Tag Archives: Urban

Urban Acupuncture Reiterated

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It’s really exciting to regularly see connections between the different readings that are done throughout this class. Particularly an overlap of ideas and thoughts regarding issues of informal and formal cities. One thing I have been particularly interested in since the beginning of our discussions has been what Urban Think Tank call, “Urban Acupuncture”. This term has come up a few times under this label, and has come up multiple times as a concept. It refers to the connection between the formal and the informal parts of the city. According to the Designing Inclusive Cities, the fact of the matter is that “We are not able to make services available as quickly as the growth.” (Smith 13) Informal cities exist. And they are often growing much faster than their formal counterparts. According to Cynthia Smith, Urban Think Tank, and many other thinkers, one of the best solutions is “hybrid solutions that bridge the formal and informal city.” (Smith 13) It’s often the case that entrepreneurship that has formed through the opportunities in the informal city become integrated with the formal city; showing that the two co-exist. A discussion that came up during class last week was how the architect contributes to the informal city – or if they do at all. At the end of this brief discussion, we began to realize that architects, of course, contribute to the formal city, which by it’s characteristics creates opportunities for the informal city to latch on. The motorbike taxis in Dakar are quintessential to the blurred line between the formal and the informal. These taxis are a form of cheap transport, and offer services to all types of people. Instead of getting rid of these ‘illegal’ services, the government decided to register them and provide signs to make them more distinguishable. This is the perfect example of the Urban Acupuncture, or the bridge between the formal and the informal.

According to Worlds Set Apart, Sao Paulo is a “city is made not only of opposed social and spatial worlds but also of clear distances between them.” (Caldeira 168) This creates an immediate donut-like diagram where the center is the ‘formal’ city made up of middle and upper class, and the surrounding area of the donut is the ‘informal’ city where the lower class are spreading to the periphery. A solution to this was often thought to be to expand the infrastructure of the city to the periphery and provide basic living necessities to the residents of the periphery. Such actions could have major impacts on the survival rate of new born children, lower crime rates, less drug use, less diseases, etc. Sao Paulo and the favelas is a great example of this. Jorge Mario Jaurequi is an architect who has had multiple Favela-Barrio projects which are designs to create a better sense of connection between the formal/informal and improve living standards. His projects, often simple interventions, are an example of what a big impact small scale changes can have. The connection between the formal and the informal is crucial, and it is almost a necessity that the two exist together. (Jaurequi 60) He values the importance of being able to recognize the ‘other’ – the 90% of the world’s population which is often ignored during design by design professionals. (Smith) Jaurequi encourages us to recognize the ‘other’ in order to insert more humanitarian designs into our lives.

Works Cited

Caldeira, Teresa. “Worlds Set Apart.” LSE Cities. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Mar. 2013.

Jaurequi, Jorge M. “Articulating The Broken City and Society.” Architectural Design 81.3 (n.d.): 58-63. Print.

Smith, Cynthia E. Design with the Other 90%: Cities. New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2011. Print.

The Informal as Architecture without the Architect

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The informal urban is thought to be an ad-hoc eternally self-evolving and changing entity. The lack of consciously recognized order or method is what makes the informal informal. But to say that the informal is lacking in design is likely not doing the order that exists within the informal justice. Example after example has shown that the informal has a method to its madness, a controlled chaos in a sense. The informal city has a grain all to its own. That grain can be called the design of the informal. But that asks whether design can exist without the designer.

The designer creates and and invents. Designers vary in their methods and products. One type of designer or architect creates based on the inevitable set of contextual conditions that face the architect. The generic constraints are site boundaries, topography, environmental, programmatic  budget, political ect. All of these conditions must be righteously integrated into the design and the designer must be aware of all of the conditions. Thus the designer creates a comprehensive and effective design.

The informal city does not have the designer and the design rigor. But how then does the informal city creates it’s grain? How does it develop its “design”? The design is made naturally. The same way that the designer must think about the constraints the informal city must think about its constraints. When an informal city is built in the hillside and every structure sits along the hillside almost create topographical lines of the geography constraints that are being adhered to. The lack of a budget, this time meaning a lack of funds instead of a “money is not object attitude” causes the informal city to be the cheapest it can be. Thus the informal city creates its own typology and thus creates its own design. And this is done without the help of the designer.

But is it still designer even though the designer dose not exist? To answer this question the product of the design has to be thought about more. The final product is not where the design ends. the final product is really where the design begins. When the user of the design interact with the designed object and activates it it inherently changes. The designers’ control has been abdicated. Now the product is used as the user see fit.The object is not used as the designer intended. This is the point when the designed object is now the used object.

The informal city is a used object and thus is reconfigured ever evolving and ever changing. So once again one can claim that the informal city is the designed city even though there is no designer. Still begs though what the implication of this question is. It is to ask if the informal, the design liberated from the  designer,can be judged in the same way that the designer based design is. Really it is asking can something be learned form the informal and thus can this learning experience give the informal power?

Top-Down Towns

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When reading about the industrial residential arrangements and comparing them to the PREVI-Lima project, the idea of bottom-up versus top-down communities came to mind. In both cases, the places where the local residents lived were “planned” in a top-down mentality, a contrast to the bottom-up concepts of emergence as discussed previously. And yet, within the top-down structure of urban organization lies the ability of the people of Lima to complete the housing project after the original planners were unable to do so. What makes the PREVI-Lima project so much more successful and humane than the industrial towns of the 19th century?

One initial point of interest in the top-down urban plan of these two sets of residential projects is that of the grand scheme. In both cases, housing was a necessity and a problem that needed to be solved. With the industrial towns, however, the housing was an afterthought. As described by Lewis Mumford in the book Slums and Urbanization, the plan started with the idea of profit and how to maximize gains from the prime placement of industries and railroads, and then an attempt followed to try and place as many dwellings for as little a price as could be engineered in the leftover space. Even in the less-than-livable towns this planning scheme created, there were still the basic elements of town planning: building structure and (some) utilities, doors and (some) windows, streets, etc. But it is the shirking of these efforts to the last priority that leaves them in such a lacking condition.

For the PREVI-Lima project, it’s as if all these factors that failed in the 19th century industrial towns were flipped and corrected, and in such a way that residents of the unfinished plan were able to understand and incorporate their own residential development into the local economy and community. The top-down order here was that of resident first, with profits and business coming from within the created community. As described in “The Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima: The Making of a Neighbourhood,” “the PREVI experience demonstrates the importance of having a planning team with a comprehensive urban approach; since only with a complex and collective understanding of the urban phenomenon beyond the residential is it possible to create optimal strategies that enable its eventual users to continue the project’s development.” The top-down planning here felt it was important to include elements that keep the community alive and able to expand, as opposed to the strict, bare necessities of living provided by the industrial towns. These elements include the abilities for families to expand their houses, increase their income within the housing project, and the provision of purposeful pedestrian axis, traffic separation, and designated public spaces and plazas.

For top-down projects, as with any plan, those doing the planning and setting the wheels in motion have the greatest effect on the outcome of a project. With the PREVI-Lima project, its clear that with a comprehensive and purposeful design, a town can be created with enough momentum to even complete itself.