This is an extract from the talk given to the finalists of Debating Matters, National Finals 2013 at UCL, London. Debating Matters is a competition for sixth form students, organized by the Institute of Ideas. For more information about Debating Matters, please see: http://www.debatingmatters.com/

Megacities may not be bad for the developing world in every sense. They concentrate population, resources and capital… they may support regional and national economies. However, I want to argue here that ‘Megacities are bad for the developing world’ in the sense that they constitute a threat to the dreams and aspirations of most urban citizens in the global south. In particular, I am worried about the extent to which megacities draw opportunities away from ordinary citizens and expose them to disproportionate risks.

Megacity, Sao Paulo- Brazil

When walking through tall cities of glass towers I do not experience the buzzing atmosphere that one would expect from the concentration of people. Think for example of walking in the city of London on a Sunday afternoon. These are empty, ghost landscapes- functional spaces where people do not live.

In Shanghai, the expansion of the glass city, for example, is threatening the traditional alleys, called Longtangs. To understand life in a Longtang you have to imagine beautiful narrow streets full of activity, with vendors, workers wandering, children running, elderly playing board games and most of all, the symbolic hanging of the clothes to dry. When walking through Shanghai Longtangs I was mesmerized. But when one of the residents said that they were being evicted to make space for glass towers I was sad to imagine those beautiful places, created through centuries of interaction between human and their environment, displaced by empty, glass buildings, monuments to human egos, rather than to human kindness and civilization. This cannot in any sense be a model for our future cities.

Communal Living, Longtang-Shanghai

When cities are regarded only as giant reservoirs of labour, people suffer. This is because, although work is important in people’s lives, people do more than just working. They may be obliged to be in cities if work is there, but cities have to offer as well quality of life and services including access to resources such as water, sanitation and energy and access to education and health.

UN-Habitat estimates that “over the past 10 years, the proportion of the urban population living in slums in the developing world has declined from 39 per cent in the year 2000 to an estimated 32 per cent in 2010”. They argue however that “the urban divide endures, because in absolute terms the numbers of slum dwellers have actually grown considerably, and will continue to rise in the near future.” UN-Habitat estimates that the world’s slum population is expected to reach 889 million by 2020. Even in mega-cities where the proportion of informal settlements has been reduced- especially in Asia- this has been done through evictions and relocations which destroy people’s lives and are hardly reflected in the official statistics.

While the availability of capital may make it possible to complete big infrastructure projects, these projects are unlikely to benefit the majority of the urban population, least of all the urban poor. Take the express highway in Mumbai to check this. While the center of the city is difficult to navigate, because of the continuous flow of people on foot, bikes, motorbikes and other vehicles, this highway is empty. A toll fee becomes a means to prevent the large majority of the people in Mumbai from using the highway, thus giving the richer people the privilege of traveling in less time. Scholars have described this kind of process as a form of “splintering urbanism”. “Splintering urbanism” means that in large urban centers, specially megacities, infrastructure services concentrate in wealthy areas and move away from poorer ones, leading effectively to the fragmentation of service provision. This limits the access of the underprivileged and the working class to basic services. Infrastructure may even pass through the houses of the poor but they lack access to it

The splintering of service provision is also related to resource scarcity. Megacities are often treated as isolated islands of prosperity. But the truth is that this prosperity depends on huge imbalances between the megacity and the broader regions that the city depends upon. These rural-urban imbalances draw giant flows of people and resources that may further impoverish rural areas. Moreover, megacities may export their residues they cannot deal with. In the past, these relationships have led to the vision of the city as parasitic. Cities are not parasitic, they are essential ways of organizing human life, reservoirs of creativity. But when massive growth- both of population and resources- is promoted at the expense of the larger regions where the city is located then there is a danger that this parasitic metaphor becomes real.

Take for example how mega cities are encroaching in their immediate natural environment. I call this “the paradox of the eternal suburb”. On the one hand, middle class urbanites go to the periphery in search of more relaxed forms of life, idyllic dreams or ruralized living and greater contact with nature. On the other hand, this search leads them to destroy the very environment upon which the city depends. For example, there has been in recent years a proliferation of eco-cities in Bangalore, India. Most of them are being built at the urban fringe in gated communities, hosting quite wealthy sectors of the population. Under the premise of eco-cities and using green technologies such as wind energy and solar panels, they draw on the land and water resources that belong to the whole city. Worse enough they are threatening the wildlife landscapes that surrounded the city. When I talked to one of the developers on the construction site of an eco-city she told me that only a few weeks before, in the same spot where we were standing, she had seen a tiger. ‘We are so close to nature!’ she said. I asked her whether she was not worried that their projects were destroying the natural environments upon which these tigers depended. ‘If we were not building this, other would come and would do something worse’, she said. But, to what extents do tigers mind about solar panels or wind energy?

Vincom Eco City

All these issues become now magnified by climate change. The pressing nature of climate change highlights the importance of considering seriously how megacities concentrate risks. Not only populations in megacities are exposed to climate change, but also, its impacts affect mostly the urban poor. The urban poor are often settled in areas with the highest risks, whether this is in flood prone areas or in areas affected by other risks. When floods struck Florianopolis, Brazil, in November 2008, 84 people die and 54,000 were left homelessness. Most of these people had not choice but to live in dangerous slopes where their houses became engulfed by mudslides. The vulnerability of the urban poor to climate change also determines that their reduced capacity for response and after a disaster such as this, their only option may be to continue living under the shadow of risk or move to even more dangerous areas.

Some have pointed out at megacities as providing solutions to mitigate climate change action. They claim that the key to reducing carbon emissions is achieving higher urban densities and promoting the concept of the compact city. But urban growth is highly heterogeneous. In most megacities, urban sprawl- rather than density- is the main feature. In megacities sprawl is only contained by the geography, such as it happens in Mumbai, where the impossibility of growing beyond the water has led to an increase in density at the expense of the cities mangroves- hence increasing the vulnerability of the city to climate change risks and natural disasters exponentially.

What are the best means to achieve high density? People living in informal settlements have demonstrated how they can achieve high densities by occupying urban space, rather than just by growing up vertically. In other places, like in Spain, higher density is achieved by moderately tall constructions, because the habitability of the city. Rather than conjuring visions of megacities, these examples speak to balanced, diverse cities which acknowledge the location of cities within a rural-urban continuum and that provide space and opportunities for all urban dwellers to reach their aspirations.

While high rise may have actually brought about higher densities in cities such as Hong Kong this has been at the expense of their vulnerability to climate change risks, especially heat waves. Moreover, the gains in reducing carbon emissions that follow high density may be small in comparison to the additional carbon emissions produced by the need to manage the emerging risks.

Ultimately we have to ask: what is a megacity and why we need them? They may contribute to bring together a disproportionate share of capital and build labour reservoirs. In doing so, megacities represent nodes in global financial and knowledge flows, rather than places for ordinary people to live their lives.

Vanesa is a lecturer at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit.

Post written in collaboration with Josephine Wilka. Students of the MSc Development Administration and Planning

On the 30th October 2012 at 11am, there was a lot of commotion at the Cumberland Lodge: almost 180 DPU postgraduate students and staff were gathering in the back garden of this beautiful Windsor mansion to have their photo taken. It captured one of the many memorable moments of this year’s Windsor Workshop which was concerned with the subsequent topic: “Dar es Salaam – Negotiating a unified strategy for land use and affordable settlement upgrading”. Some of the students then headed towards the buses to return to London. For them it marked the end of two days full of intense group work, heated discussions, film-screenings from the ground, tricky negotiating and decision-making, certainly the most demanding tasks of the whole exercise. For the other half of the students the challenges of creating a solution to this Tanzanian reality with their stakeholder groups were still ahead. After all, this simulation project was attended by Tim Ndeze, who participates in the actual negotiations on site as a member of CCI (Centre for Community Initiatives)- a civil society organisation. He not only presented an invaluable in-depth local knowledge of the situation, but also, together with Ruth McLeod and Gynna F. Millan Franco, contributed to the excellent movie footage from Dar es Salaam, which had been collected in the weeks ahead. Their team effort allowed DPU students to immerse themselves into the perspective of one of the many actor groups they chose to represent, ranging from international financial institutions to slum dwellers, in order to envision the environment and to connect to the local people through the recordings. Despite the assignment itself being very serious in nature, there was also time to enjoy the historic surroundings, giving the foreign students the opportunity to get a glimpse of the British culture, and to socialise with other participants and coaches over a delicious meal or a drink at the cosy bar. For those that preferred to be more active, there was the chance to show off their table tennis skills, to hit the dance floor for some twists and spins and to explore the vast Windsor Park, ideal for a quick afternoon walk.

Following this period that resulted in defining the strategy, forming of alliances and the establishment of concrete points of action at the Cumberland Lodge, a final meeting of all “stakeholders” was being held at the Royal National Hotel in London, providing the last opportunity to maximise support for the respective actor group’s vision. The students representing slum dwellers, for example, did not let this chance pass by and took the liberty to stage some last minute demonstrations to remind everyone that the voices of the most marginalised should not be forgotten and that it is them who should be at the heart of the solution. With the objective being clear, interests and efforts had to be harmonised – a task which emerged as the most difficult struggle in achieving a comprehensive, far-reaching action plan by all parties involved.

Reflection upon the workshop and its effects shows how profoundly it had challenged many DPU students to engage with the multiple layers of causes and impacts in urban affairs. What’s more, the specific understanding of a region has been highly valued by various Windsor Workshop participants, whose opinion is resonated in the following statement by a DAP student who contemplated about her experience a few weeks after returning from the lodge: “I thought Windsor [Workshop] was fantastic! What I liked most about it is that I now know so much about Tanzania and its development-related problems, I knew very little before.” The benefits of attending far exceeded simply learning about Tanzania: everyone had the opportunity to assume a specific role as a member of one of the various actor groups, and by doing that each one could actively contribute to finding solutions to the many issues Dar es Salaam is facing right now. Moreover, all the activities, carefully planned by the DPU staff, were notably aimed at encouraging students to enhance their ability to work in teams, to think outside the box, to be creative, and to improve their presentation skills. Whether one was a  local government official dealing with  a lack of funds, staff and coordination or a member of a Chinese estate giant trying to develop the land for the people, yet securing commercial interests: working together was crucial to achieve common goals.

What especially made the whole project worthwhile was the fact that the proposals and solutions that have been developed, will be considered by the team of practitioners on the ground in Dar es Salaam, who have sent Tim Ndeze to London to attend to this task. In this sense, DPU students had the unique opportunity of making a real contribution  to the  positive change in some of the Tanzanian communities facing resettlement.

For more images visit the DPU flickr account

Pictures in this post by ©Remi Kaupp

Photo by Flickr member: ©J@ck!

At a public meeting held on 24^th September to discuss UCL’s planned expansion on the Carpenters Estate, Estate residents clearly and collectively stated their opposition to the current initiative. Whilst we fully espouse the expansion of UCL, we believe that such an expansion should take place in a manner that supports and respects local communities.

Ongoing research in the area by the DPU provides insight into community dynamics and aspirations of Carpenters Estate residents. This has highlighted the diversity and vulnerabilities of the groups living on the Estate and its surrounding. Unless active consideration of such dynamics is taken into account, urban regeneration efforts run the risk of resulting in social exclusion.

We therefore support the Urban Lab’s concerns as expressed in its ‘UCL’s Stratford Proposition’. We further urge UCL:

• to engage afresh in its review of an appropriate site for UCL’s expansion;
• that such a review should be undertaken on the basis of revised ‘site desirability’ criteria, to include a clear commitment to the well-being of local and East London borough residents, the active participation of affected communities, as well as engagement with local government;
• that these guiding principles should further be carried through in the formulation and implementation of any future plans.

In carrying out the above, UCL should draw on its founding principles, reasserted in the current UCL Grand Challenges. It could also call upon its wealth of internal experience, knowledge and practice, working with communities, local government and planning in different contexts.

The above statement was produced in consultation with DPU staff members and represents the position of the DPU.

“The future is but the obsolete in reverse” (Vladimir Nabokov, Lance, 1952)

This post – whose title recalls Robert Smithson’s seminal essay Entropy and the New Monuments – tells the experience of the DPU summerLab in Rome, and of its landing into the reality of what we called the Occupation City. 

The New Monuments, Smithson says, are no longer for remembering and learning about the past but rather for helping forgetting a future which is dissolving because of Entropy and Obsolescence. Rome is a city of Old and New (or renewed) Monuments whose role has always been to drive a trend, either visible or hidden, formal or informal, in the urban development of their time. As last year’s strolling exploration, we navigated through these Monuments and the images of the city they wanted to portray when built, and through what they represent today. We started from Corviale, the swan song of the Modernist utopia and its monumental re-signification through the informal occupation of its one kilometre long fifth floor, originally supposed to host never-implemented services and shops. We passed on the Tiber River, through its monumental banks and bridges and its population of gypsies in provisional shanty towns. And by the Roman Walls and the non-catholic cemetery which has colonised their back. And we entered the Campo Boario, neoclassic Monument to the industrial production (of meat), abandoned by the Municipality and become a living collection of people – now Kurdish and Italians but once also Palestinians, Gypsies, Ukrainians – and the stories of how they landed there.

Part of Corviale's fifth floor and its informal housing.

A conversation with the leader of the Kurdish Community in Campo Boario.

Campo Boario and its open and multicultural square constituted a paradigmatic space for our investigation in Porto Fluviale, the squat-occupation we have been working with, today undergoing a process of opening up toward the surroundings exactly through the transformation of its central courtyard in a public square.

The galaxy of squat-occupations is a network of New Monuments, buildings whose re-significations through the (anti-entropic and anti-obsolescing) act of occupying have become the spatial manifestations of the current housing crisis in Rome. Porto Fluviale is one of those. Abandoned many years ago after serving as deposit for weapons and then for uniforms for armed forces, the building, still property of the Ministry of Defence, has been occupied in 2003 by the Coordinamento Cittadino Lotta per la Casa (one of the Social Movements leading the Struggle for Housing in Rome), in its endeavour to concentrate the Struggle on the restitution of otherwise idle and abandoned publicly-owned fragments of the city to the use of the citizens. Both the words use and citizen though are at stake in the political vision of the Movement, and the project of the new piazza challenges both concepts.

The entrance toward the courtyard (photo by Gamar Markarian)

The courtyard of Porto Fluviale (picture by Maria Rocco)

So far, the courtyard has been the centre of the community life and the spatial element that more than anything else has helped fostering throughout the years a sense of collectiveness and everyday life sharing. The day 80 families (about 250 people) from different nationalities – mainly Italians, Ecuadorians, Moroccans, Peruvians, but many more – broke into the building from one of the main gates, Porto Fluviale started undergoing a deep transformation. Its three floors got transformed into houses facing both internal and external side of the C-shaped building, with the dark distribution corridors marked by the rails once used to move the materials around the floors and to the service-lifts. The housing units search for the light vertically, thanks to the widespread use of self-made mezzanines built to reach the level of the big windows whose basis is at 2.50 meters, so to have the possibility of a view toward the outside or the courtyard.

The inner distribution corridor.

The space of a housing unit from the mezzanine.

In spite of the constant risk of eviction (the building is part of a plan through which the Municipality is trying to sell out a number of former barracks to private developers) the community have recently voted to keep the main gate open during the day so to let the people from the surroundings feel free to enter. The process started a couple of years ago opening a tearoom on the ground floor, and went on with the transformation of many spaces, that were once residential and now have become an assembly room, a bicycle workshop, guest rooms (where a group of participant was kindly hosted) and new rooms for skill-sharing activities.

All the talks and the interaction between the community and the participants to the workshop have been driven by the idea of this new space, focus of both worries (in terms of security) and dreams (a finally redeemed image) for its inhabitants. What mostly struck us, in the assembly, was a sentence that sounded more or less like this: “we don’t want to open all the gates and make the new square become a place of passage and circulation like all the other squares around the city: this would simply replicate the current experience of the city, whose public spaces are meant for the capitalistic consumption”. The new square sets aside any capitalistic logic and wants to be the place where to experiment new activities and ways of exchanging and paying back the services that the community will offer. The square is meant to be the place where new alternative lessons can be taught and more lessons have yet to be learnt, where pro-active citizens can meet and exchange their experiences, where the use-value of space takes again over the exchange one.

A moment of the assembly.

The participants’ works helped unpacking, de-codifying and portraying the neo-marxist vision come out from the initial assembly with the inhabitants and their leadership. They highlighted hidden potentialities of the new square, possible ways of portraying its many identities and stories, latent contradictions intrinsic to a project of a piazza that is open to everyone but chiefly to whom is willing to enter: what if the space opens all its three main gates and its sides become totally permeable as already happening for the tearoom? How to open a gate to show something that is other without the risk of losing this otherness itself? How does openness combine with the need for security? And which declension can the term security acquire in the transition toward a post-capitalistic urban space?

The final presentation of the works.

In spite of these open questions, in Porto Fluviale the DPU summerLab has met a community with a complex past and witnessed its will to write a different future. Through the act of occupying the otherwise obsolete Monument Porto Fluviale, its community has inverted the entropic process it was undergoing. Porto Fluviale represents a re-use of a Monument, re-use that though goes beyond a simple notion of renovation or change of use, of retrofitting to accommodate new functions. The piazza calls for a use that is totally new, crafted outside the logic of the capitalistic development and then yet to be discovered. A use made possible through means of occupation, that though, today, leads to question the appropriateness of the verb occupying itself, as remarked by one of the participants to the workshop. Spaces such as Porto Fluviale had their inception through the act of occupying but their raison d’etre nowadays lies in the even more political action of producing space: should we stop saying ‘Porto Fluviale Occupation’ and naming it simpy for its current essence ‘Piazza del Porto Fluviale’?

Many thanks to our local collaborators, Francesco Careri and Laboratorio Arti Civiche – whose preliminary work and constant insights made our workshop possible and cheerful – and warm greetings to all the inhabitants of Porto Fluviale, thanks for such a delightful week together.

What does it mean to transplant two inherently different demographic entities with different and debatable models of organisation against one another in what would otherwise be considered a current urban periphery? What would it imply, in regards to the expected evolution of a site, if the mechanism for transplanting these two entities was seen as definitively temporary and par the existenzminimum? And furthermore, if this be the situational urban problematic, what provocations can be found in critically interpretive readings and what measures should be taken in the form of alternative tactics that could increase their unspoken potential as urban generators?

workshop group walking in Oerlikon district residential park

These are the primary questions that formed the core investigation of the DPU summerLab Zurich held in the Swiss capital from August 6-11. The workshop, entitled Liminal Contours, under the collaboration and facilitation of the ETH Zurich, combined a series of lecture talks, exploratory city walks/site visits, and design charrette exercises. That suggestive title refers to a theme surrounding various suspect activities and alternative forms of development that, although not completely foreign or novel, still stand apart from the generally kosher character of the city and its more conservative development tendencies. It was in fact certain small divergent planning schemes that peaked particular entry points for this line of intriguing urban questioning.

No question about it, like many cities experiencing more rapid population growth, Zurich is expanding. Specifically, the western peripheral village of Altstetten has been a focus of real estate speculation since the early 90s. However, not living up to the hype, the area still retains its neighbouring village character complete with sub-urban style park-and-shop centres. Any serenity seems set to finally change as activities set in the former urban peripheries begin to transplant there along with an expanded rail and tram station.

containers for creative industry start-ups being moved onto the site in Altstetten

The most apparent of these new developments is the latest incarnation of the “Basislager” (Eng. translation – basecamp), a temporary clustering of stacked custom-designed shipping container-like modules meant to house creative industry start-ups. These compact commercial containers were original erected in the Binz district and will intend to house many of the previous tenants. The last few container clusters were being shifted as we visited the site. Already on the new site in Altstetten is another similar cluster of colourful shipping containers housing asylum seekers under a municipal scheme that allows immigrants to live there until their new papers are sorted, eventually giving way to another group of refugees. Undoubtedly the most intriguing entity that will be located near the commercial units is a “Strichplatz” (legal prostitution zone). Zurich has a healthy history of prostitution, both legal and illegal, and many such manifestations still exist throughout the city. The new-found attention, outright planning and forced juxtaposition of such a suspect and debated entity next to a temporary creative zone raises some profound questions in regard to the urban problematic.

shipping containers housing asylum seekers in Altstetten

 At the moment the site in Altstetten is in its infancy. The creative commercial containers are just now being stacked. The prostitution boxes or corrals (for a more honest label) are not yet erected. No landscaping features appear on the horizon and all indications would lead one to believe that not many will. Given the current skeleton of action on the site, the workshop participants and tutors had to look elsewhere for clues as to how these divergent activities manifest in their everyday manners. Through determined transect walks exploring various points throughout the city that contain elements of these activities, we focused primarily on two areas to provide the most generous identifiable revelations. The Langstrasse Quarter, an eclectic and diverse enclave of multicultural factions, sometimes hedonist energy, sex shops and a still apparent red light district character, was approached at different hours of the day in order to witness, in a sort of retrospective mode, how certain suspect activities have evolved and adapted over time. The Langstrasse has experienced various levels of gentrification. It’s once seedy image is wavering, yet a clear outsider reputation precedes any discussion on the area and one can easily find a healthy faction of sex workers and parallel levels of “clientele”, especially in the late hours of the night.

entrance of the Roland Kino (erotic cinema) on the Langstrasse

The most revealing observations were the dominating overlaps of programs in the area. An array of sex shops and erotic cinemas nestle somewhat seamlessly next to professional offices, galleries, clothing stores, kebab shops, and bars (some of which cater to the suspect trades). Here the concept of visibility vs. invisibility emerged as method of mapping and understanding the phenomenological character of the place. The idea of thresholds, the notion of public and private began to blur in different ways as one’s eyes moved from street level to a scanning of the facades of the buildings. A particularly intriguing observation was how the actual size of signage decreased as one moved away from the main high street. Signs and symbols of the sex industry would change as the residential quarters emerged in side streets, implying that a different level of acceptability occurred there.

spatial program analysis  in the Langstrasse Quarter

Similar former suspect areas were covered in our walks to gain further parallel understanding- including Platspitz (the former legal drug zone Needle Park) and drug/prostitution zones along the Limmat River. Although these scenes have been disbanded over 15 years ago, the historical knowledge and the layers of new activity provide interesting insight into the city’s liberal interludes. A short visit to the Binz district, the site of the former “Basislager” was a bookend to our field excursions. Here the group was able to detect a changing of the guard as the office containers were removed. What was clear is how the inhabitants of the containers had “moved in” to the site, dotting their immediate proximity with casual public amenities. This gave some hint as to how the future site in Altstetten might develop over a period of a couple of years.

model image of proposed “Strichplatz” and “Basislager” with walled partition in between

What emerged in the final days of production was a challenge of understand the Langstrasse Quarter and the Altstetten site across a package of thematic underpinnings. The notions of visibility, thresholds, juxtaposition, inheritance, temporary, and public formed the framework for mapping the phenomenological characteristics of these areas, hoping to reveal prioritized entry points that would elicit a sampled representation of the challenges facing the users of the future site. Recognizing a cross-cutting relationship of themes, especially in what was seen to be an odd tendency for the burgeoning creative industries and prostitution zones to always be located in peripheral settings, the framework allowed for clearer, if not still challenging transposition of observations from one site to the other. Without being able to see a finished transplanting of the activities in Altstetten, the speculation of interventions and strategies were limiting. However the process of understanding the phenomenal character and the spatialising of themes led to a more informed questioning of what it would mean to have these activities occupying neighbouring swaths of land and what tactics could lead to a critique of this situation.

group work at ETH’s  Werk 11

speculative critique of future activity on the Altstetten site

Ultimately the Zurich summerLab offered the opportunity to undertake a different reading of the city from alternative perspectives, and led to a critical thinking on proposals that challenge the decisions taken by current development planning schemes. The group was able to adopt alternative methods of design research and action with the charge to rethink the processes of urban practice in a dominant political economy where such processes, activities and contours might in some way regain control of the design of the urban realm.

Just the other day as I stood on semi-cramped tube carriage in morning rush-hour on the London Underground, passively flipping through the Metro, that bourgeois staple of just-above-the surface news periodical, I was pleasantly surprised to arrive at an article of astute guile and questioning verve. Ross McGuinness’* article on whether the concept of ‘slum tourism’ was merely a glorified exploitive cash cow or a legitimate method for enabling those individuals and communities stuck in poverty stricken conditions struck a particular chord, especially given the coincidental fact that just the evening before Film4 was screening Danny Boyle’s multi-award winning Slumdog Millionaire.

McGuinness keenly points to that film and others such as Fernando Meirelles’ City of God and The Constant Gardener as catalysts in how cinema has had a profound universal influence on generating a newfound interest in the intriguing and somehow exotic qualities of a mostly unknown social and cultural phenomenon, at least to the rest of Western society. Despite a lack of prevalent data on the correlation between exposure through film, there is little doubt in the re-emergence or growth of travellers seeking a different kind of experience as they eschew the erstwhile daily grind of the office or the default third trip to an easy and enjoyable European capital. But what exactly are they hoping to see and find in these alternative landscapes and moreover what does it imply in regards to the how the other half- the residents of these areas- perceive this attention?

It seems that a fortuitous parallel occurred in the sense that many of the ‘slums’ across the world that have experienced such influx of intrigue are located in glamour destinations already on the tourist map, for example cities in Brazil and South Africa, which became more accessible and certainly popular after the Apartheid. As Dr. Fabian Frenzel points out in the article, in Rio “favela tourism has almost become part of the package.” Frenzel is a lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Leicester and has just published a lengthy EU funded volume on the subject titled Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power, and Ethics* which attempts to advance the debate on the concept of slum tourism and put to rest the easy generalisations and presumptions that follow this trend.

The big question that stems from any presumption or debate is one of whether slum tourism should be considered an exploitive mechanism for selfish capital gain or a legitimate driver and benefit for poorer populations in cities and territories in development. But this too, as Frenzel points out, is also a generalisation of the argument. For the notion of slum tourism or at least some version of it is nothing novel at all. As a revelatory note, Frenzel and McGuinness highlight the UK’s own booming experience with the concept in the 1870-80s when well-off Londoners from the West End would visit the seedy East London foxholes of Hackney and Shoreditch and draw attention to Engels’ description of Manchester’s Irish Quarter around the same time. It is also well known that New York saw a similar phenomenon all the way through the Great Depression in such storied hollows as Central Park, briefly documented in Ron Howard’s film Cinderella Man.

So what then is the difference now in the situation and debate surrounding the economy of slum tourism? Given the fact that in some cities the idea has existed in various forms before, there are some examples where individuals involved in this growing enterprise have implemented an arguably less exploitive methodology. As the article reveals and according to his website, for 20+years, Marcelo Armstrong has run Favela Tour in Rio. Says Armstrong, “We talk about many subjects that it’s not proper to talk about if you go to Sugarloaf Mountain or Christ the Redeemer. You just see Rio. Every new step we do something new. The tour is basically to contextualize favelas into Brazilian society. It is not a tour that only talks about favelas but about Brazilian society from another point of view.” On the surface this doesn’t sound like exploitation, but rather a more critically insightful alternative tour experience, even more than one might expect to receive at the tourist flooded landmarks of the city. To that, McGuinness pointedly asks if visitors in fact go on the tours for the right reasons. Armstrong’s response is that “Human beings are very complex. There are many motivations why they want to go there. Some may have a specific interest because they are teachers, historians, social workers or architects. Others because they want to confront what they have read about. Others have seen films.” An argument for the genuine article in this particular tour which has 1500 visitors per month is that it funds a school- highlighting the belief that education is the main way out of poverty.

Aside from the primary of question of ethics and benefits, it is important to ask what is wrong with ordinary individuals wanting to gain some perspective towards a subject or a reality that they themselves do not encounter on an everyday scale- that has itself been coloured up (or down) or exploited by media and film. Not every person could be thought of as a gawker and as Armstrong points out, many of the visitors have a certain level of sophisticated and clear motivation. And tours, at least like his cater to a more critical mass of individual and subject rather than object. The work of the DPU comes quickly to mind.

Each May our various MSc courses take intriguing and somewhat exotic journeys to destinations in the Global South- i.e. Ghana, India, Ethiopia, Thailand. While the agenda is one of determined, critical and open-minded social consideration, many of our students have never spent time in such extreme conditions and there always exists a high level of debriefing and attention given to the perception we have and a clarity of what we are intending to do there. In nearly every case we are working in collaboration with community groups from within these possible slum areas, so our appearance is generally measured. Though the fact that we are there conducting research still places us square in the middle of the debate. And we are constantly questioning the benefit of our work for the communities that have taken their time to share with us the challenges they may face.

Another significant note worth mentioning, and one that is also being revealed more and more in parallel regards to why these areas have piqued such an interest for researchers and tourists alike is the fact that despite a usually clear lack of sufficient provided infrastructure, resources, and opportunity slum communities produce some of the most fascinating informal economic systems and represent, across many societies, the truly historic and grounded ideal of the working classes, the vital aspects of society. The cultural practices and the levels of resilience in these areas is something to behold and learn from, and in the case of this type of tourism, and witness in the flesh. I can signal my own experience in Mumbai when on a day off from the field research, I had the opportunity to visit the dohbi ghats- the fantastic community clothes washing centre where millions of residents and travellers’ garments go to cycle. The children outside the gate could not have been more than excited to guide me around the inner-workings for a very nominal fee. And I was able to talk with workers about what I was doing in Mumbai and about the phenomenon and tradesmen history of the dohbi ghats. This is just one of hundreds of examples that could ripen this post and address the debate further. Unfortunately this admittance will be for another day.

But, this brings up a point in that if slum tourism continues to grow, it should arguably be harnessed from within these communities. It may be a fine line, but there is a difference between exploitation, even self-exploitation and the sharing of culture. As the debate rages on and discourse and research is built around the subject, slum tourism can be seen as urban tactic formed around local trades and culture and most certainly can act as a catalyst for prompting wider strategy, whether that sits in education initiatives or physical environment upgrading. Practitioners and those individuals with knowledge in the tourism industry and likewise steeped in local knowledge have a responsibility to jump on the potential, if and/or before it is appropriated. In an ideal scenario, the local slum communities and socially-minded professionals would come to define the paradigm. If this is slow in formation, according to Ko Koens of the Slum Tourism Network and part of the research team with Fabian Frenzel, at least “if done in a respectful way that actively tries to benefit the local communities, it can help inhabitants gain income and pride. On the other hand, issues of access and power abuse may mean only a limited number of people benefit.” So continues the conundrum…

Acts of power, Agamben (2010) says, work in separating human beings from both their potentialities (their capacity to do) and their impotentialities (their faculty not to do). Exercising one’s faculty not to do means being able to refuse to follow particular norms the Society and its structures impose. This post discusses briefly the possibility to reclaim this faculty of not doing – to be negligent against those norms themselves – referring to the work of Laboratorio Arti Civiche in Salvador de Bahia (recently presented at the DPU) in the framework of the event Corpocidade 3.

Vila Paraíso and Vila São Cosme are two informal settlements in Engenho Velho de Brotas, a rather central and very populated bairro of Salvador. They lie respectively at the top and at the bottom of a triangular valley bordered by an urban highway, by a more local but not less important car axis, target of development pressures since it leads to the very close new stadium for the 2014 World Cup, and by a social housing estate built in the 60s, on the South side, somehow protected by a concrete wall topped by a barbed-wire.

The car traffic on the two roads flows not noticing the settlement – one of the many pockets of informality mushroomed inside rather formal tissues in Salvador – while the pedestrians walking on the local one seem to know what is down the valley and to avoid it on purpose. The settlements are actually in a strategic position for the pedestrian connection of the two roads, otherwise separated by a 10 meters difference in altitude: asking around though, nobody suggests to pass inside there – “You’ll have to follow this road until getting out down there, beyond those houses”, basically a 4 kilometres walk instead of a couple of hundred meters shortcut through Vila São Cosme. The tenants of the Social Housing Estate, similarly, say they do know the settlement, and that – why not – they would take part to the activities of our workshop, eventually not showing up. One of them is happy to come with us inside the settlement, curious, and confesses it is the first time in 40 years: “It is a forbidden place, and honestly the more this settlement grows and its houses climb upon the hill, the more serious is the danger for our buildings to fall down on it”. Finally, Lazaro, the leader of the inhabitants’ association of Vila Paraíso, tells us how many of his pupils (he teaches drums and percussions in a community centre nearby) are not allowed by their parents to enter his neighbourhood: he has never had the chance to bring his daily work inside there.

Many visible and invisible borders then, to be profaned (Agamben, 2007) through symbolic actions. The act of profanation according to Agamben is a particular form of negligence that is achieved through playing: the powerfulness of the act of play lies in the fact that it does not undermine the sacredness of the object of play itself, since it works alternatively on only one of the two spheres of the sacred – either on the myth or on the rite. Playing with an informal context such as the one of Vila Paraíso and Vila São Cosme – with its suspended reality, detached and different from the one of the surroundings – and with its borders, is about creating new shared visions that would allow to open up their environment without losing its (sacred) otherness. The creative act of play is carried on along with the community and translate into a twofold operation , which at the same time re-constructs the myth and enacts it through the rite.

In a collective wordplay (iocus), a mythology of the place is rescued from oblivion, searching, archaeologically (Agamben, 2008), for traces which would testify the evolution of the community and the built environment it created: talking with the inhabitants the monuments of the settlement are found and understood, the story of their construction and evolution is told, and in so doing collective efforts, shared endeavours, historical alliances and rivalries become clear. “Vila São Cosme was born around a source of water and then named after one of the twins Saints Cosmas and Damian… These figures are important in both Christian and Candomblé cults… Their iconography can be found in several spots around the settlement… Around the source of water at some point the family of the most beautiful girl of Salvador had built its house with the swimming pool in which she dived… Several years later the ruins of the pool’s wall became the separation wall between Vila São Cosme and the newborn Vila Paraíso… A hole in the wall was made to reach the water and the two communities started mingling… A fountain was built burying two statues of the Saints in there”. Such fountain was the first monument we met and we asked about, starting from the two oldest ladies from both communities.

Our first rite (physical play, ludus), a baptism into Vila São Cosme and Vila Paraíso, took place there, marking our participation to the daily rite of showering besides the fountain – probably the most important collective space in the settlement, scenario for a key moment of the communities’ everyday life.

The second rite was about sharing food: when we proposed to the communities to do something collectively – searching for an activity that stimulated an interaction between Vila Paraíso and Vila São Cosme, the inhabitants of the surroundings, and us – their first suggestion was a feijoada (a typical Brazilian dish with beans and meat, often the main course of collective meals, sometimes organised for celebrating the last day of construction of a house, when everybody is helping). The rite of cooking and organising the meal altogether sparked off a great moment of collectiveness: some people told us it had not happened in a while, and that the participation of the whole community, especially of the newcomers, had been hard to achieve lately.

The final rite was about Walking – the most ancient means of symbolic transformation of the territory (Careri, 2002), very usual in the actions of the Laboratorio. A movement from the inside toward the outside, following a child carrying a red thread to lead us out of the labyrinth, tracing an ideal connection between the settlement and the community centre on the top of the hill. And a movement backward, a procession in the form of a drums parade led by the children themselves, until the fountain where everything was born.

These actions certainly could not manage, especially in their very short timeframe, to profane the whole thickness of the borders of Vila Paraíso and Vila São Cosme: the process of opening up an environment is certainly a long one, and can only start profaning those borders that are inside that context itself. Cooking, talking and walking are rites that should aim to involve everyone: enacting rites is indeed about rediscovering a collective dimension that we know to be latent in many informal contexts, often because of the lack of a shared political commitment, disabled by years of cooptation by political and economic powers.

To play collectively though, there is the need to enter the context and to meet its communities, to get to know them for real: in other words, there is the need to take time for cooking, for walking and for talking a lot in the meantime. To be ready to enjoy wasting some time.

Further than a good chef and a wayfarer though, this post questions the need for the practitioner to become an archaeologist too, to build a mythology of what is usually defined as informal and at the same time, often as a consequence, deemed to be peripheral and marginal. Considering such Peripheries as archives, mapping their monuments and digging into their layers to write their stories, can help in understanding how the space was actually produced, by which actors, and in which relations of power they actually were. This is not simply an effort in understanding the past to forecast possible futures, but at the same time a statement of Centrality (Lefebvre, 1972, 1995; Kipfer et al., forthcoming)  for these areas and their daily realities, a statement of their right to be other while at the same time partaking the destiny of the urban whole. Therefore, in approaching environments as Vila Paraíso and Vila São Cosme the first form of negligence must be undertaken against the rhetoric of  the forgotten, of the abandoned, of the neglected: we believe that looking at the informal settlements as Monumental, at their genesis as Mythological, at their position as Central, is a necessary and potentially very powerful shift for the current urban studies scholarship and practice.

References.

[the linked videos are by Maria Rocco – Laboratorio Arti Civiche]

Agamben, G. (2007) Profanations. New York, Zone Books.

Agamben, G. (2008) Signatura Rerum. Sul Metodo. Torino, Bollati Boringhieri.

Agamben, G. (2010) On What We Can Not Do. In: Agamben, G., Nudities. California, Stanford University Press.

Careri, F. (2002) Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice. Barcelona, Gustavo Gili.

Kipfer, S., Saberi, P., Wieditz, T. (forthcoming) Henri Lefebvre: Debates and controversies. Progress in Human Geography, first published onlne May 29, 2012

Lefebvre (1972) La Pensée Marxiste et la Ville. Paris: Casterman.

Lefebvre (1995)  The Right to the City. In: Kofman, E., Lebas, E. (eds) Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell.

Just a few days before my departure to Bangkok with the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development group for the annual fieldtrip, David Harvey’s book Rebel City: From Right to the City to the Urban Revolution arrived to my doorstep.

The eleven hour flight from London allowed me to read it and the Bangkok reality, working on a project called “Co-production of Housing at Scale: Collaborative People-Centered Partnerships for Slum Upgrading in Bangkok, Thailand” in collaboration with CODI, Asian Coalition of Housing Rights and the Community Architect Network, offered rich materialities to unfold its rich and provocative narrative.

Harvey in the introduction of the book, elaborating on the relevance of Lefebvre seminal work The Right to the City, assert that such right is both a cry and a demand. A cry as a response to the existential pain of withering crisis of the everyday life in the city, as well as a demand to confront such crisis and create an alternative urban life (p.x). While sustaining the relevance of the critical Lefebvrian thinking, Harvey call for a meaningful adoption of  “dialectical methods of critical inquiries” (p.xiii). Thus, the struggle to the Right to the City make evident that cities are no more perceived as collective body politics but instead constructed for a boutique-lifestyle reflecting the driving forces of a capitalist production of territories.

So, moving from an empty meaningful signifier (p. xv) the Right to the city become the right that should “be accorded to all those who have had a part in producing the common“ (p.78)

What follows is a series of quotes subtracted from Harvey’s latest superimposed as captions onto a photographic essay capturing a reality completely different than the one tackled in Rebel Cities. Traveling with this text into the field, it became apparent that our fieldwork explorations of reality found could easily feed off the author’s quest of an alternative reality.
All the pictures are credited to Atiyeh Ardakanian, Ariel Shepherd, Bethany Ritter, Budoor Bukhari, Camila Cociña Varas, Christopher Montgomery, Diogo Cardoso Martins, Elizabeth Price, Elisabetta Bricchetto, Elsbet Alen, Francesco Pasta, Laura Pinzon Cardona, Lisa Marie Hanking, Lina Gonzalez Arango, Maria Luz Navarro Eslava, Ojama Akagwu, Paola Maria Fuentes, Rachel Felicia, Sarah Ahmad, Stefano Mascia, Zhu Han. Harvey’s Rebel City quotes, were selected in several discussions with Benjamin LeClair Paquet.

“The World Bank [World Development Report 2009] plainly favors speculative capital over people. The idea that a city can do well (in term of capital accumulation) while its people (apart from the privilege class) and the environment do badly, is never examined” (p. 29).

“The property market absorb the great deal of the surplus capital directly through new construction” (p.11).

“The central conclusion is that the collective laboring that is now productive of value must ground collective not individual property rights. […] The common is not, therefore, something that existed once upon a time that has since been lost, but something that is, like the urban commons, continually being produced” (p. 77).

“The is a categorical error to view globalization as a causal force in elation to local development” (p. 101).

“Why not focus, therefore, on the city rather then the factory as the prime site of surplus value production?” (p. 129-130).

“The actual site characteristics are important, and the physical and social re-engineering and territorial organization of these sites is a weapon in political struggles” (p. 118).

“Those who create an interesting an stimulating neighborhood life lose it to the predatory practices of the real estate entrepreneurs, the financiers and the upper class consumers bereft of any urban and social imaginations. The better the common quality a social groups creates, the more likely it is to be raided and appropriated by private profit – maximizing interests” (p.78).

“ We don’t have to wait for the grand revolutions to create heterotopic places” (p .XVII)

“Any spontaneous alternative visionary moment if fleeting; if it is not seized at the flood, it will surely pass” (p. xvii)

Twenty-twelve. As the Mayan calendar, or a certain over-exuberant Hollywood film would have you believe, this could be the end of the world as we know it. It also marks a moment in time where the world’s greatest sporting event is being held in one of Earth’s truly global cities.

For cities and – historically – civilisations, the Olympic Games have come to represent the height of individual success and achievement. Efforts are increasingly made to mirror ‘on the field’ sporting success with the ‘off the field’ glory of having curated and hosted a successful Games. The prestige is enjoyed as much (if not more so) by the host city as it is by the victorious athletes.

Defining exactly how and who benefits from the event and its Legacy are tantalising questions. Under the auspices of well-meaning objectives such as fostering greater inclusivity, promoting sport through the development of infrastructure, regenerating downtrodden urban zones and attracting investment to the city, Bid Documents frequently paint a utopian picture of the event and its legacy where everyone wins. Often where negative connotations can be found (a common one being that the long term benefits or detriments cannot be predicted in advance) they are dismissed because the feel-good factor generated through the event will vastly outweigh any criticism. The difficulty, as is often observed, is in comprehending these intangible benefits and drawing a comparison between the invisible legacy of the event vis-à-vis the more obvious tangible legacies (be the improved housing/infrastructure, notable gentrification of areas, or increased national debt).

Departing from this, ‘Whose Olympics? Transformations in urban open space and the Legacy of London in 2012’ – launched this week and undertaken by DPU staff in collaboration with UCL Anthropology and Open City London, with funding from UCL Grand Challenges – seeks to explore the dynamic impact that the Olympics will have on the use of London’s open spaces by the plethora of people who will bear witness to the occasion. The project adopts video and social media platforms as tools for urban research, drawing on the potential of new media technologies as used by residents and visitors to London to represent their changing relationships with the city’s open spaces. The research takes place across three phases: before the Games; during the Olympic and Paralympic Games; and immediately after the Games to the end of 2012 – charting these transformations and the grass shoots of Legacy thereafter. Central to the research are questions such as how public and open spaces are being transformed, and how these spaces enhance or limit people’s experiences of the event as a result. Members of the public are invited to upload their own short films, or one-off videos clips, with a description and spatial reference to an online platform hosted at www.whoseolympics.org Visitors to the website can then access an archive of geo-spatially referenced footage showing first-hand experiences of the Games through the eyes of those present in open spaces around London.

Modern mega-events transcend different scales, with television and media shortening the gap between the local and the global, bringing the event to households the world over – an estimated global audience of up to 4 billion is predicted.[1] For the vast majority unable to obtain tickets for the Games, London’s parks and open spaces will become focal points for collective Olympic experiences, and social media platforms the means through which they are shared. ‘London Live’ (www.londonlive.uk.com), for example, will run a series of fan-parks and events across the summer, while the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival promise to change the way public spaces are used throughout 2012.

By asking ‘Whose Olympics?’ we want to see how people are taking ownership of their Games and benefiting (or not) from newly built facilities and to understand who has what rights to the Olympic city. Where are the particular spaces of celebration and contestation before, during and after the event? This challenges and explores the assumptions around the legacy of such mega-events – that they truly can contribute to social and physical regeneration of the city, or conversely that they are little more than PR exercises to attract overseas investors, by documenting the togetherness that the Olympics purport to share and create –

whose is the right to the Olympic city?

The organisation and distribution of side-events around the city will influence how open spaces are appropriated and by whom, and how far the London 2012 Olympic Games is able to effectively engage the British and visiting public. These questions arise at a pertinent time, with the activities of the Occupy LSX movement putting a spotlight on the public vs. private space debate. The intensive hyperactivity created by the summer Olympics of 2012 stands to invigorate the city and its populace, and potentially exacerbate the underlying anxieties of those managing or ‘minding’ these areas, which could in turn influence the free use of public space.

Ultimately the research, which will culminate in a short film or a series of mini-films, will ask: Do we live in a city and society that encourages individual freedoms and the enjoyment of all? Are we all able to share equally in this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, and how can social media enhance this collective expression? What will be the real Legacy for London in 2012, and how is public space changing as a result?

Through this we can reflect on how far we are living through London’s golden epoch as an urban centre, and whether society and space is fundamentally changing as a consequence of this Olympic (or indeed – apocalympic) event.

Visit www.whoseolympics.org to upload films of your stories and map your own Olympic Legacy.

The ‘Whose Olympics?’ team are currently [29/03/2012] recruiting volunteer filmmakers and researchers, see here for more information.

You can stay up to date with the project by following us on Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare.

If the two recent exhibitions held in New York are part of any confirming indication that a legitimate shift in socially responsive architecture and design has indeed arrived, then it is by time the professional and academic community at large begin engaging in a critical discourse in relation to the practices and products of this movement. The Museum of Modern Art’s Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement and the Cooper Hewitt-produced Design with the Other 90%: CITIES at the United Nations highlighted an array of projects, practices, designers, and organizations that are seemingly appearing and operating outside the usual mainstream avenues of delivery. Likewise the recently published Spatial Agency project led by Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till attempts to uncover another way of doing architecture, one that eschews the image of architect as individual hero, replacing it with an idea of architect as agent, acting and collaborating with, and on behalf of, others. These happenings represent a larger buzz gripping architectural reporting and discourse.

MoMA’s Small Scale, Big Change exhibit (image by provisions)

Cooper Hewitt / United Nations Design for the Other 90% (image by James Emery)

For all the merit and overdue satisfaction of this exposure and coverage, significant questions should be raised in regards to the resulting implications on mainstream and outsider practices as well as the perception of them. Without a doubt, MoMA by its very nature and established status is targeting architects, enthusiasts and an interested, arguably cultured public. The content is tightly edited, brief, intimate, and yet richly displayed through large format pictures, drawings, and models which is no departure from how the majority of architectural projects are processed, delivered and curated, accompanied by no less than a visually abundant streamlined website. If this is indeed a representation of a different kind of architecture, a different kind of practice, it may require a rethinking of the message. This is not meant to be a critique of the show in of itself, but rather a general determining point.  The exhibition catalogue would lead one to believe that these projects entailed a challenging re-assessment of approach and process, based on geographical situation, cultural protocol, and/or the characters of end users. These are not or at least are not meant to be perceived as typical projects. In fact the website claims that:

“These projects have been selected from an increasingly large number of similar initiatives around the world because they exemplify the degree to which architects can orchestrate change, prioritizing work that has social impact but also balances very real concerns of cost, program, and aesthetics. They succeed in providing communities not only with physical spaces but with opportunities for self-determination and an enhanced sense of identity. As a result, these architects are both designers of buildings and moderators of change. Their integrative methodologies could serve as models for the profession at large”

There is again no argument that the projects represented are operating in some different parallel to mainstream practices, some more than others. Though perhaps more unsettling is the fact that there are only eleven projects and half of them are coming from the tried and tested likes of Rural Studio (Auburn University), Elemental, and Urban Think Tank, entities which also all show up in the Cooper Hewitt’s UN-based exhibit. The exhibition at the UN is part of a larger and broader initiative and arguably more thorough in terms of data and information, but also in many cases still offers an objectified aestheticizing of the subject(s). While the details of the chosen few are not necessary here, the point to be made is that darlings of social design are emerging and beginning to monopolize the conversation in the same manner that so-called starchitects garnered all our attention over the last decade or so. It is not a case of judgement on the part of these established names and practices, but more a general caution on the criticality of who comes to represent this new movement towards socially responsive architecture and design. Furthermore, is it even necessary to put a name behind a work in the same heroic manner as before? What are the consequences if this happens? A possible co-opting of the outsider activists and true agency of architecture by the object-driven mentality of the mainstream protocols is a threat to pure potential.

METI-Handmade School, Bangladesh by Anna Heringer and Eike Roswag (image by Anna Heringer)

Medellin Metro Cable (image by Omar Uran)

The Spatial Agency project, publication, and database also sheds light on practices and people, whether of historical significance or emerging interest and whether by holistic studio vision or one off project, that are concerned as they enter into socially embedded networks, in which the consequences of architecture are of much more significance than the objects of architecture. On the list exists some of the same figures and names already mentioned in the other exhibitions as well as some suspect crossover practices, usually championed for their avant garde responses to architectural problems. Now, debating lists may very well be a waste of precious time, though the effect of such lists is without much doubt. The choices made by editors and curators and then the act of publicising them as brass is problematic on the one hand because it limits the field and on the other because it assumes both internally within the profession and externally in public that those practices and individuals are doing something genuinely different. It implies that they are thinking and acting differently. And in a subconscious way one could or would assume that they are taught differently.

Elemental’s profile on the Spatial Agency online database (image by William Hunter)

Architectural production is a process, and though this process may have become saturated as an ideology, working in less-formalized arenas or situations has its own unique challenges. These situations require new skillsets, qualitative social understanding, and more importantly, new perceptions of what it means to be a practitioner. The role of professional must be internally rethought and if not, it is far reaching that someone should claim that they have the capacity to operate in these contested urbanisms. Architecture and design most certainly has a responsibility to re-establish its worth in future development, in formalized Western settings and especially in more informal settings of the Global South. But this repositioning needs to be led by individuals who are critically and ethically up to the task.

If the buzz surrounding social design and the staging of major exhibitions and research projects are actually confirming that a true paradigm shift is happening within architecture, design, and their related disciplines, we must be aware of what it means to practice differently. The fact is that when practitioners enter into different and unfamiliar arenas, the political landscape of design changes. This change as well as the individuals they work for and with has a huge impact on the methodology of practice. If the differences are not acknowledged and the same approach unfolds, the results will be misdirected and unintentionally non-productive for those individuals they serve. In addition, if the representations and viral publicising of this movement is lazily glorified sans the critical rigor they deserve, then the larger cause of shifting an agency for practice will be lost.