It’s been quite a time since I left DPU. How I missed all the teachers and classmates when I was looking at a photo of the room 201 on Facebook!  Every one at DPU is moving along in their paths in life. I think DPU is an interchange point for many of these different pathways – how interesting and amazing!

I am also moving on in my own pathway.  Now I am working at the development department of county level government in the city of Chongqing. Last year I was responsible for the local household registration reform led by Chongqing Municipal Government, the Chongqing’s reform is likely to make a breakthrough in the development of rural areas in China. The government intends to remove the discrimination between the urban dwellers with a non-agricultural Hukou and the rural people who have an agricultural one, in terms of social security, medical care, education and a series of barriers that stand in the way of the development of average agricultural people.

The household registration reform is a huge and long-lasting systematic project, which encompasses not just identity change, but also related social security construction, urban development and institution adjustment. At present, Chongqing is just in the early stages of this – transforming an agricultural Hukou to an urban Hukou; compensating pensions for the older people living in rural areas; building more houses for the rural immigrants; scaling up the size of the townships; and taking measures to increase the value of the agricultural land, through which it can increase the assets value of the peasants, and so on. In the past year 2011, Chongqing’s total number of agricultural people who became citizens holding urban Hukou [3,000,000 in my county] increased by more than 35,000. I am confident that, in the foreseeable future, the discriminated Agricultural Hukou will totally disappear and all citizens will have the equal rights of development.

My job is of great meaning to the rural people and that inspires me to do better.

Another important note about China’s future development plan is that in the recent central government conference ‘social construction’ has been proposed as the keyword for the development of China in 2012. Given that China’s social organisations have been poorly developing under the current political system, this conference has offered a sign that social actors are being considered an important aspect of the development of the country in the future. I believe that in the year 2012 deep and profound changes will happen in China. It is exciting and inspiring to be part of this social progress and witness the historic turning point.

No matter how exactly the reform is received in its infancy, we will do the best we can to fulfill its goal in the future.

I appreciate the time I spent at the DPU. What I learnt there is hard to describe but it is greatly influencing my thoughts and behavior at present. I wish for the students from all around the world studying at the unit to make great contributions to the development of their country and bring real well-being to their people through innovative projects and approaches.

Ding Liu. DPU Alumnus
Deputy Director
Development and Reform Commissions of Wuxi | County Chongqing China

It has long been argued that urban design is a variegated practice in search of a discipline, caught between – on one side – design practitioners and academics searching for a specific role in investigating the complexities of urbanism and in designing spaces that enable social justice and produce alternatives towards engagement and participation and – on the other – the reflexive, critical and ethical rediscovery of architecture, planning and design. Recent literature speaks a lot on this ethical turn and exhibitions are mushrooming. Such processes are particularly relevant to the complexity and contradiction inherent in contemporary cities and contested geographies of the Global South. These challenges are as much about process as they are about form, but such legitimacy requires serious intellectual engagement to provide the appropriate conceptual tools for dealing with the kinetic circumstance of cities in developing countries.

I was always attracted and fascinated by the Foucaultian ontology captured by his intricate reading and its now omnipresent usage in different field of studies. Innovative, provocative though impenetrable, his thoughts are profoundly challenging praxis and everyday life. Particularly fundamental to my research and architectural interests has been his notion of Dispositif to depict and investigate the relationship between spatial production, design and the exertion of, and response to, power. The dispositif serves as an aggregate source to (re)calibrate design (architectural and urban) discourse as both a way to define an interpretive perspective over the contemporary challenges of urban design, as well as to enrich the practice of development practitioners dealing with the spatial manifestation of injustices, complex urban challenges and spatial transformations in the global south.

For Foucault the Dispositif (apparatus, in its english translation) is: “[…] firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (Foucault, 1977: 194).

The capacity to become the device of connection between heterogeneous elements is the Dispositif’s first important behavioural feature. The dispositif has the key capacity to concurrently act as the apparatus of multiple connections and take on multiple behaviours simultaneously to achieve this multiplicity. A dispositif is then something able to bring heterogeneous elements together in an identifiable assemblage: the city as a whole and its peripheries (both spatial and conceptual) might be considered as assemblages on their own, a heap of negotiated knowledges, whose clear picture is difficult to render because of the convergence of multiple narratives and absence of a cohesive one.

In September 2011, the Development Planning Unit held its inaugural summerLab, structured as a six-day immersion into a scenario of contested urbanism in Rome. This new initiative attracted students and practitioners from Italy, Switzerland, Canada, France, Germany, England, and Malta and was developed in partnership with Roma Tre – Laboratorio Arti Civiche and Francesco Careri.

The specific case, grounded in the Metropoliz occupation, dealt with two adjacent sites, each containing derelict factory buildings, occupied by squatters in early 2009 in an attempt to both secure a home within the peripheral urban limits but also to actively resist pressures from market and authorities to force them into a marginalised and ‘invisible’ status. The two sites were divided by a two-meter high masonry wall, pierced in only one location by a gated opening which allows some degrees of interaction between the first nucleus of Metropoliz – a very heterogeneous population of migrants from all over the world – on one side and the Roma people on the other one: the Roma joined the occupation later carrying with them both their political potential and social stigmaThis wall has been the central investigative focus and catalyst driving the design proposals of the DPU summerLab, which aimed to deconstruct it along with its historical evolution, revealing its traced impressions, its daily uses, its permeability, and its wounds. It was a dispositive to counter-act – to profane in Giorgio Agamben’s words (Agamben, 2007).

What the Rome summerLab wanted to devise was a counter-dispositif that, while accepting and somehow endorsing the persistence of the wall, could highly improve the cycles of transaction within Metropoliz as well as between Metropoliz and the greater city. The peripheries of the city can be read as archives, made through uneven cycles of destruction and growth: the groups were asked to shape their counter-dispositifs looking at these archives, and the summerLab itself dove into those, confronting the vast variety of unofficial transformations in Rome, searching for clues and traces in several occupations, understanding their logic and functioning. This was done while also, hopefully, trying to play a role in de-coding and re-coding them, exactly through the counter-dispositifs: in other words, trying to deterritorialise and re-signify the wall(s).

Metropoliz is characterised in fact by a lack of visibility and fortress-like presence for protection and defence. The guard post and letter-boxes seem to hint at what the gates conceal: communal principles and multi-cultural axioms which need to remain somehow hidden to survive. The participants grasped the intrinsic nature of the (emergent or official) housing landscape of Rome as an agglomeration of states of exception, where a different concept of citizenship is springing out from their segregration itself.

A possible counter-dispositif was devised by a project that identified a strategic point along the wall as the locus of its disassembly and expansion into a zone of mediation and meeting. By opening up the wall and transecting it with an extended covered space, scaled to facilitate social interaction, the intervention revealed new potentials of integration and mutual understanding. This newly created zone, by provocatively exaggerating the thickness of the wall and inverting its meaning from that of blockade to pathway, served as a counter-dispositif to generate new processes and dynamics not with the prescription of, but rather with the potential for, social progress and political cohesion: a “Solomon’s garden” which would begin, paradoxically, with the initial ‘privatisation’ of one space, carried on by one of the inhabitants who could play the role of mediator between the two sides and between them and the BPM leaders. The incipit of a pathway that in the next stages could expand toward the two sides, implemented by the inhabitants themselves. Putting in relation heterogeneous elements the counter-dispositifs produce a fertile ground for interacting and write new common discourses.

Common discourses that are at the moment still being written thanks to the idea of two movie-directors along with the research group Laboratorio Arti Civiche (who helped us running the summerLab). After we left a new counter-dispositif has been put in place: using materials that were leftover on the site, the inhabitants have built a rocket that will soon depart toward the Moon. Metropoliz is at the same time departing and landing point of this science fiction journey, which have involved both sides stimulating new behaviours, alternative visions and higher level of interaction and exposure toward the surroundings.

DPU summerLab was certainly fertile in deconstructing a timely design reflection on some elements of “periphery”, both spatial and conceptual, while the complexity of the urban assemblage in making such spaces a literal archive depended as much upon what is subtracted (closure, cesurae, isolation, partition), or destroyed (cycles of adaptations and creative destructions) as upon what is added (habitations, meanings, etc) and moreover develop translocal fluxes and economies of habitation and identities. Elaborating on the potential of dispositif and counter-dispositif as architectural/design gestures enable a kind of mutual witnessing of how such spaces are imagined and operate the space and the city as a whole, discovering and playing the possibilities through which occupants become and act as urban residents which insists on the divergent aspirations and practices to intersect among each others and from the internal to the external (at different scales) without the availability of a “common language” or from the whole city perspective. Metropoliz per se beyond being a visible space of struggle, occupation and marginalization morphed as fractal space that existed between consolidated urban patterns and mega-transformation projects. Their rediscovery and re-signification as “actually existing urbanisms” but also as distinctive, though interstitial, urban discourses could potentially generate a particular understanding of the city itself.

In a way, using Latour’s words, getting closer to the facts in a renewed empiricism and praxis to be able to deconstruct the real apparatuses of the complex neoliberal conflictive derive that this presupposes at different scales: the contested nature of transformations, the strategies of morphing and re-morphing urban areas as conceived as resistant, formalized or informal practices and experiences of individual and communities and the role and agency of design as creative but not only physical dimension of transformation and then moving away from facts. Thus, design is simultaneously the production of physical form, the creation of social, cultural and symbolic resources and also, critically, the outcome of a facilitative process in which enablement, activism, alternatives and insurgence become central ideas.

An earlier version of this article written with Giorgio Talocci and
Andrew Wade, appeared in ABITARE
Image credits DPU Summerlab participants

References:

Agamben, G. (2007) Profanations, Jeff Fort (tr.), Zone Books
Foucault, M. (1977)“The Confession of the Flesh” interview. In: Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings (ed Colin Gordon), 1980: pp. 194-228.
Latur, B. (2004) Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical Enquiry, Vol. 30(2), pp: 225-248.
Shatkin, G., (2011) Coping with actually existing urbanisms: The real politics of planning in the global era. Planning Theory, Vol. 10, pp: 79-87.

< Shops in a commercial lane in Dharavi

As part of a happenstance season in which the main players in support of, as well as those opposed to, the looming redevelopment of Dharavi are lecturing in various venues around London, private developer Mukesh Mehta of M.M. Project Consultants recently spoke to an audience of designers, students and academics at the Architectural Association.

Over the past several years, interest surrounding Dharavi’s redevelopment has transcended the boundaries of the directly invested actors, expanding into the public consciousness through national and international news. This is partly because Dharavi embodies “headline” challenges, such as a lack of public services and sanitation infrastructure, informal housing, unpaved roads and a high population density typical of slums. However, it has emerged as a meticulously studied case primarily due to the traits that set it apart, such as the immensely valuable land on which it has developed, high levels of community organisation, and vast economic output of its workforce and networks of production.

While Mehta has been marginalised as the technical consultant to the Government of Maharashtra on the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), after his plan was scorchingly critiqued by Dharavi residents, local grassroots groups, NGOs, academics and activists, he continues to pursue and develop his proposals for the future of Dharavi.

< Slide from Mehta’s Presentations at the 2008 Urban Age conference in Mumbai and again at the AA, outlining his ‘HIKES’ vision

Hinging on his construction of the acronym “HIKES” — which stands for health, income, knowledge, environment and socio-cultural capital — Mehta led his argument at the AA by describing how much money the government is set to reap from his proposal without significant new expenditures, as private developers would make the bulk of investment. He then toed the line of Modernist urban planning through images of an unrecognisable tabula rasa development segregating uses and housing typologies, confining slum dwellers to rigid high-rise blocks. The degree of freedom that appointed developers and designers would have to sculpt the lived spaces of Dharavi within the logic of Mehta’s proposal has remained a contentious issue.

< A history of roadblocks to the DRP, from the Hindustan Times (January 22, 2011)

In presentations such as this, Mehta knows that he must sell his scheme to a sceptical audience. Often prioritising fiscal feasibility (profit-generation) over socio-cultural sensitivity and inclusive design, he did himself no favours by recycling what appeared to be a presentation aimed at government officials to students at an architecture school known for its well-established record of innovation at the forefront of the global-design scene.

At presentations like this, it is difficult for many to articulate specific critiques of the DRP due to the purposefully limited scope of information presented. However, the audience was well-versed in the more contentious issues of the project, such as the number of residents that the plan excludes altogether and its lack of contextual sensitivity. Contrary to aligning with the mantra of “slum free cities” in India, the DRP and its neoliberal model of global city development would create new slums by evicting several hundred thousand people from Dharavi. It would only selectively provide upgraded housing while traumatising the livelihoods of not only those evicted, but also those re-housed in buildings that emphasise product over process and prescriptive form over participatory design.

It remains to be seen how the redevelopment will progress on the ground. The stakes are higher than ever, as Dharavi becomes a precedent, setting the tone for slum redevelopment elsewhere in India and around the world. The MSc Building & Urban Design in Development (BUDD) programme at the DPU conducted fieldwork in Dharavi in May 2009, and has since adopted the case as a studio exercise in efforts to navigate a continuously unfolding case and explore critical design while devising alternative and inclusive upgrading proposals.

An earlier version of this article appeared in [polis].

Sheela Patel, founding director of SPARC, will be speaking at the DPU Dialogues in Development session on Friday, 25 November 2011 from 17.30-19.00 in room 101. All are welcome to attend.

Image Credits: Photo of Dharavi lane by Katia Savchuk. Image of “HIKES” slide from Urban Age presentation. Image of newspaper clipping from dharavi.org.

FIFA’s decision on 2 December to declare Russia and Qatar as the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 edition of the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup provides further evidence of the organisation’s strategy of expanding the frontiers of the game and using the event as a catalyst for development and global inclusiveness. This process can be traced back to 2000, when it was announced that consecutive competitions would be rotated by continent, thus providing FIFA President Joseph Blatter with the opportunity to make good on his election promise to take the World Cup to Africa. The principle has since been abandoned, but its intentions remain.

FIFA’s technical report for the South Africa 2010 World Cup bid discussed the opportunity to create “unity among the different ethnic groups that were separated socially, culturally and in sport for years,” and was seen by the Local Organising Committee as have the potential to “help strengthen and consolidate our democracy.” Similarly FIFA sees taking the competition to Brazil in 2014 as benefiting “the population as a whole…in terms of the economy, transport, communication, public services and facilities, safety and the enhancement of sporting facilities.” In these instances FIFA clearly sees the power of football, and its role as the game’s governing body, to contribute towards social change and urban development. Perhaps excited by the far-reaching potentials of the event, the 2018 and 2022 editions have been allocated to Russia and Qatar respectively, irrespective of their inferior technical reports in comparison to rival bids.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COlo9hBNM_8&w=320&h=240]

Encouraged by FIFA, many countries increasingly view mega-events as a means of furthering their national development priorities. With this in mind it would not be unlikely to see China or India bidding for a World Cup in the near future, or a South African city bidding for the Olympics. But what are the realities? Some commentators have put Greece’s fiscal woes down to the economic burden of the 2004 Olympic Games, followed by the (albeit unforeseen) financial crash. In this regard, it is reassuring that England will not have to bear the burden of a World Cup on top of the bill for the London Olympics; something Brazil will have to contend with over the next decade.

A longer-term view is seldom at the forefront of the minds of authorities who frequently crave prestige and economic returns over satisfying the needs of their people. Countries such as South Africa and Brazil have relied predominantly on public funding for the World Cup, risking an intangible legacy of national debt that could burden citizens for years to come and negating the positive impacts and ‘feel-good factor’ of the occasion.

Above: The Green Point Stadium in Cape Town on Robben Bay and next to the popular Victoria & Albert waterfront. Table mountain dominates the background.

Tangible legacies, in particular sports stadia, must have comprehensive plans for re-appropriation. For FIFA (whose projected income from the 2010 World Cup exceeded $1 billion, chiefly through television revenues and sponsorship money) the images projected into millions of households are paramount. The most poignant example of this has been the City of Cape Town’s proposal to redevelop an existing stadium located in one of the city’s deprived neighbourhoods, Athlone. FIFA rejected this suggestion, instead supporting the construction of the now iconic Green Point stadium, framed against Table Mountain and Robben Bay to satisfy the distant viewer. FIFA sponsorship rights are undoubtedly an obstacle to the spreading of wealth among the population: only authorised World Cup sponsors are permitted to operate within a one kilometre radius of stadia on match days, surely limiting the opportunities for local entrepreneurs to benefit directly from the event.

The Qatar 2022 bid proposes twelve stadia, nine of which will be newly constructed. They all lie within 60km of each other raising serious questions over their future beyond the World Cup.

This recent trend of holding the competition in less traditional nations, while admirable in its intent to use the mega-event model as a tool for urban transformation, could be seen as placating the altruistic desires of western societies. The realities of public debt without meaningful opportunities for local people, especially those on lower-incomes, cannot be taken lightly. Is this little more than a new kind of ‘entertainment dependency’? Are nations such as South Africa simply providing a setting to an event that is only really accessible to visitors from richer nations – or indeed from the comfort of their armchairs – while the majority of locals priced out of participating themselves?

The contribution of the World Cup towards meeting development goals can only be fully understood in the long term; measuring success therefore depends on how long it takes for the outcomes to become visible. Russia and Qatar will expect a greater deal of private financing, which will afford cities and their inhabitants their own opportunities and challenges. For these nations, at this early stage of the planning process, the World Cup presents them with unprecedented and unlimited possibilities and concerns.

For a discussion on the impact of the World Cup and Olympic Games on housing rights in São Paulo, see Julia Azevedo Moretti’s blog.

Some years have passed since my last visit to Jerusalem. At Tel Aviv airport, the usual aesthetic rituals of control formally welcome me in a sophisticated landscape of conflicts, borders, fences and checkpoints where everyday life is fragmented in what Wendy Pullan recently called a “frontier urbanism”.

Before returning to London following a brief period of research and analysis of the Security Barrier (the wall) and Palestinian Refugee Camps, I captured an image that has been used to introduce lectures at UCL on contested urbanism and the critical dimensions of architecture and design, and later forcefully relegated to my desktop.

Paradoxical landscape, At Tur, Jerusalem, @Boano 2008

Conflicting emotions touch me when looking at it, as the production and reproduction of Jerusalem, and possibly all of the West Bank landscape, is for me emblematic of a magnificent and paradoxical post-modern urban present. The complexly layered narratives and plethora of contested spaces and territories has resulted in an urban archipelago that is simultaneously fascinating and frightening, clear in its vision yet obscure in its pattern, rich and wretched, beautiful and revolting.

Last week I attended Wendy Pullan’s Lecture at City University in London, when she and Mike Dumper discussed some findings from their ongoing research on Conflict in Cities. It was very interesting, longitudinal, interdisciplinary and comparative research, well positioned in the current academic and policy debate over the need for a more comparative urban perspective.

Though the debate was centred on a quest for confirming the validity of the notion of frontier urbanism and what differentiates the “frontier” from a “border”, the central ideas were well presented around urban space and its structures employed to promote contestations and asymmetries, dichotomies and oppositions in the vertical as well as the horizontal dimensions.

The debate was unpacked around borders and boundary-making processes grounded in the general theories of social and symbolic boundaries, urban sociology, theories of the social construction of urban space and its representational force and cultural significance. In the specific case of Jerusalem, contests over space are not merely conflicts between exchange value and use value, productive capital and collective consumption, but rather are a paradoxical quest over ethno-national identity, sovereignty and the sacred. It is a contestation on the recognition of the “Other” in a Foucaultian sense. Or, as Nir Gazit points out in his article on Divided Cities in the Middle East in a special issue of City and Community, boundaries simultaneously include and exclude.

Boundary-making is a dialectical process between self and other, not only based on a continuous process of reclaiming natural and altered landscapes, but also entailing a reorganisation of the discursive field according to the imperative or normalization: as Samman (2006:213) posits, “The Wall that runs through Jerusalem is not simply erected on a naturally marked border, but is itself constructed in order to naturalize an otherwise artificial division”.

It depicts the essence of an overall system comprising a dispersal of fortress‐like spatialities, enormous concrete barriers guarded by watchtowers manned by machine‐gun crews, connected by special routes and bypass roads, military convoys, patrols and checkpoints, all forming a complex multiple space of “hollow lands and vertical geopolitics” (Weizman 2007). The latter is a quotation that I found strangely absent from all the detailed literature and research in Conflict in Cities as it stands in a very interesting stream of research on architectural/political relations and the  “arena of speculation” that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives on space and architecture in West Bank.

The Separation Barrier, Abu Dis, Jerusalem, @Boano 2008

To me this presumes, from an architectural perspective, a bio-political practice in which the territories are inscribed. However all of the thoughts above, and specifically the City University in London lecture, seems to me incomplete without touching and recognising the theses on biopolitics outlined by Michael Foucault (2007) which have profound architectural significance as they revolve around the notion of cultural representation.

In that respect biopower and biopolitics are categories by which Foucault characterises security as a dimension of governmentality, where population or the statistical description of population is an object from which technological and administrative protocols are extrapolated. Stemming from this specific point of view, the paradigmatic case of Jerusalem could also be instructive if read through the lenses of Giorgio Agamben (1998). His theorization of topologies of exception, if conceived as open and closed and at the same time producing not only a rational management of the population or instrument of corporeal punishment (the camp), but a diagram of inclusive exclusion (or exclusive inclusion) producing and reproducing an ever-moving state of fluidity and contingent spatial arrangements.

Excep­tion has transcended the camp as a paradigmatic notion, and following its own principle of operation, has extract­ed itself out into the open landscape (Agamben, 2005:18). This rupture of clear limits in favor of a blurry, continuous state of lines in movement works by grabbing the entirety of space, “ruling over what it is capable of interiorizing” (Deleuze and Guattari, cited in Agamben, 1998:18). A brief detour to Deleuze and Guattari might be also useful as they consider this spatial tension as a struggle between smooth and striated space (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The transition between one and the other occurs through a cycle of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation; spatial meanings are destroyed or emptied and then substituted.

Such a vision is thus consolidated in an uncharted geography, as once the notion of the territory ceases to be a bounded location, “the dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality” (Hardt and Negri, 2000:187-188).

While surely all of this literature and the Jerusalem case do need to be checked with cautions, it seems to me that the frontier is the antithetical political space and could be conceived as a space of flow in its elastic and shifting geography, a boundless border zone that could never be represented by drawing static lines at the risk of simplifying its spatiality and its “thickness” – Attempts that Petti, Hilal and Weizman recently made in a highly provocative and interesting manner their recent exhibition “The red Castle and the Lawless Line”, which I think complements very well the debate enriching an architectural political vision.

Like the two sides of a Möbius strip, in any point along its length what seems to be happening is that both the camp and the Utopia become visible poles of antinomy where the ambivalent logic of inclusive, biopolitical exclusion portrait a “neither leave nor enter” logic. As biopolitics begins its work of normalisation, the Utopia and the Camp align and the no-man’s land that separates them disappears.

But the wall, as an apparatus of division is conflictive with itself as an object that solidifies an otherwise fluid barrier. The fluidity of the line (materialised with the wall) is actually it is strongest and most lethal characteristic. As the wall clearly marks the physical limit of one country and the beginning of “another”, it simultaneously plays against Israel’s most sacred military tool: the lack of transparency and clarity about what constitutes the boundaries and precision of the law- it clearly maps where the white, grey and black zones are.

The frontier and the barbed wire, or the Wall in its manifestated thickness is then internalised, materialising the Mumford prophecy of being the earliest manifestations of cities as well as one of the most prominent features of the city” (Mumford, 1961, p. 63). The fence/wall/frontier is now everywhere, forcing us to think urbanism where the “paradigm is not the city —not even the exclusionary neo-liberal city— but rather the state of exception” (AlSayaad & Roy, 2006:18).

References
AlSayaad, N., Roy, A. (2006). Medieval modernity: On citizenship and urbanism in a global era. Space and Polity , 10 (1), 1-20.
Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller‐Roazen, Stanford, CA Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception. K. Attell, Trans. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. New York: Continuum.
Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory and Population, Lectures at the College de France, 1977‐1978. Trans. Graham Burchell, ed Michael Senellart, New York: Palgrave McMillan.
Gazit N. (2010) Boundaries in Interaction: The Cultural Fabrication of Social Boundaries in West Jerusalem, City & Community , Vol.9(4), pp: 390-413.
Hardt, M., Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge: Har­vard University Press.
Mumford, L. (1961) The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Orlando: Harcourt.
Samman, K. (2006) Cities of God and Nationalism: Mecca, Jerusalem, and Rome as Contested World Cities. Boulder: Paradigm.
Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weizman, E. (2007) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London, Verso.

Post written by: Pooja Varma. DPU alumna 2009

About a month ago I had the opportunity to attend the 361 Degrees Conference on Design & Informal Cities in Bombay, with my friend Laura. The event was compelling as it boasted respected academics and practitioners within the urban development field. The theme for the conference, Design and Informal Cities, was also extremely pertinent for India and myself as a planner. But I also wanted to satisfy a personal curiosity of seeing how such a relevant theme would be managed and showcased by Indian organizers in Mumbai, which has become a poster city for slum dwellers and housing rights.

While the panels of speakers were well regarded, knowledgeable and effective, the conference itself came across as a confused and self-indulgent attempt to achieve relevance and prominence, a reflection perhaps of India’s overall urban development. I can pin point many out of place elements such as the abrupt dance performance celebrating India’s “achievements” barely minutes after discussing the lives of more than 6 million people in Bombay living in poverty, in slums, everyday stripped of their dignity, without adequate access to basic services like shelter, sanitation and toilets. Having a world famous architect who has no connection to informal cities showcase his work as a grand finale to the two-day conference on design and informal cities as the theme is another.

A major disconcerting aspect of the entire experience was the realization that the students and professionals in the audience, educated in Bombay within the fields of architecture, planning and urbanism were completely ignorant about the failure of Indian policies on appropriate housing. They seemed to know nothing about alternate slum upgrading schemes that have successfully reduced health risks and improved quality of life in informal housing like the Slum Networking Programme implemented in Ahmedabad, the active and effective women’s NGOs like the Self Employed Women’s Association and SPARC that work on the grassroots level, with poor communities, slum dwellers acting as facilitators and intermediaries, advocating for housing rights.

After two days of listening to the impressive work and projects undertaken by people and organizations around the world on informal settlements, the concluding questions session left the impression that the vast majority of the audience did not know much about slums or slum dwellers. These students, the future city managers, designers, architects and planners of Indian cities are not equipped to understand the greatest urban issue facing most countries in the developing world. Their unabashed ignorance and lack of understanding resonates the cusp of the problem in an economically fast growing India. And that problem is the deep disconnect within Indian society. A disconnect between the social classes. The privileged or middle class leads a life so far removed from the reality of the poor that it is not their reality. They may live in the same city, on the same street, but live in different worlds.

India as a country does have technical experts, thinkers, academics, and financial resources it needs to improve the cities and realize equitable development. What is lacking is the political will that stems from the general attitude of the majority of the influential, the privileged and middle class that looks away while claiming to look beyond the appalling civic condition. But the divide is not just one of class, but also of a grave lack of understanding of what the poor want or need. They are perceived as beneficiaries of government spending while the middle class relentlessly evades taxes, builds gated communities and fancy homes over dilapidating infrastructure and rubbish piles. The government is blamed for not doing enough, for overt corruption and inefficiency; while the privileged occasionally hindered by the absence of domestic help, continue to pursue a self-interested life style.

Post written by: Laura Colloridi. DPU alumna 2009

At its fourth edition, the 361 Degrees Conference organised by ‘Indian Architect & Builder’ magazine explored the subject of Design & Informal Cities. Held in Mumbai, a mega-city with an estimated 55 per cent of its population living in informal housing, the conference aimed to “address the need for design interventions” in urban informal sectors. The first day has been dedicated to the discussion of politics of space, while the second and last day of the event focused on global practices and strategies.

Reading the 361 Degrees’ theme abstract one point called my attention. The first is that the summary starts stating that “[s]lums […] are undeniably a serious urban problem”. It is possible that this statement was made in good faith and the real meaning is that ‘slums are the object of urban concern’; however, it is also possible that the phrase naively declares the organizers’ perspective. This is a standpoint that does not recognise that informal settlements are the consequence and not the root of urban issues; consequently its adoption might mislead the research for the real causes of the problems.

After a series of presentations of the presenters and an out-of-context video about ultra-expensive high-tech building systems, Rahul Mehrotra, a practising architect working between Mumbai and Chicago, finally kicked the ball and illustrated his vision of the informal Mumbai. Mehrotra observed that nowadays Mumbai is not a city, but two; two worlds coexist within one name. The components of the biggest Indian city are not reduced to the binary of formal/informal, but they are identified with the concepts of ‘static’ (permanent, bi-dimensional and monumental) and ‘kinetic’ city (temporary, three-dimensional and incremental). The ‘kinetic’ city is defined as an “indigenous urbanism” with a “bazaar-like” form and a representation of the “local logic”. This city is not only the city of the poor and Mehrotra made use of examples such as the loan used for weddings and cricket matches around the clock to show how the elites also contribute to the “elastic urban condition”.

Regarding the housing sector, the architect highlighted the fact that approximately 60 per cent of Mumbai’s population lives in informal accommodations within an estimated 10 per cent of the city’s area. Slum dwellers’ associations and movements have been pointed out as the dialogue tool that can be used to turn over the undemocratic processes created by global pressures and the world-class city aspirations. Mehrotra concluded advocating for a substitution of the notion of formality with the one of the kinetic city and he challenged the public to physically represent its fluid nature.

After Mehrotra’s introduction the conference moved toward the discussion of the political scenarios behind the construction field in Indian cities with the speeches of Liza Weinstein and Gautam Bhan. Weinstein analyzed the context that favoured the Mumbai mafias’ shift from the management of the black market to the real estate sector. According to the researcher the state “supportively neglected” both the local ‘goondas’ (thugs) and the development mafias since the first were assuming the government’s responsibilities of fulfilling the low-cost housing shortage, and the seconds have been in charge of materialising the elitist utopia of a global Mumbai. Within the depicted setting, Weinstein highlighted the need to overcome the manipulative branding of the legal/illegal dichotomy.  Gautam Bhan, author of the critical book ‘Swept off the Map’, called for a deeper understanding of the terms into which the poor live and migrate to the city. He echoed Hardoy’s (et al, 2001) observation that “[t]here is something wrong with a legal and institutional system the deems illegal the ways by which most new housing is built, including virtually all the houses that is affordable by low-income households”. Bhan also recalled Baross’ (1987) PSBO-OBSP model to explain the development process in low-income countries and he believes that it is fundamental that this model is accepted by the state and local authorities in order to achieve a meaningful democracy.

The same topic of political threads within spatial arenas has been discussed at a deeper level by the writer and architect Eyal Weizman. The speaker looked at the differences between the formal/informal and legal/illegal binaries describing the “structured chaos” existing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The Palestinian case represents the extreme scenario where politics and space are intertwined and where what Weizman called a “controlled disintegration” is happening. As a further example of illegality within the formality (or vice-versa depending on the perspective of the observer), Weizman portrayed what he calls the ‘political plastic’. This is the spatial environment where the “often deliberate, selective absence of the government intervention promotes unregulated process of spatial transformations and dispossession”.

On the second day the conference translated its visions into actions and physical forms by presenting the innovative social projects of Alfredo Brillembourg (Urban Think Tank), Alejandro Echeverri and Revathi Kamath. These projects perfectly represent the conference topic working in the informal cities by means of design solutions; however, this is not the only possible way and another original project that links the informal city directly with its governance issues was introduced. This is the case of the recently-born project Transparent Chennai initiated by Nithya Raman. This initiative aims to empower residents through facilitating information regarding the development of their city and improving the accountability of the government. The information is summarised and represented in the form of maps and it is easily accessible either online or via other means through grassroots organisations.

Despite all these challenging and stimulating insights delivered by the speakers the overall impression of the conference has been only of partial success. There are two main reasons behind my disappointment. First, a conference that is supposed to discuss social inequities should stimulate a deeper public debate. The chosen classic format of paper presentations with panel discussions forcibly inserted between sessions did not allow for any constructive dialogue. Second, the young architecture students that accounted for the majority of the audience seemed to be insensitive to the raised point of the critical role that authorities’ support plays within architectural and urban interventions. The audience appeared concerned merely with design options and with participating in the final lecture given by famous architect Richard Meier. As a confirmation of this (degree of) indifference a comment of the presenter remarked that, due to the topic, this year less than 250 people attended the event (against the 1000 of past sessions) and getting sponsored by corporations or institutions has been unusually difficult.

Luckily, at the end of the conference we were able to enjoy a dance performance that under a stage-size Indian flag made us all forget the million people that still live in informal cities.

References:
Baross, P. (1987) Land supply for low-income housing: issues and approaches. Regional Development Dialogue.
Hardoy, J.E. , Mitlin, D. , Satterthwaite, D. (2001) Environmental problems in an urbanizing world: finding solutions for cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Earthscan, London, UK.

The views expressed are solely those of the blog post author and they do not necessarily represent the views of DPU staff or of any other author who publishes on this blog.

Post written by: Julia Azevedo Moretti

The impact of private and public projects on housing rights has been a topic of passionate discussion in Brazil recently and it has been so because the country will receive two mega events on the next few years – 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. It will be an opportunity to clarify what extent an innovative legal framework together with a considerably organized social movement will be able to avoid major evictions and manage to translate investment in such projects into a pro poor scenario.

It is well documented that urban development in Brazil is characterized by significant inequalities and socio-spatial segregation. On one hand informality drives the production of urban space and continues to be a major problem. Sao Paulo, i.e., is a city of contrasts: despite being the richest city in the country it has almost 32% of its population (over 3 million people) living in precarious settlements such as slums, old tenement houses and illegal land subdivision. On the other hand Brazil is considered to have an innovative legal framework symbolized by the City Statute. Anyhow, since the poor have limited access to centrally located and well serviced land they hold tight to the land they occupied, but the pressure on such areas is increasing and there is one case that illustrates very well the challenges to come.

Favela da Piscina is a slum located in a central neighbourhood near the highway that leads to the international airport and to an important football stadium. The area has been occupied since the 60s and has been fully developed by the poor families. Self built houses were serviced with infrastructure due to the organization of those who live in the settlement.

According to the Brazilian constitution if someone lives in an urban area for 5 years and finds no opposition from the owner this person is entitle to claim ownership of the land. The City Statute, enacted in 2001, reassures that right and enables communities to claim it collectively (collective adverse possession). The dwellers from Favela da Piscina in three different opportunities (1990, 1996, 1998) have tried to obtain such ownership declaration from a Court of Justice, but had no success. Since the land was considered abandoned they let it be and kept living in the area with no land title. Recently, however, under the influence of market appreciation the owner has claimed the land and 120 families found themselves under the threat of eviction. The land price has gone up with the expansion of the nearby highway, urban regeneration projects in the area and the expectation of higher investments for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. In response, the dwellers once more organized themselves to file a law suit aiming to obtain a land title, this time based on the City Statute. Will that be enough?

Such examples are been discussed in academic seminars as well as in mobilization events organized by civil society. It is worth follow one experience called Jornadas pela Moradia Digna in which civil society join forces the Public Defender’s Office to discuss and claim housing rights on behalf and together with poor communities – this year the subject will be exactly the impact of megaevents on housing rights. Hopefully there will be time to reclaim the right to the city, in other words, the right of all who lives in the city to enjoy urban life and have access the benefits of the city as well as to take part in the decision making process.

Post written by: Bridges Brazil

Curitiba, the capital of the State of Paraná, a mainly agricultural state in southern Brazil, is indeed the best planned city in Brazil and an international model for sustainable development, is much more than simply the result of a few successful projects. The city’s achievements are the result of strategic, integrated urban planning. This all-encompassing strategy informs all aspects of urban planning, including social, economic and environmental programs.

"Massive Transport System"

Curitiba’s strategy focuses on putting people first and on integrated planning, and these influences are apparent in all aspects of the city. The strategy is what underpins the individual projects system-wide that improve the environment, cut pollution and waste, and make the quality of life in the city better.

A clear strategy and vision of the future in Curitiba has meant that decisions large and small made over the course of 40 years have added up to a city that’s public-spirited and eco-efficient. Strong leadership resulted in successful, long-term implementation of strategy.
The city had few outstanding historical or natural features, but its architects and urban planners have transformed it into a vibrant center with good quality of life that draws many tourists. Curitiba’s population has more than doubled to 1.8 million over the past 30 years.

Despite major challenges that came with rapid growth, significant improvements have been made to the city’s quality of life in areas including public transportation, preservation of the city’s cultural heritage, expansion of parks and green areas, and social and environmental programs.
Curitiba has a long tradition of innovative and integrated urban planning geared toward the strategic imperative of making the city a better place to live, as outlined in the city’s Master Plan of 1965.  From the 1990s until today, the city’s main planning focus has been on sustainable development and integration of Curitiba’s metropolitan region. Strong political leadership and continuity has been essential to long-term implementation of the city’s plan.

The combination of core values expressed in the city plan allowed planning for efficiency and sustainability even in difficult circumstances (i.e., during the military dictatorship, times of economic crisis in Brazil, despite high numbers of poor migrants flowing into the city).
A clear strategy and vision of the future in Curitiba and creation of an agency to make sure it was implemented has meant that smaller decisions made over the course of years and in many individual programs have added up to a city that’s a model of ecological, people-centered urbanism.

Although Curitiba is known internationally as a sustainable, ecological city, it calls itself “the city of all of us.” In almost any area of Curitiba’s urban planning over the years, it is possible to see how consideration has been given to people in the big picture–and also to see the associated, system-wide sustainability benefits of integrated planning.
This is what’s most unique about the city’s strategy: it maximizes the efficiency and productivity of transportation, land-use planning and housing development by integrating them so they support one another to improve the quality of life in the city.

International Study Groups on Urban Development are organized all year round in this model city.
the group engages professors and students and eventually involves public authorities, business people, and others. If you require further information on how to enroll to this dialogues, write to Eliel Rosa bridgesndialogues@gmail.com, Executive Director of Bridges & Dialogues Brazil.