? Or is to facilitate a bottom-up process of design and implementation? Equally if not more so, the mode of participation possible depends on the ways in which the community itself is organized.

In Pune, India, the ground has been laid for a precedent-setting model of community participation in housing design and slum upgrading. There, a network of poor women's collectives known as Mahila Milan ("Women Together") are planning to mobilize around 700 families in 7 slums to participate in design and construction to upgrade their homes as part of an incremental housing strategy developed in partnership with SPARC, an NGO that supports their work (and which I work for), and an international group of architects led by Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson.

Upgrading is taking place under a scheme administered by the Pune Municipal Corporation that offers subsidies of Rs.300,000 (10% of which comes from a beneficiary contribution) to eligible households living in structures made of recycled materials for rebuilding 265 square-foot homes on roughly the existing footprint. The scheme also provides for improvement of infrastructure, roads and basic amenities. (Using government subsidies to promote incremental upgrading at the settlement level and preservation of well-developed structures is itself a landmark move by the PMC, and came in part out of negotiations and collaborations with SPARC and Mahila Milan over years.)

Housing designs and settlement layouts will emerge out of a participatory process facilitated by Mahila Milan, which has been active in the communities through savings activities and other community work for over a decade, in most cases. The strategy uses house models and other visual aids as tools for participatory design and promotes cluster development to enable consensus on rearrangements that will increase pathways and public space. A major aim is to create structures that will allow families to increment their homes over time and to maintain the existing settlement layout as far as possible to preserve social networks and the urban fabric.

In the project, Mahila Milan will also lead a community mobilization process, complete household and plane table surveys, secure consent letters, and help manage construction, which will be implemented through local labor. The idea is that the pilot project will be a springboard for Mahila Milan to explore this process in other locales that they work in across Pune and India and to manage as many aspects of the process as possible.

How is it that grassroots collectives of poor women can participate in the project to such an extent? To understand that, you need to look back to 1984, to the pavement slums of Mumbai. That was where a group of development professionals that formed an NGO called SPARC mobilized the first Mahila Milan groups organized around credit and savings activities. SPARC was aiming to develop new relationships with the urban poor and increase the participation of women in order to ultimately promote their mission of improving access to shelter, land and basic amenities for the urban poor.

Savings and credit increased financial assets, but more importantly, mobilized women into networks and built their confidence and financial and leadership skills. Savings and credit became the first core activity in a series of rituals that are both ends in themselves and means for building the capacities of the poor to proactively develop strategies and negotiate around issues of housing, land, sanitation and other basic habitat needs (these include slum surveys and mapping, peer exchanges, model housing exhibitions, demonstration construction projects, and more). Pune's Mahila Milan started with savings in 1997 , but gradually built their capacity to take on construction projects, large-scale surveys, and even a city-wide sanitation program in partnership with the government. It is only because of these decades of groundwork that Mahila Milan are poised to take on this project.

The type of involvement here is "empowered participation." Because Mahila Milan have a vast organizational base; skills in financial management, data collection, construction, and collaboration with government authorities; and staying power, they are able to lead a process in which communities are genuine partners rather than survey respondents or focus group members. Most importantly, Mahila Milan has the capacity to institutionalize and build on their learning from the partnership with design professionals to take work forward.

In the absence of a group like Mahila Milan, designers would likely be limited to talking with men, particularly those with local power, who would co-opt the process when a question of money was at stake. It would not be possible for designers to organize the community in a way that enables deep participation, and local people would not have the skills or systems for completing maps and surveys, collecting beneficiary contributions, and managing construction. Once the architect left at the end of the project, the process would end rather than being scaled up.

Because obstacles are the rule rather than the exception with housing projects in slums, it is not guaranteed that the project will unfold as planned. However, the conceptual groundwork has laid and partnerships formed give us a hint about how participation can genuinely become a reality rather than remaining a cute catch phrase.

Note: The third partner besides SPARC and Mahila Milan in what is known as the Indian Alliance is the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF). The Alliance works in 72 cities in 9 states across India and is an affiliate of Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a network in over 30 countries.

(Images by the team of Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson.)

Rickshaws and Good City Form

There is no more recognizable symbol of urban India than the rickshaws that crowd and crawl through the city like yellow-and-black insects. Although the vehicles themselves are ubiquitous and uniform, each rickshaw has a small hand-painted sign on the back that says "Stop," and this comes in endless flavors — from Retro Bollywood to Arabic Chic to American Graffiti Besides the amusing redundancy (would anyone really not stop?), for me these signs represent diversity within order, surprise within standardization, the organic within organization. Within the regulated urban system that rickshaws conform to, these signs are an element of the unpredictable, something that doesn't quite make sense. Against the uniform structure of the rickshaws, they are individualized and reveal a human hand.

It seems to me these signs say something about good city form: about the need for a well-functioning, utilitarian system to make room for difference within the order, a touch of color and a human scale.

My delight at these signs reminds me of the fascination that many from the heavily ordered environments of the West have with habitats that emerged out of more informal, decentralized processes, of which slums are the most obvious expression in an urban context. It's simplistic to write this off as romanticism. Without minimizing the deprivations that most slum residents suffer, I think it's a natural attraction to places that are designed at a human scale, reveal individual creativity and give a sense of the distinctly local. Although there is clear, tacit order that any inhabitant would be attuned to, this is more organized chaos than top-down regulation. Just like rickshaws squeeze their way through the crevices of Mumbai traffic, space is tight but there's room for maneuvering — and you'd never get anywhere if you followed the rules.

On the other end of the spectrum are environments manufactured at a grand scale, driven by the heavy hands of impatient capital or grandiose master-planning. These are sterile places with assembly-line fixtures and repeating forms, where the human hand is invisible and every movement is predicted by a sign.

Of course, this is an extreme, and the other extreme — anarchy — is equally undesirable. Although they may not carry out their ostensible role in directing traffic, rickshaw signs do give a clue about how to strike a balance in terms of what makes an efficient but rich urban element.

(Photos by Katia Savchuk.)

A Planner's Fetish

What do tourism and slums have in common? Besides the recent "Reality Tours" trend, not much! That's not what the Government of India thinks, though. This year, its national survey department has apparently decided to combine data collection on domestic tourism with that on housing conditions and slums. This means a surveyor "may be visiting you to collect data on your various travels," and "you may be also asked about housing conditions and slums."

So, are they going to ask a middle-class Indian about his last trip to Goa and the condition of his spacious flat in a Mumbai suburb, and then about the needs of slums (in which he's never set foot)? Or are they going to approach a slum household and ask them about their next weekend getaway destination? According to the notice announcing the survey, the government will use this data for planning. I can only imagine the enlightened policy India is in for.

My Indian colleague thinks that this comical combo was the result of a misguided cost-cutting measure, but I think it also says something about the relationship between statistics and planning more generally.

Like most of us in the mainstream, which rational thought has steadily colonized since Descartes, planners have a fetish for numbers. They're easily digestible. They sound important. And supposedly they don't lie. Except that statistics are not neutral, and what you ask determines what you get. If you only ask middle-class Indians about slums, you're going to get a very skewed picture. In fact, even asking about "slums" implies that such a characterization is accurate, even though the term is problematic because, among other reasons, it has strong connotations and imposes a false dichotomy on what is really a complex map of spaces and levels of informality.

Statisticians don't really measure truths, so much as create them by deciding what to ask and of whom. Although the questionable assumptions behind surveys are rarely as egregiously obvious as in this case, surveys are never just a technical exercise — and planning shouldn't be either.

(Thanks to Indu Agarwal, who made my morning when she showed me the notice.)

(Incredible India image from www.indian-tourism.us.)

Housing Post-Disasters

In 1999, the state of Orissa in eastern India was hit by a “super-cyclone” that devastated its cities and villages. Millions were left homeless. Poor and marginalized populations, who make up a disproportionate part of Orissa's population, were particularly affected. In the wake of the storm, relief agencies appeared on the scene to offer much-needed post-disaster aid. For emergency needs like food, clothing, medication and basic provisions, the welfare model employed by these organizations worked well. However, for all its good intentions, this model — in which outside agencies are providers and the poor are beneficiaries — needs re-evaluation when it comes to housing.


The difference between housing built for people and by people is clear in Mundasahi in Cuttack and Chandrabhaga in Konark - two "urban villages" that suffered in the cyclone. In each of these settlements, the Lion’s Club International Foundation, based in Oak Brook, Illinois, built around 20 uniform, ground-floor, one-room structures under their Orissa Cyclone Rehabilitation Programme. These were among 360 rehabilitation housing units for which the club donated US$500,000 in 2000.

These are essentially boxes with cookie-cutter designs that appear to have been air-dropped in the settlements. Designs lack provisions for a toilet or kitchen area. They are totally out of touch with local lifestyles and livelihoods: In the fishing village of Chandrabhaga, there is no room for storing or processing fish. In Mundasahi, a tribal settlement, there is provision for a traditional outdoor earthen stove. The houses are small compared to area standards. In Chandrabhaga, two families must split a house no bigger than 150 square feet, at least half the size of typical huts. Based on community norms, sharing a house undermines the status of these households. In Mundasahi, the structures are nine-feet short of the size of the plot that households hold — a terrible waste when every inch counts. Inside, the NGO erected a simple partition that does not use space well. Taken as a whole, the standardized structures give an impression of lifelessness compared to the rich atmosphere of the organic villages. As a result, many of the houses lie vacant. In Mundasahi, where they are somewhat better integrated, households have done their best to adapt the structures by building extensions.

In the same sites, homes that residents themselves designed and built after the disaster stand as a vibrant counterpoint. Some of these houses were built with the support of loans from the Orissa Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, grassroots group of the poor who, with the support of an NGO, manage savings groups and slum surveys, take on precedent-setting housing and infrastructure projects and negotiate with the government about evictions, basic services and other shelter and planning issues. In this case, households took out loans against their own savings, designed their homes (many learned affordable construction techniques through exchanges with peers in other cities and a few worked through a participatory process with a volunteer architect) and hired local labor for construction — contributing plenty of sweat equity of their own.

By any standard, these are better homes. The families use space in a way that maximizes its efficiency according to the family's structure, activities and culture. A home in Mundasahi includes a covered stoop used for storage and traditional cooking. There is also a kitchen, a toilet area and a courtyard at the back. The interior is also organized in a way that considers the sleeping arrangements, privacy and storage needs of the family. It connects onto a communal roof terrace used for drying laundry, storage, livelihood activities and festivals. These homes become an important asset for the family.

They can be extended over time, as the household grows and more finance becomes available. Because the family helped pay for and design the home themselves, it's a marker of pride and status. Individualized, crafted with attention to aesthetics and in tune with the local typologies, these houses make for better maintained, more interesting, and thereby better functioning neighborhoods. They adapt better to the climate and use money well, as people know what materials are available at what prices.


Post-disaster situations, in which large amounts of relief funding must be spent quickly and affected populations are viewed as victims, accelerates the tendency to build from the top. This will become a bigger issue as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of large-scale calamities. However, the model of addressing shelter deprivations by treating the urban poor as beneficiaries is not limited to post-disaster situations. Many government schemes and development programs are oriented around this paradigm.

One can argue that beggars can't be choosers, but that's missing the point. Poor people aren't beggars, and they have the skills and knowledge to produce the housing solutions that work best for them; in fact, self-construction has always been the primary way of producing affordable housing, despite lack of access to housing finance and rights to land.

Although the cyclone left people in a terribly difficult situation, a crisis is often the perfect opportunity to build or strengthen community-led efforts. The available pools of money are the perfect chance to invest in sustainable and affordable housing — which was an issue before the disaster ever hit. Money is wasted if houses are left vacant or will be obsolete tomorrow. Orienting funding and systems towards supporting local construction processes — before or after the storm — is a more cost-effective investment, creates better homes and neighborhoods and does more to create sustainable shelter and lift families out of poverty.

Photos by Katia Savchuk

Dear India: You do not need your own Dubai.

I can't be the only person who's bored to death with videos like the one here, screenshot'd above, for the Nanocity deveopment north of New Delhi, can I? Obviously, the presentation, with its sweeping aerials and zooming close-ups of crystalized placeholders for buildings is intended to impress.

And yet.

After Masdar, and the Palm Islands, and that insipid Koolhaas Death Star development, these "impressive" videos have become mundane, commonplace. There is the slight tweak to the trope, in this case, of the development's being located in India. Still, knowing what little I do of India's wild and dynamic culture, the change of location actually generates more disgust for the project. Here is a sanitized, plagiarized version of Next Generation Urban Density™ for yet another developing country.

The most irksome thing about these kind of developments is that they completely ignore existing infrastructure. Why not propose a radical rethinking of actual New Delhi neighborhoods by drawing on Indian cultural and building traditions? Dubai is a lost cause, but India has no need to go down this road. In twenty years these generic ecocities are going to look like 1960s housing projects in the US look now: like a terrible, horrible, no-good very bad idea. Building an eco-city from scratch is like burning down your house to get the kitchen stove lit.

So a plea to Indian developers and financiers looking to develop their cities in the coming decades: Dubai is not a model. It is a warning sign. Take heed.

WEEKEND READING: March 8-14, 2008

Lots of good stuff this week, but Item One is a must-read for everyone.

ITEM ONE: This week marked the (unfortunately early) end of South Central Tour, a fantastic, photo-rich blog documenting an epic trip through South and Central American cities with two infamous street artists, Above and Ripo. Take a look back through the group's stops in Rio, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and a bucketload of other cities. (Photo credit)

ITEM TWO: Speaking of South American cities, here's a great article on the idealism, overpopulation, and developing crime problems of Brasilia.

ITEM THREE: Kazys wins for title of the week -- "Take the bus to the internet." The post doesn't disappoint.

ITEM FOUR: Another literary excerpt from Archidose, this one examining the struggle between technology and nature in architecture and urbanism.

ITEM FIVE: Space & Culture provides some great links about "desire lines."

ITEM SIX: Another eloquent commentary on how cities can be used to combat global warming. (Via Civic Nature).

ITEM SEVEN: Karrie Jacobs goes searching for the soul of Times Square, with interesting (and, of course, beautifully-written) results.

Traffic has been abnormally high lately at Where; thanks for the great week. Now you have a great weekend.

Magic of America Image Database Goes Live

The digitization of Marion Mahony Griffin's The Magic of America made a small splash several months ago, but the extensive image library, which contains all 650+ illustrations from the original book, has just gone live this week.

(Click map for kickass large version)

If you like what you see here, don't miss the electronic archive, which is full of drawings, maps, and photographs of buildings from the US, Australia, Japan, and India. It is most definitely worth some perusal.






Links:
The Magic of America Image Database (SAIC Archives)

The Magic of America Main Page

One-Night Hiatus

I just moved today...a process that is draining in every way imaginable. Especially when you do it after a full day of work. Regardless, I'm now settling in and I have a belly full of awesome Thai (if you're ever in Chicago, don't miss Joy's Noodles & Rice.) I have to do some craigslist-ing for a bookcase, though, so I'm taking the night off. In the event that this should cause someone to experience feelings of sadness or disappointment, I've thrown together a mini, mid-week version of Weekend Reading. Let's call it "Brendan is Too Tired to Post Tonight, You Guys" Reading. See you tomorrow.

In case you missed it (which is unlikely), LA has a new Urban Design Studio.

Disturbing displacement results from India's rapid economic development.

Bette Middler takes on interstitial spaces in New York...no, really.