Abstract
Cities of the future will be largely extra-legal. Most will not be planned nor be built on land that is legally owned. They will be realized without the formal input of civic or private agencies. Politicians, policy-makers, planners and civic leaders will have limited impact upon them. Architects and engineers will have even less. This professional marginalization is not due to a lack of expertise, nor is it due to a lack of desire. It is because the frameworks that support these professions are structured in a manner that privileges a pace and structure of interaction that is fundamentally counter with that used to build these future-cities. This chapter proposes an alternative manner of practice, one that is more aligned with the nature of these extra-legal settlements.
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Notes
- 1.
To understand this assertion, two points must be considered. First, informal settlements represent the largest and fastest growing urban condition on the planet. In fact, according to a 2013 UN-Habitat report, “since 1990, 213 million slum dwellers have been added to the global population.” Second, the definition for informal settlement offered by the UN-Habitat Programme, which is arguably the definition most widely applicable, includes only two primary characteristics: informal settlements are illegally located; and they are illegally constructed. It naturally follows that, now and in the future, most settlements will be extra-legal (UN-Habitat 2015: 3; see also WHO 2000).
- 2.
Politically, the areas occupied by informal settlements are rarely mapped with any detail and the edges left undefined, often purposefully (WHO 2000).
- 3.
“Living in these settlements often poses significant health risks. Sanitation, food storage facilities and drinking water quality are often poor, with the result that inhabitants are exposed to a wide range of pathogens and houses may act as breeding grounds for insect vectors. Cooking and heating facilities are often basic, with the consequence that levels of excessive exposures to indoor pollution may occur. Access to health and other services may be limited; overcrowding can contribute to stress, violence and increased problems of drugs and other social problems” (WHO 2000).
- 4.
To quote author Mike Davis, “the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel, as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay” (Davis 2006: 86).
- 5.
“In the shadows of rapid urbanization and economic liberalization across the world, the formation and demographic growth of informal settlements or ‘slums’ far outpaces the availability and capacity of urban planning” (Thieme and Kovacs 2015: 1).
- 6.
“The practice of approaching services in an individualized, technocratic form highly reliant upon engineering solutions and expert knowledge reflects institutional and management overlaps and incoherencies between sectors that are not required or in the habit of communicating, whether across governmental ministries, departments or donors, and indeed, is valid across the services’ spectrum, whether for waste, water, food or energy. … Approaches to municipal waste tend to be fairly technocratic in provision and analysis, ignoring the overlapping effects of waste on water, sanitation, food and health, with emphasis on the lack of political will and finances for operationalizing an effective waste management system, but one that does not explicitly address these interdependencies. Consequent to a lack of funds and communication strategies or data streaming between government agencies, waste disposal and management options have largely stagnated and failed to evolve to address new needs and waste forms” (Thieme and Kovacs 2015: 8–9).
- 7.
“Both ‘poaching’ and fiscal bias, of course, are expressions of the poor majority’s lack of political clout throughout most of the Third World; urban democracy is still the exception rather than the rule, especially in Africa. … A consensus of urban scholars agrees that public- and state-assisted housing in the Third World has primarily benefitted the urban middle class and elites, who expect to pay low taxes while receiving high levels of municipal services.” (Davis 2006: 68–69).
- 8.
“Slums can be, from the landlord’s point of view, a lucrative but risky investment. Seeking a return on their investment, landlords have to contend with risks of high tenant turnover, mobility and rent default. The primary motive is purely profit-driven” (Thieme and Kovacs 2015: 4).
- 9.
“Overcrowded, poorly maintained slum dwellings, meanwhile, are often more profitable per square foot than other types of real-estate investment… speculators are developing the urban periphery at ‘monopoly prices’ and enormous profits” (Davis 2006: 16).
- 10.
“Given the preceding context, another issue of indubitable importance arises: the fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other. Theirs is the fundamental role, and has been so throughout the history of this struggle” (Freire 2010: 60).
- 11.
“It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited, they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think, to want, and to know. Accordingly, these adherents to the people’s cause will constantly run the risk of falling into a type of generosity as malefic as that of the oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensible precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust” (Freire 2010: 60).
- 12.
“spatial and temporal practices are never neutral in social affairs. They always express some kind of class or other social content, and are more often than not the focus of intense social struggle. That this is so becomes doubly obvious when we consider the ways in which space and time connect with money, and the way that connection becomes even more tightly organized with the development of capitalism” (Harvey 1990: 213).
- 13.
These “personal spaces of resistance and freedom” are termed “heterotopias” (Foucault 2002: 367–379).
- 14.
Perhaps this is why Mies Van der Rohe identifies architecture as “the real battleground of the spirit” (Mies van der Rohe 1975: 154).
- 15.
“that in the 18th century one sees the development of reflection upon architecture as a function of the aims and techniques of the government of societies … If one opens a police report of the times—the treatises that are devoted to the techniques of government—one finds that architecture and urbanism occupy a place of considerable importance” (Foucault 2002: 368).
- 16.
“By distancing themselves from contractors and builders with economic control of the field, they (architects) also effectively repudiated the interests of moderate-income clients. Instead, the profession linked its professional identity to large-scale monumental commissions requiring wealthy patrons. This left architects dependent on the restricted group of clients who could afford to support their ambitions: the hoped for, but only occasionally awarded, patronage of the state (far less active than in Europe), but more often, the backing of large business and corporate interests” (Crawford 1991: 30).
- 17.
“Particularly when it comes to basic service provision, a form of ‘malevolent urbanism’ has generated across urban areas in the global South, where unequal access to and use of the city is prevalent. At the same time, a mosaic of actors, sectors, and initiatives seek to address the ‘challenges of slums’, usually purporting to work with local communities, but often misunderstanding how everyday practices and expectations might differ from externally defined development goals and impact measures” (Thieme and Kovacs 2015: 1).
- 18.
“The implication has been that informal economic activities and by extension informal provision of goods and services were not only described as irregular, casual and potential precarious, but also outside the remit of state regulation and surveillance. Therefore, as urban slums are characterized by informality in all spheres of life, they become to an extent invisible to the state, especially in terms of public provisions” (Thieme and Kovacs 2015: 18).
- 19.
“Many upgrading approaches continue to inappropriately import solutions from other places without adapting operations to the local context. They are therefore unable to neither take full advantage of local knowledge nor develop city-wide/‘at-scale’ responses” (UN-Habitat 2015: 3).
- 20.
“Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly. This conversion is so radical as not to allow of ambiguous behavior. To affirm this commitment but to consider oneself the proprietor of revolutionary wisdom—which must then be given (or imposed on) the people—is to retain the old ways. The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert who approaches the people but feels alarm at each step they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose his ‘status’, remains nostalgic toward his origins” (Freire 2010: 60–61).
- 21.
Theime and Kovacs also urge those attempting to positively impact the conditions found within slums to reverse the “flows of knowledge and expertise so as to theorize the nexus from the slum, where inhabitants experience everyday relationships to water, food, energy and waste as integrated” (Thieme and Kovacs 2015: 15).
- 22.
“the important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable … even if at first no consensus exists—only the appearance of one—the groups’ sense of cohesiveness works to turn the appearance into reality, and in doing so helps dissolve whatever doubts members of the group might have” (Surowiecki 2005: 37).
- 23.
“In terms of maximum participation, consensus decision making is the most inclusive” (Cherry 1998: 57).
- 24.
According Cass Sunstein, who conducted numerous studies on this phenomenon: “As a general rule, discussions tend to move the group as a whole and the individuals within it toward more extreme positions than the ones they entered the discussion with” (Surowiecki 2005: 185).
- 25.
“Herding” is demonstrated clearly through an experiment by Milgram, Bickman and Berkowitz. In it, the researchers placed a single individual on a street corner, and asked them to look skyward. As others passed, a few stopped to look skyward as well. After a time, they placed five people on the corner looking skyward, which caused four times as many people to gaze skyward. They then placed fifteen skyward-looking people on the corner, resulting in almost half of all passersby following suit. As they continued this progression, more and more people were convinced to stop and look at the sky, until 80% of the passersby ended up so doing by the end of the experiment (Milgram et al. 1969: 79–82).
- 26.
Rather than sit in the hive and discuss the alternative locations for nectar, gradually choosing a prudent course of action, bees send all members of the hive out in every direction. Once the scouts find a nectar source, they return to the hive and perform a waggle dance, the intensity of which is based upon the excellence of the supply. This dance attracts a corresponding number of scouts, which follow the bee to the source. They then return to the hive and perform a similar dance, until the entire hive has effectively divided itself to harvest the most nectar (few bees tending the smaller sources, more tending the larger sources). Although seemingly inefficient, this method is generally quite productive: if a nectar source exists within two kilometers of the hive, bees will find it over half the time. The bees, like the business market, succeed because they allow everyone to operate independently, in accordance with their own wisdom (Surowiecki 2005).
- 27.
“The duty of every revolutionary is to make a revolution” (Marighella 1977: 3).
- 28.
“The guerrilla movement, in its growth period, reaches a point where its capacity for action covers a specific region for which there is a surplus of men and an overconcentration in the zone. The bee swarming begins when one of its leaders, an outstanding guerrilla, moves to another region and repeats the chain of developments of guerrilla warfare, subject, of course, to a central command” (Guevara 1977: 210).
- 29.
“As the research of Kavita Datta and Gareth Jones has shown, the loss of economy of scale in housing construction dictates either very high unit prices for construction materials (purchased in small quantities from nearby retailers) or the substitutions of secondhand, poor quality materials. Datta and Jones argue, moreover, that ‘self-housing’ is partly a myth: ‘Most self-help is actually constructed with the paid assistance of artisans, and for specialist tasks, skilled labour.’” (Davis 2006: 72).
- 30.
UN-Habitat recognizes the importance of this by noting that “participation is often most effective when initiated at the neighborhood level through individual or community projects which are relatively limited in scale and developed progressively” (UN-Habitat 2012).
- 31.
“Design can be a means of controlling human behavior, and of maintaining this control in the future. The architect is a functionary in a chain of command whose most important task (from the standpoint of social institutions) is to label otherwise abstract and ‘meaningless’ spaces with ‘functions’ that are actually instructions to people as to how they must behave at a particular place and time. The network of designed spaces, the city, is an intricate behavioral plan prescribing social interactions of every kind, prescribing therefore the thoughts and, if possible, the feelings of individuals.” (Woods 1997: 23).
- 32.
[MF] “If one were to find a place, and perhaps there are some, where liberty is effectively exercised, one would find that this is not owing to the order of objects, but, once again, owing to the practice of liberty. Which is not to say that, after all, one may as well leave people in slums, thinking that they can simply exercise their rights there.
[PR] Meaning that architecture in itself cannot resolve social problems?
[MF] I think that it can and does produce positive effects when the liberating intentions of the architect coincide with the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom” (Foucault 2002).
- 33.
As noted by UN-Habitat: “Physical upgrading of slums with street networks and improved access to municipal basic services through augmentation of physical infrastructure has proven to make formidable positive social and economic changes in many cities. Socially, upgraded slums improve the physical living conditions, improve the general well-being of communities, strengthen local social and cultural capital networks, the livelihood generation opportunities, quality of life, and access to services and opportunities in towns and cities” (UN-Habitat 2012).
- 34.
“what ties the rural and urban slum experience in relation to the nexus are the prevalence of social networks and social capital as the dominant albeit informal platform for self-organizing and provisioning that determine how things get done” (Thieme and Kovacs 2015: 11).
- 35.
“Revolution that does not constantly become more profound is a regressive revolution” (Guevara 1977: 204).
- 36.
“Guerrilla warfare or a war of liberation will, in general, have three stages: the first, a strategic defense, in which a small hunted force bites the enemy; it is not protected for passive defense in a small circle, but its defense consists in limited attacks which it can carry out. After this a state of equilibrium is reached in which the possibilities of action of the enemy and the guerrilla unit are stabilized; and later the final moment of overrunning the repressive army that will lead to the taking of great cities, to the great decisive encounters, to the total annihilation of the enemy” (Guevara 1977: 210).
- 37.
For more information on leaderless organizations, reference The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom (2006).
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Shall, S. (2019). Guerrilla Architecture and Humanitarian Design. In: Arefi, M., Kickert, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90131-2_3
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