Participatory Architecture
Reply
Author Archives: Michael Kowalchuk
Participatory Architecture
Micro-Finance or Micro-Reaction?
While micro-finance has proved successful in lifting families out of poverty it is politically problematic for two major reasons: it perpetuates capitalist social relations, thereby masking the root cause of poverty and the system is susceptible to manipulation by larger financial entities which charge interest and run counter to the socially conscious vision of Muhammed Yunus.
Yunus’ vision, while admirable, ultimately falls short because in the end it relies on a belief in “capitalism with a human face.” His vision asserts that the periodic crises in global capitalism are the result of greed and mismanagement as opposed to a systemic problem. The system of micro-finance that he pioneered gives people the impression that global poverty can be significantly reduced by small actions and that even the most basic economic exchanges should be formalized in the capitalist market. Furthermore, the valid sense of hope generated through his model’s successes potentially negate any hope for concerted political action that would demand jobs and services (such as healthcare) that should be treated as rights in the first place. The ideological implications of belief in such a system may outweigh the on-the-ground benefits in the long run.
Poverty is not accidental and such assertions that globalization can be transformed to include the Global South as a beneficiary are naïve at best. The systemic issues of global capitalism and its symptoms of hunger and poverty cannot be adequately addressed through micro-finance. The international working class is thoroughly productive and yet poverty and chronic unemployment are a result of mismanaged distribution at the hands of the owning class.
While it is obviously good to lift families out of poverty, and micro-finance has proven successful in many instances, the political implications of such a reliance may in fact maintain extreme levels of income inequality and power across the world. If the solution were as easy as giving every poor family a small sum of money, global poverty would have been history years ago. The system of micro-finance enshrines bourgeois social relations and provides a false sense of hope for the class that in reality produces the world’s wealth through its labor.
1. Dr Toh Han Chong, Interview with Professor Muhammad Yunus, SMA News, Volume 40 No. 12 December 2008.
Spatial Subversion and Political Opposition
Any spatial challenge to the inefficiencies and inequities generated by the global domination of capital requires a principled political opposition and the social engagement of the most oppressed sectors of the working class. Spatial agency and networking are important tools to realize the goals of an anti-capitalist movement. While Lenin speculated on the subversion of bourgeois state power through the creation of a dual state, there is a more immediate potential for the generation of subversive spaces that have the ability to serve as a nucleus for further revolutionary action. Squatting settlements and slums are two examples where space functionally exists outside of state power.
Beyond some romantic revival of youthful 60s-inspired rebellion, these spaces can have explosive political consequences. The FARC-EP, though primarily based in Colombia’s countryside, operate urban networks of alternate governance in the informal neighborhoods of Colombia’s largest cities. This shadow government owes its efficacy to the informality of the space itself. While this example is certainly extreme and related to a specific political/geographic context, it demonstrates that informal conditions can generate highly sophisticated forms of spatial and social organization. Namely, the working class is capable of generating its own culture and spatial livelihood under even the worst circumstances.
The next step in reorganizing space, drawing from Teddy Cruz’s methodology in Tijuana, is from the design point of view. The organization of the building project itself along a community-oriented mentality is capable of transforming how communities think about space. Teddy Cruz does not merely propose recycling San Diego’s capitalist refuse to build individual housing units; he contends that the act of social organization necessary for such an endeavor will reinvigorate a larger sense of collective power. Finally, he recognizes that the state will only recognize new settlements with infrastructural improvements only when these settlements exist as at least semi-permanent communities.
However, Cruz’s approach highlights the political roadblock that even the most well-intentioned projects encounter: how does one reconcile a principled critique of unjust systems while working to improve the lives of those most adversely affected by these systems? Cruz’s speculative design for housing in Tijuana has many positive, potentially liberating elements but does it not also ignore the glaring contradiction that Mexican labor is hyper-exploited by the Mexican and American bourgeoisies, literally bound by a wall to prevent any chance of social mobility and then forced to consume the leftovers of U.S. capitalism’s overproduction (in this case physical refuse and under-valued capital in the form of housing)? Architects must not only creatively work in contradictory, oppressive political climates but join movements to dismantle them.
Aquilino, Marie Jeannine. Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity. New York, NY: Metropolis, 2010.
Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. Abingdon, Oxon [England: Routledge, 2011.
Cruz, Teddy. Tijuana Case Study: Tactcis of Invasion: Manufactured Sites.
Infrastructure as Architecture
While the ecological and humanitarian crises facing our species are daunting, doomsday scenarios and statistics often overlook two important considerations: the crises are not matters of scarcity, but of overabundance and the unequal distribution of wealth and second, humanity’s impact on the planet is not necessarily malevolent. While carbon emissions stemming from the global industrial economy are driving patterns of climate change, humans are also capable of remediating environmental disasters and have the potential to consciously regenerate the planet. It is with these considerations in mind that projects such as slum networking on the Indore River and infrastructural upgrades in Sao Paolo have a greater significance.
The project in Indore, though ripe with shortcomings, demonstrates the potential of understanding informal urban conditions as necessarily tied to questions of ecology and infrastructure. If the city was traditionally conceived of as the antithesis of the country, today’s informal settlements are often constructed in “rural” or peripheral zones that the traditional city was unable to conquer. Consequently, infrastructural adjustments that both address basic human needs on the level of a network have the potential to regenerate entire landscapes. In the case of Indore, upgrading and formalizing the sewage system within slum neighborhoods is already having an impact on the level of untreated sewage in the Indore River.
Although also starting on the level of infrastructure, MMBB’s practice demonstrates that public urban infrastructural projects also have the potential to become public space activators. In this case, the creation of a network of reservoirs to deal with drainage issues creates the raw space that can be sculpted into a public good. These innovations demonstrate that what was previously considering outside of the discipline of architecture, environmental engineering and public infrastructure can actually have massive positive architectural results with a minimal amount of design intervention. While the past treated these spaces as dead zones of necessity and public hygiene, there is an imbedded element of whimsy and the public realm. While MMBB consciously explored the architectural potential of the new spaces generated, the project in Indore also shows that changes to the landscape prompt aesthetic/architectural shifts. When the river began to be cleared of sewage and was once again more habitable, a traditional river walkway was restored and many of the adjacent buildings were beautified to reflect the renewed public quality of the space.
Rather than viewing the discipline of architecture as a building-only practice that can be involved with infrastructural/engineering projects, these projects should be viewed as less efficient if they do not tap imbedded architectural potentials. Some of the most influential contemporary architects base their practices on innovative programmatic combinations that are celebrated formally. If more infrastructural projects were treated this way, such as Urban Think Tank’s cable car station/gym, informal settlements would not only see an improvement in access to vital goods and services but access to the sought-after “right to the city.”
Franco de Mello: Filling Voids
Himanshu Parikh, “Slum Networking Along the Inodre River”
Recognition, Intervention and Respect: Engaging the Informal
Although this is seemingly obvious, the first step in transforming informal communities is recognizing the scope and permanence of these urban phenomena in the first place. The spatially jarring, almost fantastical images of favelas engulfing the boundaries of gated communities in Brazil points to this issue dramatically. Even though informality in urbanism is expanding rapidly and affecting societies around the globe, economic/social/political marginalization remains a major hindrance to the advancement of social justice in these communities.
The paradox of aid and development lies in the fact that informal communities physically need to be transformed in order to promote the health and wellbeing of residents while simultaneously understanding that these communities are inhabited by individuals who have agency and their own conceptions of space, dignity and development. Top-down approaches are not necessarily good or bad but require a heightened awareness of conditions on the ground in order to be effective. While The City of God dramatized the difficulties of growing up in informal settlements in Brazil, it also gave the impression that the culture of gang violence was so pervasive that it dominated life itself. While hard-hitting and based in reality, the film does not take into account the richness of life beyond gang violence. Ironically, the film’s main character comes of age by straddling the boundaries of the formal and informal, fulfilling his lifelong dream of becoming a photographer through strange twists of fate that result from his peripheral relationship to the gang war. The film culminates in a detached journalistic account of the violence, departing from the first person narrative that characterized the beginning of the film.
Teresa Caldeira identifies the film’s main limitation as giving the false impression that the experience of life in the favela was universally characterized by gang life. She counters this approach by celebrating grassroots forms of culture such as hip hop and street art that articulate an entirely different conception of marginalization and class/racial division (Caldeira 174). Her approach recognizes the cries of protest coming directly from the favela as a more genuine form of cultural expression and identity.
Where does the role of the architect and urban planner fit into these questions of culture and identity? Successful interventions must be critical of condescending grand narrative assumptions about daily life in informality and avoid generalizations while recognizing the need to improve material conditions on the ground (Jáuregui 60). This mentality suggests that the person behind the intervention have a personal connection to the community in question, similar perhaps to Robert Neuwirth’s project of embedding himself in informal communities. Even a project as simple as a community well or latrine involves a complex series of questions concerning site, access, existing conditions and the community’s relationship to land itself. Attempts at blanket solutions, such as giving land titles to entire communities of squatters, demonstrate that there are limitations to approaches that do not correctly assess conditions on the ground.
Jáuregui, Jorge Mario. Articulating the Broken City and Society.
Caldeira, Teresa. Worlds Set Apart.
Micro-Revolution: Class Struggle in 21st Urbanity
While Harvey aptly describes the city as a dumping ground for surplus value, allowing capital to expand relatively (as opposed to absolutely) in space, it is important to recognize that the right to the city speaks as much to the right to public ownership of the means of production as it speaks to public control over the means of distribution. The city is not merely hollow concrete buildings and its humbled inhabitants but a site of immaterial, creative, interpersonal and industrial labor. Whatever right to the city Harvey is searching for will have to be answered in terms of the right to publicly own the means of production as well.
The city, as a narrative, also offers the revolutionary question, “What happens now?” Harvey masterfully demonstrated how the success of Hausmannization was negated by the Paris Commune of 1871 and the “American dream”/suburbia could not contain the revolutionary explosion of the civil rights movement in the 60s. During the Modernist period of revolutionary upheaval from the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 to the demise of the socialist camp by 1991, imperialism and capitalist expansion was naively predicted to halt and lurch into fatal crisis once every conceivable area of the globe was parceled up by national monopoly capitalists in the West. While this prognosis seemed plausible in the heat of both World Wars, the Cold War demonstrated capitalism’s ability to survive crisis through the wanton destruction of surplus value and through the frenzied urbanization of the globe (Harvey 29).
The question for revolutionaries and oppressed peoples in the 21st century is how to confront a system that seemingly can expand and revive itself infinitely. The answer is probably somewhat obvious: if capitalism expands infinitely through urbanization and the conscious destruction of surplus value, each instance of that relative expansion becomes a potential for rebellion. Of course there are no guarantees for success, as the Paris Commune was drowned in blood and the militancy of the American Civil Rights movement has led to a banal post-racial liberal excuse for equality. One could not conceive of the Paris Commune without Paris, nor the American Civil Rights movement without the march on Washington, but today’s conflicts with capital are generalized and universal. From the banlieus to the favelas to the slums, marginalization is meeting a common globalized enemy that cares little for tradition or national peculiarities. Following Rem Koolhaas’ logic of the Generic City expanding across the globe, the multitudes that are disenfranchised and forced to live informally or semi-legally are in some ways in an analogous position to the industrial proletariat of the 19th century. Broudehoux’s description of Olympics Beijing is indicative of this explosive social struggle, pointing out that corruption, growth and disenfranchisement represent the rule, not the exception (Broudehoux 100). The coming period of struggle and capitalist crisis is exciting from a revolutionary perspective because it is unprecedented in scope. The right to the city will have to be answered in the coming period because the 21st century city is the clearest example of capitalist exploitation. Whereas institutions such as the factory, church, or school previously articulated the roles in class struggle, today’s struggle can be understood on a larger, urban level.
Works Cited
Broudehoux, Anne-Marie. Delirious Beijing: Euphoria and Despair in the Olympic Metropolis.
Harvey, David. “New Left Review – David Harvey: The Right to the City.” New Left Review – David Harvey: The Right to the City. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2013.
Koolhaas, Rem, and Bruce Mau. S M L XL: OMA. S.l.: S.n., 1993.
The Social/Political and Emergence
What I find most compelling about the framework set up by emergence is that their implications can cross over into the social/political. After all, are not legal systems and social systems capable of creating new inputs that generate measurable change in the world of architecture? Emergence should not only be understood in terms of technology’s ability to generate inventive and environmentally responsive forms. Architecture can also be informed by changing social understandings. For example, the nuclear family and racist legal structures facilitated the rise of suburbia in the United States and the notion of the “American Dream.” In this case, social inputs generated specific formal outputs such as the division of land along (generally patriarchal) family lines, etc. As a result, suburban spatial configurations and developments look similar across the entire United States, without too much differentiation based on geography.
The exciting potential lies in architectural speculation based on social change. A queer architecture that rejects the heterosexual nuclear family as a given would most likely generate a wholly different spatial experience that is itself queer. Of course, to have a “queer emergence” would require massive social upheavals that are more involved than changing a parameter on a computer screen or observing the social organization of ant colonies. Such historic changes are possible when one considers the civil rights movement of the 60s, the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement. Nevertheless, if emergence can be applied to the complexities of urban life, it can also comment on social transformations. Rather than viewing form as the primary subject of emergence in architecture, maybe social conditions can inform program or overall spatial layout.
Studying emergence in relation to architecture and urbanism also has the potential to blur boundaries between understandings of class and other social divisions. While whitewashing the demographics of a city would have disastrous political consequences, viewing urbanism in its entirety along the lines of emergence could demonstrate how seemingly separate social systems manage to intersect or interact.
A class analysis of emergence could draw from the contradictions outlined in Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, specifically his descriptions of “mixed-used” industrial/agricultural quarters in working class neighborhoods. Here, Engels outlines the interaction between high-density housing which included courtyards for pigs where the residents were forced to dispose of waste. Emergent issues of oscillation could be applied to changes in environmental qualities for residents. Engels inadvertently observed what can be understood as oscillation when he states, “The couple of hundred houses, which belong to old Manchester, have been long since abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed into them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter,” (Engels 80). With the impending climate crisis and massive inequalities in wealth distribution, we may be able to recognize emergent patterns in human migration, especially on an urban level. This could suggest that informality will become not only widespread but the urban cultural norm.
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Web. 11 Feb. 2013. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf>.
Tradition in Modernity
The Economic institution of the dabbawalas is indicative of the tensions between tradition and the pressures of 21st century neoliberal capitalism. Again highlighting the conflict between fetishizing poverty and applauding creative economic efforts on the part of slum residents, the dabbawalas represent a highly sophisticated response to the alienation of urban life. At the same time, they exist in the framework of traditional family values (domestic work being entirely carried out by women) and are a potential hindrance to further social advancements. While home-cooked food delivered daily on an urban level is a fascinating response to the ravages of the fast food industry, the processes behind that production of food remain basically unaltered. That is not to say that the work of the dabbawalas is to blame for the social relations in Mumbai but is indicative of the fact that it is dangerous to celebrate creative solutions originating from the slums without calling into question their forced existence in the first place.
Mehrotra’s piece also recognizes the ingenuity of informal urbanism that is situated in static built/social systems. The Kinetic City is conceived of as an informal urbanism that exists within the static or “real” city of Mumbai and is comprised of informal markets, the flow of people and temporary urban installations surrounding new religious festivals (Burdett and Sudjic 110). The sheer scale of residents living and working in an informal sense constitutes a living architecture. The density of residents competes for dominance with static vestiges of colonial architecture. The real revolutionary quality of the Kinetic City is that the scale and transformability of the population can work to erase a cultural legacy of imperialism through its very existence. Returning to the example of the dabbawala, a thoroughly urban profession also regenerates more autonomous cultural feelings. Dabbawalas are typically from the same rural region of India and continue to identify as such, marking Mumbai urbanism with a reignited sense of Indian rural culture (Percot 9).
Conversely, improvised solutions to “problems” have negative consequences. In Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s main informal settlements, ethnic/religious conflicts in the early 90s were “solved” by literal barriers between communities, eliminating the impression that informal settlements were benign melting pots (Sharma 33). Informal settlements do not exist outside of larger societal constructions and while there is a certain freedom of movement and a subsequent freedom of identity, informal settlements will not be the site of spontaneous revolutionary change. One of the important qualities to draw from in the conception of the Kinetic City is the setup’s dynamism and potential for bringing about radical change. If informal communities can generate new markets and new architecture, they can also potentially alter the political landscape. Although on a cultural level rural tradition is entering the urban structures of Mumbai, the process of transformation is dialectical and the inhabitants of informal settlements are also exposed to a previously unheard of amount of people, ideas and lifestyles. Change is never automatic but it is always possible.
Bibliography
Burdett, Richard, and Deyan Sudjic. “The Static and the Kinetic.” Living in the Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society. London: Phaidon, 2011.
Percot, Marie. “Dabbawalas, Tiffin Carriers of Mumbai: Answering a Need for Specific Catering.”
Sharma, Kalpana. Rediscovering Dharavi.
The Informal Proletariat
In their book Empire, Hardt and Negri offer a fresh understanding of the proletariat, “as a broad category that includes all those whose labor is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction,” (Hardt and Negri 52). This understanding is important to keep in mind when considering the population of over one billion living in informal communities operating in globalized capitalism. While some suggest that many of the jobs that make up the informal community are entrepreneurial in nature, limited access to resources and capital render these “entrepreneurs” as proletarians involved with the exchange of the scraps of bourgeois productive forces.
Mike Davis correctly notes that the explosion of informal settlemtns is part of a semi-proletarianization process that continues in the tradition of 19th century Naples (Davis 174). Instead of reflecting an explosion of micro-capitalism, the trend represents the inadequacy of non-urban economic forms in the rush of 21st century capitalism. Informal settlements become hyper-saturated markets for the consumption of developed capitalism’s waste and contrived levels of unemployment. Just as the unemployed masses of the 19th century were a byproduct of capitalism itself, informal communities and the informal economies that sustain them are not accidents of postindustrial capitalism. Rather, they serve to continue the expansion of capital relatively. The mangnitude of unemployment cheapened the cost of labor because any efforts at collective bargaining could be made null by the rapid replacement of an organized workforce with scores of unemployed masses.
In a similar trick of the market, the electronics market in Lagos (perhaps the most efficient and highprofile example) recycles the detritus and obsolescence of capitalism by exploiting previously-excluded markets (Koolhaas 702). Antiquated electronics of the late 20th century become the epitome of 21st century technology for a market that is constantly expanding in a strikingly dense manner.
Beyond the more “formal,” informal political structures described in the report on Lagos, the development of informal settlements on the scale witnessed thus far suggests that there is the potential for a new political/spatial logic that exists outside of capitalist globalization. If Haussmanization processess in the 19th century brought urban space under the control of the bourgeois state, the scope of informal settlements in the 21st century generate possibilities of extra-state resistance and alternative forms of social organization. Neuwirth, in contrast to Mike Davis, commented on conditions in informal settlements somewhat positively. Some residents remarked that the communities within informal settlements often allowed for a sense of freedom and human solidarity that were otherwise unavaiable in the formal city (Neuwirth 5). Beyond this sense of community, one can speculate the ability to radically critique the global capitalist system. Without fetishizing underdevelopment or caricaturing “the natives’ creativity,” informal settlements are sites of constant growth, dynamic change and close contact between previously-unrelated masses of people. The potential for this in shaping consciousness in gigantic; modern processes of urbanization are transforming into processes of hyperurbanization without similar levels of economic advancement. In this sense, the new expanded proletariat is becoming a global phenomenon far surpassing the industrial proletariat of Marx’s days.
Bibliography
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.
Koolhaas, Rem. Lagos: How It Works. Baden: Lars Müller, 2007.
Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. New York: Routledge, 2005.