Dharavi III: The Rules of the Game

This is Part Three in a series looking at Dharavi, a mostly informal township in Mumbai often referred to as Asia’s largest slum, and the government’s controversial plans to redevelop it. With billions of dollars on the table, tens of thousands of homes and businesses at stake, and the global spotlight shining bright, this case of contested urban space is worth a deeper look.

“The early residents of Dharavi recall that when they entered the area from Mahim station, they had to build an access path themselves as there was no road. People placed rocks on the marshy ground, covered it with mud, and created a dirt road… Today, that same dirt road has become Dharavi Main Road.”
―Rediscovering Dharavi by Kalpana Sharma, p. 25

"My vision would be that it would be transformed into one of the better suburbs of Mumbai – it will be forgotten as any kind of slum – there will be state of the art modern amenities and a lot of happy people living in Dharavi."
― Mukesh Mehta, “Slum in Way of Mumbai’s Progress,” BBC News, 21 March 2007

***

In my previous post, I brought up what becomes obvious to anyone who’s taken even a cursory stroll through Dharavi: that describing the area as one big “slum,” a term that is officially sanctioned and almost universally accepted, is deeply problematic given the ground reality.

Packaging Dharavi with this label is very convenient, however. Not only does it condemn the area as an unacceptable space, but one that needs emergency rescue ― an idea not-so-subtly reinforced in a slide Mukesh Mehta likes to feature in his presentations that shouts, “Support Our Slums,” emphasis on the “SOS.” Ostensibly, the Dharavi Redevelopment Plan is a “win-win” slum rehabilitation scheme that will provide slum dwellers with adequate housing and amenities subsidized through commercial development.

Up close, it’s clear that calling it a welfare scheme is a dangerous euphamism. In fact, the plan enables the government to repossess a luctrative piece of land occupied by a poorer population in order to efficiently clear and resell it, while affording those in the way the minimum possible space and benefits to make this politically feasible. This not only allows large corporate conglomerates to maximize the land’s commercial value (leaving a hefty profit for the state, of course), but also squeezes the poor out of a central piece of land to make room for middle- and upper-classes and “cleans up” Mumbai to make it attractive for upper classes and investors.

The decision to redevelop Dharavi as a township creates the regulatory and administrative conditions for this to take place efficiently. Although taking a holistic approach to Dharavi is necessary for planning things like infrastructure and transport networks, in this context it allows land appropriation to take place in one fell swoop, sets up an authority to organize the process, and makes economic exploitation maximally convenient by limiting contendors to big multinationals and dividing land into convenient pie slices – a “readymade project with a potential to net in excess of USD 1.5 BN” as Mukesh Mehta put it in his presentation.

Authorities have manipulated the rules and regulations governing the area’s development in order to maximize and facilitate commercial development. They have limited the population eligible for rehabilitation to those who can prove residence prior to 1/1/2000 (previously 1/1/1995) and live on the ground floor (70% of Dharavi homes have more than one floor, which means 35,000 families according to one informed estimate!). They abolished a clause that typically requires the consent of 70% of affected households for slum rehabilitation projects. They modified the Development Control Rules (DCR, 1991) to allow the project to demolish non-slum areas, like government-built housing and private property, in the service of a "public purpose." They declared Dharavi a "difficult area", on which basis they raised the Floor Space Index (Floor Area Ratio) to 4 from 1.33, meaning that developers can build for-sale space at a rate of 4 :1 relative to rehabilitation area. This represents a profit in the billions of dollars, while experts have proven that the project could be subsidized through development at an FSI as low as 0.25.

Dharavi was initially a marshy swamp. Over generations, those who inhabited it acted as land developers by gradually creating landfill, pathways, and residential and commercial space. This incremental development is the only reason that the area is habitable in the first place. Besides physical development, this homegrown growth has been a huge creator of affordable housing and jobs, not to mention cultural capital and social cohesion. Yet, rules and regulations are not amended to recognize this investment and functioning system or to support local economic growth. On the other hand, the rules of the game are happily and briskly changed when it benefits the other players.

Dharavi was ignored when it was on the periphery of the city (The city’s main water lines initially plowed right through Dharavi without serving residents. It was only to prevent nuisance and contamination when people understandably hacked into the line to access water that the government provided this basic service.) Now that the Bandra Kurla Complex has re-oriented Mumbai’s financial compass and land values are high, it’s a convenient time to want to help. It’s the kind of charity that comes with a price tag.

(Dharavi 2014 image from Mehta's presentation at the Urban Age conference, SOS image and sector map from his "Slum Free Dharavi" presentation.)

Dharavi II: Does This Look Like a Slum?

This is Part Two in a series looking at Dharavi, a mostly informal township in Mumbai often referred to as Asia’s largest slum, and the government’s controversial plans to redevelop it. With billions of dollars on the table, tens of thousands of homes and businesses at stake, and the global spotlight shining bright, this case of contested urban space is worth a deeper look.

“Dharavi is a black hole – something we should be ashamed of.”
-Mukesh Mehta, “Slum in the Way of Mumbai’s Progress,” BBC News, 21 March 2007

“Asia’s largest sprawl of squalor – the Dharavi slum – breathed below.”
-Aditya Ghosh, “Final plan for Asia’s largest slum ready,” Hindustan Times, 07 February 2008

“Dharavi has always been a permanent eyesore to foreign travellers flying to India.”
-“Blueprint for a new Dharavi,” The Financial Express, 17 June 2007

Dharavi is almost universally branded as a massive “slum.” This terminology is taken for granted in most mainstream media accounts, government designations and the popular imagination. In fact, the planning authority for Dharavi is the state’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority.

Even in the legal sense, this term is an inaccurate generalization. According to Sharad Mahajan of MASHAL, an NGO that managed GIS mapping and data collection for the government’s official survey of Dharavi, the 59,316 "slum structures" counted in the survey occupy around 396 of 590 acres. The rest of the area includes government-owned properties (including buildings developed under previous upgrading schemes), a Tata power station, a BEST bus station, Mahim Nature Park, a cemetery, railway facilities, private industrial and residential buildings, and streets (many paved by the municipality).

Koliwada, a historical fishing village that existed before Bombay did and has historical documents attesting to that, was never a slum — a fact finally recognized by DRP authorities in early 2009, when they agreed to exempt the area from the redevelopment plan. Kumbharwada, a community of potters who migrated to Mumbai after a drought in their native Gujarat, were afforded "Vacant Land Tenure," a unique tenancy arrangement, in Dharavi by the Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1932. There is also the Transit Camp, originally temporary structures built by the government for people displaced by infrastructure projects; decades later, this is a relatively well developed commercial and residential area. Matunga Labor Camp, has housed municipal sweepers for over 50 years. There are also chawls built by the Bombay Municipal Corporation prior to 1940. Many of these areas are now officially labeled slums, which seems legally questionable, even if it is permissible.

When you look beneath the surface at the parts considered "slum areas", the term seems equally problematic. Does the ICICI bank on 90 Feet Road count as a slum structure? What about the Sri Siddhi Vinayakar Temple, the 120-year old Dharavi Mosque or St. Anthony Church? Kala Killa, a fort built by order of the Governor of Bombay in 1737? The three-story Gurudutta Gym, home to one of Mumbai’s champion bodybuilders? The London-trained cosmotologist’s clinic, blood and X-ray labs, cyber cafes, lawyers’ offices? The air-conditioned stores selling gold jewelry and high-end electronics? The schools, the bakeries who stock stores across the city and 13 Compound, Mumbai’s unofficial but main recycling center? The offices of countless NGOs and associations of every creed and culture? The streets that look like the old city of Jodpur or any small town in India or Tokyo minus a few decades? With more than 80 distinct neighborhoods, over 600,000 people, and a "GDP" of USD 500 million, by all measures this slum looks suspicously like a city of its own.

This is not to say that Dharavi is without serious problems. Many parts of Dharavi are overcrowded and suffer the effects of a lack of provision of basic civic services and amenities. Many structures use recycled materials, reflecting owners’ poverty and lack of access to finance. Dharavi needs support to develop. But it should be obvious by now that the label "slum" is inappropriate.

"Slum" is not a neutral descriptive term, but a highly affective one. Sometimes – as in the quotes I introduced with – the biases are clearly spelled out. Even when there are no blatant stereotypes, "slum" is always shorthand for blighted, dirty, dysfunctional, unacceptable. The myth of Dharavi as a uniform slum is reinforced by cliché imagery of sprawling corrugated tin roofs and garbage-choked lanes, repeated on the government’s websites and presentations and most mainstream Indian papers. Rhetoric and images evoking Dharavi’s scale (“largest slum in Asia,” “sprawl of squalor”) further dehumanize it and inflate the “threat.” Middle- and upper-class Mumbaikers have no reason to dispute the term, likely never having set foot in Dharavi.


This is not a neutral misunderstanding — packaging Dharavi as one big slum serves a clear purpose. Although there is no single actor behind it, the PR campaign that brands Dharavi as such is so masterful that the inaccurate and loaded term is assumed to be a fact by most and has provided unquestioned justification for the government’s developer-driven redevelopment plan.

(Photos by Katia Savchuk. Photo collage of Dharavi and Tokyo by Matias Echanove (www.airoots.org/www.dharavi.org).)

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.)

Dharavi I: A Tale of Two Cities

You may have heard of Dharavi by now. This vast (largely) informal settlement in central Mumbai, which has seen a media blitz after being featured in Slumdog Millionaire, was already under a brightening international spotlight on account of being the focus of a multi-billion dollar government redevelopment plan and possessing the false moniker of being “Asia’s largest slum”. Adopted in 2004 and in action since 2006, the plan slices Dharavi into five sectors to be awarded to giant developer consortiums through a competitive bidding process. In exchange for re-housing eligible households in 300 square-foot flats and providing some requisite infrastructure, amenities and commercial space, developers win the right to build developments on the rest of the land for sale on the open market.

Architect Mukesh Mehta – who designed the plan and was appointed official consultant by the Government of Maharashtra (his previous experience was in luxury developments in Long Island) – has widely marketed the plan as a win-win solution: a model of slum redevelopment through public-private partnership to be exported around the world. Residents, local activists, and international critics have called it a thinly veiled land grab.

The project is ridiculously lucrative, owing to the high potential commercial value of the land. Once a no-mans-land on a peripheral marsh, 590-acre Dharavi has found itself in the center of globalizing Mumbai, surrounded by three major railway stations, a bus station and the two major east-west link roads. Most importantly, it is flanked by the Bandra-Kurla Complex, Mumbai’s new financial hub, where land values rival those of Manhattan and Tokyo.

It is also home to over half a million people, over 80 neighborhoods, and thousands of businesses of various scales. It recycles the great majority of Mumbai's waste and supplies everything from bread to leather goods to surgical thread across the city and the globe - producing USD 500 million in goods annually, according to The Economist. It continues to be the entry point for many of Mumbai's migrants and has been home to many families for generations. It has provided affordable shelter, economic opportunities and social mobility for countless people. I would venture that there are more languages spoken, festivals celebrated, and local organizations operating here than anywhere else in India in a territory of this size. With the exception of the 1992-93 riots, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Buddhists, from all different states, live side by side in peace. Dharavi is home to waste-pickers, leather tanners, computer science students, embroiderers, body-building champions, bakers, potters, lawyers and doctors. There may be a reason Dharavi is shaped like a heart - it makes Mumbai tick in more ways than one.

A recent student presentation I saw called Dharavi a case of “contested urbanism.” It’s a case of contested everything: land, identity, power, aspirations, economics. The conflicts playing out in Dharavi are a microcosm and a test case of whether there will be any space for the poor in tomorrow’s global cities.

I have been lucky enough to have a front-row seat on some of the events related to Dharavi’s redevelopment over the last 1.5 years. I helped draft and field test the official baseline socioeconomic survey for Dharavi. I attended meetings of the now-official expert advisory group on Dharavi. I helped run two participatory design workshops in the area. I facilitated visits for Swedish Parliamentarians, the Governor of Sao Paolo, and a number of journalists and student and professional groups. I published two articles about it. Most importantly, I have walked there, eaten there, played tag, danced, made friends.

Over the next few months, look out for a series about various aspects of this “city within a city” and the visions (and nightmares) it has inspired.

(Photos by Katia Savchuk (not the satellite image - that's from Google).)

Transition States

Development, use, abandonment, reuse, demolition, redevelopment. Transition states. It seems that everything is in transition, but here I'd like to focus on the span of time between clearly defined places like factories and forests.

Development includes combining separate elements into new forms, like making something out of legos. Materials are assembled into buildings, which in turn form cities. This may fulfill a need or function based on reactions to things that came before. In this sense, new things embody the past.

When a thing no longer serves its purpose, it is often abandoned. At this point it can be reused in its current form, reassembled into something new, or destroyed. But it can never really be destroyed. Nearly imperceptible parts remain in circulation. They integrate with other things. They may haunt us in ways more tangible than the ways we haunt places. Smoke can be like a ghost that haunts us.

If left abandoned, things are said to return to nature. Not that they ever left, but they can again be transformed into something else. There is a period of transition. For a building, this may be when weeds start to grow around and within it, or when other life forms make it their home. Eventually it may be enveloped by a forest.

Plants are often considered therapeutic, like Mandela's prison garden. They are also zoned and regulated. We put them in our cubicles, malls, streets, airports, and they represent healthier locations. Why are the places we work not healthy in their own right? How did the real or perceived separation between healthy environments and work environments come about? What was the transition like? And how do we alter the resulting state?

We might consider what happens to the things we develop and abandon. Ideally they are reclaimed, reassembled, or disposed of with care. This is how we prevent a haunted world. Maybe this will help us improve the quality of work sites, or even change the nature of our work. As unhealthy places are abandoned, there is hope for transition. What will this transition be like?

In animation, creating a transition requires a momentary destination state. Maybe we can learn from this. If we envision a solution to each problem that confronts us, clearly defining our origin and destination, we should find improved transitions. Many people are doing this through ecologically oriented design, entrepreneurship, policy, architecture, education, activism, engineering, and other pursuits. Inclusive planning can help us work towards well conceived destination states. We'll still face the unexpected, but we can keep experimenting and solving problems as we move closer to where we hope to be.

(Credits: Photo of transitional space in Harlem by Camilo Jose Vergara of Invincible Cities. Photo of plants growing on an abandoned house from Houses of Tung Ping Chau. Photo of Nelson Mandela in his prison garden from City Farmer News.)

Slumchitecture

While policymakers — backed by real estate developers, the development industry, and the pressures of global capitalism — are pushing slum redevelopment models that replace informal settlements with high-rise blocks, some urban practitioners are using slums as models for redeveloping decaying neighborhoods in the West.

Architect Teddy Cruz drew on design elements he observed in the shantytowns of Tijuana to inform a redevelopment plan aimed at reintegrating poor immigrants into the fabric of a gentrifying town in Hudson River Valley. He previously incorporated Tijuana's lessons into a design for a residential complex for Latino immigrants near San Diego.

Cruz is one of a growing number of architects and other professionals looking to informal settlements for lessons on good urban design. These practitioners point out that, for all their deprivations, slums exemplify many of the textbook qualities that make up strong urban environments: low-rise, high-density, mixed use. They are home to well-functioning public spaces, heterogeneous communities and aesthetically interesting spaces. They promote safety by channeling "eyes on the street."

In an age where sustainability is the keyword, slums are "green" in their efficient use and reuse of materials for construction and livelihood activities. They are highly walkable, often represent optimal utilization of space and are easily adaptable to changing user needs.

Some have also argued that the decentralized, informal production processes and blending of live-work spaces that slum typologies allow represent a restructuring in line with the demands of a post-industrial economy.

In February, no less than Prince Charles lauded Dharavi — a vast slum in central Mumbai that he visited in 2003 and has since become the focus of a multi-billion dollar redevelopment plan — as a healthy antidote to built environments created through a "brutal and insensitive process of globalisation." He suggested that "it may be the case that in a few years’ time such communities [as Dharavi] will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have a built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living.”

It seems that slums are the new utopian landscapes — and they couldn't be more different than the neat segmentation and uniformity of the previous generation's suburban and modernist dreams.

While the West is trying to recapture something lost, many slum inhabitants can't wait to get out. Slum residents who are relatively wealthy, better educated and young and who live in well-developed slums in cities where building-living is the norm (which are also the ones that designers are emulating) often strive for the privacy, social mobility and security that high-rise buildings connote. On one hand, you can argue that their face-value aspirations are unreliable because they have not been presented with another version of what it means to be modern, middle-class and legal. But all of our preferences and judgments are similarly socially conditioned. Is this a case of "you don't miss it 'till it's gone"? Or is the grass always greener?

Equally eager to leave slum settlements are those on the other side of the spectrum from Dharavi, where there is no public space to speak of, no more than half of the family fits in the house at a time, and you risk getting hit by a train or falling off a water pipe when you go outside. Although such places remind us of people's capacity for ingenuity and survival and can be aesthetically interesting, no one actually wants to live here.

There are many places in between, and overall, I would guess most inhabitants of slums would prefer to preserve their current settlements and stay in ground-floor structures that they can increment over time. And there's a lot to learn from these well-functioning, organic neighborhoods.

Those who use "slum" as a blanket term to connote blight and justify self-serving solutions ignore the diversity among slums and the strengths that many already possess. However, those admiring the forms of certain types of slums should also not glaze over the diversity of slum environments — as well as the people who live in them — to make their point. Let's hope that this wave of excitement about "slumchitecture" does not lead to superficial conclusions, but rather that it energizes debates and generates perspectives that can create better cities in both proverbial hemispheres.

(Photos by Katia Savchuk. Image of Teddy Cruz's model from the New York Times.)

Exploring the Favelas of São Paulo

WEEKEND READING: February 16-22, 2008

You know how once a month or so Weekend Reading starts off with me getting all excited and writing something along the lines of "OMG you guys this week is SO GR8!! Read all of these they are AMAZIN! FURRILZ!"? Well, this is one of those weeks.

Read all of these. They are amazing. For reals.

ITEM ONE: Tijuana's enterprising spirit influences the design of a new affordable housing project in Hudson, NY.

ITEM TWO: Airoots features another great post about resistance to the Dharavi Redevelopmet Project in Mumbai, this time focusing on the efforts of the fiercely independent neighborhood of Koliwada.

ITEM THREE: Hayley Richardson on the obnoxious futility of twenty- and thirtysomethings bemoaning the loss of "authentic New York," a place that most of them never really knew in the first place.

ITEM FOUR: All About Cities pulls some great Lewis Mumford quotes, including the following gem: "The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity."

ITEM FIVE: A spectacular and almost disturbingly detailed map of London, reimagined as an island. (Photo credit)

ITEM SIX: Part IV highlights some recent articles about the Untergunther, a subgroup within les UX, which is itself a group of people "who are on a mission to uncover and exploit the city’s neglected cultural underworld."

ITEM SEVEN: AdaptiveReuse.net is a blog about creative adaptive reuse projects around the world (natch).

See, what did I tell you? That's some good stuff right there. See you next week!

Review: Suburban Transformations

I'll start this review off with an apology to PA Press, since they sent me a review copy of architect Paul Lukez' new book Suburban Transformations back in early November and I'm just getting around to actually reading and reviewing it more than two months later. There was NaNoWriMo, then there were holidays...it has been a crazy winter. And so, without further ado...

There is a lot of discussion these days, at least in architecture and planning circles, about what will happen to today's sprawling suburbs as people wake up to the fact that the current suburban model is unsustainable. There have been calls for a complete return to cities, though I think most everyone knows that this would be extremely difficult if not outright impossible. Cities have physical limits, and density becomes unhealthy after a certain point. Compare Paris to the infamous Kowloon Walled City for an exemplary contrast.

Still, it is widely assumed that the suburbs of tomorrow will look quite different from the beige, cul-de-sac draped landscapes that currently surround central cities throughout much of the developed world. While the speculation about the external changes that will force suburbs to shape-shift is frequent and varied, ideas (not to mention actual visualizations) of what these nouveau suburbs might look like are surprisingly few and far between. Suburban Transformations fills a unique gap in that regard, and the pragmatic novelty of author Paul Lukez's descriptions and images of prospective suburban densification and evolution is what makes them so very impressive.

Stylistically, Suburban Transformations is something of a hybrid; it is too colorful to be called an academic text, and yet a bit too dry to be read purely for entertainment. Still, the mix works well, with the text augmented generously with drawings and photos. The bulk of the book is spent discussing the methods Lukez envisions for changing the shape of traditional auto-centric suburbs as painlessly as possible; his process -- deemed the "Adaptive Design Process" -- is appropriately simple. It offers ways to examine and reshape suburban spaces characterized (ironically?) by their lack of character. If suburbs are to be criticized for their generic appearances, Lukez' process should conversely be commended for its ability to take these incredibly generic places and not only make sense of them, but also to make valid suggestions about how to take supposedly hollow, meaningless places and re-think the context to provide opportunities for site-specific design.

The bulk of the book focuses on a single hypothetical case study of the area around a mall in the Boston suburb of Burlington. Here, the author puts his theories into action, using everything from the topography to the noise levels to the freeway interchange -- yes, the freeway interchange -- to give texture and meaning to the site. The book suggests that Burlington's history as an important transportation route -- established first by Route 128 in the early 1900s and reinforced by the freeway in the 60s, can and should be used as a contextual element to guide the design process for transforming the site. The massive roadway is thoroughly and thoughtfully integrated into all of the adaptive designs that are envisioned during the second half of the book. In the end, the freeway itself becomes more closely related to the site; at the same time that it gives the site meaning, the reconfiguration of that site transfers increased significance to the road itself.

Further exploration of the Adaptive Design Process is helpful to understanding its versatility. As a result, Lukez also takes time at the end of the book for three shorter case studies of Amsterdam, Dedham (another Boston suburb), and Shenzhen. Illustrations are plenty and the ideas presented exciting. In fact, this is perhaps the book's greatest strength: its ability to turn a seemingly dire problem (the proliferation of soulless suburbs) into a golden opportunity. Suburban Transformations envisions the dramatic altering of the suburban landscape. And whether or not the process described in the book is ever widely used, the true value of this book is how effective it is in dramatically altering the reader's perspective.


Links:
Suburban Transformation (Powells.com)

Paul Lukez Architecture

WEEKEND READING: November 10-November 16, 2007 (Guest Post by Colin Kloecker)

Hi, I'm Colin and I usually cover the intersection of humanitarian issues, sustainability, and the built environment over at Blog Like You Give A Damn. But this month you'll find me here, curating Where's Weekend Reading segment. Five Items of interest for you this week.

ITEM ONE: I've been saying it for years: Skyways suck the vitality out of our city streets, "we should tear them all down". Living in Minneapolis/St. Paul I often get blank or bewildered stares when I tell people this (which I probably do far too often), but I feel my argument has been bolstered now that top urban designers Jan Gehl and Gil Penalosa have come out and expressed a similar sentiment.

ITEM TWO: Time-travel ALL the way back to September 29th, 2007 when nearly 100 teams from 70 different cities around the world participated in "Snap-Shot-City" and photographed a day in the life of their urban environs. Billed as an "urban photographic treasure hunt", the resulting photos are a wonderful celebration of city life. The CityDwellers team from London gets credit for the photo this week.

ITEM THREE: Is Jean Nouvel designing the most exciting Skyscraper to hit New York City since the early 20th century? This blogger thinks so. Straight out of a Hugh Ferris painting, 53W53rd is a thing of beauty. NYT article here.

ITEM FOUR: The Dharavi district (an urban mega-slum with over 1 million inhabitants) of Mumbai, India is getting "rehabilitated". So how much space will current inhabitants get out of the deal? Each of the 57,000 families are allotted a meager 225 square feet, no more and no less. Social Design Practice Blog has more, including an interesting memo from Matias Echanove suggesting that the city use Tokyo's revitalization after WWII as an alternative development model - see airoots for more on that. (Thanks Matias!)

ITEM FIVE: 250 Million Urban Planners! Planetizen reports that the $200 XO-1 laptop (the first model designed for the One Laptop Per Child program) will come packaged with Will Wright's 1989 classic planning game Sim City. OLPC plans on getting the laptop into the hands of 250 million poor children around the world by 2012. Want one too? You only have 11 more days.

Until next week, Happy Friday!

Build, Rebuild, Build Anew

One of the best articles written about New Orleans' progress (or lack thereof) two years after its tango with Katrina has come from within the Crecent City, itself. Nola.com's article by Doug MacCash, entitled Architectural Soul of the City at Stake, discusses in great detail the efforts of preservationists to save the city's pre-hurricane architecture; and that label is very deliberate, as there is a general push to save anything, be it from the 1800s or the 1960s, that survived Katrina and the resulting floods.

MacCash's article has particular resonance because it so very subtly ties New Orleans' architectural soul to its overall civic soul; indeed, the city's identity, now in crisis, is intrinsically tied to its built environment. New Orleans faces the intractable problem of having to build, to rebuild, and to build anew. That is to say, NOLA must replace destroyed buildings (build) without further damaging -- and trying to maintain -- its legendary sense of place (rebuild) in a way that avoids painful, regressive kitsch (build anew). This explains the desire to save everything -- no matter the architectural style -- that wasn't truly irreparably damaged.

John Magill, a historian with The Historic New Orleans Collection, is quoted in the Nola.com article as saying "There are so many houses lost. Nobody can comprehend what's gone." This quote is particularly telling because it refers not to Garden District mansions or classic Victorian shotguns, but to the so-called "slab city" neighborhoods built in the post-war era. Magill's lamentation is for the brick-veneer bungalows that can be found blanketing suburban tracts from Seattle to Atlanta, but that "meant a great deal to the people who lived in them." The point being made here is that what has been decimated in New Orleans is not just a physical vernacular, but an emotional one as well. A page of the city's cultural story has been savagely ripped from the binding.

But the name of the game on the bayou is Resilience, and the destruction of New Orleans has presented a dream scenario for architects and urban designers. Visions for the city's future have not been scarce, though traction with public officials, unfortunately, has been. Still, they continue to come pouring in. Most recently, Thom Mayne's National Jazz Center and TEN Arquitectos, Hargreaves Associates, and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz's reimagining of the downtown riverfront have added some lustre to the city's architectural news roster.

Of course, the reality is that these projects could quite possibly fizzle out like their predecessors. "Still," a NY Times article on the proposals points out, "the scope and creative ambition of these projects suggest how architecture could someday be vital to the city’s physical and social healing. Both seek to transform dead urban areas into lively public forums, employing powerful architectural expressions of a democratic ideal."

New Orleans hasn't been a center of contemporary design since "contemporary" refered to the kind of flowery aesthetic that makes today's historicists salivate. In the wake of an event that has changed the very way in which the city thinks about itself, there is a chance that this could change. In fact, while the artistic merits of modern architecture (as with any style) will forever be argued, with its clean lines and frank honesty modernism is (metaphorically speaking) exactly what the city needs

Trahan Architects have come up with what may be the most enticing endorsement of modernism in the new New Orleans with their impossibly sleek update of the city's most beloved piece of vernacular: the shotgun house (pictured above). If built, this house would be a new, flood-conscious building that could easily nestle into a newly cleared lot (build) that draws from the city's architectural and cultural tradition (rebuild) in a way that is neither chintzy nor dishonest (build new). This is democratic architecture at its best.

People will always be wary of buildings built in newer styles of architecture because they suggest, whether it's true or not, that the places around them are changing. But New Orleans is a city that can not afford to deny change, and it can likely be agreed that, after Katrina, it would be particularly bullheaded to do so. Modernism is certainly not the answer to every problem facing this city, and shouldn't even necessarily be the primary architectural mode in the city's reconstruction. But embracing innovative and progressive architectural values, in a place where architecture is so vital to the civic character, can help to bring about important changes in a city desperate for a new raison d'être. The people of New Orleans cannot rebuild simply for the sake of doing so; the hurricane has given them an incredibly rare chance to create a built environment and a community that together form something greater and stronger than the insular, stagnant city that they had before.

It's time to consider building change into the vernacular.


Links:
Architectural soul of the city at stake (Nola.com) (found via Life Without Buildings)

Two Infusions of Vision to Bolster New Orleans (NY Times)

Trahan Architects (Photo credit)

The 21st Century Park

“A 21st-century park is something very different from what Frederick Law Olmsted imagined when he won the competition for Central Park in the 19th century. We have the Internet, we have computer games, we have people flying to Hawaii for vacation, so a park in the 21st century has to be a wholly new kind of thing...I hope that we cast a wide enough net to get truly the first park of the 21st-century. Shelby Farms is certainly big enough to be something very special.”

This little nugget of hubristic bombast comes from Alex Garvin, a former LMDC official (*ding*, red flag), in reference to his current project: a revamp of Shelby Farms Park, currently a twinkling RFQ in Memphis' eye. As it stands, the 4,500 acre park is currently used for a variety of recreational activities, as one might expect for such a huge space. The Shelby Farms Park Alliance describes the park as encompassing "lakes, paved and unpaved trails, forests, meadows, an Agricenter, a farmer’s market, a horse arena, a visitor center, rental horses, skate boarding, disc golf, dog off-leash area, senior gardens, a natural area with a river running through it, a restaurant, government offices and even a prison."

Heh...someone really knows how to end a list and start a party.

At any rate, Garvin was originally brought in to develop a master plan for the park that one can only assume was originally intended to have some sort of developed component. But Garvin's suggestion was to shape the rough natural spaces into the majestic, high-tech Versailles of the Future described at the start of this post. So now the RFQ is calling on L-archies big and small to come up with a way to turn a subdivision-ringed area that claims to be the largest urban park in America into a fully-functioning greenspace-masterpiece-extravaganza. Sounds like a thunderous disappointment waiting to happen, no?

There is naked ambition evident in Garvin's blustery prophesy of trailblazing landscape architecture; the Shelby Farms Park being (vaguely) envisioned is grand, expansive, and very, very important. Yet the conflict of a park five times the size of Manhattan's Central is inherent in Garvin's own description of the challenge. The internet, computer games, and increasingly affordable transoceanic flights are all smaller pieces of the larger problem of technology's tendency to pull or even drive us apart. The logical solution to this problem, in terms of parks and other public spaces, would be to create engaging and inviting parks that, by design, bring people together. To achieve this, theoretically, a designer would need to work on a very human scale, focusing on details that would inspire interaction. To suggest that this can be done over a stretch of 4,500 acres implies a fairly rosy tint to one's glasses.

In fact, "humanly scaled" is most commonly used to describe the very un-grand side of urban design. The human scale is best suited to smaller spaces: pocket parks, plazas, paseos, grottos, playgrounds, and neighborhood gardens. These small spaces very frequently serve as local gathering places, reinforcing the importance of community in the larger context of the sprawling, technologically advanced megacities of the 21st century. They provide a sense of scale (there's that word again), reminding city dwellers that they are a part of something smaller than the cities in which they live. This is vital to city life, and these places are well-used because they are easy to fill up. That sounds a bit circuitous, but the fact is that the places most enjoyed in cities are the places where there are a lot of people around. A healthy amount of people-traffic makes us feel safe, and smaller public spaces are easier to keep busy, plain and simple.

That's not to say that large parks can't work. Central Park in Manhattan, Lincoln Park in Chicago, Hyde Park in London -- all of these are wildly successful urban parks not merely because of their beauty, but because of the high density of the neighborhoods that abut them. These parkside neighborhoods generally hold at least 50,000 people per square mile, roughly the density Jane Jacobs suggested as ideal. But this is yet another example of proper scaling: huge numbers of people require more space to spread out. If, following conventional wisdom, the Upper West Side is the traditional town writ large, then Central Park is the resulting exaggeration of courthouse square.

In addition to the incompatibility of Shelby Farms Park with its surroundings (in terms of creating a great urban park) there are issues of accessibility. The 754 square mile Shelby County, in which the majority of the Memphis area's residents reside, has a population density of just over 1,100 people per square mile. In short, the Memphis area is fairly spread out. With Shelby Farms Park located at the eastern edge of the metro -- 10 miles from downtown Memphis at the closest point -- the only access to the park for almost everyone in the region will be by private automobile. Even ignoring the implicit socioeconomic segregation, this location fails, through inaccessibility, to address any of the problems brought on by increased technology. It is merely a sprawling green space surrounded by sprawl. No matter what the park looks like, it will be accessible only to select people, and is unlikely to encourage an increased sense of community.

A few hundred miles to the north, another Mississippi River metropolis is struggling with an exacerbated version of the problems facing the Shelby Farms Park redesign. Mayor Slay and other residents of Saint Louis made news recently by suggesting that some of the national park surrounding the Gateway Arch -- the city's greatest landmark and monument to Manifest Desitny -- be redeveloped by reinstating the street grid that once ran right up to the riverfront and building a New Urbanist-style extension of downtown, complete with walkable condo-and-coffee-shop neighborhoodlettes. The merits of this project aside, it is interesting to note what the mayor and other St. Louisians describe as the somewhat infamously placid park's greatest problems: it's hard to get to, and there is not much to do.

In a park as large as Shelby Farms, a solid and cohesive landscape is next to impossible; any attempt would create extreme monotony. There will inevitably be a mix of landscapes surrounding specialized areas of activity. No matter how interesting or innovative they are these scattered points of interest will, at best, see the same fate as the Gateway Arch: they will become islands in an ocean of unused open space. But when all is said and done, what is most irritating about Shelby Farms Park is not that it will be nothing particularly special; there is no rule against gargantuan suburban parks. What is truly frustrating is that ths park claims that it can address the critical issues of landscape and public space in the 21st century, when at the most fundamental level, it cannot. Just call a spade a spade.

***

As we struggle to first define and then combat sprawl in the coming years, it will be interesting to see what kind of meaning that wretchedly overused and woefully misunderstood term -- "open space" -- takes on. It seems important to make some distinction between well-designed parks and public places (streets, riverfronts, plazas, etc.) and rural areas, and the wasted and/or misused areas that are so frivolously and irresponsibly labeled "precious open space" by reactionary neo-NIMBYs. Henceforth, "open space" will be used accordingly in posts at Where, while the well-designed places will be referred to either as "green space" or "public space," depending on their intended use.

(Photo from Flickr user motus media.)


Links:

Shelby Farms to Be a "21st-Century Park" (Architectural Record)

America's Great 21st Century Park (CEOs for Cities)

Shelby Farms Park Alliance

Should the Landscape at the Arch Change? (STLtoday.com)

WEEKEND READING: August 4-10, 2007

It's been humid here like you wouldn't believe this past week, but the weekend is supposed to get a bit cooler. (Note to self: stop starting every Weekend Reading post by commenting on the weather...)

ITEM ONE: The US Affordable Housing Institute's blog is both informative and hilarious. Quite a feat, hey?

ITEM TWO: Milwaukee Magazine has a great article up about the unsinkable Whitney Gould, the architecture critic who has played quite a large role in the development in Milwaukee's attitude (and thus, my own) toward design and architecture.

ITEM THREE: The headline takes care of this one - Asia's biggest slum set to turn into India's Madison Avenue .

ITEM FOUR: One Porteño's commentary on (and photos of) Buenos Aires' new $46 million, 16 block tram. Oy. (Found via the excellent Global Voices Online)

ITEM FIVE: Some good news out of New Orleans -- the city's population has reached 60% of the pre-Katrina level.

ITEM SIX: Great post this week on brain drain at the Burgh Diaspora blog.

ITEM SEVEN: In case you missed it, proposals for San Francisco's Transbay Tower from Richard Rogers (ouch), Cesar Pelli (double ouch), and SOM (actually quite good) were unveiled this week. Life Without Buildings points us to some gorgeous animations of SOM's tower and station buildings on YouTube.


That's all for now, folks. Enjoy your weekend!

(Photo from Flickr user fddi1.)

The Brewhaus

When was still living in Milwaukee, I got a call from my roommate one afternoon. A mutual friend of ours had founded a photography club, and he had somehow managed to befriend the security guard of the Pabst Brewery complex and convinced him to let the club tour the old Pabst Brewhaus. The roommate wanted to know if I wanted to come along.

A bit of background: for those who don't know, beer is kind of a big deal in Milwaukee, historically speaking. The city was once the largest German city in the world after Berlin, and the German Beer Barons who built the city's legendary breweries -- Miller, Blatz, Schlitz, and Pabst are the best remembered -- were major celebrities in their day. Many of their elaborate Flemish mansions still stand. And while microbreweries are nearly as ubiquitous as corner bars in the Brew City, Miller Brewing Co. is the only one of the historic brewers left (Pabst still exists, but brewing operations have been contracted out to Miller).

The Blatz and Schlitz complexes have both been converted into residential and office complexes. Pabst's 20-acre complex, however, which sits isolated on a hilltop at the far northwestern corner of downtown, remains empty. With its great smokestack, gothic spires, and the huge red "PABST" lettering that hangs from a skybridge connecting it to a neighboring structure, the 1872-vintage Brewhaus is an imposing landmark on the skyline.

Did I want to come along on a tour of the building? Of course I did. A year and a half later, the complex is finally being rehabilitated and sold off piece by piece in a unique historic preservation redevelopment by Zilber Ltd. While I'm ecstatic to see this fabulous complex so carefully brought back to life, I will probably always remember the Brewhaus as it was the afternoon that I first went inside: broken, decrepit, and devastatingly beautiful. The following photos were taken with an older digital camera (an Olympus D-380, I think) that I've since managed to lose. I couldn't use the flash and had no tripod, so there's a bit of haze in some of these...whether or not that adds to or subracts from the images, I will leave the decision up to you. And so...


(Click the thumbnails for full images.)












Links:
The Brewery

Zilber Ltd.