Territory and Transgression: An Interview with Stuart Elden

by Peter Sigrist

Stuart Elden, professor of political theory and geography at Warwick and one of the editors of the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, has published volumes of groundbreaking research on geopolitics and spatial theory over the past decade. His research addresses topics of critical importance to cities today, including globalization, territory, terrorism, power relations and place. It engages with the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, along with many of their lines of influence.

Data Collection in the Moscow Metro

by Gulnaz Aksenova and Artur Shakhbazyan

In the words of John Holland, "the city is a pattern in time." Yet actions within its boundaries leave traces. Whether crossing the street, making a phone call or entering the subway, our traces are retained in the city's memory.

Housing Demolition and the Right to Place

by Tony Roshan Samara

There is no small irony in the fact that the most notable achievement of affordable housing policy in the United States over the past two decades has been the systematic demolition of affordable housing stock. To understand this upside-down world of housing politics, at least as it collides with the lives of the urban poor, we have to understand the moral panic that has developed around the concept of concentrated poverty. Over time, this panic has hardened into a consensus among the urban policy elite. For its members, most if not all social ills associated with cities and poverty stem from too many poor people being gathered in one place.

Corruption and Cities

by Dieter Zinnbauer

Creative, inclusive and just. Safe, healthy and green. Adaptive, resilient and sustainable. Urbanists frequently articulate these visions for cities, but an important element is missing: integrity.

Placing Sidewalk Vendors on the Map in Ho Chi Minh City

by Noalee Harel, Ruth Sappelt and Jackie Sly

Some urban treasures are hidden in plain sight. The documentary film "On the Map" shows how MIT professor Annette Kim and her research group, the Sidewalk Lab (SLAB), trained themselves to see anew in Ho Chi Minh City. In the process, they helped open the eyes of planners to one of the city's greatest assets: street and sidewalk vendors. Through rigorous observation and cartography, SLAB worked to protect the rights of these entrepreneurs and highlight their positive impacts on the city.

Alternative Globalization in ‘Ordinary Cities’

by René Boer


Tunis, Tunisia, site of the 2013 World Social Forum. Source: Paix & Développement

On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of people will gather in Tunis for the World Social Forum (WSF). They plan to discuss alternatives to capitalist globalization, in response to widespread economic and ecological problems wrought through market-oriented development over the past thirty years. The WSF has taken place annually since 2001, inspiring national and regional versions in cities throughout Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia and South America. These forums have become important congregation points for the alter-globalization movement, and their locations reveal a striking counterpoint to those of "global cities."


A map of World Social Forums (green) and their regional counterparts (pink), by René Boer.

Saskia Sassen coined the term "global cities" in reference to increasingly interconnected nodes of worldwide economic and political influence. Periodic reports like the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Classification or the Foreign Policy Global Cities Index tend to designate London, New York and Tokyo most influential, followed by cities like Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Paris, Zurich, Chicago and Seoul. Cities in lower-income countries are disproportionately scarce among the top 25, which contrasts sharply with the nodes of global social movements.


The 2011 World Social Forum in Dakar. Source: Abdullah Vawda

Jennifer Robinson, Aihwa Ong and Ananya Roy criticize "global cities" rankings that concentrate on the development trajectories of relatively few cities in the highest-income countries. Such hierarchies dominate contemporary thinking on urbanization and shape policy in not-so-global cities, aimed at "catching up" with the command centers. Robinson's notion of "ordinary cities" highlights the unique histories, current situations and future possibilities of all urban areas. While not discounting the importance of examining global cities, this idea opens a much wider range of options for research and policy.


The 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai. Source: Claudio Riccio

Research on less-dominant cities often takes the form of local case studies with limited scope. Broader lateral networks, interactions and mutual experiences among them receive less attention. Robinson points to alternative globalization processes taking shape among ordinary cities and shaping their development paths. Migration patterns, criminal networks and religious movements, for example, forge new relationships between cities and exert considerable influence at local scales. In a similar way, the recent emergence and distribution of social forums has created an alternative urban constellation. The networks of activists meeting in ordinary cities of different sizes, cultures and regions prove that these places can be "global" in their own way.

René Boer (@rene_boer_) recently graduated from the University College London Urban Laboratory and currently works for Failed Architecture in Amsterdam.

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Sociology of Courtyard Design: A Conversation with Petr Ivanov

by Peter Sigrist

Petr Ivanov is carrying out ambitious research in his Moscow neighborhood. He and a group of young volunteers have combined Web technology with social surveys to gather input from residents of four tall buildings around a woeful courtyard. The survey results will inform a redesign project aimed at improving this public space.


Petr Ivanov, an independent researcher and activist from Moscow. Source: Varvara Tchumakova

Petr's neighborhood, Troparyovo-Nikulino, is a "sleeping district" in southwest Moscow, one of many apartment-block constellations from which masses of people commute to jobs in the city center. Much of the public space in these areas is plagued with poorly regulated construction, advertisement and vandalism. In addition to quality management, there's a pressing need for attentive design that goes beyond questionable improvements by local authorities (mainly limited to colorful recreation equipment). In the following interview, Petr discusses this situation and his approach to addressing it.




The research site, a housing complex at 38 Academic Anokhin Street. Source: Google Earth

Can you tell us about your current research on public space?

The goal of our project at 38 Academic Anokhin Street is to find out what improvements people would like to see in the territory around their homes. We went door to door to talk with residents and ask them to fill out a survey; if they declined, we asked if they could fill it out at a more convenient time and place it in one of the boxes we installed in each entranceway. Along with desired improvements, the surveys asked residents about how they use the courtyard, how they think others use it and what they view as appropriate and inappropriate use. We also collected demographic and historical information to add new dimensions to our understanding of the community.

Critical Activist Design: A Conversation with Quilian Riano

by Andrew Wade


Quilian Riano presenting at the Center for Architecture in New York. Source: DSGN AGNC

Quilian Riano is the founding principal of DSGN AGNC (Design Agency), a research and design practice that operates through critical activism. He also founded the project #whOWNSpace. His current research focuses on the implementation of flexible and hybrid designs within challenging, multi-layered contexts. He seeks to re-imagine the structure and scope of design process. Polis recently sat down with Quilian to discuss the role of critical activism in his work and that of other innovative design practices.

You’ve described your interests as rooted in expanding the role of design and the designer in larger social and political contexts. What distinctions do you make between "design" and "activist design?" What kind of value is generated in activist design that makes it a necessary mode of practice?

I think that process is key — by that I mean the process by which design is generated and created, but also thinking of the outcomes as continuous processes. Architects are accustomed to studying the physical context, but we want to expand our process to engage with the economic, political and social dynamics of the places where we work.


Site of La Union Housing Co-Op in Facatativa, Columbia. Source: DSGN AGNC

Let me be specific about what that means. In Facatativa, Colombia, we are working with La Union Housing Co-Op on the design of 50 houses. Through research and conversations in the community, we found that the case involved not just those 50 houses but also widespread privatization around the Facatativa's periphery. We learned that a global network driven by the flower industry and companies that produce greenhouses has been privatizing large sections of the city. These complex economic and political processes are just as integral to the project's context as the landscape around the 50 houses. In response, we've organized a variety of design interventions — workshops, posters, movies, etc. — that highlight these conditions and create tools to help the local community influence them.

As for design, we're identifying the players and actions needed to create a longterm plan for the wellbeing of the community. We're designing adaptable housing within a solid framework, which residents can improve upon over time. With the help of a local lawyer and politician, we're looking to intervene in the system through which Colombia subsidizes public housing. We plan to help collectivize loans both for housing and for small business that could occupy flexible space within each building.


La Union masterplan (above) and renderings (below). Source: DSGN AGNC






You began writing about "critical activism" in your thesis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2008. How has your understanding of the term evolved, and what are its key elements today?

Critical activism in design practice involves continuously assessing the political landscape of each project and working with vulnerable populations to remove injustices and resolve problems that threaten their wellbeing. Since leaving the GSD, I have been working with urban activists to fine-tune the concept in theory and practice. We've been particularly inspired by the critique, ideas and action associated with socio-praxis. We're also interested in relational aesthetics, tactical media, gizmology and radical cartography.

Many socio-praxis groups are questioning the role of the designer and artist in a society with decentralized and complex power structures. To understand this, it is helpful to think about the differences between the protests in Egypt and Occupy Wall Street. In Egypt it was clear that there was a space — Tahrir Square — where protests would take place, and a person — Hosni Mubarak — who people would protest against. In the United States it is not as simple. The Occupy Wall Street movement is relegated to occupying a symbol, as many of the banks are no longer on Wall Street. However, would the movement be as effective if it was called Occupy Midtown Banks? Probably not.


Graphic by Quilian Riano, based on a photo by Paula Segal, to illustrate laws broken when the New York Police Department closed Zuccotti Park during the Occupy protests. Source: #whOWNSpace

It is also curious that the occupation is not happening in Washington, D.C. There is a tacit understanding that D.C. no longer has all the power. Our decentralized government and power structure have created a situation in which we no longer know who to protest against. So we are left with the symbol.

In this context, the designer can become an activist when he or she engages the complexity of our political and economic system to begin to create some clarity. This approach is particularly important when looking at the city. So critical activism is about finding complex socio-political urban systems, researching them fully, producing maps and other visual tools, and then intervening strategically. Critical activism is a way to apply real design thinking — not just exercises from the Ivory Tower — toward empowering marginalized communities.


Maps of Privately-Owned Public Space and other forms of public space in New York City, including the organizations with decision-making power over these areas. Source: #whOWNSpace

How did DSGN AGNC and #whOWNSpace come about, and what vision do you have for their future development?

We started DSGN AGNC as a way of exploring critical activism. The first action I took with DSGN AGNC was a trip to Colombia. This led to "A City in Search of Good Fortune," an article for Places Journal on Buenaventura, one of the most contested and militarized urban areas in Colombia. We also met with the group of 50 families that make up La Union in Facatativa. In both cities we were struck by the privatization and lack of public space around the peripheries. In Facatativa, for example, people had to use the parking lot of Carrefour, a French mega-store, for celebrations and other gatherings.

When the Wall Street occupation began, a large part of the story was the physical space — Zuccotti Park — and its status as a Privately-Owned Public Space (POPS). Through #whOWNSpace, which was inspired by Occupy Wall Street, we wanted to better understand how privatization has changed the city. Through our research we've found that POPS are often not as public as they should be according to established legal guidelines. At 60 Wall Street, a POPS located down the street from Zuccotti Park, there is a rule that says "no excessive use of space." These are the type of things we need to question. How public are these spaces, what type of rules are being enforced and are they legal?


A Privately-Owned Public Space at Chase Manhattan Plaza in Manhattan. Source: #whOWNSpace

Ultimately, we see #whOWNSpace as a way to advocate for and produce urban spaces that are truly public. To us this means that space accommodates multiple uses, encouraging people to talk to their neighbors and find mutual understanding around political, economic and social issues — crucial preparation for collective action when needed.

Working on international projects, it can be easy to fall into the stereotypical role of self-ordained savior of the poor, present for a period of time, after which it is difficult to follow up and assure sustainable results. How do you approach design projects in other parts of the world when it is so challenging to gain a thorough understanding of the local context and enact meaningful, longterm change?

This is a hard question, but one that is important to address if the renewed interest in this type of work is to be sustainable — and, by the way, we do not claim to have THE answer. An approach that has been working for us is a combination of being there as much as possible, doing a lot of critical research, having strong partners on the ground and getting input from final users during the entire process. We also work to create designs that can be modified over time as community and ecological conditions change. Above all, it's about showing respect for the community you work with (in any location), understanding that you can't possibly have all the answers and bringing as many people into the process as possible.


A "Casas de la Esperanza" dwelling in La Prusia, Nicaragua. Source: DSGN AGNC

The project for a housing community in La Prusia, Nicaragua, has worked this way in collaboration with Estudio Teddy Cruz, landscape architect Simon Bussiere and the community group Casas de la Esperanza (Houses of Hope). We began with a series of visits that led to a simple, rule-based, flexible masterplan. We have since worked with local architects, community groups and residents to apply these rules according to conditions on the ground. The community has built 10 houses using our flexible masterplan and will build more as additional funds become available.

Who are some of the people and organizations whose work you admire?

There are many artists and architects experimenting with socio-praxis and political activism that I admire. Inspiring design practices include Recetas Urbanas, Not An Alternative, Jeanne Van Heeswijk, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Sorkin Studio and Cohabitation Strategies. Immigrant Movement International, commissioned by the Queens Museum of Art, is redefining the role of museums in urban neighborhoods. There are also community groups like CAAAV, Picture the Homeless and Organizing for Occupation, which for many years have been doing the hard work of organizing communities for action. These initiatives give us confidence in the effectiveness of integrating critical activism and design to bring about positive social change.

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Colleen Morgan on (Digital) Archaeology

Source: Colleen Morgan

“The tradition of craft in archaeology has been brutally squandered; as the de-skilling and devaluation of archaeologists continues through the culture of academic underrepresentation, lack of training, and a world-wide paucity of funding for cultural heritage, recognition for the origin of archaeological data and its relative reliability has dwindled. Even as complex network analyses of migratory patterns, massive relational databases, and vast 3-D reconstructions of Roman cities are created, the underlying data relies on the skilled labor of craftsmen and craftswomen in archaeology. A better archaeology is a participatory, multivocal, craft-based archaeology that recognizes the value of both dirt and digital archaeologists. Using digital media to highlight inequity, to bring the voices of stakeholders into relief, to de-center interpretations, and to make things and share them is a gift to archaeology, and a threat, and a promise.”

— Colleen Morgan in “The Conclusions of the Conclusions,” 2012

This is part of the Polis collection of quotes related to cities.

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Three Questions: Fadi Tofeili of Portal 9

by Natalia Echeverri

In the walls and ramparts surrounding nineteenth-century Beirut were seven fortified gates, or portals. The number was considered a symbol of perfection and represented the seven families who guarded those entrances. As the walled town grew beyond its enclosures, an eighth gate was added. Portal 9 is an imaginary opening into the city, an intensive exploration of the urban condition from architecture and planning to metropolitan mores and cultural pursuits. It is a gateway to endless possibilities.

— Fadi Tofeili in "The Imagined," Portal 9, Issue 1

Fadi Tofeili is a Lebanese journalist, poet and translator who has published three books of poetry and translated many works of literature. He is also editor in chief of Portal 9, a new journal that features creative and critical writing on cities. We asked Fadi if he would take part in the Polis Three Questions interview series, and he graciously agreed. By way of introduction, we've added an opening question about the origins and identity of Portal 9.



How did Portal 9 come about, and what makes it unique?

The idea came up in a conversation with my friend Nathalie Elmir (creative director of Portal 9), a year and a half ago. We wanted to start a publication that would bring together diverse perspectives on cities in the Middle East. We also wanted to help re-engage people with Beirut's city center — which has endured devastating violence — and revitalize the city's public realm.

Portal 9 began with a three-day workshop at Solidere in central Beirut, where we gathered a group to exchange ideas. The participants included an architect, an urban planner, a novelist, a photographer, a publisher, an artist, a journalist, an academic, a theater director and a designer. We discussed a structure for the journal and assembled an editorial team based in Beirut (managing editor Eyad Houssami and me), London (editor at large Malu Halasa), Liverpool (reviews and critique editor Omar Kholeif) and Amsterdam (urbanography editor Todd Reisz).

Each edition of Portal 9 revolves around a particular theme, offering conceptual context. Within the theme, we combine the freshness of conversations and interviews, the adventure of creative writing, the rigor of academic research and the liveliness of cultural critique. The concept helps this varied content become a coherent whole.



What are you most excited about working on at Portal 9, and what lies ahead for the journal?

Working on a bilingual publication in Arabic and English, with a diverse group of writers, editors and contributors, is what I find most exciting. It enables a rich exchange of information and ideas, expanding the range of possibilities within each theme. Having launched "The Imagined," our inaugural issue, we will continue to develop Portal 9 into a platform for exploring the city through multiple genres. We also plan to keep weaving together urban, social, architectural, artistic and linguistic perspectives.

What do you consider the most pressing issues we face as a society today, and how should we go about addressing them?

Conflicts around identity at the local and international levels, including religious, ethnic, national and class identities. Cities are growing more condensed, coded and complicated. One might argue that urbanization leads to cosmopolitan social relations, yet divisions remain; and in some cases people who live in proximity are still aliens to each other. With communal identities urging for representation, partitions between different communities become more serious. In order to address these sociopolitical dynamics, we need to adopt the highest degree of openness. We need to study the human condition in the most complex of fields: urban fabrics. How do we penetrate the partitions that barricade different communities? How do we come to terms with identity in writing truthfully about the city?



What do you find inspiring?

Primarily change, or ways in which things take on new appearances and meanings with time. Although change is often cruel, it also inspires. It can spark reflection and creativity. Today it happens at a shockingly fast pace, and requires us to respond almost instantly. The concept of time, which is a core aspect of writing, is largely about change. Unwritten stories also inspire me. I find photographs, old newspaper articles and keepsakes from personal archives fascinating. They are great sources of insight into places and their inhabitants.

Credits: Spreads from "The Imagined" appear courtesy of Portal 9.

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Social Sustainability Report Must Look Deeper

by Melissa García Lamarca



Building on previous research exploring design for social sustainability, the British developer Berkeley Group recently commissioned research to measure the social sustainability of new housing and mixed-use developments. Released last week, the resulting report was carried out by Social Life, a social enterprise created by the Young Foundation this year, and Tim Dixon, a professor at the University of Reading. It seeks to challenge the stereotype that new housing developments are less sociable and attractive places to live than older communities. In the bigger picture, the Berkeley Group also hopes the report will bring the social dimension of sustainability onto the British government’s agenda as it considers embarking on one of the biggest housebuilding programs in a generation to address housing shortages.

The report outlines a framework for defining and measuring social sustainability:





The framework consists of four dimensions: infrastructure and social amenities, voice and influence, social and cultural life and change in the neighborhood. The report assesses the first three dimensions through site surveys and nearly 600 face-to-face surveys at four Berkeley Group developments: two urban, one semi-urban and one rural. The neighborhood change dimension will be studied when 2011 Census data becomes available.





While the report presents an impressive amount of valuable data, I was disappointed by the lack of critical analysis of the findings. The report focused on comparing the performance of the Berkeley Group's developments to benchmarks for comparable places and to national studies, highlighting the strong performance of the developers' projects in terms of "social sustainability."

Yet the report's definition of social sustainability focused on quality of life, well-being, spatial design and residents’ relations. It did not include explicit explorations of equity and justice, which are fundamental components of social sustainability. Such a critique is certainly not new: Julian Agyeman, co-editor of Just Sustainabilities, had a similar response to the Design for Social Sustainability post on Polis earlier this year. It is not surprising that the research took such a depoliticized stance on the fuzzy term "sustainability," considering that a developer commissioned the framework and that this is the dominant approach the world over.



Taking equity and justice to the heart of social sustainability brings some uncomfortable, and fundamentally important, discussions to the table. Using the data gathered, an important step would be to analyze the survey results in relation to tenure (each site contains one-third affordable housing), diversity of residents, the location of affordable housing within the site and the location of the development in its surrounding environment. This would begin to tell us something about the relationships between equity, justice and space alongside quality of life, well-being, design and the relationship between residents. On three of the four sites, residents in affordable housing were less likely to strongly agree that they felt they belonged in the neighborhood than private owners and renters. This highlights the importance of asking some deeper questions.

The report highlights a key challenge in the contested notion of sustainability. Discussing, let alone solving, structural issues is no easy task. But it is misleading to overlook the political component of social sustainability — fundamental social and economic injustices. Exploring such issues does mean challenging discussions as we examine our own positions in relation to power. But if the Berkeley Group wants to be true to their statement that England's 2011 urban riots influenced their decision to research social sustainability, then there is no doubt that such ideas need consideration.

Credits: Images are from "Creating Strong Communities" [PDF].

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Three Questions: Annette Kim of M.I.T. Sidewalk Lab

by Peter Sigrist

As part of the Polis Three Questions series, in which we present the same three questions to a range of people doing impressive work related to cities, we bring you an interview with Annette Kim, professor of international urban development at the M.I.T. Department of Urban Studies and Planning.


Source: SLAB / Narrative Maps

Annette is founding director of SLAB, or Sidewalk Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that uses cartography to generate knowledge about the public space between streets and buildings. Her research and teaching encompass property rights, critical cartography, market transition, urban housing, entrepreneurship, public space and municipal finance. Recent publications include "Real Rights to the City: Cases of Property Rights Changes Towards Equity in Eastern Asia," "Takings in the Twenty-First Century: Comparisons of Urban Land Development Controversies in the US, China and Vietnam" and the forthcoming "Sidewalk City: Re-Mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City." Annette has worked as a consultant to the U.N. Centre for Human Settlements, a designer of low-income housing and a manager for construction projects in cities around the world. In this interview, we discuss her current work, future plans and sources of inspiration.


Source: SLAB / Physical Survey Research

What is your most exciting project at the moment?

The last two years have been exciting with the formation of SLAB — a completely different mode of scholarship for me that reconciles a number of issues: collaborative yet directed inquiry, social science and art, academic scholarship and public engagement, etc. We have mostly been focused on one output for our research — the book "Sidewalk City: Re-mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City," which is being published by the University of Chicago Press. We are just now sending it off to go into press production.


Source: SLAB / Street Vendor Interviews

So now we are turning to constructing a traveling exhibit of our critical cartography to engage with a slightly broader public, with the high point being an exhibit in Ho Chi Minh City itself, where the role of sidewalks and street vendors is a big social debate. The show is really exciting to me because moving from print into installation unleashes all kinds of possibilities. We are now working on animated maps, tactile maps, interactive maps, all of which are very large. One of the things I learned from writing the book was that the most promising direction forward is to develop a narrative, almost cinematic, map in order to integrate analysis of space-time and the material-social, as well as to communicate better. With the accessibility and development of technology and the continued experimental melding of the disciplines, the possibilities are quite in reach. There is a heck of a lot of visualization out there in the sciences, humanities, design, etc. But, core to SLAB is the pursuit of a humane ethos and aesthetic, so we are careful to not get too slick or complex for our own good, although we can appreciate the wizardry of others.


Source: SLAB / Public Space Maps

What do you plan to take on next?

In keeping with SLAB’s vein of mapping overlooked spaces and overlooked peoples, I see the next stage of SLAB moving to a different geography. There are an estimated 2 million people living underground in Beijing, in old bomb shelters and basements, because that's the best space that they could afford in the city. I suppose you could think of it as excavating the subterranean dimensions of rapid urbanization. The situation is somewhat remniscent of Jacob Riis's New York, but different as well.

In any case, I look forward to an in-depth period of fieldwork again. I think one thing I contribute to scholarship is to not rely solely on either remote technology or remote theorizing, but to engage in a spatial ethnography. I’m taking Mandarin classes!


Source: SLAB / Photography

What do you find inspiring?

I have found many sources of inspiration: people, nature, places, growth, grace, etc. Rather, it seems the question is whether I’m in a state sensitive enough to notice inspiration. Its so easy to become deaf and blind — it’s truly amazing! That is what critical cartography is about: to help us notice, to navigate ourselves to greater awareness. And like receiving inspiration, it paradoxically takes discipline.

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КООП: Cooperative Urbanism in Moscow

by Shriya Malhotra and Anton Polsky

The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — these phenomena all seem to be neglected. People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are gloomy and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume that elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor streets are depressing, and let it go at that.

— Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” 1956

Over the past two months, Partizaning — an art-based urban activist group — collaborated on 8 public workshops with experts from diverse professions, academic disciplines and countries around the world. The project, КООП: Cooperative Urbanism, focused on creative research-based approaches to addressing livability concerns in neighborhoods around Moscow’s periphery.

As active members of Partizaning, we were approached by the Strelka Institute to help organize and implement the workshops. We focused on research, community engagement and urban interventions. Our goal was to successfully integrate theory with practice, international experts with local communities, and activists with municipal authorities.


Turning a tram stop into a checkerboard. Source: Maria Semenenko

The workshops were based in Moscow’s “sleeping districts” — planned communities of mass housing blocks outside the city center. For all the negative attention these neighborhoods receive, they offer many useful lessons on the placement of green space, public transportation, clinics and schools within densely populated areas. Using basic methods drawn from ethnography and mapping, we tried to understand the social fabric of these districts.

Collaborative Engagement

Moscow is in the midst of a new era of young leaders working to change the city, so the workshops were well timed. Partizaning had just finished a neighborhood research project in St. Petersburg and started promoting cycling culture in Moscow. We were using postcard surveys and mailboxes to help people share thoughts about their neighborhoods. The Cooperative Urbanism project was an opportunity for us to build upon these initiatives.


A mailbox installed in Yuzhnoe Medvedkovo Park to collect the thoughts and ideas of local residents. Source: Shriya Malhotra

The workshops were experimental in content and format. We wanted to be sensitive, circumspect and practical, analyzing our actions at every stage. How much could we hope to understand and address in the span of a few weeks? Whose voices were being heard and whose were not? And what were we hearing? How could we mediate conflicting priorities within communities? What happens when the desires of some outweigh those of others? Whose idea of improvement were we putting forward?

We started out by exploring and mapping the neighborhoods, and decided to blur the boundary between research and artistic practices through process-oriented interventions. We believe in the importance of interacting with people to understand their challenges, demonstrating the value of small, often transitory changes that inspire new possibilities.


Aurash Khawarzad leading a balloon mapping workshop. Source: Ann Nayshul

Engaging residents and activists helped increase the likelihood of continuity. Our interventions were less about altering physical objects than about sparking engagement and collaborative problem solving. We wanted to represent the needs of local residents and amplify their voices.

Given time limitations, everything was touch and go. Still, we wanted to leave space for things to go wrong. Collaboration and participation are logistical challenges, and mistakes and failures sometimes offer the most valuable lessons.

Citizens as Experts

We found that the best way of learning about neighborhoods was to ask residents about their daily lives. Their understanding of local problems was our touchstone. We could bring fresh perspectives, but we needed to listen carefully and encourage participation.


One of the letters from a mailbox in Mitino. Source: Partizaning

Ultimately, if residents think everything is fine and there is no need to change, it isn’t our place to tell them to do so. And we couldn’t expect to identify and solve problems in a community right away. But, at the very least, we could start a conversation and raise awareness.

Part of Partizaning’s goal is to promote a spirit of D.I.Y. action, encouraging people to speak up and act on the changes they want to see in their communities. So we needed to demonstrate how direct action can affect change.


A D.I.Y. toolkit. Source: Shriya Malhotra

People-Centered Research

Given our limited timeframe, research had to be rapid but effective. Rather than presenting residents with solutions to what we thought were problems in their communities, we sought to learn from them in planning interventions. Our primary methods were observation, questioning and dialogue. We started to become familiar with the neighborhoods through surveys, postcards, maps, conversations and simply walking or cycling around.


A postcard survey on means of transportation. Source: Shriya Malhotra

We wanted to make sure people considered their responses to our surveys, and we gave them to individuals as well as groups. Whenever possible we would just have a conversation. Discussions added context, deeper explanations and ideas that couldn’t be expressed in surveys.

Mailbox letters and D.I.Y. mapping provided valuable insights. For instance, we now know that a pond is neglected in Medvedkovo because it falls beyond the line of municipal responsibility. Sometimes reasons are so simple that they seem obvious — but we would not have known this without connecting maps with experience at ground level.

Reality Check

Many workshop leaders were from abroad, including Finland, France, Israel, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. Everyone had to adjust to difficulties of fitting in and understanding different practices. Apart from language challenges, there were cultural, educational, social, economic and generational boundaries to overcome, which made for a remarkable experiment in collaboration.


Ted Ullrich assembling a D.I.Y. traffic counter. Source: Ann Nayshul

In each workshop we tried to be careful about using the word “improve,” because it seemed an indication of our biases. How could we measure improvement? Whose improvements were being implemented? What impact would our ideas and interventions have over time? We had to consider these questions and ensure that solutions were defined by residents. It was essential for them to guide the process.

The Cooperative Urbanism workshops were an experiment in research, collaboration and engagement in the human dynamics of urban neighborhoods. The experiment was an important one. Cities rarely thrive in isolation, and we value the insight and experience that visiting experts bring to Moscow. At the same time, solutions must be conceived and nurtured by local residents if they are to be of lasting value.

Whether or not we were successful can be debated, but we are sure the workshops challenged current norms. Our hope now is that the process might not only activate local citizenship, but offer new insights for research and intervention in other cities.

Shriya Malhotra and MAKE (Anton Polsky) are map-loving urban researchers, artists and interventionists from Partizaning in Moscow. You can find more information on the daily activities of the Cooperative Urbanism workshops at coop.partizaning.org, as well as summary articles at eng.partizaning.org.

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Mapping the Suburbanization of Poverty

by Alex Schafran

One of the fundamental issues in American urbanism is the changing geography of poverty. American cities are famous around the world for having abandoned large portions of the central core, largely unthinkable in Europe and much of the world. Even if suburban historians are doing their best to remind us that poverty — along with economic, social and ethnic diversity — has always existed in suburbs, shifts in recent decades are fundamentally changing metropolitan life in many parts of the country.

In an earlier post, I showed some preliminary maps of race and foreclosure in the San Francisco Bay Area. The following two maps roughly show how poverty has evolved across the greater Bay Area in the past two decades. They are based on data from the 1990 and 2006-2010 American Community Survey. They are consistent with an excellent report by Matthew Soursourian that examines changes from 2000 to 2010 at a smaller geographic scale.



The map above shows the ratio of families living in poverty in 2010 to 1990 in places with populations above 10,000 in 2010. The blue regions are areas where the number of poor families dropped. You can see how the core of the region, and virtually all of the San Mateo County coast between San Francisco and Santa Clara County, lost poor families while 95 cities gained roughly 25,000 poor families.



The second map shows changes in the family poverty rate between 1990 and 2010. In blue and green areas, the rate went down, while red, orange and yellow regions saw an increase. Interestingly, many cities in Santa Clara County, at the heart of Silicon Valley, saw a slight uptick in the percentage and number of poor families, in contrast with the peninsula and San Francisco. The data for wealthy Marin County are similarly surprising.

Together, the maps show something very important: Cities like Brentwood, on the eastern edge of Contra Costa County, are red in the first map and blue in the second. While the city transformed itself from a small farm town to a booming suburb, the percentage of poor families dropped significantly. But during this time it gained more than 450 poor families, straining resources in a subregion with poor transit access and limited social services.



The Bay Area is certainly an exceptional place, but the suburbanization of poverty is evident in virtually every American metropolis. What it precisely means is also a difficult question. On the one hand, the fact that the city of Oakland no longer has half of the families in poverty of an entire region is a good thing, both for the city and for the region. For some poor families, this move has meant more peace and quiet, safer streets and better schools. But this does not mean that poor families are going everywhere equally — as you can see, they head primarily to a series of outlying, fast-growing suburbs, rather than to the wealthy and exclusive suburbs that ring the Bay. Exclusion is not what it once was during the days of racial covenants, but this does not mean that inclusion is shared equally. Nor are poor families necessarily finding more job possibilities or a more economically or environmentally sustainable life — commuting statistics for the outer suburbs show a heavy dependence on expensive, long-distance car travel. Moreover, services for low-income families in suburban locations can be severely lacking compared to central-city locations.

For some in the urban policy business, the changing geography of poverty in America is an excuse to argue about the efficacy of this program or that, or the more foundational debate about whether the government should be assisting poor families to suburbanize, whether in the name of opportunity or to reduce concentrated poverty. Yet what this now decades-old trend should be doing — especially when combined with a foreclosure crisis, constant fiscal crisis at the local level, rising inequality, persistent problems of environmental injustice, ad nauseum — is forcing us to rethink the politics of urban and regional development as a nation. There has never been a better time for a leader who can end the "place wars" between cities and suburbs, a leader who can make people realize that the just and sustainable development of our regions is the center of a 21st-century economy and that sustainability, fiscal sanity, social justice and our longterm future are fundamentally urban and suburban questions. This is what I meant when I wrote that I was searching for a metropolitan president back in October. If we want to understand how America was built, to borrow a slogan from the Republican convention, perhaps we should be talking more about how America was actually built, for better or for worse, rather than ideological questions with little basis in reality.

I get a sense that President Obama understands this, but he has resisted making urban and suburban policy central to his campaign and administration, likely out of fear of being branded too "urban" in a nation still unwilling to think openly and critically about what cities and suburbs really mean. But there is still time to change, or at least I hope so.

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Rethinking Urbanism at TU Delft

by Jiya Benni

The second annual Urbanism Week at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture will take place this Sept. 24-28. Last year more than 200 students and 80 professionals from around the world took part in conference workshops, lectures and debates organized by the platform for urbanism at TU Delft (POLIS).


TU Delft Faculty of Architecture. Source: Managing the University Campus

This year's theme is “Secondhand Cities: Rethinking Practice in Times of Standstill.” Participants will explore alternative solutions to problems linked to economic crisis. The conference addresses questions such as: What is the role of the citizen today? What is the best way of engaging citizens and involving them in projects? Is it time to explore new ways of making cities? How can virtual networks help us find these ways?


Source: Urbanism Week 2012 Committee

Urbanism Week speakers include Joan Busquets, Machiel van Dorst, Henk Ovink, John Habraken, Duzan Doepel, Santiago Cirugeda, Wouter Vanstiphout and Atelier d'Architecture Autogérée. Symposium days will conclude with informal occasions to chat with colleagues.

Check out the Urbanism Week website for more information and registration details. Early-bird registration will be available until the end of August. See you in September!

Jiya Benni is a masters student in urbanism at TU Delft, and part of the Urbanism Week 2012 Committee. For inquiries related to Urbanism Week, Jiya can be reached at contact@polistudelft.nl.

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Review: ‘Urban Constellations’

by Andrew Wade


Montréal Biosphère (2007). Source: Matthew Gandy

In a recent conversation on Polis, urban geographer Matthew Gandy touched on the multiple registers of urban governance, development, society, media and film that link with contemporary debates on cities. These viewpoints — framed as a reference to Sigfried Kracauer's "vignettes" — collectively render a vital, kaleidoscopic view of the modern and historical city. As editor of "Urban Constellations," Gandy collects an astounding 43 contributing authors, loosely and artfully shuffling them into chapters on "Urban Lexicons," "Crises and Perturbations," "Excursions," "Places and Spaces" and "Projections."

Most entries are distilled text from wider ruminations on topics ranging from London's Trellick Tower to property markets and capital accumulation in East Asian cities. The chapter on "Excursions," which prioritizes image over text to highlight the work of young artists and photographers, is a welcome deviation from the pattern. This segment of the book begs to be designed in a way that capitalizes on the shift in content — full-bleed images and a more striking graphic layout.


Buenos Aires (2006). Source: Matthew Gandy

Providing a glimpse into the past five years' work at the Urban Laboratory of University College London, the book quietly makes a case for cross-disciplinary urban research and the complexity and contradictions that emerge from it. In an indispensable introduction, Gandy pinpoints the relevance of both urban processes and the cities that generate them:

The idea of the 'urban' encompasses far more than the 'city' as a bounded or discrete entity, since the cultural, political, technological, and ecological impacts of urbanisation extend to the most remote regions. Yet we cannot dispense entirely with this distinction between cities and urbanisation because cities have served as catalysts for successive waves of modernity and many 'city-states' also perform specific roles as nodes for connectivity and exchange.

While this collection of short essays does not claim to provide answers, it does lead the reader to contemplate the collection of included themes. While aligning these stars into a recognizable image is a monumental task, this book presents the firmament of urban scholarship in an engaging way that encourages us to make our own connections.

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'Interactive Cities' Summer Course in Moscow

by Yuriy Milevskiy


Shukhov Tower in Moscow. Source: Wikimedia Commons

From July 4-12, Interactive City will hold a summer course at the Strelka Institute titled “Interactive Moscow: Spatial Theories, Practices, Interventions.” A collaboration between the University College London (UCL), Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, the Higher School of Economics (HSE) and the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH), the course is dedicated to engaging students in dialogue on the future of cities. It is not an attempt to simply refresh the city’s image, but to question who is the source of change, how does this change take place and what lies behind the “right to the city.”

The course is open to present undergraduates from any field, including those who graduated this year. Activities will be in English, under the guidance of professors from LSE, Vilnius, HSE and RSUH. The total cost is $30 (1,000 rubles).

Online applications and further information can be found at interаctive-city.org. Applications are due on June 24.

Yuriy Milevskiy is assistant dean of the HSE Graduate School of Urban Studies.

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Urban Design for the Public Realm

by Peter Sigrist


Billy Goat Hill Park in San Francisco's Diamond Heights neighborhood. Source: San Francisco Days

"Public Places - Urban Spaces" — a recently updated textbook on urban design and planning — includes a review of six place-making frameworks by the likes of Kevin Lynch, Nan Ellin and the Congress for a New Urbanism. The frameworks range from criteria to manifestos, at scales from the region to the home. While each has a different orientation, in sum they offer a mix of touchstones, principles, characteristics, goals and approaches linked with "good" urban design. They're useful in developing standards for comparative evaluation, which can be applied adaptively toward creating healthy, democratic and attractive public space in cities.

Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Taner Oc and Steve Tiesdell structured "Public Places - Urban Spaces" around dimensions (morphological, perceptual, social, visual, functional, temporal) and processes (development, control, communication) for consideration in adopting a "holistic" urban design process. They frequently refer to the integrated nature of these dimensions, as well as the importance of context and politics:

Effective place-making demands sensitivity to, and cognisance of, power dynamics in and across urban space and its production. Urban designers thus need to understand the contexts within which they operate and the processes by which places and developments come about. As in many spheres, there is often an implementation gap between theory and practice and, in the case of policy, between high-level, aspirational principles and local delivery (11).

Based on these considerations, along with initiatives by the Project for Public Spaces, Building for Life and the Urban Design Alliance, the authors outline a series of questions aimed at building "an agenda for improving the quality of place" (359). Citing Ernest Sternberg, they discuss the threats to public space from "real estate markets that would treat land and buildings as 'discrete commodities'" (Sternberg 2000: 265), explaining that "without conscious concern for urban design as a process of restoring or giving qualities of coherence and continuity to individual, often inward-focused developments, overall place quality is inevitably neglected" (14).

The authors acknowledge the problems with assigning definitions and formulas to urban design, summarizing this point in the final chapter:

while most definitions of urban design are appropriate and valuable, they are also limiting and contestable. Although some useful frameworks from distinguished urban designers were presented, they were accompanied by the caveat that they should not be treated as inflexible dogma, nor reduced to mechanical formulas. Application of a formula negates the active process of design and downgrades the role of the designer and of design intelligence. No single set of rules (or objectives) can capture the scope and complexity of urban design, nor offer a step by step formula for successful place-making. It is an exploratory, intuitive and deductive process involving research into the problem posed and into the variable and specific conditions of time and place. The complex interactions between the variety of processes and elements in a place can, however, be examined and these can give generic clues to why some places succeed while others fail (359).

Thus, while it's helpful to set up common languages for evaluating and improving urban environments, the design process should, of course, be rooted in a thorough understanding of each project's unique and multi-faceted dimensions. This seems the best approach to collectively developing public space with the care that cherished private space receives.

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The Power of Community-Led Surveys

by Carrie Baptist


Federation members in Cape Town, South Africa, discuss the results of their community-led survey. Source: SDI

The term "participation" is thrown around a lot in urban planning and international development circles. In the past decade, there has been a strong push for increasing transparency and participation in planning and governance at the city level to make them more accountable and effective. These principles sound nice, but they are tricky to pull off on the ground. In practice, who gets to participate in policymaking and planning? Whose voices are heard? How are competing interests prioritized?

Community-led enumerations — household surveys that are administered and completed by members of the community — provide a way for urban poor communities to meaningfully and effectively participate in urban planning, policymaking and development and disrupt conventional notions about the top-down power effects of information.

The latest issue of Environment and Urbanization (to which I contributed) sets out to describe the successes and challenges of community-led enumerations in India, South Africa, Namibia, Uganda, Ghana and Zimbabwe. The issue can be accessed online for free until May 15. In each context, the idea behind enumerations is the same: Mobilized communities of the urban poor are able (and best placed) to take stock of what they already have, figure out what they need most — whether it’s a road, toilets, housing or a school — and then undertake those projects, often with the support of local, regional or national governments. Rather than having their needs interpreted or represented by a third party, the community itself (organized into a federation and primarily mobilized through women-led savings groups), directly represents and negotiates their needs and aspirations with local or national government. This model has been pioneered by Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), an international network of federations of the urban poor who mobilize through community savings, survey themselves and seek to negotiate pro-poor projects and policies with government.

This process is contentious: both due to conflicts within the community and in terms of legitimacy in the eyes of government. Poor people are assumed incapable and inconsequential. But over time and as their numbers grow, federations are able to demand notice from government and make their voices heard. While individual federations have certainly faced challenges, and had to mature and grow as organizations, as a whole their track record of success at the local, regional and national scales during the past 16 years is impressive. Among the groups within SDI, more than 8,000 settlements have been surveyed, and more than 58,000 houses and 17,000 toilet seats have subsequently been built.

A team of enumerators in Uganda. Source: Joel Bolnick

In his influential 1998 text “Seeing like a State,” James Scott characterizes surveys, maps and censuses as tools for the “administration of society.” In the eyes of the state, informal settlements are spaces of anonymity — illegible to bureaucrats or other outsiders. Surveys and censuses become a tool of governance and discipline from above and can dis-empower those being surveyed. In a new commentary to Environment and Urbanization, Arjun Appadurai argues that community-led enumerations, as developed by SDI, present an interesting counter-example to this conceptualization of the power effects of information within and about cities. In these cases, information is a tool of empowerment from below; enumeration is a tool that allows communities to coalese, define priorities, take action and hold government accountable.

As Sheela Patel, Celine D’Cruz and I describe in our article, enumerations developed over a long period of time as a tool for the urban poor to proactively define, negotiate and address issues in their communities. They have proven to be an exceptionally flexible tool, as they are easily adapted to local needs and contexts. In Namibia, the government was willing to support federations to enumerate themselves and use that data for settlement upgrading, paving the way for enumerations to be completed at a national scale. In this case, community-led enumerations were a fast and effective way to gather information on informal settlements, prioritize local needs and act on those concerns.


A community meeting about an enumeration in Cape Town, South Africa. Source: SDI

Enumerations can also be effective in more contentious contexts. In Accra, Ghana, the government wanted to evict a large informal settlement and did not accept the legitimacy of enumeration data on the area. As Braimah Farouk and Mensah Owusu describe, the federations then used enumerations strategically to mobilise the community against evictions and then put political pressure on local government at critical junctures through the sheer size of their group, the power of their data and their organizational capacity. In Uganda, enumerations provided a vehicle for the creation of new, local governance bodies: municipal and national urban forums that institutionalized the participation of community groups in developing urban policy and projects and channelled funds to small-scale upgrading projects defined and undertaken by the community.

Enumerations are an incredibly powerful tool, and an enormous amount can be said about the nuances and complexities of their use, strategy and practice. However, the most critical relationships are those between enumerations, participation and good governance. The practice of community-led enumerations, combined with women-led daily savings (another pioneering SDI practice), helps to form community in a settlement. It provides an opening for neighbors to discuss what they feel their settlement is lacking and how those issues might be addressed. Forming communities, mobilizing neighbors and defining priorities are all crucial preconditions to meaningful large-scale participation in politics and governance.

Mapping a settlement in Uganda. Source: Joel Bolnick

Enumerations are also a powerful force toward social accountability, as they gather information where there previously was none and make it transparent and easily accessible to everyone. Essentially, through the process of conducting enumerations (combined with daily savings), federations of the urban poor constitute large groups of people who are able to stay mobilized over a long period of time, brandishing clear and accurate data — this makes them well-placed to demand results from their governments and put pressure on those in power to keep their promises.

Finally, enumerations can be used as a tool of empowerment, helping poor people gain a political voice and make a case for their concerns. They can lay the groundwork for pro-poor policy-making, service delivery, infrastructure and settlement upgrading.

Clearly, community-led enumeration is a tool that deserves attention and whose usage may bring many insights into the evolving relationship between communities, participation and governance.

Carrie Baptist is currently working on an MSc in Urbanisation and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, she lived in Mumbai, where she wandered the city and worked for SPARC.

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