The Social Design Public Action Reader
The Social Design Public Action Reader
The Social Design Public Action Reader
Social Design
Public Action
Keep Their
Heads Ringin
DESIGN IS EVERYDAY
Public Action
Knowledge must be open-source. Architecture, despite its reputation as being a product of the creative whim, is a collective
and collaborative act.
And whereas the sharing economy remains grounded in market exchange, the
open-source movement stands to reclaim
access to the commons. This we believe is
a key premise for effective social design.
Knowledge must be open-source. Architecture, despite its reputation as being
a product of the creative whim, is a collective and collaborative act. By sharing even
the most innocuous of details, an opening is provided for critical insight and
improvement of methodology. At U-TT we
believe in licensing our prototypes under
the Creative Commons, allowing them to
be shared, adapted, and restructured in
an open-ended future. We are creating an
open-source toolbox of social designs, to
be made available to multiple stakeholders.
But to design socially is also to distribute the process of making architecture
and urban environments. This is what
we seek to achieve through our work in
the slums of Petare and Santa Cruz in
Caracas where we are currently completing two vertical gyms. Our designs involve
multitudes of collaborators and integrate
comprehensives attempts to map social
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By Lukas FEIREISS
Social Design
Social Design
Tatjana SCHNEIDER
Towards Architectures of Welfare (22)
Lukas FEIREISS
Design is Everyday (1)
Miguel ROBLES-DURN
The Rise of Instant Activism, and How its
Transforming Architecture, Urbanism and
the Way Our Cities are Built (24)
INTRODUCTION (4)
Anton FALKEIS
Social Design = Public Action
Urbanizing the World (4)
(Skateistan) 28
Oliver PERCHOVICH
A Different Angle Can give a Form a New
Function and New Owners (28)
Michael MURPHY
The Architecture of Social Justice (30)
Benjamin FOERSTER-BALDENIUS
The Silkworm Solution and Other Ways to
Save the World (36)
Tracy K WOODARD
Mad Housers and the American Definition
of Home (147)
Justin MCGUIRK
Revolutionary Housing in Argentina (150)
Emily FAHLEN
Ahmet ght: The Silent University (62)
David HARVEY
The Right to the City (82)
Richard SENNET
The Open City (88)
Thomas LOME
Open Structures (68)
FELD72
Built on Sand (33)
Lusa ALPALHO
One of Many Recipes for Socially Engaging
Projects (144)
Ion SRVIN
The Power of Logic Versus the
Logic of Power (71)
Erica HAGEN
Ground Truth Initiative (74)
Afaina de JONG
City of the Young (92)
Marjetica POTR and Andres LEPIK
Cities in Transition (94)
Elke KRASNY
Domicide. Favela Chic.
Oikophagia. A Desired Manifesto (98)
Philip URSPRUNG
Echo-Logy:
A Greek Reenactment (40)
(Luis Berros-Negrn) 64
(Raumlabor Berlin) 36
Marco CASAGRANDE
Ruin Academy: Towards the Third
Generation City (106)
Thorsten DECKLER
Informal Studio: Marlboro South (110)
Alexander RMER and
Ricarda CAPELLER
Bom Dia, Casa do Vapor!
Transforming Space / Open Perspectives /
Common Public Space (116)
COMMUNITY and
CO-EXISTENCE (127)
Re-thinking architectures
of relationships, processes
and agencies of the collective and the individual in
the contemporary city.
Giancarlo MAZZANTI
From the Social Design to the Sense
of Community (128)
Jeanne van HEESWIJK
Art and Social Change: Learning
Collectively to Take Responsibility (131)
Jeroen KOOLHAAS and Dre URHAHN
Knowledge is Prejudice (134)
Rick LOWE and Rixt WOUDSTRA
Project Row House (136)
CONTRIBUTORS (158)
IMPRINT (161)
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Leonidas MARTIN
Disrupt the Dominant Narrative (18)
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Social Design
EDITORIAL (00)
Public Action
it became feasible to increase the velocity of movement: the velocity of machinery replaced the velocity of pre-industrial
transportation systems. As a result of industrialization, automobiles appeared on
the urban agenda. Gaining the biggest influence on urban planning to date, they became the driving force of city development.
Streets and public spaces of pre-industrial
cities once populated by a variety of activities now faced the reduction to traffic only.
Depending entirely on car mobility, cities
developed into sprawling urban forms.
This sprawling model of urbanization has
had a big and long lasting impact on urbanas well as societal structures.
During the development of the industrial society, technological progress, and
innovation amplified the production of
wealth. For the first time in history, the
living standards of the masses of ordinary
Arts as
Urban Innovation
Knowledgerepresented
primarily
in science, technology and innovation
takes the place of industry and agriculture
as a key factor in economical and urban
development. While the physical abilities
of man and animal defined the pace of
the pre-industrial world, and the velocity
of machinery those of the industrialized
world, the absolute speed of electro-magnetic fields now questions the notion of
distance.
The concept of knowledge-society emphasizes immateriality and specific intangible features of products and services in
economic progresses, and of innovation
in particular (Hochgerner 2013). Innovation is our best means of successfully
tackling major societal challenges, such
as climate change, energy and resource
Social Design
Social Design
By Anton FALKEIS
Notes
Benevolo, L. (1986). Die Geschichte der Stadt.
Frankfurt/New York. p. 781
Falkeis, A. (1997) Featureless City / Stadt ohne
Eigenschaften. In: Werk Bauen und Wohnen.
Falkeis; Hochgerner (2013). Social Design = Social
Innovation. Public discussion on Social Design by
Anton Falkeis and Josef Hochgerner moderated
by Gerald Bast. University of Applied Arts Vienna.
April 18, 2013.
Hochgerner, J. (2012). New Combinations of Social
Practices in the Knowledge Society.
In: Franz; Hochgerner; Howalt. Challenge Social
Design. New York
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Saskia
Sassen
10
Abstract
Public Action
all are vehicles for making social and political claims. We can add to these the very
familiar anti-gentrification struggles and
demonstrations against police brutality
in US cities during the 1980s and in cities
worldwide in the 1990s and continuing.
Most recently, the over 100,000 people
marching in Tel Aviva first for this city
not to bring down the government, but to
ask for access to housing and jobs; part of
the demonstration is Tel Avivs tent city,
housing mostly impoverished middleclass citizens. The Indignados in Spain
have been demonstrating peacefully in
Madrid and Barcelona for jobs and social
services; they have now become a national
movement with people from through- out
Spain gathering to go on a very long march
to EU headquarters in Brussels. These are
also the claims of the 600,000 who went
to the street in late August in several cities
in Chile. These are among the diverse instances that together make me think of a
concept that takes it beyond the empirics
of each caseThe Global Street.
In each of these cases, I would argue
that the street, the urban street, as public space is to be differentiated from the
classic European notion of the more ritu-
11
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Social Design
When
Powerlessness
Becomes Complex
city and to the country rather than protection of property. What the two situations
share is the notion that through these
practices new forms of the political (for
Weber, citizenship) are being constituted
and that the city is a key site for this type
of political work. The city is, in turn, partly
constituted through these dynamics. Far
more so than a peaceful and harmonious
suburb, the contested city is where the
civic is made.
We see this potential for the making of
the civic across the centuries. Historically
the overcoming of urban conflicts has often been the source for an expanded civicness. The cases that have become iconic
in Western historiography are Augsburg
and Moorish Spain. In both, a genuinely
enlightened leadership and citizenry
worked at constituting a shared civicness.
But there are many other both old and
new cases. Old Jerusalems bazaar was a
space of commercial and religious coexistence for long periods of time. Modern
Baghdad, under the brutal leadership of
Saddam Hussein, was a city where religious minorities (though not necessarily the majority, always a threat), such as
Christian and Jews, lived in more relative
peace than they do today. Outsiders in
Europes cities, notably immigrants, have
experienced persecution for centuries;
yet in many a case their successful claims
for inclusion had the effect of expanding
and strengthening the rights of citizens
as well.
We see some of this capacity to override
old hatreds, in its own specific forms, in
Cairos Tahrir Square. But also in Yemens
Saana, where once conflicting tribes have
found a way to coalesce with each other
and with the protesters against the existing regime. Tahrir Square has become the
iconic case, partly because key features
of the process became visible as they
stretched over time: the discipline of the
protesters, the mechanisms for communicating, the vast diversity of ages, politics,
religions, cultures, and the struggles extraordinary trajectory. But in fact we now
know that these features are also at work
in other sites. Yemens protest movements have been intent on being peaceful
and unarmed, and indeed many members expressed distress when one tribea
long-standing enemy of the regime for political and economic reasonslaunched
an armed attack. In a matter of weeks, the
ethics of the protest movement and the
complexity of the situation ensured a situation that allowed enemy tribes to find a
system of trust in the city, for sharing the
struggle against the regime. This was not a
minor achievement.
The conditions and the mechanisms
are specific to each of the several cases we
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Cities have long been sites of conflictsracisms, religious hatreds, expulsions of the poor. At the same time, cities
have historically evinced a capacity to triage conflict through commerce and civic
activity; this contrasts with the history of
the modern national state, which has historically tended to militarize conflict.
Major developments in the current
global era are making cities the sites for
a whole range of new types of conflicts.
Religion is one such critical vector for
conflicts in citiesboth as a cause and
as a consequence. These are not urban
causes horror, or, an ontological insecurity, that people dying from malaria does
not. The mix of people and buildingsin
a way, the social physics of the cityhas
acquired the capacity to temper destruction, not to stop it, but to temper it. What
makes this possible? It is the combination of non-urban deaths in a city and
a sticky web of constraints consisting of
a mix of law, reciprocal agreements, and
the informal global court of public opinion (Sassen, 2010). And it is the collective
making that is a city, especially in its civic
components. Ontological insecurity was
also part of the response to the bombings
in New York, Mumbai, Madrid, London,
and other cities
Again and again, history points to the
limits of power. Unilateral decisions by
the greater power are not the only source
of restraint. Multiple interdependencies
act as restraints. To this, I add the city as
a weak regime that can obstruct and temper the destructive capacity of the superior military power, yet another component
for systemic survival in a world where
several countries have the capacity to destroy the planet (Sassen, 2010 and Sassen,
2008, ch. 8).
Under these conditions the city is both
a technology for containing conventional
military powers and a technology of resistance for armed insurgencies. The social
physics of the city, its material and human
features, are an obstacle for conventional
armiesan obstacle wired into urban
space itself. Would Gaza have been completely, rather than partially, destroyed if
it was not densely populated, but was occupied only by Palestinian-owned factories and warehouses?
1
2
3
4
5
Conclusion
This article explored a few of the vectors at work in the uprisings of the MENA
region, with the aim of opening up a larger
conceptual field to understand the complex interactions between power and powerlessness. This exploration makes it possible to examine the heuristic potential of
these events, in that they tell a larger story.
It situates this discussion in the larger
question of the return of the city as a site
for the making of political and civic changes, but also as a lens for understanding
13
Notes
Globalizations. 2010. Globalization and the
financial crisis. Globalization, 7(12)
Latham, R. and Sassen, S. 2005. Digital Formations: IT and the New Architectures in the
Global Realm, New York: Princeton University
Press.
Sassen, S. 2008. Territory, Authority, Rights:
From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sassen, S. 2010. When the city itself becomes
a technology of war. Theory, Culture & Society,
27(6): 3350. [CrossRef]
Sassen, S. 2011. The minimalist Facebook:
Network capability within large ecologies. In
The Facebook Reader, Edited by: Rhle, T. and
Leistert, O. Berlin: Transcript.
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12
massive
processesindustrialization,
urbanization, alienation, a new cultural
formation they called urbanity. Studying the city was not simply studying the
urban. It was about studying the major
social processes of an era. Since then the
study of the city gradually lost this privileged role as a lens for the discipline and
as producer of key analytic categories.
There are many reasons for this, most
important among which are questions of
the particular developments of method
and data in the social sciences. Critical
was the fact that the city ceased being the
fulcrum for epochal transformations and
hence a strategic site for research about
non-urban processes. The study of the
city became increasingly the study of what
came to be called social problems. Todays resurgence of the city as a site for research on major contemporary dynamics
is evident in multiple disciplinessociology, anthropology, economic geography,
cultural studies, and literary criticism. In
the global era, economists have begun to
address the urban and regional economy
in their analyses in ways that go beyond
older forms of urban economics. Globalization has given rise to new information
technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and
the strengthening presence and voice of
sociocultural diversity. All of these are at
the cutting edge of change. These trends
do not encompass the majority of social
conditions; on the contrary, most social
reality probably corresponds to older continuing and familiar trends. Yet, although
these trends involve only parts of the urban condition and cannot be confined to
the urban, they are strategic in that they
mark the urban condition in novel ways
and make it, in turn, a key research site for
major urban and non-urban trends.
Social Design
Hana Al
Bayaty
14
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Lieven:You
You say two things: you have to look at Tahrir in a
time line and on a bigger scale.
HANA:
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HANA:
15
Lieven: I understand that you, as an Iranian, are sceptical, Pajam. But, the first reactions are telling: Kahmenei
said it would be an Islamist revolution, Netanyahu said it,
and Cameron and the Dutch prime minister Rutte. It is all
wishful thinking: Khamenei hopes it will be turned into a
Islamist revolution, for a democratic revolution is a nightmare to him, Netanyahu doesnt want a democracy at his
back door, for it is obvious it will not help in the blockade
of Gaza as the Mubarak regime did, and Cameron and Rutte
ventilate this typical right wing European vision that Islam
deeply equals fundamentalism. But, Hana, tell us about the
Muslim Brotherhood?
HANA:
They are definitely an important social force in Egyptian society. They didnt
back the revolution until very late. There is
a split into many different constituencies.
Since the success of the revolution they
are split into various factions. The young
ones have spend 18 days of struggle on the
square with all other strands of society.
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HANA:
The fundamentalists never had a political program that was clear about social justice. They were willing to make
deals with capitalist countries that do not
benefit the people. The people now are
very aware of what is just, what is real development, what is a real health system,
what is a real education system, what are
union rights, etc. I hope the fundamentalists will be discredited because they have
no real program. And whether people
are deeply religious or not; whether they
take of their headscarves or not, is not my
problem In fact, the girls in Tahrir square
might not have taken of their veils yet, but
their bodies have changed, their relation
Lieven:So that was the first day of anger. Thats interesting. How important was the trigger effect of Tunisia?
HANA:
It was very important. It is very important for all the Arabs. It was a youth
movement that was later joined by the
workers and the middle class, that actually was able to put down such a well established dictator and client regime of
the West. Of course this has given hope to
every other client state that had a dictator
and was based on police repression.
PAYAM:
Last questions!
Last questions!
HANA:
17
Lieven: With these words we can finish. Now it is for all the
Muslim migrant neighborhoods and for all the youngsters
in fact elsewhere in the world, in Brussels, London, Paris,
etc, to learn from Tahrir. My slogan these days is: Everywhere Tahrir Square! Lets give Hana a hand. [applause].
HANA [SHOUTS FROM AFAR]:
And no scepticism!
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Lieven: For me the period after 9/11 was dark, but now I am
in a period of optimism, of wishful thinking even. I believe
that project of theocracy, both in Islam, Judaism and Christianity (think of the born again Christians in America, who
were a very important political force in the Bush years and
are now united in the tea party), as an alternative for all
the western, modern political projects, like Marxism, Nasserism, other globalismthat this project, is over. That is
the world historical significance of the Arab Awakening.
The youngsters said in Tunis and Egypt: we dont want
Sharia, we want freedom, democracy and social justice.
And that is why in Iran the leaders are so scared (Payam
nods in agreement.) Even in China they are scared: as you
know they censured the word jasmine on the internet and
are arresting all sorts of activists and personalities like Ai
Wei Wei.
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A physical space in Barcelona, an artists collective, an action group? What exactly is Enmedio?
LEO:
18
Leonidas
Martin
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We try to make our actions inspiring and catchy. We conceive and design
them like seeds, which can scatter and
germinate elsewhere. After the 15-M mobilisations there was a party in an unemployment office in the Canary Islands and
other similar actions. First we define a
framework (aesthetic, political, theoretical) and from there we seek participation
and reappropriation.
emerged from a creative activism conference that we called How to End Evil,
which revolved around the idea of transmitting creative activism practices and
experiences to younger people who were
being politicised by the 15-M and similar movements at the time. It ties into a
long history of fictional characters who
become active in spaces of protest, from
Prt a Revolter to the New Kids on the
Black Block, which offer different ways of
being on the streets, brimming with joy,
colour and creativity.
The Reflectors have a lot to do with
the moment when they arose, around the
first anniversary of the 15-M mobilisations. By then, governments and police
had activated channels for repression and
criminalisation in order to put an end to
street protests. Once these kinds of dynamics come into play, the streets lose
their plurality and protest is de-democratised. All that remains are small, highly
homogenous groups that can be easily
codified and identified. Thats where The
Reflectors came in, declaring: Were not
going to play this game. Were going to
blow open the codes
CAMPA
19
MARIO:
: The Reflectors play with the imaginary of superheroes and fan culture. They
are ordinary people with a series of tools
that allow them to fight Evil: blow-up
cubes to stop police charging, mirrors to
confuse the surveillance helicopters, costumes to break the expected codes, etc.
They add drama, but at the same time they
make the protest less dramatic: through
humour, by generating other affects, by
making it desirable to be on the streets
again and at the same time, bringing real
elements into play so as to redirect the
moments of tension and violence.
CAMPA:
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issatisfied with the lack of connections between art and political action, Campa, Leo, Mario, and Oriana,
along with four others, set up the collective Enmedio (Barcelona), which explores
the transformative potential of images
and stories. We talked to them about the
real and potential power of this thing we
call art to have a political effect on the
crisis.
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LEO:
ORIANA:
20
We rounded up a series of like-minded people and brainstormed ways of damaging Bankias image. We thought that
the only way to affect a bank, and to show
that we were against the bailout, was by
encouraging people to close their bank
accounts. And that the best way to do this
was to organise a party (as you see, we
love organising parties).
CAMPA:
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The idea was to show that something as personal and private as a bank
account can be used politically, and that
closing it can be a public action, and
above allgreat fun!
LEO:
CAMPA:
CAMPA:
You also designed the popular red and green signs that
were used at the escraches organised by the PAH. After an
escrache, a friend said to me: those simple posters made
such a big difference; without them wed just seem like an
enraged multitude.
LEO:
Those dots later became photographs. We organised a Photocall, inviting people to have their photographs
taken holding a sign that set out their own
reasons for attending the 25-S action. We
took the Photocall out onto the streets,
and used social networks to encourage
people to take photographs of themselves
showing their reasons for being there.
The idea was to boost diversity and open
up an event that had originally been uninclusive.
ORIANA:
And lastly, can you name an influence or a point of reference for this work that you do at the intersection of images
and the social, art and politics?
ORIANA:
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CAMPA:
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The very same week that the Spanish government announced cutbacks of
20 billion euros to health and education
funding, we found out that Bankia was to
be bailed out with 23 million euros of public money. Like most people, we were outraged. And then we decided to do something about it.
Social Design
block at the demonstration for the first anniversary of the 15-M movement, including people who wed never met but had
seen the costumes on the Internet. Now
The Reflectors are an autonomous group,
very close to Enmedio but independent of
us. This aspect is also very interesting.
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The mention of art and technology is
not really surprising. It crops up in almost
every personal statement of prospective
students of architecture. Social agenda,
however, is different. I dont have hard
evidence of this, but I have a gut feeling
that the reference to social agenda is a
relatively new development.
So, I say: Why do you say: social agenda? What do you mean? Isnt design always
23
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Tatjana
Schneider
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Miguel
RoblesDurn
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E, POLITICS,
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technical competence, and without ethical conviction, they go along with the established order.3
Under the neoliberal umbrella, the image of the instant activist hunts and banalizes the work of those creators that have
constantly confronted themselves with
the casualties of their political struggle,
those that out of lived experience, urgency, and necessity have persistently imagined ways to continue fighting against the
present oppressions of their past. Under
the current lingo, the struggling creator,
the one that conflicts and opposes the
neoliberal establishment from its roots is
not an activist. He or she might be a rebel, a radical, a fundamentalist ideologue
or a dysfunctional social actor, but never
an activist.
In contrast to the old critical and calculative struggles of the activist architect, the
idea of the creative architect as an instant
activist has recently been blown up out
of proportion. This new breed of the market is being described as socially respon-
1
2
3
4
5
6
Notes
David Harvey. Spaces of Hope. illustrated ed.,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
From The Universal Convergence on Competitiveness (adapted from Cammack 2009, working
paper by Dr. Greig Charnock)
Herbert Marcuse,. One-Dimensional Man:
Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial
Society. Beacon Press, Boston, 1964.
Harold Rosenberg,. The De-Definition of Art,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1971 p.
11,
Ibid. p.12
Interview with Teddy Cruz, June 2009. An
architect like Teddy Cruz, someone that since
his childhood has been confronting the dreads
of dictatorship, political imposition, murder,
poverty and extreme inequality, is now equaled
and put together with instant activists. All of
Cruzs past struggles and political involvements
are constantly erased by the new media and the
use of his seductive imagery. In a practice like
the one of Cruz, the interests in design shifts
to the processes of mediation and into dynamic
assemblages of activity and program. Possibly,
the action that has characterized Cruzs contemporary practice is his conscious transgression of the traditional architectural canons and
its claims of autonomy, into actively pursuing
the exploration of trans-disciplinary realms,
with the purpose of better understanding the
immaterial urban processes that configure the
city, but also with an aim to borrow and adapt
other disciplinary procedures, contaminating
his views on the urban condition with the views
of the other. It is the transgression of the architectural discipline into the necessary active
positions that are relevant to a specific urban/
architectonic case, that distinguishes Cruzs
activist position. In difference to the singular
viewpoint of the common architect, Cruz has
made a practice of translating his professional
stance into a diverse array of disciplinary fields,
which are significant to the processes that define the urban context where he is operating. In
entering the realm of law and policy, sociology,
economics, art, Cruz choreographs, empowers
and enables local inhabitants to claim fundamental decisions in the way they wish to inhabit
and structure their social relations vis--vis the
neighborhood. The most developed example
of Cruzs engagement in critical proximity with
a neighborhood, is his work in the city of San
Ysidro, California. Located at five hundred meters from the Mexican border, in a site owned by
Casa Familiar, a non-profit organization working
in education, advocacy, service programming,
housing and community economic development.
One could argue that this is the project that got
international recognition to Teddy Cruz, and despite its attractive architectural language, what
made this project so prototypical of an activist
position in architecture was the design of its
process. Architecture as a material construct
was taken as an important but given component.
The site would need a series of buildings to conform to the program, which asked to affordably
house immigrants in a permanent and temporary
basis, as well as to provide social and cultural
services to the neighborhood. As the buildings,
7
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INJUSTICES OF DEVELOPMEN
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Shaped like a shallow dish, the empty concrete structure was in the middle of a public park which was mostly the domain of
street children and drug-users. Inspired
by the enthusiasm of the Afghan kids,
in early 2008 we began teaching regular
skateboarding lessons there in the afternoons with an emphasis on getting the
girls on skateboards and involving not
just the poor working children, but also
the richer kids living in the nearby flats.
In retrospect I guess this was truly handson social design, but at the time it was just
something that made a lot of sense and
had enormous potential.
In the last five years this unexpected
takeover of a derelict public park has
grown into an international non-profit
called Skateistan with two educational
skatepark facilities in Afghanistan and
one in Cambodia. In Kabul and Mazare-Sharif we have reappropriated K-Span
buildings forms that are usually reserved
for military installations and created vibrant schools in them. The K-span form
is now not only seen as a military hangar
but as quick, cheap and effective way to
build a school and create a social hub for
bringing together children from different
ethnicities and social backgrounds.
TAKETED TTA
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Oliver
Perchovich
We work with nearly 1000 children every week, teaching not only skateboarding
but also arts-based education, a Back-toSchool program, leadership skills and
much more. Over 40% of our students are
girls, and the majority are street-working
children and impoverished youth.
I have learned countless things in the
process of creating a project in Afghanistan that most people thought was crazy,
but one of the most important realizations is also very basic: sometimes you
dont know if something will work, or is
needed, until you try to put it into practice.
Furthermore, giving a new social purpose
to a space that already exists is a lower risk
endeavor than creating a new space, with
the equivalent opportunities for communal and transcultural interaction and far
less investment required for uncertain
results. As in the case of Skateistan, a successful pilot project in an existing urban
space is a very effective way of showing
a clear demand, which can often lead to
government support to create a purposebuilt facility to expand the activities.
When reappropriating an area, the
program design is as important as the
space itself. Just as every skate spot needs
skateboarders to use it for it to have legitimacy, this thinking can be expanded to
other spatial productions. When a space
or a building is not being used to its full
potential, ideas must be formulated to revive the space.
It seems like common sense, however
this lack of focus on the program design
associated with infrastructure development in Afghanistan has led to billions
of dollars wasted on schools, hospitals
and other buildings which have been unused or misused due to improper or nonexistent program planning, lack of local
ownership, and simply trying to plant a
Western design in a country without the
capacity to maintain it. With Skateistan,
we took the approach of putting social
capital before financial capital. We started out with no money, but were able to invest time, ideas, trust and a common love
of skateboarding.
The amazing thing about investing social capital instead of financial capital is
that you can do it anywhere, just like when
we took over Mekroyan fountain in Kabul.
What I saw is that by using an existing spatial form in a new way you can also create
new ownership and new opportunities for
interaction. Before we skated there the
rich and poor children would never interact, and many had only seen a foreigners
from afar, sitting inside an armored vehicle. When we started the skateboard lessons all of us came together to skate, and
I suddenly, unbelievably, had something
in common with a 10 year old Afghan girl
Michael
Murphy
Construction of the GHESKIO Tuberculosis Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, provides on-site training for local
laborers in masonry and safe building practices.
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Artistic rendering of the Butaro Ambulatory Cancer Center, Rwandas first outpatient cancer infusion facility.
Construction of the GHESKIO Cholera Treatment Center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The facility, designed with a
custom facade that enhances patient comfort and privacy, is set to open in Fall 2013.
well as the processes that design, construct, and evaluate the buildings impact
over time (these are all proximal considerations).
As architects we lack precedents of
what it would cost to not apply our training to a problem. Our experience working
on the Butaro Hospital has provided us
the opportunity to quantify the value of
design and also revealed to us its impacts
on the ability of communities to not only
survive but to live, healthy and sheltered.
Architecture is an important proximal
consideration of health.
Architecture is also, as Dr. Zeynep Celik
reminds us, a crystallization of social relations and power structures into form.4
Health care, too, is a crystallization of
power into social relations; this means
framing health care not only as access to
medicine, but also as access to sanitation,
access to employment, and even access to
housing. These conditions affect peoples
health, and therefore are part of the doctors purview.
Farmer characterizes these systemic
failures as structural violence, a mode
of describing social arrangements that
put individuals and populations in harms
way. They are structural, he tells us, because they are embedded in the political
and economic organization of our social
world; they are violent because they cause
injury to people. He continues:
Structural violence describes social
structures economic, political, legal, religious, and cultural that stop individuals, groups, and societies from reaching
their full potential. In its general usage,
the word violence often conveys a physical image; however according to [Johan]
Galtung, it is the avoidable impairment
of fundamental human needs or the im-
31
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Feld
72
A local craftsman builds custom bookshelves in the MASS workshop for the Butaro Doctors Housing at the Butaro Hospital in Burera, Rwanda.
The Umubano School in Kigali, Rwanda provides access to primary education for over 300 orphaned and
vulnerable children, employing a terraced design to fit
the regional topography, and providing ample space
for outdoor learning.
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Notes
http://www.tballiance.org/why/the-tb-pandemic.php
The Geography of Poverty and Wealth by Jeffrey D. Sachs, Andrew D. Mellinger, and John
L. Gallup, Scientific American, March 2001,
pp.71 74.
Farmer PE, Nizeye B, Stulac S, Keshavjee
S, 2006, Structural Violence and Clinical
Medicine. PLoS Med 3(10): e449 doi: 10.137/
journal.pmed.0030449.
. Celik, Zeynep. Cultural Intersections:
Re-visioning Architecture and the city in the
Twentieth Century. At the end of the century:
one hundred years of architecture: [exhibition,
Los Angeles, Museum of contemporary art]. Los
Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art;
1998. pp. 192 228.
Farmer, 2006.
The settlement started with a few houses of fishermen 80 years ago, which have
been erected at the time when the dike at
the mouth of the Isonzo was constructed. Throughout the decades the illegally
built small houses have become more and
more and changed size and function. At
33
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34
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mated 40,000 illegal seasonal farmworkers mainly from Ghana, Nigeria, and Mali,
the agricultural industry in Sicily could
not survive.
A similar phenomena happens in
Monfalcone. With the big success of the
cruising ships for the middle-class the
big dockyards in Monfalcone were able to
re-invent themselves after years of crisis.
And so just a few hundreds meters away
Notes
The Italian Syndrome is a new form of depression recently defined by Ukrainian Psychiatrists. It is a result of social transformations.
The victims of this syndrome are mostly the
young female migrant health care assistant for
the elderly. It is a result of stress, solitude and
being lost in between two social spaces: leaving
behind their family and children to be able to
provide them a solid economic ground for the
future by taking care for old people in solitude
abroad. Already 1.5 Million people are working
in the growing market of domestic healthcare
in Italy: Most of them are young, female and
migrant. In 2040 the over 60s will make up 40%
of the Italian population.
58,000 is the number according to UNHCR
statistics of people who arrived to Europe in
2011 across the Mediterranean Sea on tiny or
overcrowded boats risking their life
35
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Marseille
the burden of 300 eggs inside, that just
wait to be fertilised and put on the next
muldberry leaf. Then it dies.
How complicated is our life compared
to these breeding machines. All these
people around us that influence what we
do and think, all these things to take care
of, all these emotions. But I have to admit:
I am happy that my life is more complex
than the one of a silk worm, that I have
Banlieue
36
Benjamin
FoersterBaldenius
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Quartier Cratif
Marseille Provence 2013
We are the artists dropped in this area
by a city entertainment programme. Our
task is to integrate. Integrate the quartier
into the cities marketing campaign, integrate all the institutions, that are active
in this area into our project, integrate the
people, who live here and integrate whats
goes on in public space into our work. Will
we still manage to integrate ourselves into
our project.
There is a triangular piece of wasteland beside the rond point beside the
, VIOLENCE,
N
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FER (WELCOME
THE SCHOOL.
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Heaven and
Hell
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1
carrying some downstream water
a distance upstream
bucket-by-bucket
pouring it into stream
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transferring a mouthful of
upstream water
a distance downstream
mouth-to-mouth
spitting it into the stream
2
sending a mouthed
silent word
a distance upstream
person-by-person
saying it aloud to the trees
propelling a shouted word
a distance downstream
person-by-person
mouthing it to the sky
3
transporting a gas-soaked cloth
a distance upstream
(waving it gently in the air)
person-to-person
waving it gently until dry
carrying a bagged breath
a distance downstream
each adding a breath
opening the bag to the wind1
On the last page of the booklet, Kaprow
explains the Activity, stating that it is
concerned with natural processes. Water
flowing downstream is carried mechanically upstream, is dumped and flows
back. Some is lost among the way. More
water is transferred downstream mouthby-mouth, loses oxygen, is mixed with saliva and is given back to the stream to be
altered again.2
Today, only specialists know about
Echo-Logy. It stands in the shadow of
Kaprows more spectacular Environments
and Happenings such as Yard, Household,
or Calling, which made him famous in the
1960s. But Echo-Logy still resonates with
crucial topics of our own time, such as
the issue of ecology, the limits of political
action, the topic of human labor and the
issue of the common. The very title raises
the question of the relation between the
past to the present, and I therefore wanted to find out if this work of art is an art
historical document or something, which
still is part of our own present.
On March 21, 2013, I reenacted
Kaprows Activity Echo-Logy with a group
of 25 architecture students in small creek,
just outside the Antique site of Olympia,
Greece. The reenactment was the highlight of a fieldtrip, called Ec(h)o-Logy:
Greek Returns which lead us to Athens
and Olympia. The reenactment lasted
about an hour and took place in the afternoon. We rehearsed the score and discussed how to solve certain details. For
instance, most participants were against
the idea of literally exchanging the water
mouth to mouth, and someone suggested that we simply fill a cup of water and
then pass along this cup by using only
the mouth. We had forgotten to bring gas
with us, but since Greeks are heavy smokers it was easy to find a refill for gasoline
liters in the nearby grocery shop. Two
forms of networks and flows.4 The traditional separation between private life and
work dissolves, because the fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and
economic value at the same time demonstrates how capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all
the oppositions among economy, power,
and knowledge.5 The participants of
Echo-Logy and the participants of the reenactment were performing, so to speak,
immaterial labor. Work and leisure, labor
and play blurred. My students, unlike myself, were not paid, on the contrary, they
had to pay a substantial contribution to
the costs of the field trip. Together, we
produced affects, social relations, networks, experiences and to some extent
corporeal proximity. But we also undermined the process of immaterial labor
and prevent our subjectivity from being
exploited. We constantly interrupted the
productive cycle by loss, misunderstanding, non-communication, non-sense. We
constituted subjectivity and immediately
deconstructed it again. The words were
sent person-to-person, but too silent for
us to hear and then shouted aloud to the
trees and thus, from the viewpoint of productivity, wasted. The water was spat into
the stream. The bagged breath is opened
to the wind. The movement was, as
Kaprow had put it in his text, always back
and forth.6 Echo-Logy, as a work of art in
1975 and as a reenactment in the realm of
academe goes far in accepting and articulating the current form of labor. But it also
demonstrates how difficult it is for capital
to draw on values, which are immediately
shared and available to everyone for free.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Notes
Allan Kaprow, Echo-Logy, New York, DArc Press,
1975, n.p.
Ibid.
Maurizio Lazzarato, Immaterial Labor, in
Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed.
Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 133 150,
quote p, 135.
Ibid., p. 136.
Ibid., p. 142.
Allan Kaprow, Untitled text, in: Allan Kaprow,
Echo-Logy, New York, DArc Press, 1975, n.p.
41
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Philip
Ursprung
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Nabeel
Hamdi
46
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ach academic year we start our sessions with one of those class-room
seminars on what is development?
the kind of seminar thats never-ending
and impossible to conclude but which
gets everyone thinking. Most times the
response is predictable. Development
is whatever you want it do be depending
on your politics and ideology: economic
growth, rights, freedom, livelihoods,
good governance, knowledge, power
all of which are often interspersed with
words like integration, sustainability, empowerement, partnerships,
participation, community, democracy, or ethics. In combination, all the
ideals they invoke offer us hope for building a better and fairer world and, for the
poor majority around the world, a better
deal.
Sometimes, to liven things up, I select a combination of words from Roberstons lexicon of buzzwords arranged in
four columns of 14 each, generating in
total some 38,000 development options:
something like, development is: demo-
is the foundation of all the other developmental goals we have set; it is the essence
of good governance and of sustainable
work; it empowers and opens doors; it
makes you money and wins you respect.
I began to wonder what this could
mean in practice and what theory of practice was implied. It got me thinking again
about Steven Johnsons book on emergence and his account of Keller, Lee, and
Nakagakis research into slime mould
behaviour and the application of mathematics to the understanding of biology.3
Their research was a part of the scientific
search for an understanding of how simple and mostly independent cells, under
the right circumstances, come together
and emerge as a larger and more sophisticated organization, not led by a single
brain and without the help of an executive branch, much in the way in which the
highly sophisticated and informal sector
works in cities.
Johnson reports that in August 2000,
Nakagaki, a Japanese scientist, had
trained the slime mould (that brownish stuff you find in your garden) to find
its way through a maze. He placed some
food at two of the mazes exits. The slime
mould solved the problem of the mould
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BEFORE THE
ED
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EE
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E
B
L
IL
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TU
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E VERY
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SERVE, AND
TO
ED
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IG
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D
IS
IT
H
IC
H
W
SYSTEM IN
BECOMES SELF-SERVING?
47
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AYS
ND NEW WAY
FI
TO
LE
P
EO
P
LE
B
A
EN
E
W
,
O
IN DOING S
RESPONSE
IN
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AT
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FOR
ES
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E
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O
H
IC
H
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S
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LE
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R
A P
TO EVERYDAY
TIMIZING
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O
;
S
R
IE
R
R
A
B
N
W
O
D
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IN
K
GRANTEDBREA
NOT MAXIMIZING
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minds rather than a measure of professional competency. There are few sacred
prototypes to follow, no best practices for
export, no brand names that guarantee
quality. Instead, approximation and serendipity are the normthe search for scientific precision is displaced in favour of
informed improvisations, practical wisdom, integrated thinking and good judgement based on a shared sense of justice
and equity, and on common sense.
These competencies, we will see, combined with a good measure of idealism
and pragmatism, enable practitioners to
move easily and creatively from the high
ground of global issues into the swamp of
the everyday with its small beginning and
seemingly irrational short cuts to survival
and successto the strategic settings of
national policy development, into the
board rooms of development banks and
multinationalsseeking
inspiration
from all levels with the moral imperative to solve problems and change minds
and in ways which make a difference and
more, on a scale that counts.
Experience everywhere confirms how
all these small beginningsthis seemlingly ad-hoc and makeshift landscape of
looseparts and organizationsgive cities
their ordered complexity, which is at once
flexible, durable and as we have seen, infinitely resourceful. They offer fast and ingenious short-cuts to goods and services
and a vitality of energy and social interaction that depends critically upon diversity, intricacy and the capacity to handle
the unexpected in controlled but creative
ways. 16 In the end, we will see how practice and practitioners using the power
of [their] authority to empower others,17
can nurture this processor sometimes
how they can disable it. We will learn how
skilful practice can trigger the emergence
of novelty and organization; how it can
help build an architecture of opportunity
for rediscovering community, building
networks, and stronger organizations,
and making moneyfor communication and learning to flourish, and for new
partnerships to be explored. In doing so,
we enable people to find new ways of doing, thinking, and relating in response to
everyday problems which one takes for
grantedbreaking down barriers; optimizing not maximizing. These are alle
qualities of leadership in practice and for
developmenta new openness for dialogue and learning.
Finally, and by way of summary, I offer
a code of conduct based on my own experiences and the experiences and advice of
others:
Ignorance is liberating
Start where you can:
never say cant
Imagine first:
reason later
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Be reflective:
waste time
Embrace serendipity:
get muddled
Play games, serious
games
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Challenge consensus
16
17
Notes
Robertson, A. People and the State. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Kaplan, A. The Development Practitioners
Handbook. London: Pluto Press, 1996.
Johnson, S. Emergence: The Connected Lives
of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. London:
Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001.
Ibid.13.
Simmel, G. On Individuality and Social Forms.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971:
137.
Zohar, D. Rewiring The Corporate Brain. San
Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1997: 50.
Berlin, I. Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural
Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 31 of October 1958. Oxford: The Clarion
Press, 1958, 11.
Capra, F. The Hidden Connections: A Science
For Sustainable Living. London: Harper Collins,
2002: 106.
Johnson, S. Emergence: The Connected Lives of
Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. London: Allen
Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001.
Based on Gillispie, S. Scaling up community
driven development: an overview, Unpublished
working draft, 2002.
Edwards, M. NGO Rights and Responsibilities.
A New Deal for Global Governance. London: The
Foreign Policy Centre in association with the
National Council for Voluntary Organizations
(NCVO), 2002: 10.
Zohar, D. Rewiring The Corporate Brain. San
Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1997: 38.
Jose Saramango quoted in The Guardian Review, 28 December 2002.
Jacobs, J. The Death and Life of Great American
Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.
Schon, D. The Reflective Practitioner: How
Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic
Books, 1983.
Harvey, D. The Condition of Post-modernity.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
Capra, F. The Hidden Connections, A Science
For Sustainable Living. London: Harper Collins,
2002: 106.
49
Work backwards:
move forwards
Feel good
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Marisa
Mazria
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artists safety.
While I dealt with this regularly as a
journalist, in my new role as editor for
Creative Time Reports these issues were
revelatory. How did the organization,
whose mission states, Public spaces are
places for creative and free expression,
plan to work in countries where sometimes the opposite is true?
How would we contend with an artist
in Malaysia, for instance, wanting to cover his governments repressive reaction
toward protestors demanding electoral
reform, while, he explained, social media
in the country was being monitored and
openly contributing to Creative Time Reports could jeopardize the safety of his
fellow artists?
Rather than proffering answers, we
posed questions, not only to our community in New York City, but also to artists
around the world. I visited Hungary on
the eve of the countrys annual Revolution
Day celebration to discuss Creative Time
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efore the first artist was asked to contribute to Creative Time Reports, I
flew to Tunisia, arriving within days of
the one-year anniversary of the Jasmine
Revolution. Outside the half-empty terminal, storm clouds cast milk-white
halos around street lamps. It was the
middle of winter, and the normally temperate North African country was struck
overnight by a cold snap.
A taxi dropped me off just a few miles
from Avenue Habib Bourguibathe Tunisian capitals main boulevard, and also
the location where thousands had gathered to demand an end to dictator Zine
Abidine Ben Alis 23-year rule.
Within hours, I began meeting artists
51
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52
Emeka
Okereke
Reality Can Be
Synthesized
I
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I am of the strong opinion that art practices and process should aim to reach out
to the everyday person and most importantly in the public space. But as we travel,
I am compelled to reflect on what public
space means. It is not so much the physical space as it is the social space of the
people who occupy that physical space.
Indeed if we should refer to the immateriality of reality, then it suffices to say that
the physical space in itself is a derivative
of the intricate networks of events, perception, personalities embodied by the
people within the spacethis is the real
Public Space and every work that intends
to exist or work with the public space
must put into consideration or dialogue
the everyday reality by which the physical
space is a function. The physical space is a
function of the social space and the social
space is in turn a product of the immaterial radiations of those who occupy it.
Therefore, as we progress on this discourse surrounding borders, it becomes
imperative not to undermine the performative nature of this intervention as a
philosophical foothold and to inculcate it
into the aesthetics of representation. Our
objective therefore would be to constantly
look for ways to present this project as an
intervention within the everyday reality of
the regular inhabitants of any given geography taking into account the element of
spontaneity and improvisation, which are
the core ingredients of uncurated interactions.
We are Masters of
Improvisation
If today I were asked what exactly is
contemporary Africa, I would first of all
begin to talk of radiations, a kind of energy which flows through the continent like
Aesthetics, Presentation,
and Interpretation
In the past years, what has become
challenging is not just the struggle to permeate the implications of borders, but
also (1) in what ways to use the different
media at our disposal to effectively question and invigorate discussions about
limitations in Trans-African exchange (2)
how to present and interpret the project
in such away as to convey the true experiences of the journey as a performative endeavor for which the process of the journey is in essence the outcome.
It is rightly said that it all began as a
photographic project, but over the past
years it has evolved beyond the term photography, as writers, filmmakers, and art
historians began to play a major role in
the discourse. This came with its challenges as many people continue to see
the project as solely a photographic one,
thereby neglecting or paying little importance to the literary and filmic aspect of
the project. It is indeed deliberate that we
have had only few exhibitions where we
had to put up photographic prints on a
(white) wall.
As we progress from one edition to
the other, so does our experience, and
we have come to the point where we realize that the idea of borders could act as a
double-edged sword, therefore must be
approached meticulously. It could easily
play us against our dogma. The naivety
that borders are something tangible and
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a continuous line. This energy, this radiation is indeed what a whole lot of people
tend to coin words to define. It has been
there from the onset, and no matter how
time changes, it surfaces in myriad forms,
it is ever constant and reinventive in nature, it permeates everything and everyone whose feet are rooted in the soil of the
continent and thus has long since become
our naturesubconsciously. This radiation gives rise to the shared reality of the
people of this continent, but at the same
time is nourished and fine-tuned by the
struggle to circumvent unfavorable situations. It is what gives rise to the arbitrary
indefinable nature of existence in the
continent. This energy is the unequivocal
tendency towards spontaneity, the sheer
extent of improvisationthat which flaws
any form of predefined statistics. It is said
that it is in Africa that the weatherman
is always wrong. Why? Because naturally
people live shoulder to shoulder with the
moment and between two moments there
are one billion ways of being.
Living in this reality is like being in
a space where everything is non-linear,
shapeless, yet this is the shape because
it works. It reevaluates the defined and
invigorates the stagnated. It momentalises every interaction in such a way that it
seems far-fetched to base ones reason of
action on the awareness of the past or the
assumptions of the future. This however
does not mean that people do not make
plans but this planning is never incapacitated by predefined notions, every moment is a stand-alone regardless of the
fact that one leads to the other.
If there is anything like contemporary
African art, it is those creations that are
cognizant of this element of spontaneity
and improvisation, which tends to work
with, and draw from it the possibility of
alternative forms and aesthetics. Therefore being African is to blur the lines
between possible and impossible rendering the very state of being indefinable.
This radiation, this energy permeates
everything but manifests prominently
through the everyday space of the African
peoplethe public space, where all the
drama of living and co-existing is symbolized. Consequently, our work over the
years followed this trajectory and hinged
on depicting the exchange, the interaction of people and things within the public space; looking at what might be dismissed as banal, but by the act of putting
a frame to them, we extract them from
the ordinary. Moreover, we are consistently conscious of the fact that no click
is a waste as far as posterity is in consideration.
Therefore our approach to imagery
goes beyond making beautiful photo-
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54
Anil
Gupta
Embedding Nature
Narrow corridor, one of the many secret shortcuts in Ahmedabads old part of the city
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Fragile Thread: strong trunk: will you protect me, O tree? Ahmedabad
Keep our prayers safe, O tree, we go now: Ahmedabads old city cuts in Ahmedabads old part of the city
57
Flutter your wings, soothen the breeze; Purulia, West Bengal the city
Cultural Creativity
Almost in every Shodhyatra, we discover unique nuances of cultural expressions
of different coping strategies. During the
Shodhyatra in Dahod District, we discovered that a family would promise to itself
to get a wall painted by a local tribal artist
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O Birds, you are a part of our family, Chabutra, a traditional bird feeding platform
Educational Innovation
During the period of economic transition from material to knowledge-based
economy, the education systems became far more fragmented, quantitative
in their treatment of subjects and much
more divorced from real life conditions.
Countability or measurability became important, any thing that could not be measured, was considered not worth the effort. Variance was sought to be explained
only by what was measured. How to measure the feeling that motivates a person
to collect food and milk to feed the dogs?
How to measure the look and feel of parrot feeding hangers in a balcony.
The pursuit of specialization was inevitable when it was an instrument of differentiation in the knowledge economy.
With the advent of social media, the attention span of students became smaller and
lots of information and knowledge began
to be packaged and encapsulated in digestible formats. The disconnect from the
social sciences and social reality became
intense. This disconnect has led to a demand for rethinking education in a manner that cognition, contradiction, commensuration1, co-evolutionary empathy
or samvedana ke sanskar2 and empathetic innovations, and emotive convolution
are aspects that aesthetics may amplify
in our consciousness. No need to paint a
simple, smooth, convergent picture of the
world and then create dissonance in the
minds of learners, observers and explorers. Though, some dissonance can indeed
be a source of inspiration and creativity.
Surprise is the salt of a meaningful life.
The day I have not been surprised, I have
not lived fully.
The Honorable President of India
has given a call for National Innovation
Clubs to be created in all the universities
to search, spread, sense and celebrate innovations. He has given a new meaning
and push to the mission of the Honey Bee
Network to make not just India but the
whole world a creative, collaborative and
compassionate society.
A lot of innovations are needed to
bring these connections in the cognitive,
emotive and reflective space of students.
SRISTI (Society for Research and Initia-
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Institutional Innovation
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them. Urban spaces have ignored commons at the cost of individual privileges.
Cycle and pedestrian lanes are missing
in India but about 25 percent growth of
the auto sector during the last decade
has mesmerized growth planners about
dispensability of what a common person
needs: a little space to walk, a safe lane for
a child to go to school.
Technological innovation
There are a huge number of technological innovations and traditional
knowledge practices displayed at www.
nifindia.org and www.sristi.org. People
who are disadvantaged in terms of material resources, invariably leverage the resources in which they are rich, i.e., knowledge, values, and institutional networks.
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Emily
Fahln
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62
he Silent University is an autonomous knowledge exchange platform, initiated by the artist Ahmet gut.
The University recruits asylum seekers,
refugees and immigrants with a professional background in their countries of
origin, which, due to systematical social
exclusion and processes of discrimination, is unable to put their knowledge to
professional use in the countries which
they currently live in. Through the Silent
University, careers that have been muted
are included and reassigned. Taking the
form of an academic program, classes,
lectures, libraries, seminars, a website
and student-cards are created.
The Silent University was founded
in London in 2012 in collaboration with
Delfina Foundation and Tate, and is currently being established in the Stockholm
suburb of Tensta, in collaboration with
Tensta konsthall. Parallel discussions
about the universitys continuation are
simultaneously taking place in Paris and
Berlin. The Silent University does not yet
have a permanent space, rather, the concept of the university is being established
at different art institutions as a collaborative effort by Ahmet gut and the team
members.
What the art institutions contribute
with is the offer of a physical meetingplace, the creation of public points of
contact, economical means and their own
local networks. The workgroups form organically; one person that fits the criteria
of the project leads to another person
with, and so on. The long-term goal is
that these project-based collaborations
will create lasting commitments, as the
Silent University aims to be more than
a project. In Tensta the workgroup currently consists of about fifteen people that
take on the role of mentors or lecturers.
Among them is a language teacher from
Palestine, an engineer from Jordan and a
Kurdish journalist.
There are no monetary fees for taking
part in the Silent University. Instead, the
members invest in alternative currencies
of exchanges of time and knowledge. If
you want access to the universities collected material, its documentation, classes
and articles, you sign up on its webpage.
In doing so, you will be asked to estimate
the amount of time you will be able to
donate to the project, and what type of
knowledge or skills you will be able to
contribute with. Over time, a bank of immaterial resources is formed, one that the
administrators of the university can put
to use: A text might need to be translated,
tickets need to be handled, or a video may
need to be edited.
The Silent University moves between
different fields and by doing so, finds a
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The Turtle mobile student thesis archive and presentation space, dimensions variable, wood, steel, sonotubes
(cardboard concrete formwork), prototyping, and fabrication via H2O, Laser, and 2.5 axis cutters, at Bush Lobby,
M.I.T., Cambridge, U.S.A., 2005.
Could you explain how you came to work with the archive
both as a concept and physical entity?
LBN:
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Negrn
Anne
Klbk
Iversen
LBN:
Threeing Rugs and Pavilion (with Relational Circuit in the foreground), in collaboration with Paul Ryan for his
Threeing project at Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012.
66
Sure, electronic devices are prosthetics to our memory. I guess that this is
the matter of the hypomnemata, where
Stiegler kinks out, with tremendous rigor, how the ubiquity of these prosthetics
seem to corrode away our abilities to build
memory, not necessarily as information
into itself, but simply in the ability to retain and retrieve it. My sense is that, most
recently, we can undoubtedly see that our
electronic information flows devoid of
personal privacy. It is not paranoia. It is
clear that the State, which is business and
government tightly entwined into one, as
recently demonstrated, has absolute control over the digital world, completely devoid from any exteriority, and thus striking a final blow to public space, unless,
under aggressive oversight by the public
itself. Therefore, it is the physical object
that then regains a prescient importance
as mnemonic trigger, in its material economy and its historical determinism. How
the sculptural object is embodied with
both new materiality while also maintaining a materiality appropriated from the
past, where we could potentially not only
inscribe a memorial experience, but also
strengthen our common mental landscape, that is seemingly our only common
exteriority left.
You might say that the sculptural work THE SLEEPING ARCHIVE
is a sort of answer to this. How would you describe the
sculpture?
LBN:
Public Action
What kind of material could you imagine would be accumulated in this sleeping archive? In what ways is or can
the human mind be an archive?
LBN: Well, there is already an appropriation
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LBN:
for processing beyond a kind of post-colonial nostalgia, while at the same time,
the hammock simply serves as the sleeping device.
The Sleeping Archive Test Module at the KUA2 Lobby of the University of Copenhagen. Recovered
curtains and fabrics, recovered Ip and Oak woods, and steel framing. 300 150 150 cm, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2013.
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Stiegler claims that the increasing use of memory support technologies decreases our individual mnemonic
capacities, yet, that there is no such thing as memory
without an exterior manifestation. How do you see the
exchange between traces of memory and the interior remembering?
Visualization of The Sleeping Archive at the KUA2 Lobby of the University of Copenhagen. Recovered curtains and fabrics, recovered Ip and Oak woods, and steel framing.
Nine modules in total, each at 300 150 150 cm, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2013.
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Context
Public Action
Application
In order to materialize this mind-set,
in order to shift from massive linear production lines towards innumerous networks of small, interdependent product
life cycles, we have to rethink the digital,
physical and logistical frameworks that
surround and shape them. We need to
evolve towards universally applicable
personal uniform structures and a stockpile of fairly useless modular pieces after
deconstruction.
So, if we want to improve the concept
of modularity, if we want to facilitate
compatibility and enhance flexibility, we
need to open up and synchronize current dimensional frameworks. We need
to define one universal standard that
will allow the broadest range of people to
interchange the broadest range of modu-
RO-ACTIVE
P
,
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ER
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IG
ES
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E PROCESS,
IV
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PARTICIPA
S AND IDENN
ER
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EMBEDDING
, HYPERG
IN
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TITIES IN THE FI
CONSUME.
EY
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LINKIN
through an open exchange of knowledge
and experience.
But also within our physical frameworks we will need to further align material use, assembly and dimensions in
order to facilitate restorative production
methods, open exchange, and universal
compatibility.
The natural and synthetic resources of
the future will be restricted to those that
can either be infinitely recycled or fully
degraded while in the process nurturing,
rather than damaging, their surroundings.
Joints, construction techniques, and
assembly lines will be designed for deconstruction without damage or loss, aiming
at infinite reconstruction cycles.
And future dimensional frameworks
will shape new modular systems for the
obvious reasons of scalability, flexibility,
and simplicity.
The current debate around sustainability has been gravitating towards the
first two sets of physical frameworks, towards refining the principles of material
use and assembly in order to establish
closed resource and component loops.
So how could we improve the third
framework, the dimensional restrictions
that define modular systems, in order to
generate closed object loops?
In the past architecture has cranked
out countless proposals for modular
structures in an attempt to streamline efficiency and enhance structural flexibility.
Although these systems represent the first
steps towards a more intelligently built
environment we find ourselves today with
an abundance of closed, incompatible
modular systems that often generate im-
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More people are having, sharing, and discussing more ideas in more places more
quickly than at any other time in world
history
Social Design
Thomas
Lome
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BLUEPRINT
S
E
R
U
A
AT
N
M
O
FR
W
O
R
R
O
B
T
SO WHY NO
WARDS AN
TO
T
EN
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N
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IR
V
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T
L
LT
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U
AND SHAPE O
A , FROM
AT
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TS
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U
ORGANIC, MOD
PS AND
O
LO
ED
S
LO
C
IN
H
IT
W
A
AT
O
FL
,
MICRO TO MACRO
INFINITE CYCLES.
zanne Niles, Modular Systems: The Evolution of Reliability)
So why not borrow from natures blueprint and shape our built environment
towards an organic, modular puzzle of
objects that, from micro to macro, float
within closed loops, and infinite cycles.
Why not sync our existing logistical and
architectural standards towards one universal standard that will generate an infinite diversity of blocs and combinations.
If we want to communicate (exchange
words) we need to use the same vocabulary and grammer, if we want to exchange
files, we need to work from the same formats. If we want to co-create our environment, we need to build with the same
bricks.
Srvin
Proposal:
N55 suggest that we find a different approach to architecture, urban planning.
design and art, and take into consideration whats wright and wrong. Intelligent
urban design would require the design
of systems which adjust themselves to
the persons who live in them and to their
needs. Unlike a top-down master plan,
such systems gradually dissolve themselves as the inhabitants take over and
transform their city according to their
needs and desires. Based on collaboration, cooperation and diversity, intelligent cities acknowledge that we are social
beings needing space for being different.
It is possible to let the growth of the city
be framed by simple rules, which allows
people to freely develop their own environments and systems. This will lead to
inclusive relations across ideologies, re-
Logic
Logical relations are the most basic
and most overlooked phenomenon we
know. Nothing of which we can talk rationally can exist, can be identified or
referred to, except through its logical relations to other things. Logic is necessary
relations between different factors, and
factors are what exist by the force of those
relations. The decisive thing about logical relations is that they can not be reasoned. Nevertheless, they do constitute
conditions necessary for any description,
because they can not be denied without
rejecting the factors of the relations. Per-
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Conclusion
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70
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Ownership of Land
thing more basic than language. Logical relations are what makes language a
language and what assigns meaning to
words. Therefore, it is impossible to learn
a language, without learning to respect
logical relations. But as we grow up and
learn to master language, logical relations
are not present on a conscious level. If we
are conscious of logical relations, it is possible for us to decide whether something
is right or wrong and not to allow ourselves to be ruled by for example habitual
conceptions and subjective opinions.
Persons
Public Action
A person can be described in an infinite number of ways. None of these descriptions can be completely adequate.
We therefore can not describe precisely
what a person is. Whichever way we describe a person, we do however have the
possibility to point out necessary relations between persons and other factors.
We have to respect these relations and factors in order not to contradict ourselves
and in order to be able to talk about persons in a meaningful way. One necessary
relation is the logical relation between
persons and bodies. It makes no sense
to refer to a person without referring to a
body. If we for example say: here we have
a person, but he or she does not have a
body, it does not make sense. Furthermore, there are necessary relations between persons and the rights of persons.
Persons should be treated as persons and
therefore as having rights. If we deny this
assertion it goes wrong: here is a person,
but this person should not be treated as a
person, or: here is a person, who should
Concentrations of
Power
Concentrations of power do not always respect the rights of persons. If one
denies this fact one gets: concentrations
of power always respect the rights of persons. This does not correspond with our
experiences. Concentrations of power
characterize our society. Concentrations
of power force persons to concentrate on
participating in competition and power
games, in order to create a social position
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N ALSO
A
C
S
IE
G
LO
O
N
H
C
TE
ED
R
A
H
S
OPEN AND
BLERS
A
EN
D
N
A
,
S
ER
FI
LI
P
M
A
,
S
R
SERVE AS CONNECTO DUOUS PROCESS OF LOCAL
FOR THE ONGOING AND ARL CHANGE, NEIGHBORHOOD
DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIA
BY NEIGHBORHOOD.
Erica
Hagen
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Notes
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/arts/
design/in-cairo-rethinking-the-city-from-thebottom-up.html?pagewanted=all
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76
events take form. Whatever takes place relies on distinct forms of technical mediationon recording techniques, narrative
devices, architectural forms, infrastructural arrangements, and modes of visual
and cognitive displayall of which filter,
transmit, and generate data and information in ways that are neither neutral nor
transparent. We may make these tech-
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Abdou
Maliq
Simone
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David
Harvey
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power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake
our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue,
one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class
phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody,
while the control over their disbursement
typically lies in a few hands. This general
situation persists under capitalism, of
course; but since urbanization depends
on the mobilization of a surplus product,
an intimate connection emerges between
the development of capitalism and urbanization. Capitalists have to produce a
surplus product in order to produce surplus value; this in turn must be reinvested
in order to generate more surplus value.
The result of continued reinvestment
is the expansion of surplus production
at a compound ratehence the logistic
curves (money, output, and population)
attached to the history of capital accumulation, paralleled by the growth path of
urbanization under capitalism.
The perpetual need to find profitable
terrains for capital-surplus production
and absorption shapes the politics of capitalism. It also presents the capitalist with
a number of barriers to continuous and
trouble-free expansion. If labour is scarce
and wages are high, either existing labour
has to be disciplinedtechnologically
induced unemployment or an assault on
organized working-class power are two
prime methodsor fresh labour forces
Consider, first, the case of Second Empire Paris. The year 1848 brought one of
the first clear, and European-wide, crises
of both unemployed surplus capital and
surplus labour. It struck Paris particularly
hard, and issued in an abortive revolution by unemployed workers and those
bourgeois utopians who saw a social republic as the antidote to the greed and
inequality that had characterized the July
Monarchy. The republican bourgeoisie
violently repressed the revolutionaries
but failed to resolve the crisis. The result
was the ascent to power of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered a coup
in 1851 and proclaimed himself Emperor
the following year. To survive politically,
he resorted to widespread repression of
alternative political movements. The economic situation he dealt with by means
of a vast programme of infrastructural investment both at home and abroad. In the
latter case, this meant the construction
of railroads throughout Europe and into
the Orient, as well as support for grand
works such as the Suez Canal. At home, it
meant consolidating the railway network,
building ports and harbours, and draining marshes. Above all, it entailed the reconfiguration of the urban infrastructure
of Paris. Bonaparte brought in GeorgesEugne Haussmann to take charge of the
citys public works in 1853.
Haussmann clearly understood that
his mission was to help solve the surpluscapital and unemployment problem
through urbanization. Rebuilding Paris
absorbed huge quantities of labour and
capital by the standards of the time and,
coupled with suppressing the aspirations
of the Parisian workforce, was a primary
vehicle of social stabilization. He drew
upon the utopian plans that Fourierists
and Saint-Simonians had debated in the
1840s for reshaping Paris, but with one
big difference: he transformed the scale
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Urban Revolutions
at which the urban process was imagined. When the architect Jacques Ignace
Hittorff showed Haussmann his plans for
a new boulevard, Haussmann threw them
back at him saying: not wide enough
you have it 40 metres wide and I want it
120. He annexed the suburbs and redesigned whole neighborhoods such as Les
Halles. To do this Haussmann needed
new financial institutions and debt instruments, the Crdit Mobilier and Crdit
Immobilier, which were constructed on
Saint-Simonian lines. In effect, he helped
resolve the capital-surplus disposal problem by setting up a proto-Keynesian system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements.
The system worked very well for some
fifteen years, and it involved not only a
transformation of urban infrastructures
but also the construction of a new way
of life and urban persona. Paris became
the city of light, the great centre of consumption, tourism and pleasure; the cafs, department stores, fashion industry
and grand expositions all changed urban
living so that it could absorb vast surpluses through consumerism. But then the
overextended and speculative financial
system and credit structures crashed in
1868. Haussmann was dismissed; Napoleon III in desperation went to war against
Bismarcks Germany and lost. In the ensuing vacuum arose the Paris Commune,
one of the greatest revolutionary episodes
in capitalist urban history, wrought in
part out of a nostalgia for the world that
Haussmann had destroyed and the desire
to take back the city on the part of those
dispossessed by his works.2
Fast forward now to the 1940s in the
United States. The huge mobilization for
the war effort temporarily resolved the
capital-surplus disposal problem that
had seemed so intractable in the 1930s,
and the unemployment that went with
it. But everyone was fearful about what
would happen after the war. Politically
the situation was dangerous: the federal
government was in effect running a nationalized economy, and was in alliance
with the Communist Soviet Union, while
strong social movements with socialist inclinations had emerged in the 1930s. As
in Louis Bonapartes era, a hefty dose of
political repression was evidently called
for by the ruling classes of the time; the
subsequent history of McCarthyism and
Cold War politics, of which there were already abundant signs in the early 40s, is
all too familiar. On the economic front,
there remained the question of how surplus capital could be absorbed.
In 1942, a lengthy evaluation of Haussmanns efforts appeared in Architectural
Forum. It documented in detail what he
Social Design
even physically wiped out. Surplus commodities can lose value or be destroyed,
while productive capacity and assets can
be written down and left unused; money
itself can be devalued through inflation,
and labour through massive unemployment. How, then, has the need to circumvent these barriers and to expand the terrain of profitable activity driven capitalist
urbanization? I argue here that urbanization has played a particularly active role,
alongside such phenomena as military
expenditures, in absorbing the surplus
product that capitalists perpetually produce in their search for profits.
Dispossessions
Surplus absorption through urban
transformation has an even darker aspect. It has entailed repeated bouts of
urban restructuring through creative
destruction, which nearly always has a
class dimension since it is the poor, the
underprivileged and those marginalized
from political power that suffer first and
foremost from this process. Violence is
required to build the new urban world
on the wreckage of the old. Haussmann
tore through the old Parisian slums, using powers of expropriation in the name
of civic improvement and renovation.
He deliberately engineered the removal
of much of the working class and other
unruly elements from the city centre,
where they constituted a threat to public
order and political power. He created an
urban form where it was believedincorrectly, as it turned out in 1871that suf-
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though it was an active component of expansion in the earlier part of that decade.
The property market directly absorbed a
great deal of surplus capital through the
construction of city-centre and suburban
homes and office spaces, while the rapid
inflation of housing asset pricesbacked
by a profligate wave of mortgage refinancing at historically low rates of interestboosted the US domestic market for
consumer goods and services. American
urban expansion partially steadied the
global economy, as the US ran huge trade
deficits with the rest of the world, borrowing around $2 billion a day to fuel its
insatiable consumerism and the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
But the urban process has undergone
another transformation of scale. It has,
in short, gone global. Property-market
booms in Britain and Spain, as well as in
many other countries, have helped power
a capitalist dynamic in ways that broadly
parallel what has happened in the United
States. The urbanization of China over
the last twenty years has been of a different character, with its heavy focus on infrastructural development, but it is even
more important than that of the US. Its
pace picked up enormously after a brief
recession in 1997, to the extent that China has taken in nearly half the worlds
cement supplies since 2000. More than
a hundred cities have passed the onemillion population mark in this period,
and previously small villages, such as
Shenzhen, have become huge metropolises of 6 to 10 million people. Vast infrastructural projects, including dams and
highwaysagain, all debt-financedare
transforming the landscape. The consequences for the global economy and the
absorption of surplus capital have been
significant: Chile booms thanks to the
high price of copper, Australia thrives and
even Brazil and Argentina have recovered
in part because of the strength of Chinese
demand for raw materials.
Is the urbanization of China, then,
the primary stabilizer of global capitalism today? The answer has to be a qualified yes. For China is only the epicentre
of an urbanization process that has now
become genuinely global, partly through
the astonishing integration of financial
markets that have used their flexibility to
debt-finance urban development around
the world. The Chinese central bank, for
example, has been active in the secondary
mortgage market in the US while Goldman Sachs was heavily involved in the
surging property market in Mumbai, and
Hong Kong capital has invested in Baltimore. In the midst of a flood of impoverished migrants, construction boomed in
Johannesburg, Taipei, Moscow, as well as
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84
Formulating Demands
Urbanization, we may conclude, has
played a crucial role in the absorption of
capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction
that have dispossessed the masses of any
right to the city whatsoever. The planet as
building site collides with the planet of
slums.16 Periodically this ends in revolt,
as in Paris in 1871 or the US after the assassination of Martin Luther King in
1968. If, as seems likely, fiscal difficulties
mount and the hitherto successful neoliberal, postmodernist, and consumerist
phase of capitalist surplus-absorption
through urbanization is at an end and a
broader crisis ensues, then the question
arises: where is our 68 or, even more dramatically, our version of the Commune?
As with the financial system, the answer
is bound to be much more complex precisely because the urban process is now
global in scope. Signs of rebellion are everywhere: the unrest in China and India
is chronic, civil wars rage in Africa, Latin
America is in ferment. Any of these revolts
could become contagious. Unlike the fiscal system, however, the urban and periurban social movements of opposition, of
which there are many around the world,
are not tightly coupled; indeed most have
no connection to each other. If they somehow did come together, what should they
demand?
The answer to the last question is simple enough in principle: greater democratic control over the production and
utilization of the surplus. Since the urban
process is a major channel of surplus use,
establishing democratic management
over its urban deployment constitutes the
right to the city. Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value has been
taxed, and in social-democratic phases
the proportion at the states disposal rose
significantly. The neoliberal project over
the last thirty years has been oriented towards privatizing that control. The data
for all OECD countries show, however,
that the states portion of gross output has
been roughly constant since the 1970s. 17
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Notes
Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective
Behavior, Chicago 1967, p. 3.
For a fuller account, see David Harvey, Paris,
Capital of Modernity, New York 2003.
Robert Moses, What Happened to Haussmann?, Architectural Forum, vol. 77 (July
1942), pp. 5766.
Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis 2003; and Writings on Cities, Oxford
1996.
William Tabb, The Long Default: New York City
and the Urban Fiscal Crisis, New York 1982.
Richard Bookstaber, A Demon of Our Own
Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of
Financial Innovation, Hoboken, NJ 2007.
Hilde Nafstad et al.,Ideology and Power: The
Influence of Current Neoliberalism in Society,
Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, vol. 17, no. 4 (July 2007), pp. 31327.
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future
in Los Angeles, London and New York 1990.
Marcello Balbo, Urban Planning and the Fragmented City of Developing Countries, Third
World Planning Review, vol. 15, no. 1 (1993), pp.
2335.
Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question, New
York 1935, pp. 747.
Engels, The Housing Question, p. 23.
Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford 2003,
chapter 4.
Usha Ramanathan, Illegality and the Urban
Poor, Economic and Political Weekly, 22 July
2006; Rakesh Shukla, Rights of the Poor: An
Overview of Supreme Court, Economic and
Political Weekly, 2 September 2006.
Kelo v. New London, CT, decided on 23 June
2005 in case 545 US 469 (2005).
Much of this thinking follows the work of
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital:
Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails
Everywhere Else, New York 2000; see the critical
examination by Timothy Mitchell, The Work of
Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World,
Archives Europennes de Sociologie, vol. 46,
no. 2 (August 2005), pp. 297320.
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London and New
York 2006.
OECD Factbook 2008: Economic, Environmental
and Social Statistics, Paris 2008, p. 225.
Edsio Fernandes, Constructing the Right to
the City in Brazil, Social and Legal Studies,
vol. 16, no. 2 (June 2007), pp. 20119.
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velopment, once a city is freed of the constraints of either equilibrium or integration. These include encouraging quirky,
jerry-built adaptations or additions to
existing buildings; encouraging uses of
public spaces which dont fit neatly together, such as putting an AIDS hospice
square in the middle of a shopping street.
In her view, big capitalism and powerful
developers tend to favour homogeneity:
determinate, predictable, and balanced
in form. The role of the radical planner
therefore is to champion dissonance. In
her famous declaration: if density and
diversity give life, the life they breed is disorderly. The open city feels like Naples,
E IN SHOULD
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planner, those developers in London, as
in New York, who complain most loudly
about zoning restrictions are all too adept in using these rules at the expense of
communities. The contrast to the closed
system lies in a different kind of social
system, not in brute private enterprise,
a social system that is open rather than
closed. The characteristics of such an
open system and its realisation in an open
city are what I wish to explore in this essay.
The Open
System
The idea of an open city is not my own:
credit for it belongs to the great urbanist Jane Jacobs in the course of arguing
against the urban vision of Le Corbusier.
She tried to understand what results when
places become both dense and diverse, as
in packed streets or squares, their functions both public and private; out of such
conditions comes the unexpected encounter, the chance discovery, the innovation. Her view, reflected in the bon mot of
William Empson, was that the arts result
from over-crowding. Jacobs sought to
define particular strategies for urban de-
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Richard
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Incomplete Form
This discussion of walls and borders
leads logically to a second systematic
characteristic of the open city: incomplete form. Incompleteness may seem
the enemy of structure, but this is not the
case. The designer needs to create physical forms of a particular sort, incomplete in a special way. When we design
a street, for instance, so that buildings
are set back from a street wall, the space
left open in front is not truly public space;
instead the building has been withdrawn
from the street. We know the practical
consequences; people walking on a street
tend to avoid these recessed spaces. Its
better planning if the building is brought
forward, into the context of other buildings; though the building will become
part of the urban fabric, some of its volumetric elements will now be incompletely
disclosed. There is incompleteness in the
perception of what the object is.
Incompleteness of form extends to
the very context of buildings themselves.
In classical Rome, Hadrians Pantheon
co-existed with the less distinguished
buildings that surrounded it in the urban
fabric, though Hadrians architects conceived the Pantheon as a self-referential
object. We find the same co-existence in
many other architectural monuments: St.
Pauls in London, Rockefeller Center in
New York, the Maison Arabe in Parisall
great works of architecture which stimulate building around themselves. Its the
fact of that stimulation, rather than the
Narratives of Development
Our work as urbanists aims first of all
to shape the narratives of urban development. By that, we mean that we focus on
the stages in which a particular project
unfolds. Specifically, we try to understand
what elements should happen first, what
then are the consequences of this initial
move. Rather than a lock-step march towards achieving a single end, we look at
the different and conflicting possibilities
which each stage of the design process
should open up; keeping these possibilities intact, leaving conflict elements
in play, opens up the design system. We
claim no originality for this approach. If
a novelist were to announce at the beginning of a story, heres what will happen,
what the characters will become, and
what the story means, we would immediately close the book. All good narrative
has the property of exploring the unforeseen, of discovery; the novelists art is to
shape the process of that exploration.
The urban designers art is akin. In sum,
we can define an open system as one in
which growth admits conflict and dissonance. This definition is at the heart
of Darwins understanding of evolution;
rather than the survival of the fittest (or
the most beautiful), he emphasised the
process of growth as a continual struggle
between equilibrium and disequilibrium; an environment rigid in form, static
in programme, is doomed in time; bio-
Democratic Space
When the city operates as an open systemincorporating principles of porosity of territory, narrative indeterminacy
and incomplete formit becomes democratic not in a legal sense, but as physical
experience. In the past, thinking about
democracy focused on issues of formal
governance, today it focuses on citizenship and issues of participation. Participation is an issue that has everything to
do with the physical city and its design.
For example, in the ancient polis, the
Athenians put the semi-circular theatre
to political use; this architectural form
provided good acoustics and a clear view
and of speakers in debates; moreover, it
made the perception of other peoples
responses during debates possible. In
modern times, we have no similar model
of democratic spacecertainly no clear
imagination of an urban democratic
space. John Locke defined democracy in
terms of a body of laws which could be
practiced anywhere. Democracy in the
eyes of Thomas Jefferson was inimical
to life in cities; he thought the spaces
it required could be no larger than a village. His view has persisted. Throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
champions of democratic practices have
identified them will small, local communities, face-to-face relationships. Todays
city is big, filled with migrants and ethnic diversities, in which people belong to
many different kinds of community at the
same timethrough their work, families,
consumption habits and leisure pursuits.
For cities like London and New York becoming global in scale, the problem of
citizen participation is how people can
feel connected to others, when, necessarily, they cannot know them. Democratic
space means creating a forum for these
strangers to interact.
In London, a good example of how this
can occur is the creation of a corridor connection between St. Pauls Cathedral and
the Tate Modern Gallery, spanned by the
new Millennium Bridge. Though highly
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n August 2012 in Berlin, on the occasion of the Nationalgaleries Architektonika exhibition at the Hamburger
Bahnhof, the artist Marjetica Potrc and
the architectural historian and curator
Andres Lepik held a discussion about
the future of the city. The starting points
for the conversation were Potrcs contribution to the exhibition, Caracas: Growing Houses (2012), as well as an exhibition that Lepik curated, Small Scale, Big
Change. New Architectures of Social Engagement (Museum of Modern Art, New
York, 2010), and a publication that he
edited, Moderators of Change. Architecture
That Helps (Ostfildern, 2011). They talked
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Potr
ANDRES LEPIK:
AL:
MP:
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Andres
Lepik
The Schrebergarten is an escape fantasy for the modernist housing but then the people who live in small apartments have again their little parcel with a fence around. The
community garden is an open field, comparable to the one
on the Tempelhofer Feld, a former airplane field in Berlin.5
People come together and cultivate a little piece of land,
but they do it all together, there is this self-organization,
which is taking more responsibility.
AL:
Right: You start with the commuity garden but you might
end up with different results of the project. To take your
project in Caracas as an example, what was the impact on
the community in the end? Did you follow that up?
AL:
MP:
as moderators of change.
The title is: Moderators of Change.6 I think that architects should become more like moderators of change. They
have the expertise and design, but lack the knowledge of
the problems on site. So they first have to learn about the
problems and then they can react to these problems with
their designs. To interact with the community in terms
of really allowing them to participate in the design. This
problem interests me. Most artists and architects act like
top-down designers, top-down decision-makers, with the
community being asked only at the last momentand then
sometimes refuses to accept. If you start with the process
very early and include the community, then the citizens
will have proposals. Even when they dont get through with
them, they still have the feeling of being involved in the
process of decision-making.
AL:
MP:
MP:
In the architectural field I would describe different levels of participation. Theres this kind of fake participation
where the city planner gives two options to a community:
either A or B. Participation for me means listening to the
community first, before starting a plan at all. The second
step is involving the community in the design process. And
the third step is involving the communities in the construction process. The last level is giving over responsibility to
the community. At this point the architect or artist has to
step back and say: Now Im out of it. This is my rather optimistic vision of how participation can work. It takes a lot
of energy and time and thats exactly why many developers
and politicians avoid participatory planning in the deeper
sense of the definition. Politicians in democratic countries
think about election terms. If they start a building project
they want to cut the ribbon before the next elections.
AL:
MP:
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Im really tired of this iconic architecture thats generally covered by the media. What is the idea of architecture
behind this? Is architecture a profession to produce largescale luxury objects? Or is architecture a discipline thats
engaged in the problems of society? Only a tiny fraction
of the global society is currently served by architects.
But they are highly trained professionals in design, multiskilled and intelligent people. They have a responsibility to
the rest of society!
AL:
MP:
Right, its the same direction. Its just less politically engaged, its more pragmatic, lets call it: radically pragmatic.
As you said, some architects are working in Caracas, some
architects are working in Bogot. They care about the communities or about the society but not about the political
system. And in this case Im very positive about the power
of an architect.
AL:
MP:
When I was working on the Amsterdam project, I learned that the city had
given the public land in New West to the
housing corporations. The problem was
that the municipality was serving the developers and their vision of the city, while
the residents were being left to fend for
themselves. Democracy was broken. But
its important that the link between residents and government works. Democracy, after all, is a social construction.
Lets face it. The financial crisis broke out with the crash
of the housing market in the US. As the housing market
turned into a speculative business that lost its relation
to the real needs of society it became the reason for this
global crisis. And thats why I totally agree when you say
the government cannot draw back from responsibility, like
taking care of affordable housing, of social space, of these
questions. Theres a responsibility of politics for the built
environment. Years ago everybody believed in the future
of cars, for example. The US gave up public infrastructure
completely, like public transport and light-rail and bike
lanes and all these things and theyre now desperately
trying to get back to it. But they lost 60 years of city development, destroyed even what they had. So if you go to St.
Louis, just to give one example that stands for many other
cities in the US, you go to the center of the city but there
is no center any longer in the sense of that word, there
are only garages, some office buildings and empty space
in between and no people on the streetsonly in cars.
Suburbanization has driven people out of the center and
produced the need for cars. Now the inner city houses are
empty and cities like Denver and many others are rapidly
shrinking, theres no identity of the city any more. We have
to think more about what is the social space, not just the
public space of the city.
AL:
MP:
MP:
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98
rently, no word exists for the action of destroying peoples homes and/or expelling
them from their homeland. We suggest
the neologism domicide, the deliberate
destruction of home, that causes suffering to its inhabitants. 2 The authors distinguish extreme domicide from everyday
domicide. Unlike extreme domicide. the
everyday variety comes about because of
the aesthetic attractions of slums are implicated in both the growth and its aesthetization of an urban surplus value. As early
as 1884 the word slumming appeared in
the London Oxford Dictionary. It referred
to a distinct form of tourism which did
not choose go visit the hegemonic and
representative sites of palaces, churches
or museums, but rather went to see the
ON OF
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GGEST THE
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ID
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NEOLOGISM
TION OF HOME, []
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Elke
Krasny
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Alfredo
Brillembourg Klumpner
ERZOG & DE
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TO THE FA
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AVELA CAF
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AND THE TE
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4
5
Notes
David Harvey, The Right to the City, in: New Left
Review 53, September-October 2008 http://
newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-theright-to-the-city
Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith, Domicide. The Global Destruction of Home, (Montreal:
Mc Gill Queens University Press, 2001), ix.
Ibid. 106.
(http://vernissage.tv/blog/2013/06/27/
tadashi-kawamata-favela-cafe-art-basel-2013/)
http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/
dyn/92317/favela-cafe-at-art-basel-promptspartying-protests-and-police/#.UeZ5aLTIa1s
When I spoke with local Baselers about this,
they described the police action to me as a
police action of the local riot police la Taksim
style.
Simone Osthoff, Lygia Clark and Hlio Oiticica.
A legacy of interactivity and participation for a
telematic future, in: Corpus Delicti. Performance Art of the Americas, edited by Coco
Fusco, (London and New York: Routledge 1999),
157.
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Introduction
Cities around the world are growing rapidly; a projection that we have all
heard time and time again. While megacities, the likes of Tokyo, New York, Cairo,
Mexico City, and Lagos will likely always
experience a certain level of incoming
immigrants bound for their centers in
search of the opportunities associated
with urban living, these are not the areas
where mass flocking will occur in the next
few decades.1 Second tier cities are the
sites of extreme growth, most of the fastest growing cities in the world at the momentBeihai (China), Ghaziabad (India),
Lubumbashi (DRC)fall into this category of mid-sized cities and it is toward
these environments that architects and
urban planners must turn their attention
to best serve the expanding urban, global
population.2
Informal cities have become mid-sized
cities of their own right within the formal city. They are an integral part of this
growth and yet are most often excluded
when it comes to implementing smart
solutions. One billion people live in
squatter communities worldwide, a num-
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next day, Favela Caf was back up and running as if nothing happened (complete
with falafel at reassuringly exclusive
prices).5
Thirdly I want to propose an Oikopophagic Manifesto. The conflicts I pointed out in both the strategies of domicide
and favela chic lead me to invoke the terminology of the Brazilian Anthropophagia avant-garde group. They critically used
notions of cultural cannibalism. Anthropophagia literally means cannibalism.
As employed by the Brazilian avantgarde
of the 1920s (the Anthropophagic Mani-
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102
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Emerging Mobility
Solutions from the
Informal City
In addition to being minimally invasive, intelligent infrastructure in informal settings must multitask.
Torre David, a 45-story office tower in
Caracas designed by the distinguished
Venezuelan architect Enrique Gomez,
was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer, David Brillembourg, in 1993 and the
collapse of the countys economy in 1994.
As of 2012, over 750 families, approximately 3,000 residents, inhabit the first
28 floors of this structure. Its unfinished
layout provides a world of possibilities.
Squatters have established different ways
of dividing space, sectioning off public
and private areas, providing general services to the towers community. Residents
have only settled up to the 28th floor so far
up because this skyscraper has no elevator system. Highly adaptive by nature, the
community came up with a mobility solution of their own, using the adjacent parking structure to ferry goods and people up
and down, building foot bridges between
the parking garage and the tower. Motorcyclists play the role of taxis drivers and
transport walkers, but way of the garage,
up and down the first 10 floors. Torre
David is not the only structure in the city
that has made transportation-specific infrastructure into so much more. Today,
retrofitted parking garages are a new vernacular in Caracas (an oil-based economy
that over anticipated the amount of automobile dependence that would arise after
the millennium) and have been occupied
by Chinese restaurants, dry cleaners, doctors offices, hairdressers, nightclubs,
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Looking
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when the city recognizes its local knowledge and allows itself to be part of nature.
The Ruin Academy (Taipei 2010- ) is set
to re-think the industrial city and the re-
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Marco
Casa
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Illegal Architecture
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The Instant Taipei is self-made architecture using the official city as a growing
platform and energy source, attaching
itself like a parasite in order to leach electricity and water. The illegal architecture
is so widespread and deep rooted as a
culture in the Taiwanese cityscape that
we could almost speak about another city
on top of the official Taipei, a parallel
cityor a Para-City. This DIY built human
environment is tied directly to human
nature and motivated by basic human
instinct and mandated only by desire and
availability. Paradoxically, the illegal settlements such as Treasure Hill are living
in a more balanced relationship with the
natural environment
Ultra-Ruin
River Urbanism
Taipei (1G) exists because of the river
and the fertile flood plains. The industrial
city (2G) claimed independence from nature and turned the river into an industrial sewage site. A reinforced concrete wall
of twelve meters high was constructed
in-between the built human environment and the river nature. Third Generation City aims to reunite the river and city
through the natural restoration of the
river environment. The river shall run as
an ecological corridor through a city that
is pulsating together with its hydraulics.
The city will be re-developed from the view
point of the river. Local knowledge still remembers the time when the water of the
rivers was drinkable and people washed
themselves in the rivers. Every family had
a rowing boat and the river was full of harvest. This is still a living memory for some
in Taipei, but for the industrial generations the river has become a fiction.
The Phoenix bird has not yet come and
the River has not yet revealed its divine
nature: this is the end of me.
Confucius
THIRD GENERATION
CITY
The way towards the Third Generation
City is a process of becoming a learning
and healing organization and to reconnect the urbanized collective conscious
with nature. In Taipei the wall between the
city and the river must be gone. This requires a total transformation from the city
infrastructure and the centralized power
bureaucracy. Citizens on their behalf are
ready and are breaking the industrial city
by themselves already. Local knowledge is
operating independently from the official
city and is providing punctual third generation surroundings within the industrial city and by doing that providing self
organized urban acupuncture for the stiff
official mechanism.
The weak signals of the un-official collective conscious should be recognized
as the futures emerging issues; futures
that are already present in Taipei. The official city should learn how to enjoy acupuncture, how to give up industrial control in order to let nature to step in. The
local knowledge based transformation
layer of Taipei is happening from inside
the city and it is happening through self
organized punctual interventions. These
interventions are driven by small scale
businesses and alternative economies
benefiting from the fertile land of the Taipei Basin and of leaching from the material and energy streams of the official city.
This acupuncture is making the city weaker, softer, and readier for a larger change.
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Urban
Acupuncture
Urban Nomad
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targets). The Department of Human Settlements recent call for tenders for the drafting of upgrading plans for 46,000 informal
households, in Johannesburg alone, pays
evidence to this shift and the recognition
that the formal subsidy system is too slow
and does not provide a holistic housing solution to the poorest members of society.
Furthermore the conditions of deprivation in informal settlements pose a serious threat to political and social stability.
National Context
In the face of a 2.3 million backlog in
the delivery of state-sponsored formal
houses, the upgrading of informal settlements is being given credence by the state.
This is evidenced in the National Upgrade
Support Programme (NUSP) called into
being to assist the government in reaching its target of upgrading 400,000 households in well-located informal settlements
around the country (as part of Outcome
eight of the National Delivery Agreement
Fig. 1:
Backlog Graph (by 2610 south Architects)
Graph showing ever increasing backlog in formal
subsidized housing which has ostensibly been met by
the informal city.
Background
The Housing and the Informal City
project initiated in 2008 by 2610 south Architects in partnership with the GoetheInstitut, Johannesburg has evolved over
successive years from a purely researchbased project (investigating informal urbanism) into a university course which
has engaged with people-driven development processes in two separate informal
settlements.
Fig. 4:
Ruimsig Studio (image by Alex Opper)
The university studio was trans-located into an existing
informal church within the settlement. At least half of
the studio sessions, workshops, and many meetings
and debates involving students, residents and city
officials took place here.
Fig. 3:
Diepsloot Shack (image by 2610 south Architects)
Illegal road-side business offering cooked meals and
housing. A house can be delivered in 1-2 days at 5% of
the cost of a subsidized house.
Fig. 5:
Ruimsig Re-blocking Map (image by 2610 south
Architects)
A re-blocking map produced by students and residents
was the outcome of the seven week course. Here it is
displayed at an exhibition and film screening attended
by the multiple stakeholders vested in the project. The
public display of the studio results and process forms
and important aspect lending agency and legitimacy to
the communitys development process.
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Fig. 6:
Ruimsig Re-blocked (by 2610 south Architects)
This map shows the dwellings moved (into better
positions) in the six months period following the studio.
These adjustments to the fabric of the settlement were
carried out by residents assisted by CORC (NGO).
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Thorsten
Deckler
Participatory planning, in which inhabitants play a central role in co-determining outcomes specific to their own
needs, is seen as an important component in developing upgrading strategies
ensuring more sustainable livelihoods. A
simple example is that the provision of a
top structure (house) delivered through a
subsidy system may not be the immediate
priority, when taking into consideration
the slow process of delivery, the low densities and high costs for a shelter which
people are (and have been) quite capable
of providing for themselves in the face of
the housing crisis. These costs could thus
be better spent on immediate improvements to existing settlement by means of
retro-fitting essential services with a view
towards long term formalization and integration with the city.
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Fig. 2:
Sewerage Map of Reception Area, Diepsloot (by 2610
south Architects)
7.2 kms of daylight sewerage flow from oversubscribed
communal toilets in the Reception Area, a formally
laid out but informally settled area in Diepsloot, one
of South Africas largest post-Apartheid settlements
comprising approximately 200,000 inhabitants. The
promise of formal subsidized housing coupled with a
lack of tenure (and the very real threat of evictions)
has resulted in an illegal limbo in which residents are
reluctant to invest in land they do not own.
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Through the association with the university and the production of the re-blocking plan Ruimsig has received increased
attention from city authorities, who now
show more support of the community of
Ruimsigs focus on upgradingto the
extent that the area has been declared
an experimental zone in which certain
municipal standards and by-laws may be
re-defined in order to meet the very different spatial demands and needs of the settlement. An example which precipitated
this ruling is the excessive road reserve
width the citys roads agency insists on
in order to install services. Would these
widths be implemented throughout the
settlement, most households would need
to be relocated.
Fig. 11b:
Diagram of Typologies (by 2610 south Architects)
The different typologies existing in Marlboro South
ranging from formal business to hybrid conditions of
business and living to walled and open lots with live
stock.
Fig. 10:
Occupied Warehouse (image by Ryan Bosworth)
An example of an occupied warehouse with informally
constructed mezzanine level.
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Fig. 8:
Map with Road Reserve (by 2610 south Architects)
Map shows the extent to which a legal road reserve
width would displace further households. The drawing
became a tool of negotiation with city officials who
subsequently declared Ruimsig an experimental zone
in terms of town planning regulations.
Fig. 12:
Land-use Map (by 2610 south Architects, based on
work by students)
The land-use map formed the main deliverable, demonstrating the many new uses which have humanized
the industrial landscape through the introduction of
housing, livestock, restaurants, crches, churches,
sports fields, etc.
Fig. 11a:
Warehouse diagram (by 2610 south Architects after
students work)
Drawn example of an occupied warehouse with informally constructed mezzanine level.
CHALLENGES and
OPPORTUNITIES
(One of the biggest challenges is the
energy, time and cost associated with running a course of this nature. This places
a significant limit on what can realistically be achieved during the course in
terms of benefits for both the students
and the community partners involved. A
clear deal had to be made which defined
the concrete deliverables to the community in relation to the learning outcomes
for students. Furthermore the conceptual
nature as student projects had to be explained and that only, one or two of these
could likely be developed further. As it
happened, the resettlement plans drawn
after the course drew on many of the ideas
and findings collectively generated during the seven-week period.
Fig.13:
Re-settlement Workshop (photo by: Delite Visual
Archives)
Models used to workshop settlement layouts with
evicted households. Residents won a court interdict
against the Citys evictions orders and are legally able
to re-settle land in the area.
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Fig. 14:
Re-settlement Models (photo by: Guillermo Delgado)
11 settlement options were produced by 2610 south
Architects & BOOM Architects. Each option shows a
starting and end condition (after growth). Residents
decided on 10msq room sizes as these could be affordably self-constructed. The various settlement options
thus explore future growth and expansion from 10msq
to 20, 30, and 40msq. 40msq is the size of a subsidized
house.
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Fig. 7:
Ruimsig Resident presenting Project at Final Reviews
(image by Alex Opper)
Albert Masibigiri, one of the 8 community planners
involved in the course shown here presenting his
groups work. An important aspect of the INFORMAL
STUDIO is that residents are engaged throughout the
process which ostensibly forms part of their larger drive
for development.
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Fig. 9:
Marlboro South Figure Ground (by 2610 south
Architects)
Figure ground showing the domestication of the former industrial buffer strip through informal housing.
Fig. 17:
Process & Engagement Map (by BOOM Architects)
This timeline, produced by Eric Wright and Claudia
Morgado, charts the course and documents the key
events such as meetings, agreements, evictions,
court battles, protects and victories which took
place before, during and after the course. It also
shows the sheer number of people (approximately
100) which were involved in the process.
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implies a very open but principled flexibility in order for the studio to be able to
adapt to changing circumstances.
A challenge specific to lecturers of
this course is the pervasive emphasis on
the image of architecture and the overstatement of the importance of individual (one-off) buildings as perpetuated in
blogs, magazines and books. The resulting aesthetic overload makes it difficult,
especially for students, to focus on the
unspectacular. The field of informal
settlement upgrading requires an almost
invisible but by no means less important design as support approach; one
in which sensitized architects have an important role to play.
Exhibition
Part of the purpose of this exhibition
is thus to make accessible the underlying
dynamics and principles of participative
design to students and institutions and
to convey the nature of collaborative/participative design as a dynamic and contextually-rooted process of un-learning
and re-learning for both professionals
and community partners. The exhibition
also seeks to demonstrate the value of
participative design practice in developing contextually well founded and achievable approaches to city making through
a set of retro-fitting moves and adjustments which acknowledge rather than do
away with the imperfect and contingent
aspects of ever-evolving cities.
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Fig. 16:
Exhibition at Goethe-Institut (image by Kutlwano
Moagi)
The exhibition, curated by Anne Graupner of 2610
south Architects, contained drawings, maps, text,
a graphic narrative, models, student proposals as
well as four films depicting the views of STUDENTS,
RESIDENTS, NGO / OFFICIALS and ARCHITECTS /
TEACHERS. Connecting a multiplicity of insights and
opinions across the divide of an unequal society was
an important motivation in the curatorial strategy. The
exhibition became a site for community discussions as
well as media coverage.
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Fig. 15:
Re-settlement Proposal (excerpt from comic produced
by student Jaco Jonker)
The final splash page of comic (illustrating the entire
studio process) shows the resultant resettlement proposal (by 2610 south Architects & BOOM Architects).
This proposal was presented by evicted residents of
Marlboro South to the city.
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Notes
http://linesofflight.files.wordpress.
com/2008/03/participation_notes.pdf
Filipe Borges de Macedo. Out of the box. A
arquitectura participativa de Filipe Balestra.
Lisboa, FAUTL, Setembro, 2011, pp. 15 25
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/
Kito
Nedo
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In what respect?
MC:
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MC:
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who said: What you are doing here is selling out the cityand we urgently need
to change that. Whether the planned
transparent property policy actually
means a departure from pure budgetary
policy in urban development will have
to be demonstrated through its concrete
implementation. These are still merely
announcements
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Giancarlo
Mazzanti
WORKT
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AND
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IES, BECAUSE WE BEL POWERFUL MECHANISMS
A ERIAL PRACTICES ARE ANSFORMAT
MAT
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OF SOCIAL INCLU
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Jeanne
private food production activities in public spaces. We used actions in contradiction to foster new relationships between
users and the place, for this review we
were concerned with the value of condition; indeterminate, unfinished, empty,
unused, etc.
In our Canopy, the model designed
was able to propitiate different kind of
Heeswijk
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and take part of different recreational and
academic activities that lead to a cooperative and inclusive community.
The other reflection here was wondering what the role of the common space is
as public scenario of diversity in the construction of the world today. Strategies
such as the design of programs, protocols, use and exchange are basic concepts
Hope Forest consists of a 1,744 m2 horizontal surface and a 700 m2 spatial structure,
which acts as a structural bunch of trees. The
dimensions of the canopy are approximately
22.7 30.8 m, with a perimeter of 138,198 m.
Each of the modules is a polyhedron of 12 surfaces which multiply to form the canopy. The
structural canopy functions as a beam plane,
supported over the two axes of the columns.
Materials used are expanded mesh, round metal
pipe, and translucent tile.
This project was made possible thanks to the
foundation Pies Descalzos founded by the
well known singer Shakira and the Spanish
ONG Ayuda en Accin.
Client: Piez Descalzos Fundation
Project year: 2010
Design development time: 3 months
Construction year: 2011
Build area: 800 sqm
Cost per sqm: 700,000 COP
As our main interest is what the architecture
can produce, part of our design process is to
learn from what happens with our projects after
they are built and used. For that we have done a
series of documentaries where the inhabitants can express what they think and how the
project has changed their environments.
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It Runs in the Neighbourhood, a soap series written, acted, and filmed by hospital staff addressing the ethical
dilemmas of the hospital, Stavanger, 2008 2009
they raised the necessary amount of money to do the building work. I learned that
the program of action (a offline form of
crowd funding) and multipliers of images
which make up the work, made it possible
for a community to maintain itself in its
own indetermination and at the same
time, to multiply its links with a outside
world that it continually approaches.
Ruhr 2010
By working with a small community
living in the middle of one of the largest
motorway intersections in the Industrial
Ruhr area in Germany I learned a lot about
the way in which small happiness can
be a resistance force. In a time where the
Ruhr area wanted to put itself on the map
as a creative Metropole, they effectively
fought to retake an empty church to create
a community centre within. Together, we
created a large table (at which it was possible to seat the whole village) to serve both
as a council table, a beer garden and most
of all as a place to publicize their ongoing
fight to be recognized as a viable community and to be taken serious for that. We
are the Ruhrgebiet. We are people open
to the world and determined to act in solidarity. We are the heartland of Europe par
excellence. You have to take us in account
while dreaming up a new Metropole.
While at the same time, through selling
beer, coffee, cakes, marmalade, and socks
Stavanger University
Hospital
The same counted for the employees of
one of the largest university hospitals in
Norway. They used the opportunity to be
part of the public art project Neighbourhood Secrets, in order to tell their own
narrative on the ethical and moral dilemmas they face every day, but which have no
place in the official information the hospital is supplying to the outside world.
After collecting stories from within the
Hospital, an Open Call for Actors (players) was made and over 80 people both
working as well as being patient in the
hospital showed up for audition. It took
two years to shoot (completely in house,
actors, camerawork, musical score, scene
locations) an hospital sitcom series episode. Imagine how difficult it is to have
seven volunteer actors play in a real time
operating hospital and at the same time
to shoot a scene. But all the actors/players always found a way to be there. When I
expressed my concern, that we might take
time away from more urgent matters, they
had to tell methat besides saving lives
Freehouse
The Afrikaander district was one of the
first in the Netherlands with a population
mostly of foreign origin. In the 1990s, the
Rotterdam City Council started a major
urban development scheme adjacent
to the area, and while one architectural
feature after another rose up around it,
with the slogan Clean, Whole, and Save
stricter regulation were put in place and
the economic activity in the Afrikaander
district itself died out. In order for the Afrikaander district to survive the expansion
of the creative cityand to thrive from
itFreehouse actively challenged this
new regulation imposed by the local government in doing over 300 interventions.
Freehouse helped to set up small-scale
skill based projects to regenerate the area
and its market, by improving products,
services, market interactions, and social
integration in order to retain its intimate
local character and cultural diversity. In
collaboration with residents, artisans,
artists, and designers new sustainable
infrastructures were different skills and
knowledge were combined were created
such as a neighbourhood workshop for
making and designing clothes, a communal kitchen area, a neighbourhood shop
selling local products and a small-scale
delivery service, which at present offering 40 jobs and various internships in the
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1
2
Notes:
In reference to Gottfried Wagner, The Art of Difference: From Europe as a cultural project to EU
policies for culture, 2011.
My own lesson from practices about the
contemporary state of the public domain is that
it will require nothing less than making private
public during this state of exception
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132
JEROEN:
DRE:
A Self-Questioning Session
I
134
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When our Boy With Kite painting was shot in the head,
we wondered whether it was symbolic of the climate in Vila
Cruzeiro or if we should restore it, which we eventually did.
JEROEN:
After we had worked for several years in Vila Cruzeiro while there was a war going on between the Comando
Vermelho and the police, we felt we had a decent understanding the dynamics of such a perilous environment.
What you can do, but mostly what you shouldnt do. Who
can you approach and what can you ask or say. What things
shouldnt you talk about at all. When is it OK to go out in
the street and when isnt it. In most cases, when violence
erupted you would know by the fireworks exploding at one
of the entrances of the favela. You could go inside and wait
out the few hours of gunbattle.
JEROEN:
To work in and with a specific community, means working extremely close with locals and emotionally becoming
very close to the community. One automatically positions
oneself within their community and therefore adapts to
their standpoint. Obviously we have no ambition whatsoever to be in any way involved in any conflict. We are both
pretty pacifistic and tend to avoid any physical fights. In
places like Rio and Philadelphia, where the local inhabitants tend to fall victim of systematic oppression, it is hard
not to become very critical towards the local governing
forces. In Brazil, invading police forces would shoot at
anything that moves, including painters. In Philadelphia
our community members were systematically arrested and
incarcerated . The key is to try to balance between neutral
and loyal, while also trying to stay safe. The biggest problem is the realization that one is putting a large burden of
trouble on ones family and loved ones back home.
DRE:
JEROEN:
Can what you wear influence how people will see you?
JEROEN:
Why would you rather have post traumatic stress syndrome over a regular job?
DRE:
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JEROEN:
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JEROEN:
a different relationship.
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different. The randomness with which violence can erupt anytime on any corner or
street, possibly directed at someone you
are talking to or friends with. This fosters
an environment where youre constantly
very alert and dependent on the people
around you to keep you informed of possible danger. The conflicts that take place
in such neighborhoods are often between
streets or even individuals, as opposed to
a whole neighborhood against the police
such as it was in Rio. The best thing to do
in both cases is to keep your ears to the
street and your mouth shut.
/
Dre
Urhahn
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Jeroen
Koolhaas
136
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Why?
RL:
Community
How was the project received in the area? Was there cooperation and communication from the beginning onwards?
RL:
RL:
Our young mothers residential program is integral to our artist projects, education, and housing program. First, the
program challenges them to think of their
lives as sculptures. The daily choices they
make determine the level of beauty and
positive growth. So from the very outset,
they are connected to the artistic process
the week seek to employ in the broader
community. It is the young mothers who
set the stage for visiting artists. Artists im-
137
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EX
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WE PUT TOGET
PUBLIC
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DRIVE BY EXHIB
OOD
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G
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TH
TO
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M
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WHO WAS AFRAID TO
E WITHOUT
IT
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TH
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COULD VISIT
CARS.
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parents of many of the children came to
help. I realized during this process that
having children and parents around in
conversation with artists while we worked
together to clean up, they were a valuable
resource for creatively generating ideas
for what the project could become. So
community residents quickly became collaborators on the project.
mediately get to know folks from the community who are available as a resource to
them in understanding our community.
They engage with the arts and education
programs in a number of ways from assisting artists to being featured in projects.
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Rixt
Woudstra
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RL:
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Exhibitions
Turning to the role of the artists; are most exhibitions related to matters that are an issue in the neighborhood? For
example, I had to think of the exhibiton Round 34: Matter of
Food of 2011, which touched upon the fact that Project Row
Houses is located in a so-called food desert.
RL:
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Do you consider it your task as artist to come up with creative solutions for society at large?
RL:
ON SOME
ED
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FO
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SO IN THAT
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TO
ARTISTS IN
AND
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DEVELOPING IN
ORB
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HIGHLIGHTING TH
HOOD.
139
Kiran
Sethi
n October 2009, eight 10 year-old children from a small village named Lordi
Dejgara near Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India,
stopped sixteen child marriages.
In 2010, a few 11 year-old students
from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, U.S.A partnered with the local government to design
bicycling paths in their city to tackle obesity.
In 2011, five 13 year-old students from
Taipei, Taiwan revisited their culture and
taught the adults a heritage song that noone knew about.
There are thousands of such stories
from different cultures and countries.
The one thing that runs through all of
them is the power of children displayed
in the actions that changed their communities. Or in the words of Kiran Bir Sethi,
founder of Design For Change, The spirit
of I CAN.
DESIGN FOR CHANGE (DFC) is a global movement designed to give children an
opportunity to express their own ideas for
a better world and put them into action.
Initiated by Kiran Bir Sethi at the Riverside School, Ahmedabad in 2009, the
movement now reaches out to over 35
countries and 25 million children worldwide.
Kiran is a designer who became a teacher, a principal who grew into an education
reformer, an advocate who morphed into
a social entrepreneur. A trained graphic
designer from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, she comfortably uses
the language of designiteration, prototype, design specsto develop not only
curriculum innovation, but also community-based social programs.
After realizing the need for an education revolution and to provide for the
best education environment for her own
daughter, Kiran founded the Riverside
School in Ahmedabad, India in June 2001.
Riverside School is viewed as a laboratory
to prototype design processes that enable
exceptional teaching and transformative student participation, in Kirans exuberant vocabulary.
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138
GRAM IS
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mented by the teachers for an entire academic year allowing the students to work
on more long-term solutions.
This year marks the beginning of the
5th year of Design for Change. There is
much energy amongst the team members and the participants due to the new
formats, a brand new website and most
importantly the very first Be The Change
Conference on September 28th 29th
2013, at NID, Ahmedabad leading to Mahatma Gandhis Birthday on October 2nd.
This year DFC calls for action to re-imagine Gandhi Jayanti as Be The Change
Day as a celebration of being good. Kiran says, Our schools often applaud the
fastest, the smartest, the tallest etc. but
never has been a childs goodness been
spotlighted. Through the BTC conference, we want to celebrate the goodness
that resides in every child and the ideas
of change that children all over the world
have very courageously implemented.
Student teams from all over the word
will fly down to Ahmedabad and share
there inspiring stories of change.
Maverick international designers,
young achievers and artistes will retell the
stories of courage and inspire students
with the I CAN spirit.
Eminent designers will also conduct
Design Thinking Workshops for students
141
atelier
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142
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components running as social enterprises (e.g. the micro-farm, market, and cafe)
and others being run by user organizations (e.g. the community garden, cultural space, and pedagogical space) and local
associations.
Recyclab is a recycling and eco-construction unit comprising several facilities for storing and reusing locally
salvaged materials, recycling and transforming them into eco-construction elements for self-building and retrofitting.
An associated fab lab5 has been set up
for resident use. Recyclab will function as
a social enterprise.
Ecohab is a cooperative eco-housing
project comprising a number of partially self-built and collectively managed
ecological dwellings, including several
shared facilities and schemes (e.g. food
growing, production spaces, energy and
water harvesting, and car sharing). The
seven dwellings will include two social
flats and a temporary residence unit for
students and researchers. Ecohab will be
run as a cooperative.
The R-Urban collective facilities will
grow in number and be managed by a cooperative land trust, which will acquire
space, facilitate development, and guarantee democratic governance.6
Networks and cycles of production
consumption will form between the collective facilities and the neighborhood,
closing chains of need and supply as locally as possible. To overcome the current
crisis, we must try, as French philosopher
Andr Gorz (2008) states, to produce
what we consume and consume what we
produce (p. 13).
R-Urban interprets this production
consumption chain broadly, going well
beyond material aspects to include the
cultural, cognitive, and affective dimensions. The project sets a precedent for the
participative retrofitting of metropolitan
suburbs, in which the relationship between the urban and the rural is reconsidered. It tries to demonstrate what citizens
can do if they change their working and
living habits to collectively address the
challenges of the future.
Resilience is a key term in the context of the current economic crisis and
resource scarcity. In contrast to sustainability, which focuses on maintaining the
status quo of a system by controlling the
balance between its inputs and outputs,
without necessarily addressing the factors of change and disequilibrium, resilience addresses how systems can adapt
and thrive in changing circumstances.
In contrast to sustainability, which
tends to focus on maintaining the environmental balance, resilience is adaptive
and transformative, inducing change that
offers huge potential to rethink assumptions and build new systems (Maguire &
Cartwright, 2008).
R-Urban is thus not about sustainable
development but about societal change
and political and cultural reinvention,
addressing issues of social inequality,
power, and cultural difference. A city can
only become resilient with the active involvement of its inhabitants. To stimulate
the democratic engagement of the largest
number of citizens, we need tools, knowledge, and places for testing new collective
practices and initiatives and for showcasing the results and benefits of a resilient
transformation of the city. In this, architects have a role to play. Rather than acting merely as building designers, they can
be initiators, negotiators, co-managers,
and enablers of processes and agencies.
R-Urban claims that urban sustainability is a civic right. In this sense, R-Urban creates the conditions for this right
to sustainability to be exercised not only
as a right to access and consume sustainability (provided by the welfare state) but
as a right to produce sustainability (allowing citizen involvement in decision making and action). Sustainability is on the
agenda of many urban projects today, but
this does not mean that all these projects
are political in their approach to the issue.
A political ecology approach, like that
of R-Urban, does not just positively and
uncritically propose improved development dynamics, but also questions the
processes that bring about inequitable urban environments.7 People such as David
Harvey (2008) argue that the transformation of urban spaces is a collective rather
than an individual right, because collective power is necessary to reshape urban
processes. Harvey (2008) describes the
right to the city as the citizens freedom
to access urban resources: it is a right
to change ourselves by changing the city
(p.23).
In this sense, R-Urban follows Harveys ideas and facilitates the exercise of
this right through processes of appropriation, transformation, networking,
and use of city infrastructure. R-Urban
perhaps differs from Harvey in scope, as
it does not seek to instigate a large-scale
global movement to oppose the financial
capital that controls urban development,
but instead seeks to empower city inhabitants to propose alternative projects where
they live and to foster local and trans-local
networks, testing methods of self-management, self-building, and self-production. Here R-Urban is perhaps closer to
Lefebvres idea of the right to the city.
Lefebvre imagines a locally framed emancipatory project, emphasizing the need to
freely propose alternative possibilities for
urban practice at the level of everyday life.
1
2
4
5
Notes
This chapter is a revised version of Tyszczuk,
Smith, Clark, and Butcher (2012); it is reprinted
with permission of the editor and publisher.
One of the first occasions marking the emergence of this global awareness was the first
UN Conference on the Human Environment in
Stockholm (1972), followed up by the Nairobi
(1982), Rio (1992), Johannesburg (2002), and
Rio+20 (2012) meetings. In recent years, such
summits have multiplied and diversified in
both scope and participants. The Copenhagen
Climate Change Conference of 2009 recently
exemplified the blockage resulting from the
growing conflicts between and opposing interests of major international actors (e.g., governments, corporations, and NGOs), blockage that
paralyzes decisions at the global scale.
Transition Towns, Incredible Edible, Continuous
Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs), and
Ecovillage Networks are a few such initiatives
that have started at the local scale and developed into extended networks.
For more information, see http://r-urban.net
Fablab is short for fabrication laboratory, a
small-scale workshop equipped with various
fabrication machines and tools that enable us-
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7
8
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Materials Bank
with re-useable materials and objects to
be used in the construction
Ingredients
Lusa
Alpalh
Brief
should be created in such way it will involve a subject we want to learn about
144
Collaborators
Small Products
make each stage of the design process
into a product by itself
A Playful Mind
so you can create playful spaces and
objects
Preparation
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Children
Brief
Participation and
Involvement
from local people and organizations
Collaborators
Normally no project will be developed
just by ourselves as one of our ultimate
aims is to learn and share experiences
and knowledge with others. Depending
on what we want to investigate, we try to
mix people from other fields and get them
to collaborate, nourish the project and
bring in new ideas. In [ alfacinhas ] we
worked with cooks and organic farmers
who helped developing innovative ways of
portraying lettuces in various forms, from
seed to compost. In [ estrias andantes
] puppeteers, actors, dress-makers and
writers were involved in the re-invention
of Portuguese folk tales that would lead to
the design of temporary theatres around
Ajuda, Lisbon. A good relationship with
the collaborators is crucial for the success
of the project.
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Misused Urban
Spaces
Most cities have a multitude of sites
that shout for an intervention to happen
so they can regain life and use. We look
for our own sites rather then expect to
be given one. We normally choose areas
in, or around, the city that reveal some
lack of care or use. Those are located and
mapped so we can then identify the owners, private or public. Normally, those are
not in the most obvious locations, what
results from our desire to unravel unknown urban areas. Both in [ a linha ] and
[ jogos de rua ] different run down neighborhoods in Lisbon were surveyed so that
new proposals for temporary interventions could be created to respond to the
sites needs, both physical and social. As
part of the interventions strategy, we created networks of sites so that the projects
could have a broader impact around the
neighborhoods.
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Children
146
Children are sources of energetic, optimism and creativity. Their naivety and innocence is a source of inspiration for designs that aim to be inventive and playful
so they can contribute to free people from
pre-conceived ideas. All our projects involve children so we can be inspired, but
also so we can inspire them and contribute to their education. They become part
of the design team and they are always
some of the key users, as we experienced
in [ jogos de rua ]. The way we involve
them depends on the nature of the project and the research topic, but ultimately
all projects can be perceived as pedagogic
tools for a more holistic understanding of
pubic spaces and our role as participant
citizens.
Participation and
Involvement
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Materials Bank
We collect hundreds of pallets, old
chairs, tables, chests of drawers, pans,
glasses, and many other objects. Local
people are invited to donate materials and
objects they want to get rid off to our materials bank. Waste is transformed it into
new temporary installations. It is not our
intention to refurbish, but to re-invent
things that people can related to, creating
unique designs that respond both to the
site and the brief and can be appropriated by the users. Re-using materials is a
key creative element in our design strategy and naturally relates to the ephemeral
nature of the projects.
Reflective and
Experimental Design
Stages
Although we set up a detailed brief,
programme and budget before the project starts, the temporary, participative
and low-budget nature of the projects
means that the initial plan will inevitably
have to be constantly readdressed and reinvented. The development of the design
requires an ongoing reflection on what
has and hasnt worked and what could
possibly work better. The projects are approached as experiments rather the decisive products allowing for more creativity
and diversity.
Small Products
Each stage of the project is thought
as if it could be a product in its own right
making the process as important, if not
more, as the final product. It is the involvement with the local users that is essential, so our work overlaps different disciplines, from product design to graphics,
animation, gardening, cooking We try
to be versatile in order to reach different
audiences creating small products they
can take home along the process.
A Playful Mind
For the recipe to work we put all the
ingredients together and always remain
positive and optimistic. We prepare each
stage of the project with joy and enthusiasm. Every piece of our work reflects commitment and dedication in the playful
design of new spaces or objects.
We always have fun so that others can
have fun too when they engage in our projects!
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Tracy K
Woodard
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On-site Observation
and Research
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where community members can make
use of their own public goods. One camp
in Atlanta has its own vegetable garden,
lending library, water catchment system,
and charging station powered by a series
of car batteries.
Atlanta is a business town, attracting
outsiders with its conference centers,
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Justin
McGuirk
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It might be a pure coincidence that another event happened on June 20th in Rio
de Janeiro at Praa Tiradentes in immediate proximity to the revolting masses. Under the supervision of Rainer Hehl, Elena
Schtz, Julian Schubert, and Leo Streich
a group of ETH students from the MAS
Urban Design Program of Prof. Marc Anglils Chair presented their research on
Popular Brazilian Architecture to a local
crowd. With the eye of an outsider to the
investigated culture, building elements,
street activities, construction methods,
floor plans, public furniture, and other
components were collected that seemed
to make a fundamental contribution to
the richness, vitality, and creativity of
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when the recent movement occurred Gilberto Gil, the former minister of culture
and one of the most prominent figures
of the Tropicalist movement was drawing parallels between what happened
back then and now, asking if the popular
movements that are occupying the streets
today are strong enough to change the reality. Concerned about the monstrous dimension of the riots, but at the same time
relieved to see this popular insurgency
happening again, he saw a common denominator between the countercultural
movement of the past and the kind of mix
between rave and raid (rave-arrasto) that
we experience today. What is more, according to his interpretation the protests
are revealing a phenomenon that applies
to the recent global condition dominated
by a neoliberal economic system: the ongoing reproduction of asymmetries between the ruling classes and the popular
massesthe increasing gap between rich
and poor, high and low culture, between
top-down governance and bottom-up mobilization.
presentation and the mass demonstrations that happened at the same time in
Rio have in common that they are both
based on the ingenuity and creativity that
is produced within the streetscape. Similar to the claim for more participation
as articulated by the protestors, the APB
catalogue introduced (again) a new perspective on design practices for and by
the people. Against the notion of individual authorship, the collection of Popular
Brazilian Architecture launched the formation of a repertoire necessary to create
popular neighborhoods. By promoting
popular cultures the aim of the inventory
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Ludwig
Engel
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Poot::
Poot
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Poot::
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Towards a Flexible
Utopia
Utopias seem like locomotives to me,
that pull mankinds trains through
history.
Yet, they can never arrive since the
trains timetables
are newly written by every new
generation.
Horst Krger in conversation with Ernst Bloch and
Theodor W. Adorno, May 6, 1964.
The idea to provide appropriate housing for a many people hasnt lost its utopic
glow. Providing a livable place for everyone seems like an architectural Atlantis
oras in Mores Utopia and other utopian city projectsthe ideal of an egalitarian urban environment, inclusive of
everyone, hasnt lost its spark. This seems
particularly relevant for developing coun-
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U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy Development and Research, Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, 1972
LUSA ALPALHO
Lusa Alpalho is a Lisbon and London based
architect and the founding member of atelier urban
nomads. Lusa is currently a PhD candidate at the
Bartlett, UCL. Her research focuses on the appropriation and negotiation of public space between
local and immigrant communities in certain areas
of Lisbon.
ATELIER DARCHITECTURE AUTOGRE
atelier darchitecture autogre is a research led
practice founded by Constantin Petcou and Doina
Petrescu in 2001 in Paris to conduct actions and
researchon participative architecture. The team
includes architects, artists, urban planners, sociologists, activists, students, and residents working
within a network with variable geometry. aaa has
developed a practice of collective appropriation of
urban spaces and their transformation into a series
of self-managed facilities.
www.urbantactics.org
GERALD BAST
Dr. Gerald Bast is retor/president of the University
of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria since 2000. He
published in the fields of university law, university
management as well as educational and cultural
policy. Bast is speaker of the Rectors of Austrian
Universities of the Arts, Vice president of the
Austrian Rectors Conference, Member of the
scientific Board of the Journal for University Law,
University Management, and University Politics,
Board-Member of the European League of Institutes
of the Arts and member at the pool of experts for
the Institutional Evaluation Programme of European
University Association.
www.angewandte.at
158
HANA AL-BAYATY
Hana Al-Bayatyis a film-maker and journalist. She
studied Political Science in London. She specialized in international relations and military strategy
at the Universit de la Sorbonne and joined a cinema documentary school in 2001. In 2003, she made
the documentary On Democracy in Iraq, providing
an insight into a meeting of the major tendencies
in the Iraqi opposition which took place in London
three weeks before the invasion. Hana Al-Bayaty is
a member of the Executive Committee of the Brussells Tribunal, a commission of inquiry organized in
Brussels in April 2004 that investigated the crimes
committed by the occupation after the invasion of
Iraq. She is based in Cairo.
LUIS BERROS-NEGRN
Puerto Rican artist and architect Luis Berros-Negrn (1971*) focuses on visual arts, material economies, and mass customization through the lens of
architecture. Luis received a Master of Architecture
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons the New
School for Design.
Public Action
www.luisberriosnegron.org
ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG
Alfredo Brillembourg was born in New York, where
he received his Bachelor of Art and Architecture
and his Master of Science in Architectural Design in
1986 from Columbia University. In 1992, he received
a second architecture degree from the Central
University of Venezuela and began his independent practice in architecture. In 1993 he founded
Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) in Caracas, Venezuela.
Since May 2010, Brillembourg has held the chair
for Architecture and Urban Design at the Swiss Institute of Technology (Eidgenssische Technische
Hochschule, ETH) Zrich in Switzerland.
casagrandeworks.blogspot.de
LIEVEN DE CAUTER
Lieven de Cauter is philosopher, art historian, and
writer. He teaches philosophy at the University of
Leuven and the RITS art academy in Brussels. His
recent publications include The Capsular Civilization. On the City in the Age of Fear (2004) and Entropic Empire. On the City of Man in the Age of Disaster
(2012). He co-edited Art and Activism in the Age of
Globalization (2011).
MARCO CLAUSEN
Marco Clausen, co-initiator of Prinzessinnengarten:
a place dedicated to urban agriculture, environmental learning, and neighborhood participation at
Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Co-publisher, coauthor, and photographer of Prinzessinnengarten.
Anders grtnern in der Stadt (Prinzessinnengarten. Pioneering Urban Agriculture in Berlin). Marco
Clausen sees himself as an community activist and
is working especially on questions of sustainable
and resilient urban development and is engaging in
the discussion on the privatization of public land.
He initiated the petition Let it grow! Establish
a sustainable future for Prinzessinnengarten,
signed by over 30,000 supporters in a few weeks,
and helping to secure this pilot project of an social,
ecological and educational diy-urbanism.
prinzessinnengarten.net
THORSTEN DECKLER
Thorsten Deckler runs 2610 south Architects
together with partner Anne Graupner. The practice
thrives on engaging with Johannesburgs array of
urban, social and economic contexts. In order to
thrive within this segregated reality, the practice
finds it necessary to operate in the field of URBAN
design, ARCHITECTURE and RESEARCH. Since
2008 a long held dream to conduct research in parallel to practice has been realised in the form of an
on-going project investigating formal and informal
housing processes. Both partners teach, write
and lecture on occasion. In 2012 the practice was
chosen as the most interesting emerging practice
in South Africa in the Backstage Award.
ANTON FALKEIS
Anton Falkeis is an architect and Professor at the
Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts
Vienna. He has been teaching and lecturing at several universities and in 2012 he was guest professor
at Nanjing University of Art, China. Anton Falkeis
served as the Vice-Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from
1999 to 2003, Head of architectural programme,
department of Arts and Education (since 2001),
Head of Department, Special Topics in Architecture
(since 2007), and Head of Department Social Design (since 2011). He also holds the Expertise Chair
of the new Master programme Social DesignArts
as Urban Innovation.
www.falkeis.com
LUKAS FEIREISS
With a background in philosophy and cultural studies Lukas Feireiss runs the interdisciplinary creative
practice Studio Lukas Feireiss, focusing on the
discussion and mediation of architecture, art, and
visual culture in the urban realm. In his artistic, curatorial, editorial and consultive work he aims at the
critical cut-up and playful re-evaluation of creative
and spatial production modes and their diverse
socio-cultural and medial conditions. Lukas Feireiss
teaches at various universities worldwide.
www.studiolukasfeireiss.com
FELD72
feld72 is a collective exploring the intersection
between architecture, applied urbanism and art. The
office realized numerous buildings, urban interventions in public space, masterplans and researches
in an international context. The work of feld72 has
been exhibited in numerous Biennales: Venezia
2011 / 2010 / 2008 / 2004, Shenzhen / Hongkong
2009, Canaries 2009, Art Triennial of Guangzhou
2008, Sao Paulo 2007, Rotterdam 2003. Besides
having won numerous awards, feld72 was selected
by the jury of the latest Iakhov-Chernikhov-Award
as one of the 10 most innovative young practices
worldwide. From 2003-2011 Michael Obrist was
teaching at space&designstrategies at the University of Art and Design Linz, Austria.
groundtruth.in
NABEEL HAMDI
Nabeel Hamdi is one of the pioneers of participatory planning and his book, Small Change, has
been highly influential in describing the role that
informality plays in urban life. It sets out a way of
thinking on cities that gives precedence to smallscale, incremental change over large-scale projects.
Hamdis own practice has always used the tactic of
small-scale change at grass-roots level, whether
in his early housing work with the Greater London
Council that tested ideas on participatory design
and planning, or his later work as consultant to
various governmental and UN agencies. As a pedagogue, Hamdi set up the highly successful Masters
in Development Practice at Oxford Brookes University in 1992 as part of the Centre for Development
and Emergency Practice.
DAVID HARVEY
David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of
Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
A leading social theorist of international standing, he received his PhD in Geography from the
University of Cambridge in 1961. Widely influential,
he is among the top 20 most cited authors in the
humanities.In addition, he is the worlds most
cited academic geographer,and the author of many
books and essays that have been prominent in the
development of modern geography as a discipline.
His work has contributed greatly to broad social and
political debate; most recently he has been credited
with restoring social class and Marxist methods
as serious methodological tools in the critique of
global capitalism. He is a leading proponent of the
idea of the right to the city, as well as a member of
the Interim Committee for the emerging International Organization for a Participatory Society.
davidharvey.org
www.feld72.at
www.jeanneworks.net
RAINER HEHL
Rainer Hehl is an architect and an urban planner.
Currently, he directs the Master of Advanced
Studies in Urban Design at the ETH, Zrich, where
he also runs a theory seminar and lecture series
entitled Urban Mutations on the Edge. He studied
at the RWTH in Aachen, the University of the Arts
in Berlin and the Ecole Speciale dArchitecture in
Paris. In addition to having lectured widely on urban
informality, popular architecture, and hybrid urbanities, Hehl co-founded the non-profit organization
and online network urbaninform.net (www.urbaninform.net). Hehl holds a PhD from the ETH, Zrich,
on urbanization strategies for informal settlements,
focusing on case studies in Rio de Janeiro.
www.2610south.co.za
LUDWIG ENGEL
Ludwig Engelworks as afuturologistandurbanist.
With his office raumtaktik he works interdisciplinary in the fields of culture, science and economy
on questions dealing with the future and with past
and present visions of the city and urban utopias.
Ludwig studied in Berlin, Shanghai, and Frankfurt/
Oder. He holds a masters degree in cultural studies
and a bachelors degree in economics and communication sciences. He lives in Berlin.
www.raumtaktik.de
EMILY FAHLN
Emily Fahln is a team member of the Silent University. She works as a mediator at Tensta Konsthall,
Stockholm, an art institution situated in the northwest suburb of Tensta. Her work focuses on locally
anchored projects and public work.
www.u-tt.com
thesilentuniversity.org
MARCO CASAGRANDE
Marco Casagrande is a Finnish architect, environmental artist and social theorist. Casagrandes
works and teaching are moving freely in-between
architecture, urban and environmental design,
BENJAMIN FOERSTER-BALDENIUS
Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius is an architect and
co-founder of raumlaborberlin. The Berlin-based
architecture collective began working on the issues
of contemporary art, architecture and urbanism in
www.sristi.org/hbnew
ERICA HAGEN
Erica Hagen is an ICT for development specialist
working with citizen media and participatory technology. She is co-founder and trustee of Map Kibera
Trust, a mapping and new media organization based
in Nairobi, Kenya. She is also co-founder and director of GroundTruth Initiative, in Washington, DC,
which works with communities to use new technologies for increased influence in development and
democracy . GroundTruth has developed projects
AFAINA DE JONG
As an Architect Afaina de Jong believes in the
practice of an active architecture that goes beyond
just making buildings. She is deeply rooted in the
context of the contemporary city translating urban
underground culture and lifestyles into architecture
and urbanism. She recently published her first book
For the People, By the People. She has worked internationally with the likes of AMO-OMA, 24 in New
York, and the Hakuhodo Think Tank HILL in Tokyo.
She was a contributing editor for MARK Magazine
HUBERT KLUMPNER
Hubert Klumpner is Dean of the architecture faculty
at the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETHZ). He
graduated from the University of Applied Arts
Vienna and later received a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University. In 1998 Klumpner joined Alfredo Brillembourg
as Director of Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) in Caracas,
Venezuela. Since May 2010, Klumpner has held the
chair for Architecture and Urban Design at the Swiss
Institute of Technology (Eidgenssische Technische
Hochschule, ETH) in Zrich, Switzerland.
www.u-tt.com
ELKE KRASNY
Elke Krasny isSenior Lecturer at the Academy of
Fine Arts Vienna, Visiting Professor at the University of Bremen 2006, Visiting Scholar at the CCA,
the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montral
in 2012, Guest Professor at the Academy of Fine
Arts Nuernberg 2013. As a curator and cultural
theorist she focuses on urban transformation,
critical architectural history, spatial politics, politics
of remembrance and the historiography of feminist
curating. In 2011 she received the Outstanding Artist Award Womens Culture.
www.elkekrasny.at
STEVE LAMBERT
Steve Lambert is an American artist who connects
uncommon, idealistic, or even radical ideas with
everyday life. Lambert carefully crafts various
conditions where he can discuss these ideas with
people and have a mutually meaningful exchange.
He is founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency,
and artist-run initiative which critiques advertising through artistic interventions. Together with
Stephen Duncombe he founded the Center for
Artistic Activism as a place to explore, analyze, and
strengthen connections between social activism
and artistic practice.
visitsteve.com
ANDRES LEPIK
Andres Lepik is a curator for architecture exhibitions and author of publications. His recent work
discusses contemporary examples of social engagement in architecture on a global scale and explores
various strategies for how design can actively influence underserved communities. Andres research
focuses on three main areas: rural neighborhoods in
developing countries, informal cities and new stategies for shrinking cities. Andres worked for many
years as a curator and head of the architecture collection for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and as
curator in the Architecture and Design Department
of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In his cur-
RICK LOWE
Rick Low is an artist and founder of Project Row
Houses (PRH), a neighborhood-based nonprofit
art and cultural organization in Houstons Northern
Third Ward, one of the citys oldest African-American communities. PRH began in 1993 as a result of
discussions among African-American artists, spearheaded by Rick Lowe, who wanted to establish a
positive, creative presence in their own community.
Social Design
Social Design
atelierurbannomads.org
projectrowhouses.org
LEONIDAS MARTIN
As an artist, professor, and activist Lenidas Martn
has invigorated the wave of Spanish protests beginning in 2011 known as M15. When not teaching
new media and political art at the University of
Barcelona, writing about art and cultural politics for
online and print media, or directing and producing
documentaries, Martn organizes social actions with
the Barcelona-based artist collective Enmedio
(which translates to among in English).
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leodecerca.net
GIANCARLO MAZZANTI
Giancarlo Mazzanti is a Columbian architect of projects such as the Convention Center, Biblioteca Espaa, the Tercer Milenio Park and the Southamerican Games Coliseums in Medelln, Colombia. He is a
teacher at several Colombian universities and taught
at Princeton University in 2012. In 2006, Mazzanti
won the XX Colombian Architecture Biennial in the
category of public space, and the Ibero-American
Biennial in the category of Best Architectonic Work
in 2008 (Lisbon, Portugal). Also, he received the the
Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (Paris
France ) in 2010 and was chosen by the MoMA (New
York) to exhibit his work in their permanent collection. Most of his architecture work involves social
values at its main core, it searches for projects that
empower transformations and builds community.
www.giancarlomazzanti.com
JUSTIN MCGUIRK
Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator based
in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the
publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow,
and the design consultant to Domus. He has been
the design columnist for The Guardian and the editor of Icon magazine. In 2012 he was awarded the
Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture
for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank.
He is currently working on a book about activist
architecture and social housing in Latin America.
www.justinmcguirk.com
MICHAEL MURPHY
Michael Murphy is the Co-Founder and Executive
Director of MASS Design Group. In addition to
Public Action
CONTRIBUTORS
KITO NEDO
Kito Nedo is a journalist based in Berlin. He regularly writes for the German art magazine artDas
Kunstmagazin and is a contributor to Artforum
International Magazine.
www.exyzt.org / www.constructlab.net
SASKIA SASSEN
Dutch-American sociologist Saskia Sassen is
currently Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology
at Columbia University and Centennial visiting
Professor at the London School of Economics.
Saskia Sassens research and writing focuses on
globalization (including social, economic, and
political dimensions), immigration, global cities
(including cities and terrorism), the new technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result
from current transnational conditions. In each of the
three major projects that comprise her 20 years of
research, Sassen starts with a thesis that posits the
unexpected and the counterintuitive in order to cut
through established truths.
www.saskiasassen.com
www.massdesigngroup.org
EMEKA OKEREKE
Emeka Okereke, born in 1980, is a Nigerian photographer who lives and works between Africa and Europe. He is a member of Depth of Field (DOF) collective, a group made up of six Nigerian photographers
and is the Founder and Artistic Director of Invisible
Borders Trans-African Photography Project an
annual photographic project which assembles up
to ten artists from Africa towards a roadtrip across
Africa. He uses photography, poetry, video and
collaborative projects to address the questions of
co-existence (beyond the limitations of predefined
spaces), otherness and self-discovery.
TATJANA SCHNEIDER
Tatjana Schneider is a senior lecturer at the School
of Architecture, University of Sheffield, where she
teaches design studio, history and theory. She
is co-founder of Spatial Agency a collaborative
research, web-and print publishing project that
presents a new way of looking at how buildings and
space can be produced. Moving away from architectures traditional focus on the look and making
of buildings, Spatial Agency proposes a much more
expansive field of opportunities in which architects
and non-architects can operate. It suggests other
ways of doing architecture.
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OLIVER PERCHOVICH
Oliver Percovich is the founder and executive
director of the non-governmental organization Skateistan. Founded in 2007 in Kabul is now an international non-profit charity providing skateboarding
and educational programming in Afghanistan and
Cambodia. Skateistan is non-political, independent,
and inclusive of all ethnicities, religions and social
backgrounds.
skateistan.org
RICHARD SENNET
Richard Sennett writes about cities, labor, and culture. He teaches sociology at New York University
and at the London School of Economics. Sennett
has explored how individuals and groups make
social and cultural sense of material factsabout
the cities in which they live and about the labour
they do. His publications include The Fall of Public
Man (1977), The Craftsman (2008), and Together:
The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
(2012).
SOMETHING FANTASTIC
Something Fantastic is a young architectural
practice committed to smart, touching, simple architecture. Its works include publications (Something
Fantastic, Building Brazil, e. a.) teaching (Technology Exchange at ETH Zurich, e.a.) and design for
private and institutional clients. Next to Something
Fantastic the partners Schubert, Schtz, and Streich also operate a creative agency called Belgrad
to be able to work in a broader field and context of
creative production. The belief that architecture is
affected by everything and vice versa does affect
everything is the basis of their claim that working as
architects involves a general interest and involvement in the world.
somethingfantastic.net
ION SORVIN
The Danish artist, activist and founder of N55,
the Copenhagen-based art collective, has been
challenging conventional notions of living,
architecture and land ownership. Srvin has been
fighting for simple freedoms, his work and lifestyle
is an example for other ways to live a fulfilling life,
alternative economic models and no need to compromise. Srvin says that N55 believes in educating
people: The only way I can work is to create good
examples. Srvin is aware that only by adopting a
consistent position does he have a hope of influencing the planners, architects and the public who
decide how societies and cities will develop.
www.n55.dk
DRE URHAHN
Dutch social and conceptual artist Dre Urhahn
founded together with Jeroen Koolhaas the artistic
duo Haas & Hahn. They endeavor to bring outrageous works of art to unexpected places.
They are renowned for painting enormous murals
together with the local youth in the favelas of Rio
de Janeiro as well as in Philadelphia. Their work
combines urban design, architecture, and social/
economic stimulus in a highly visual form of urban
intervention.
www.phillypainting.org / www.favelapainting.com
www.richardsennett.com
MARJETICA POTR
Marjetica Potr is an artist and architect based
in Ljubljana, Slovenia and Berlin, Germany. Her
interdisciplinary practice includes on-site projects,
research, architectural case studies, and drawings.
Her work documents and interprets contemporary
architectural practices with particular regard to
energy infrastructure and water use and the ways
people live together. Potrs work has been exhibited
extensively throughout Europe and the Americas,
including the Sao Paulo Biennial and the Venice
Biennial. Potr is Professor in Design for the
Living World at the Hochschule fr Bildende Knste
Hamburg.
www.potrc.org
Public Action
MIGUEL ROBLES-DURN
Urbanist, Director of the Graduate Program in Urban
Ecologies at The New School/Parsons in New York
and cofounder of Cohabitation Strategies, an international non-profit cooperative for socio-spatial
development based in New York and Rotterdam. He
is in the advisory board of The Center for Place Culture and Politics, the National Economic and Social
Rights Initiative (NESRI) Right to Housing Program
and in the research board of The Right to the City
Alliance. Robles-Durn has wide international
experience in the strategic definition/coordination
of trans-disciplinary urban projects, as well as in
the development tactical design strategies and civic
engagement platforms that confront the contradictions of neoliberal urbanization.
www.cohstra.org
ALEXANDER RMER
Alexander Rmer is an architect and carpenter
based in Berlin and Paris, and has been a member
ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE
AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist and research
professor at the University of South Australia and
professor of sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, visiting professor at the African
Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, research
associate with the Rujak Center for Urban Studies
in Jakarta, and research fellow at the University of
Tarumanagara. For three decades he has worked
with practices of social interchange, cognition,
local economy, and the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous African and
Southeast Asian cities are lived. He has acquired
a substantial understanding of urban processes
and change in Africa and Southeast Asia as a body
of academic knowledge, but has worked on the
concrete challenges of remaking municipal systems,
www.abdoumaliqsimone.com
www.spatialagency.net
emekaokereke.com
IMPRINT
PHILIP URSPRUNG
Philip Ursprung, born in Baltimore, MD, is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at ETH
Zrich. He taught at the HdK Berlin, the GSAPP
of Columbia University, the Barcelona Institute
of Architecture and the University of Zrich. At
CCA in Montral he curated Herzog & de Meuron:
Archeology of the Mind and edited the catalogue
Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History (2002). His
latest books are Die Kunst der Gegenwart: 1960 bis
heute (Munich, Beck, 2010), and Allan Kaprow,
Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art (University of
California Press, 2013).
TRACY K WOODARD
Tracy K Woodard is part of Mad Housers Inc., an
Atlanta-based non-profit corporation engaged in
charitable work, research and education. Their goals
and purposes are: To provide shelter for homeless
individuals and families regardless of race, creed,
national origin, gender, religion, or age. To develop
low income housing for people in need of housing.
To help people develop the skills and knowledge for
constructing and rehabilitating housing and shelter.
To increase the quantity and to improve the quality
of housing in the world.To act, if necessary as an advocate for the homeless, to ensure that their moral
and civil rights are protected.
www.madhousers.org
RIXT WOUDSTRA
Dutch art and architecture historian Rixt Woudstra
studied at the University of Amsterdam. She
currently doing her PhD as Presidential Fellow in
Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Guest Editor
Graphic Design
Gerald BAST
Lukas FEIREISS
Floyd E. SCHULZE
Anton FALKEIS
W//THM,
Angewandte / University of
Editorial Assistance
Rixt WOUDSTRA
Buero fr Gestaltung
Copy Editor
Alice HERTZOG
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Rixt WOUDSTRA
Alfredo BRILLEMBOURG
Hubert KLUMPNER
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Technology Zurich
Contact
Prof. Brillembourg & Prof. Klumpner
ETH Chair Of Architecture and Urban Design
50 Neunbrunnenstrasse
8050, Zrich, Switzerland
+41 (0)44 633 90 80
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