Tag Archives: infrastructure

Infrastructure as Architecture

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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”

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/

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.