Daily Archives: March 24, 2013

Competition and Boundary

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As described by Daniela Fabricius in her article “Resisting Representation”, Rio de Janiero is a city filled with urban islands, favelas, which are geographically and culturally isolated. However the fact is that these urban islands are tied to the city with submerged structure. Favelas are everywhere in Rio. “The geography of marginality is identified with the people themselves, even if the place they inhabit is at the core of the city.”(3, Fabricius) The boundaries that separate favelas with formal sector are controlled by the competition between the formal and informal everyday.

Infrastructure, as the current flowing and connecting the city with favelas, is one main aspect in the competition. “Control over urban space is exercised not only through the ownership of property but also through the monopolization infrastructures.” (5, Fabricius) It’s interesting that the infrastructure in favelas is added after the informal settlement formed, as the reverse process of the inhabitation of formal cities with the grid and infrastructure installed first. It’s caused not only because favelas are all self-built, but also the formal infrastructural service provided by state and foreign companies is expansive and inconvenience for favela residence. In this situation, Gatos come out and dominate the competition. Illegal connections are made to legal sources of water and electricity in order to provide necessary infrastructure for favela residence that are unable to get formal utility. Gatos make the extension and connection within the system, at the same time, they provide possibility for representing the informal citizenship:

“citizenship is defined not only by an address but also by one’s utility bills, account numbers, and listing in a phone book, being connected by gatos creates vast populations that are by official standards undefined and unaccounted for, but in truth already intensely linked with the city.” (6, Fabricius)

The informal practice reveals its strength again in the competition on transportation. The routes of vans are organized based on favela residence’s demand. Also, “these vans provide the fastest and often the only way to reach the city centers.” (6, Fabricius) There seems no way for government regulation to help in the competition because of the illegality and flexibility of vans and the “van mafia”.

One the other hand, the government tries to take back control over the favelas through series of practices of “the favela pacification progress”. In the article “ Pacification and 24 Hour Surveillance in Rocinha”, author Carman introduces the competitive condition between government force and the drug gangs in favelas. The favelas become the battlefield of the invasion of these two forces. Rocinha becomes the “best watched place in the world” due to “cameras monitors watching nearly everything that goes on in public in Rocinha.” (Carman)

Three groups involving in these competitions are favela residence, government and illegal armed group. They are creating and defining the boundary of the favelas through the choice in the competitions.

 

1.Fabricius, Daniela, “Resisting Representation”
2.Carman, Andrew,”Pacification and 24 Hour Surveillance in Rocinha”, http://favelissues.com/2013/02/14/pacification-and-24-hour-surveillance-in-rocinha/

Young Cities

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Informality is NOT exclusively a term for slums and poor cities. Although we have discussed informality within the context of the Global South, I believe that we need to remember that informality occurs within cities in Western Europe and the US. Architects have even shed light on this condition in what we may call cities of the Global North. For example, Rem Koolhaas describes in “Delirious New York” behavioral attributes within one of the most regulated cities in the world. Informality is a condition of human behavior and multitude of personalities colliding within a cluster of space. I believe that if the term “Informality” is going to be used specifically towards cities of the Global South, its definition must be detailed more towards slums or a new and more appropriate term must take its place.

Informal, by definition, means, not according to the prescribed, official, or customary way or manner. I believe that as many authors have mentioned, slums exude informality. I also believe that formal cities also exude informality. Not necessarily to the same amount but it is not strictly a quality of slums. There is a clear distinction between what these authors are calling the informal city and the formal city but I don’t believe that it is simply as black and white as formal verse informal. There must be something else that causes this disparity of formality.

Looking back through the histories of formal cities, there was a time when informality had a stronger presence within that society. For example, looking at Italian cities like Florence, before a ruling merchant controlled the entirety of Florence; the city was broken up into hundreds of tower houses that demarcated neighborhoods of powerful families. This same condition is seen in the favelas of Rio De Janiero as described by Daniela Fabricius in “Resisting Representation”. She explains, “If favelas are islands and the city is the sea, then that sea is filled with currents, routes tides…and pirates” (5). Although Florence is considered a formal city today, it was far from formal when it was still a young settlement.

Even age might not be the most appropriate term to explain what occurs in cities of the global south; but, I believe that it is getting at something beyond simply the formal verses the informal. There are slums and favelas which are now receiving infrastructure which made them, by definition, slums for not having them. I am starting to believe that it is just a matter of time before cities of the global south step towards the global north.

The Unignorable Favela

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The favelas of Rio de Janiero have the reputation of being the informal. As Daniela Fabricius had stated in “Resisting Representation” the favelas are unmapped and ignored in city’s municipal surveys. The favelas though are redefining how they are informal. All the elements that make up the formal city exist in some form or another in the informal city. Electricity, television, public trasportion all exist in the informal city. They emulate and mimic their formal counter parts but differ to fit the informal context. The informal counterparts are cheaper but still as integral to their existence and operation.

The implications of this are that conflict inevitably occurs are the moments of overall and threshold of the formal and informal city. The vans that supply transportation to the informal city now illegally shadow the the formal buses that support the formal city. The informal city’s electricity comes from electricity stolen from the formal city. The same can be said for television cable. Interestingly though the municipal government admits that the informal infrastructure, especially transportation, is needed to keep the city from operating.

This becomes important for the city to understand. If the arteries of the city’s circulation and infrastructure need informal options to maintain’s the city operation then ignoring the favela may no longer be a viable option. If maps of Rio show the favelas as not existing because they are informal then the informal infrastructure need exists in a gray area of the  maniple government’s vision. The government either ignores their existence or acknowledges that they are practicing illegally. Yet the government admits that these system are needed for the city to operate.

This means that the informal city can no longer be ignored or unmapped. The municipal government has placed itself in a postion to ignore certain aspects of the informal city but still rely on certain aspects of the informal city. The municipal government has become hypocritical in its relationship with the informal city. But the municipal government’s need of certain aspects of the informal may be the way the informal becomes mapped. If the area of conflict where hypocricy exists where thought of a seeds to map the informal, potential exists to connect and thus legitimize the informal to the formal. This could be where illegal aspects of the informal gain legitimacy and integration. The key to helping the informal could exist in how the informal and formal meet and integrate.

Daniela Fabricius, Resisting Representation: The Informal Geographies of Rio de Janiero (Harvard Design Magazine, 2008).

Implementing Networks

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As Daniela Fabricius mentions in her article Resisting Representation, what lies just beyond the “networked society” is often neglected, meaning that we must search out the information in order to fill in the vast gaps in our knowledge (Fabricius 8).
With such an immense amount of the world’s population living in favelas, and other types of informal settlements without safe or reliable access to the infrastructure that many of us take for granted each and every day, we must create flexible solutions that can be implemented once a community is well established. Infrastructure such as water, transportation, sewage, and electricity was originally omitted from the vast majority, if not the entirety of informal settlements at their creation (Fibricius 3). Over time as settlements illegally add these networks on their own often in a haphazard way, it becomes necessary to create new infrastructure that can facilitate growth, and connect them with the formal city more directly.
There are a variety of possibilities for systems that can be implemented that will aid in the improvement of informal settlements. Urban Think Tank brings up a variety of their own ideas in Beyond Shelter Architecture and Human Dignity. They propose improvements ranging from building stairs, to creating a cable car system, to harvesting rainwater, to adding public programs on sites that would be unsafe to build on (Aquilino).
When adding or amending the transportation system in a city, Beyond Shelter Architecture and Human Dignity mentions that “where existing bus routes only connect the city and the favela, reinforcing the division between the two and the city’s fragmentation, a new bus line, bootstrapped onto the city system, can create a network of interconnections within the slum itself” (Aquilino 1). Often when looking at informal settlements like those in Rio, it is hard to differentiate various areas within a large favela, so it is simple to forget that the entire favela is not a single, interconnected entity. Is it possible that by creating links between each neighborhood within an informal city, there would be a greater sense of community? It would most likely take a variety of programmatic interventions, such as Urban Think Tank’s Vertical Gymnasium, which would bring a larger portion of the community together in a single location, in order to facilitate more personal connections between inhabitants of various areas (Aquilino 6). With the amount of drug warfare that is present in favelas, particularly in Rio, it is necessary to attempt a variety of solutions in order to keep the violence at bay and create positive connections between neighborhoods.
Whether implementing infrastructural changes in informal settlements will truly improve the lives of the inhabitants enough to create a change from informal to formal is unknown. It may not even be possible given the additive nature of the growth of informal settlements. It also may not be entirely desirable for those who have been living for so long without the same amount of regulation as their counterparts in the formal city. While it is certainly necessary to improve the living conditions for the favela dwellers like those in Rocinha, there needs to be a collaboration between highly organized infrastructure and the unplanned nature of the settlements in order for projects to be successful.