"Landscapes of city and wilderness represent poles of a continuum in the history and intensity of human intervention. Seen thus, they bracket a range of environments, some destructive of life and some life-sustaining..."
This is part of a collection of quotes related to cities. They don't necessarily reflect our views, just things that may be interesting. Please feel welcome to add other quotes or suggestions.
Credits: Photo of a shoreline restoration project in Maryland by Environmental Concern.
Cristina Mariano da Silva, 30 years old and 6 years squatting the building in Rio de Janeiro's city centre, arrived there in the following way. She used to live with her mother in the periphery of the city when she left home to live with her partner. They went to the city without any means to pay a rent where they got to live in a house "as a favour". In a few months they had to leave the place. Cristina, then, was already pregnant of her first child. That's when they heard of what used to be the headquarters of today's extinct magazine "Manchete", a building that had been given to Banco do Brasil as a debt payment. "My husband knew someone who lived there", she said. When she arrived to the building there were no pigs, broken sewage, garbage or barrack huts. She got installed on the forth floor of the six-storey building, built some walls for 10 Reais, put a door for 30, got an illegal power connection, was given a refrigerator for free, recovered a discarded cooker and a sofa from the street and bought a second-hand TV.
Today, there are some 100 families squatting the building, and getting a space to live there can cost 300 Reais. The main problem there is water, which can be fetched only from a broken tap on the ground floor, next to the pigs. The owner of the pigs promised to the rest of dwellers in vain that he would get rid of them soon.
There are tens of thousands of families in Rio de Janeiro occupying derelict buildings all over the city. The local government estimates that there is a deficit of 450,000 houses in the metropolitan area, that is, 450,000 individuals or families living on the streets or, if they are lucky enough, in an occupied building. They simply earn too little to access the formal real estate market, and no government housing scheme has managed to alleviate such situation, so far. Things are changing, slow, but changing. Since 2004 there is a process of regularization of occupied public buildings. There are also resettling programmes that give the option of living in new housing estates in the city's periphery. By the end of 2008 there were some 20 public buildings that were given the status of housing estates of "social interest" and were given access to resources from the National Fund for Housing of Social Interest. It means that if Cristina and her neighbours get well organized and go through the process, they might get the chance to have legal electricity, water, bathroom, kitchen, garbage collection and sewage.
Some of Cristina's neighbours went to the new housing estates and came back after some months, because there are no income opportunities, transport is too expensive and basic social services are scarce. Cristina's partner left her with their two 7 and 2-years old children Igor and Tawany, and she manages to survive selling beer and other refreshments on the beach.
Credits: The information of this article comes primarily from an article published by O GLOBO's Sunday magazine. Image of a child in an occuppied building in Rio de Janeiro, from O GLOBO. Video of daily life in an occupied building in Rio de Janeiro, from O GLOBO.
As I drove through the Malawian countryside at night, I was struck by the total darkness. It is almost inky in its completeness – on this night, it was cloudy so there were no stars or moon. The only light was from the headlights of the car and the rare oncoming car, and the few moments when we’d pass a trading center which was dotted with kerosene lamps and candles. Some estimate as few as 2% of the population in Malawi have access to electricity, and as you drive through towns during the day, it is hard to miss the number of stores which advertise batteries and cell phone charging services.
William Kamkwamba, author of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, grew up in Wimbe, a small village in Malawi, which relied on subsistence farming, mainly of maize, the staple food here and in much of East Africa, and tobacco, the largest cash crop in the country. The “hunger season” hits Malawi every year from December to February, and while the crops grow, the entire economy slows down. In the cities, this means less trading and business, but in the villages this often refers to a literal hunger season, when families have run out of their food storage and are still waiting for harvest season, which starts in April or May. For a country whose population is 80% rural and whose economy is driven by agriculture, this has a significant impact on the population. However, during difficult harvest years, the country can quickly plunge into famine, which struck all of Malawi in 2001 to 2002. Kamkwamba’s book describes his experience growing up in rural Malawi, his family’s and village’s experience during the famine of 2001, and the inspiration this provided him to develop renewable energy sources.
Kamkwamba, who was looking for something to keep him occupied after he had to drop out of school during the famine because of his inability to pay the school fees, was inspired by English physics and energy books he picked up in the library. The English scientific vocabulary was often over his head, but he quickly picked up many basic energy and physics concepts from the diagrams. He began to focus on renewable energy, especially windmills, as one of the only natural resources widely available in this small, land-locked country, is wind. He saw it as a way to provide much-needed electricity and water for irrigation:
“All I needed was a windmill, and then I could have lights. No more kerosene lamps that burned our eyes and sent us gasping for breath. With a windmill, I could stay awake at night reading instead of going to bed at seven with the rest of Malawi. But most important, a windmill could also rotate a pump for water and irrigation. Having just come out of the hunger – and with famine still affecting many parts of the country – the idea of a water pump now seemed incredibly necessary. If we hooked it up to our shallow well at home, a water pump could allow us to harvest twice a year. While the rest of Malawi went hungry during December and January, we’d be hauling in our second crop of maize. It meant no more watering tobacco nursery beds in the dambo, which broke your back and wasted time…No more skipping breakfast, no more dropping out of school. With a windmill, we’d finally release ourselves from the troubles of darkness and hunger…The windmill meant more than just power, it was freedom.” (159)
In The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Kamkwamba describes the slow and difficult process of building a windmill, using pieces and supplies he scavenged in Wimbe, while many of his friends were in school. He spent afternoons in the scrap yard, using the frame of a bicycle for the body of the windmill, drainage pipe dug up from a friend’s house for PVC pipe, and Carlsberg caps as washers. Villagers from nearby areas came to charge cell phones, and marvel at the lighting system he built in his home, the only lit home in Wimbe.
Stimulated by the article published in the UK newspaper The Guardian titled 'Architects are often the last people needed in disaster reconstruction' by David Sanderson, several alumni and myself, pulled together by our former MSc Course Director, crafted a collective reflection on the issues raised therein. We want to share this on Polis to hear your thoughts and insights on the role of architecture in post-disaster reconstruction.
In an article titled ‘Architects are often the last people needed in disaster reconstruction’ (3 March 2010), David Sanderson recognises the need to “build back what can’t be seen as much as what can” in post-disaster recovery processes. Much of what he says is justified to some degree. Strangely enough, however, his claim does not acknowledge that the modus of practice in architecture in developing countries and especially in disaster situations has evolved on a similar path tothat of humanitarian work. In fact, it seems that Sanderson does not recognise that architecture has significant power to reconstruct social networks, raise solidarity, empower communities and encourage partnerships. Moreover, as he deems architecture to be “marginal at best” in cases of relative certainty, the critical relationship between built environment, social networks and the ability for action in general is dismissed.
The literature on architecture, disasters and the role of participation in the building process is expansive. As with general humanitarian work, it has become widely accepted that turnkey projects are not the answer and that communities need to be enabled and empowered. Within the architecture process, engaging local people in the design and construction phases has become central to good practice, and rightfully so – the discourse that instigated this new mode of practice has evolved in parallel to broader dialogues regarding work in development. While it is true that many architects continue to work towards deliverables, the same can be said about humanitarian workers. The problem does not lie in architectural education alone but rather in the broader institutional structure that defines who gets development funding and who doesn’t. As accountability gets shifted towards funding agencies/agents instead of the community itself, humanitarian workers, whether an architect, social worker, or otherwise, often have to present the outcome of their work in a way which can be empirically calculated and qualified. Stating that architects are “taught to focus on the product (a building), whereas humanitarian practitioners major on the process (involving people)” not only oversimplifies the difference between branches of architecture and architectural education, but it also denies the fact that many NGOs and international agencies continue to work within a conventional top-down bureaucratic model.
I'm reading The Jew in the Lotus, which chronicles the first formal dialogues between the Dalai Lama and a delegation representing the Jewish faith in 1990. Over the course of the exchange, the historic parallels between Jews and Tibetans as subjects of persecution and religious exiles became a subject of discussion.
An Orthodox Jewish member of the delegation was intrigued by the idea that Tibetans felt that the monastaries they had established in India and Nepal over 50 years of exile were replacing the ones they had lost. She wanted to know whether Buddhists had a concept of holy space, like Jerusalem for the Jews.
Karma Gelek, Secretary of Cultural and Religious Affairs of the Tibetan government in exile, put it like this:
"Holy spaces are symbols rather than the essence. We don't believe in untransportable holy space."
The author attributes this view to Tibetan Buddhists' understanding of the ultimate impermanence of all phenomena. It also makes sense in light of other Buddhist concepts, especially emptiness: everything lacks an intrinsic existence or an innate essence, but rather exists only in dependence, including upon a consciousness perceiving it. We are the ones imputing sacredness to the buildings, objects, territories.
As with so many ideas, concepts of holy space have a very real effect. Observant Jews today evoke memories of exile and the idea of return to the Holy Land as a regular part of prayers. Zionism has often sung a secular tune, but is obviously the logical extension of the idea of a sanctified land. Of course, the problem is when conceptual clashes lead to violent clashes. It seems difficult to imagine how competing ideas ascribed to one space for so long can be reconciled: How can people even talk when they look at the same thing and see something completely different? At the same time, it's clear that concepts are not set in stone and can change radically. Like the buildings themselves, set in stone, they cannot but be changing every moment.
Credits: Images of Buddha and temple in Dharamsala, India, by Katia Savchuk. Image of Israeli flag over the Dead Sea by Adam Hyatt.
“The experiences I discuss here have been complicated, and clear and simple lessons are not easily packaged. The language of description will thus always be complicated at times. It will not always be clear just what is going on, as stories open up to other stories.”
- AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come, p.15
A quintessential urbanist for the 21st century, AbdouMaliq Simone has never shied away from the complicated or confusing, instead seeming to seek out urban environments far off the map of the flaneur set. His new book, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar is certainly “always complicated at times,” and vertically integrated coherence is certainly not the goal. In many other books, books that claim to be coherent but fail to achieve it, or who offer nothing if the endoskeleton falls apart, it is a critique that would resonate. But for Simone, this is not the point, for as cities are not coherent structures, the stories must “open up to other stories,” and the sense that one could read the book, or the paragraphs, out of order is seemingly part of the point.
This is not to argue that there is not a cohesiveness to City Life, to its intertwined emphasis on movement, intersection and circulation, in Maliq’s never-ending quest to treat cities of the South as places in their own right, or in his way of bouncing between the world of ideas, the movement of policies, capital, resources, etc. and actual stories from actual places.
But it is nice, at times, to be freed and even empowered to gather and pick and assemble your own set of findings from the text. Whether it is an unknown Spivak story about Harlem (262) or a brilliant quote about the relationship between race and class by a heretofore unknown (to me) Harry Chang (291), or an observation that a set of (urban) relationships may be functional without being egalitarian or just (93), one can glean what one chooses to use as one needs to, or pleases to, much as many of the actors in Simone’s stories are forced to do in actual space and place with both ideas and infrastructure. New twists are possible – the realization that in the global north, the discussion can not simply be about movements and frictions and “bouncing-off” (189), but about the dialectic relationship between movement and inertia, or that the one area where Simone delves into the United States – the subject of blackness – is a clue that it is one of the few remaining areas where American urbanism continues to hold relevance outside its narrow confines (I would argue suburbia is the other).
He almost forces you into the creation of a collage of your own making, an individualized reading that is both incomplete and a mixture of well- and misunderstood, and that this is quite all right. His writing, like his cities, are constructed at the overlapping intersections of multiple circulations of varying movements, and like his cities, can be alternatively brilliant and frustrating.
It would be a shame if everyone wrote like Simone, and even more of a shame if he didn’t.
Credits: Image of City Life book cover from flipkart.com.
Urban Explorers: Quests for Myth, Mystery and Meaning is a 30-minute short by University of London PhD candidate Bradley L. Garrett. Anchored around interviews with five scholars (Tim Edesom, Caitlin Desilvey, David Pinder, Hayden Lorimer, Alastair Bonnet), the short explored topics such as pyschogeography, materiality, surveillance, and rediscovery of play against a backdrop of the filmaker's own exploration footage in London, Las Vagas, and California. The film goes deeper than the usual historical and aesthetic survey, and into the emotional aspects of why urban explorers are drawn towards the search for "gaps and cracks" in our predictable and spectacularized urban spaces.
Credits: Video of Urban Explorers from Bradley Garrett's vimeo channel.
cit·y·scape (sĭt'ē-skāp') n. 1. An artistic representation, such as a painting or photograph, of a city; 2) A city or section of a city regarded as a scene.
View of Delft (1660-1661) by Jan Vermeer
Boulevard Montmartre la nuit (1898) by Camille Pissarro
The Papal Palace, Avignon (1900) by Paul Signac
Street of Santa Rita (1961) by Antonio López Garcia
In 1966 Julio Cortazar writes ”Autopista del Sur” a fascinating short story about the spontaneous birth of social life in the most uncanny of places; a traffic jam in the outskirts of Paris.
Cortazar is recognized as one of the leading figures of the Latin American “Boom”; a literary movement that included Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. His literary production was influenced by Surrealism and Existentialism, engendering a powerful narrative that allows the reader to absorb the frame of the short story as a parallel universe like our own.
In 1967 Jean Luc Godard, founding member of the French Nouvelle Vague translates “Autopista del Sur” to a different narrative format, the big screen. In his classic movie “Weekend”, Godard’s aim is to mark the underlying decadence of bourgeoisie values which defined post-war France. The dimensions of this encroaching social crisis would eventually find their full expression in the May 68 student movement, a historical moment re-defining French society and inspiring urban scholars to re-imagine the city as the location for social change in modern times.
In this famous scene, Godard uses the camera to guide us through a rural landscape transformed by the presence of the car. In an almost ethnographic fashion, this clip sets the stage for the power of the narrative format. Tempo, composition, progression, sequence and rhythm combine to unravel what appears commonplace, as utterly strange and foreign. The scene culminates with a striking climax of alienation before the value of human life.
From a place of historical distance in contemporary times, some among us may claim through this clip the evidence of a foreboding proof: the exhaustion of the car as mode of transportation. For me, however, the marvel of Cortazar’s original work and Godard’s subtle interpretation is not about what constitutes good or bad urbanism, rather it offers a different lesson: The exercise of rendering the complex contradictions of modern life visible.
Such is the power of the narrative form: a format that could provide architects, designers, activists and, planners a path to inform others how follow the road to the City.
Credits: Image of from El Gusano de Mezcal. Video of Youtube.
It is once again a curious moment in the Golden State, as the world's eighth largest economy lurches into a deeply unknown future. Carey McWilliams, one of the greatest writers about space and place we have ever produced, once said that California is to the United States as the United States is to the world. It was a comment surely rooted in typical Californian/American hubris, although McWilliams can surely not be accused of ignoring the ignoble sins of this would-be Zion, chronicled so painfully in Factories in the Fields, published four years before Steinbeck's legendary Grapes of Wrath fictionalized the same shameful period.
But there is one thing I have always been proud of, even though it took me 32 years to take advantage of it - an unparalleled system of public higher education, put in place by a "master plan" in 1960 which would eventually result in a system that truly was world renowned, not to mention the world's largest. The three-tiered system, which includes 112 community colleges, 23 California State Universities and 10 UC's has an estimated 3.5 million students, almost 1 in 10 Californians. It is this legacy of the University of California that is at least as important as those moments of free speech that have gained so much fame over the years - a reason to remember Clark Kerr for something other than his decisions on those steps in 1964.
This past Thursday, the master plan and the Free Speech Movement came together - not simply on the campuses of the universities and community colleges, but in the very streets of the cities in which they are located. For the first time in my memory, students, teachers and parents took to the street to demand education - a return to the priorities of an earlier era, before neoliberalism and its constant fiscal panic meshed with a generation of bad decisions and reactionary populist referendums which threatened to undermine one of the greatest public works projects in history. This was not an on-campus protest, but one that united town and gown - students from Berkeley marched down Telegraph avenue into Oakland to rally with K-12 students and their families, many of whom see the doors to higher education closing in their face even as they seek to be the first generation in their family to walk through them. Protesters in San Francisco gathered 5,000 strong in front of City Hall, not on the SF State Campus, as the city came together to defend and demand education and the reconstruction of the California dream.
It is a moment which must be appreciated from an urban perspective, for especially in Oakland, this was clearly not just about UC Berkeley, but about the potential futures of many low-income and minority youth, many of who still call cities like Oakland home. Any sense of a potentially better urban future hinges in part on a more educated one, both from the first days of reading up through the realization of personal and professional dreams at the university level.
In a strange urban twist that seems like a blast from another era, one of the few rays of possibility lie in the upcoming 2010 election, where Jerry Brown - former governor, former mayor of Oakland, and scion of the legendary Governor Pat Brown - the producer of the 1960 Master Plan - is the presumptive democratic nominee and an early favorite to replace Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. During his first run as governor from 1975-1983, he was certainly no friend to higher education, and many mark the beginning of the decline with his administration. He is the most unlikely of saviors - either for higher education, cities like Oakland, or both. If he does end up back in the governors office, on the first floor of the capitol building across from the eerie sculpture of the bear, let's hope he begins a new energy to the task - both California and Oakland surely need it.
And a serendipitous remix in the spirit of my last post on the wonders of Arizonan urbanism.
Credits: Image of Clark Kerr from uchistory.org. Image of protest from SDS of Chicago.
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."
This is part of a collection of quotes related to cities. They don't necessarily reflect our views, just things that may be interesting. Please feel welcome to add other quotes or suggestions.
As I drove around Ramallah, West Bank, I was struck by something that was absent: homelessness. On streets in major cities from Mongolia to India to Malawi to the USA, homelessness is evident, often from the moment one arrives in the city. I asked the young Palestinian who was driving me around about the lack of homelessness, and he responded, offended by the very question – we would never let a friend or family member be homeless, he protested, ever. We always support each other, and we would just never let that happen. There are certainly hidden homeless, as we call them in the USA – people who are doubled up with family or friends and while not living on the street, are still living in cramped, subpar situations.
I thought about the absence of homelessness in the West Bank as I walked into the D.C. General Emergency Family Hypothermia Shelter, the largest family shelter in Washington, D.C., currently housing 192 families and over 300 children. It is hard for me to describe the environment at D.C. General, where the Homeless Children Playtime Project has recently started working. The complex where D.C. General is located is not conducive to families or children – on one corner of the large cement plot is the D.C. jail, and as you walk towards D.C. General, there are signs for a STD Center. The moment you enter the D.C. General building it is impossible to mistake it for anything other than an abandoned hospital. All of the signs from its days as a hospital are unmoved – indicating wings for intensive care, dental services and other hospital services – ironic considering the dirty and unhygienic environment it now provides its residents. The hallways and stairways are covered in grime, heartbreaking as small children sit on the floor playing. Security guards are placed on each floor, emphasizing the already oppressive atmosphere.
D.C. General was originally the city’s first and only public hospital, opened in 1806, and was closed, controversially, in 2001. It is now the focal point of D.C.’s efforts to serve homeless families. Family shelters have been full every night since the beginning of January, and D.C. General is over-capacity – evident by the overflow rows of cots in the cafeteria, as families sleep in refugee-like settings. In 2009, 20% more D.C. families were counted as homeless than in 2008, with almost 1,500 children. In August, the city announced plans to increase the number of beds in family shelters, though this has clearly not been sufficient to address the demand.
During one of my first visits to D.C. General, as I stood in the entrance hallway waiting for the HCPP program to start, I saw a young woman with her two young children waiting by an elevator. They were inside, though all bundled up in hats, gloves and scarves, as this was one of the snowiest weeks in D.C.’s history. The two children – a young boy about 2 and a girl about 5, were sitting on the floor, half-heartedly playing. I glanced over when I saw the little boy jerk forward and realized that he was falling asleep – tired enough to fall asleep in a fluorescently lit hallway, noisy with other children and adults walking around, still in his outdoor clothes, and sitting upright. When I mentioned it to his mom, she smiled sadly and picked him up, at which point he promptly fell sound asleep on her shoulder. She was waiting for the health clinic, which operated weekly at the hospital, and she explained that they were exhausted because they had had to walk a lot that day. The girl was still sitting on the floor and also started to doze while sitting in place until I went over to play with her.
I recently sat down with a former university tutor who has spent the last several years of his life acting as a champion for public transit. A civil engineer by training, he has devoted his recent academic years to the study of transportation planning and promoting more sustainable forms of transit across North America.
During our casual get-together, the broad region noted above was reduced to a far simpler conversation on Waterloo, Ontario; the small, sprawling Canadian city that has become world-famous for its ‘engineer-o-centric’ university and its continuing contribution to the high-tech industry. Research In Motion (RIM), the city’s most cherished mega-corporation, has transformed Waterloo from a small, historic farming village into a global center of telecommunications R&D with the innovative Blackberry. The University of Waterloo, one of two universities in the city, has proudly produced the university-dropout, founder, and developer of RIM and its technologies, and receives notable donations from this former student for various projects.
It goes without saying that the farming town is history, and the somber sight of suburban sprawl is all too visible.
My tutor and I met at a recently completed development “downtown”; a loft/condo conversion project that emerged out of an historic manufacturing warehouse. This type of urban development has become typical in this part of Canada, and although it detracts greatly from the historical integrity of these traditional buildings, it is often the last chance that these structures have before they are gutted and demolished to make way for larger roads and additional parking.
Waterloo is part of a twin-city network, which is made up of Kitchener and Waterloo and often referred to as “K-W”. An arterial spine, King Street, seamlessly connects the two cities and, if it weren’t for a small signpost, you wouldn’t know where one city stopped or where the other started. Waterloo is special for certain reasons and painfully standard for others. A significant portion of “Inner-Waterloo” is made up of students, many of whom vacate the city during the summer months, adversely affecting business for the endless number of pubs, bars, and cafes that line the city’s main street. But this demographic is vibrant, international, intelligent, and generally well behaved. “Outer-Waterloo” is a different sight, where suburban subdivisions claiming to be “middle class” communities showcase their neighborhoods, which are strewn with VWs, Volvos, BMWs, and roads. Lots of them. Though Waterloo-ites are generally proud and committed to their intelligent and worldly community, the same cannot be said for their interests in urban development and sustainability.
Back at our meeting, we focused our conversation on transit. Things didn’t start well seeing as I had to drive to this new development, which is conveniently located on the city’s main street. To no surprise, free parking was everywhere in sight. From where I was lodging, the closest bus stand was 7 kilometers away, and from there it was a further 2.5 kilometers to the restaurant. I was soon told that the current public transit fleet helplessly struggles to service the small percentage of population that uses it, and interests in expanding services, supported heavily by students and low-income families, are contested angrily by the wealthier, car-owning citizens.
dvantage of it - an unparalleled system of 
Posts
