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”