Atlantis #20.1 DSD Urbanasymmetries

TLANTI issue 20.1 june 2009

DSD URBANASYMMETRIES 1

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editorial

Editor Santiago de Chile Shirin Jaffri Editor Mexico Carlos García-Sancho Editorial advise dr. ir. Heidi Sohn Editorial team Anouk Distelbrink Sonya Kohut Phillip Lühl Dirk Robers Luuk Verheul Kevin Vervuurt DSD UA graduation team UA Project Leader: Prof. Arie Graafland UA Studio Coordinator: dr. ir. Heidi Sohn Mentor Team: Heidi Sohn, Miguel Robles-Durán & Gerhard Bruyns

Research team - Mexico City Levan Asabashvili, Georgia [Architecture] Silvia Bizarri, Italy [Urbanism] Yan Bai, China [Urbanism] Carlos García-Sancho, Spain [Architecture] Tania Guerrero, Mexico [Architecture] Tomi Jaskari, Finland [Architecture] Tom Kolnaar, The Netherlands [Architecture] Phillip Lühl, Namibia [Architecture] Siebe Voogt, The Netherlands [Architecture] Taufan ter Weel, The Netherlands [Architecture] Willem van de Veen, The Netherlands [Architecture] Idan Zveibil, Israel [Urbanism] Research team - Santiago de Chile Anouk Distelbrink, The Netherlands [Urbanism] Teun Duinhoven, The Netherlands [Architecture] Sanne van den Heuvel, The Netherlands [Urbanism] Shirin Jaffri, The Netherlands/Pakistan [Urbanism] Sonya Kohut, Canada [Architecture] Amber Maessen, The Netherlands [Architecture] Martynas Morozas, Lituania [Urbanism] Nicola Placella, Italy [Architecture] Dirk Robers, The Netherlands [Architecture] Vivian Scheepers, The Netherlands [Architecture] Emiel Tijhuis, The Netherlands [Architecture] Luuk Verheul, The Netherlands [Architecture] Kevin Vervuurt, Curaçao [Architecture] Alexander van Zweeden, The Netherlands [Architecture]

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contents

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editorial content from the board polis Contemporary Urban Questions Towards a unitary-relational urbanity Solidarity and the informal economy: the case of Karachi Urban malaise: the relation between space & crime DSD Urban Asymmetries Ecatepec, Mexico City La Victoria, Santiago de Chile

+ Extra contributions from Polis members:

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De Paradox van de Delftse Stedebouw

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From low-level rules to higher level

Bart Stoffels

sophistication Pieter van der Kooij

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from the board edoardo felici Dear Polis members and Atlantis readers, A year-long silence has finally come to an end with this issue of Atlantis. The problems we have had to face after the fire at Bouwkunde have been many and have clearly been a weight on our shoulders. Nonetheless, with this extra big Atlantis issue, we hope to somehow compensate our absence in the past academic year.

As in every organization, there comes a time to reflect on what has been done in the past and how to react on what will come in the future. Especially in the field of university education, methods, techniques and goals are in constant development and change. Polis is always playing an active role in this and therefore our organization is also subject to these movements.

Besides offering our members and students very down-to-earth activities like visiting urbanism bureaus, attending interesting lectures, working as a portal for internships and organizing study trips, we also play an important part on a less tangible, but very important level. Polis has the opportunity to strengthen the networks around us and bring together urbanism students of all ages and practice members from around the country, and seeing the recent rise in foreign students at our faculty, also far beyond Dutch borders. Polis is also the voice of students towards the faculty, giving them an opportunity to make their say and actively participate in the educational debate.

Unfortunately these social and educational aspects seem to have lost credit in recent years, turning Polis into a top-down organization realizing those practical activities but often neglecting the

higher goal this organization was founded for.

The significance of the name ‘Polis, platform for urbanism’ implies contributions from all, staff, students, members and bureaus alike. The invitation to use this platform has been written and said often, but to what extent is Polis really being used as a voice of opinion, a promotor for workshops and publications and a network for social and professional contacts?

The position this year’s board has been asked to take is a difficult one, as none of us are in very close contact to the urbanism education due to various circumstances. Nonetheless, we do have a vision for Polis spanning longer than our term as a board, as the situation clearly requires this. In this long-term vision we are putting those aspects on the forefront which in our eyes Polis was meant to fulfill, besides the activities we usually organize and you participate in.

In pratical terms this means we are working on changes in our policy and organizational structure to bring about this change of mentality. Issues of board continuity, invisibility in our faculty and student disinterest will eventually lead to problems we do not want Polis to face.

So do not hesitate to voice your thoughts, on any level. You can keep track of our latest developments and proposals through the Atlantis and our website.

We will not hesitate to play our part in proposing new ideas and approaches to our work as a board to strengthen the future of Polis. Remember, Polis is here to be used by YOU.

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POLIS - platform for URBANISM

History

Consultation

Urbanism

Polis Fund

Polis was founded in October 1989 by Urbanism teachers and students of the department of Urbanism in the Faculty of Architecture, in Delft University of Technology. The initiative was created to preserve and reinforce the quality of the education, under pressure from modifications.

Furthermore, Polis has the goal to initiate better contact between education, research and practice.

Urbanism is a dynamic subject. The content of the profession is forever subject to change and a topic of discussion. This is headed by the changes in society. As an urbanist in the daily practice and in research it is important to be aware of these changes to take a stand. The urbanist can then give a vision on the [design] tasks in our society.

Podium

Polis, Podium for Urbanism, wants to give urbanists in the practice and in fields of reasearch a podium where the determination of their role is possible. The goal of Polis is seduce urbanists to profit from this podium. This is done through the organisation of various activities as excursions, debates, lectures, symposia and competitions. Our periodical magazine Atlantis plays an important role in this, as it is a platoform for discussion and it gives a good overview of all the Polis activities.

Polis is the link between scientific research and practice. Polis keeps in touch with different groups within urbanism. Polis leads conversations on different levels about the quality of education. The relevance for research and education in this is a primal criterium. To increase the range inside and outside of the Faculty, Polis keeps connections to related organisations.

The Polis Fund was created by Polis, Podium for Urbanism to promote and finance individual and small scale activities that come forth from the daily practice. Please contact Polis for funding requests.

The Polis board of 2008-2009 Edoardo Felici [president] Haani Washian [treasurer] Practice members: Bart Stoffels Christian Messing Main editor Atlantis: Pouyan Mehdizadeh

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Contemporary urban questions heidi sohn

Introduction

Since the publication of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity in 1990 many of the processes that were emerging at the time, and which he identified in the introduction of his book as the result of a ‘sea-change’ in cultural as well as politico-economic practices since 1972 (1990, 2) have in fact shaped our contemporary human world. Related to what Harvey saw as the ‘origins of cultural change’, the transition to postmodernity has made all sorts of convoluted phenomena and conditions patent.

From the urbanization of the majority of the world’s population, rapidly changing geopolitical configurations and shifting relations between State and civil society, the poignant environmental questions that plague us incessantly, the encroachment of the media in our daily lives, to a sharp technological divide, the last decades of the twentieth century appear to have functioned as a catalyst to capitalism in its advanced stages, rather than as a vehicle for modern ideals such as emancipation and equality, or for socio-economic improvement, empowerment of the weak sectors of society, general positive change, as the postmodern sentiment seemed to promise.

The transition from modernity into postmodernity has been everything but straightforward, or unproblematic. Deep conflicts and contradictions in the ideological and philosophical model of modernity lay at the heart of what Jürgen Habermas refers to as the ‘Project of Modernity’ (1997 [1983]).

This partial, ‘unfinished project’ it appears, has led to even deeper problems in our postmodern world.

One thing has become clear, though, something that is intimately related to the evolution of nineteenth century industrial capitalism into different

modes of production, to its ‘final’ stages during the last decades of the twentieth century. If during the turbulent twentieth century capitalism managed to book irrevocable advances and triumphs, it was not without its dire consequences, and a long tradition of critical theory has been witness to this.

But it has been in the most recent shift that it has arguably lifted itself from a material process related to production and manufacturing to a flexible, ungraspable system based on financial and legal ‘services’ created to support and sustain a host of attitudes that if anything tend to elevate the individual and its excesses, and subjugate the needs of the social.

Under the logic of flexible accumulation, endorsed by the slogan of modernization, progress, and globalization, capitalism has managed to mutate once again into what appears to be an overarching global economic system that, backed by parallel transformations in all realms of human endeavor has altered not only our imaginaries and desires, but also our lifestyles, subjectivities and practices.

The first signs of this latest transformation of capitalism’s ‘modus operandi’ did not escape cultural critics of a Marxist lineage. Fredric Jameson, for instance, in his seminal essay ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ of 1984 vehemently claimed that the shifts in the modes of production and consumption had consequences beyond mere material and distributive issues, but were instead altering our very modes of perception, defining the sensibility of our era. Tracing his analogy to psychoanalysis, and in particular to schizophrenic episodes, he identified the generation of a ‘hyperspace’ in which our conventional mental and

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cognitive abilities were utterly incapable of adjusting to the new spaces of advanced, or late, capitalism. Our bodies’ and our minds’ coordinates, he argued, could no longer make any sense of the spaces created in the postmodern city (1991 [1984], 43).

His views echoed with that of many other leftwing or Marxist theorists and scholars during the years leading to 1991, but this clearly anti-modern critique lost strength in the light of the ‘victories’ that the ideology of late capitalism in the guise of modernization, and of globalization claimed with the thawing of the Cold War and the lifting of the Iron Curtain in the last decade of the past century.

Under this climate of ‘cultural determinism’ we witness how ‘culture’ systematically supplants social concerns.

What, exactly, is this new form of capitalism that seems to have emerged during the 1970s and consolidated out of “thin air” under our very own eyes in the early 1990s when the world (or a portion of it, at least) celebrated the so-called democratization of its nations and the cusp of their wellbeing? And more importantly, what form of (critical) theory has replaced or substituted the anti-modern, Marxist critique, and has it been effective to address and unmask this ‘new spirit of capitalism’, as Boltanski and Chiapello pose? (2005) Although the term has been around for some time now, being especially prominent in economic theory, it is only relatively recently that neoliberalism as a concept has turned into pretty much of a household item in contemporary critical discourse. Indebted largely to Harvey’s tireless efforts to theorize uneven geographical development at its roots and reach his outstanding thesis, namely that neoliberalism is nothing short of the preferred ‘weapon’ of a new capitalist elite waging a ‘class-war’ in an attempt to restore its power (2005), today a vast array of ‘critical discourses’ or critiques are taking a clear position towards global capitalism and the neoliberal agenda as the culprit of much -if not all- of today’s problems. Their effectiveness to counter and change the current stream of capitalist globalization, however, remains limited in scope and practice.

The reduced space of this essay renders a full account of neoliberalism and its conflicts impossible.

But if we were to reduce the term to a manageable working definition, borrowing from Harvey, we could say firstly, that it “is…a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private rights, free markets, and free trade” (2005, 2). And as such, this framework supposedly requires changes in the political structure of institutions and the State to become fully operative. From the paternalistic or interventionist States of the 1950s, the socalled Welfare States, and for the duration of little over three decades, today the role of once sociallycentered States has been ‘subjected’ to the ideology of a deregulated market economy that favors the well-being and interests of capital flow and the soundness of its institutions over that of social wellbeing. However, this is only one way to put it. There is another, more ‘shady’ side to the role of States under neoliberalism, which complicates matters even further. As Mike Davis and Daniel B. Monk in the introduction to their collection Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism; Evil Paradises, clearly say, “what has characterized the long boom since 1991 … has been the naked application of state power to raise the rate of profit for crony groups, billionaire gangsters, and the rich in general” (2007, x). This has greatly contributed to one of neoliberalism’s most significant and probably gravest outcomes, namely the redistribution of profit and wealth among a few (of questionable integrity), instead of the generation of pockets of opportunity and development where it is needed most, usually in those regions where the secondary, negative effects of neoliberalism (Harvey 2006, 43), -- amongst them pure and simple exclusion-- are felt the most. It has also, and not unimportantly so, drastically transformed the power relations within society, and this unbalance has incremented and dramatically worsened acts of dispossesion, repression and violence against the underpriviledged. In the light of the scale and reach of neoliberalism today, extending to that has even been considered planetary, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate trusted theoretical notions and

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discourses that may lead the way ‘forward’.

Nevertheless, as an ‘economic model’ based on a numerical ‘equation’ (one that paradoxically produces unbalance or inequality among its ‘terms’) that until very recently seemed ‘water-proof ’ neoliberalism has shown its many weaknesses and flaws in the current global financial and economic crisis that took many by surprise in September 2008, and which will plague us for many years to come. It is perhaps now that a global awareness finally will be reached and a common consensus established on the fact that neoliberalism, very differently than what it claims, is based on values that it cannot sustain in reality. Since the logic of neoliberalism rests on an inherent contradiction: instead of balance, it has produced deafening homogeneity and uniformity for the sake of profit; instead of “difference” and variety, it has fueled informality and disarray in both abstract, and material terms. Troubled by a natural tendency to conflict and contradiction, neoliberalism and its many practices are (re-)producing extreme conditions of socio-economic polarization, environmental devastation, and more generally, differential conditions that generate degrees of unprecedented uneven development and asymmetries in all domains and scales.

Particularly visible where material processes take ‘place’ these asymmetries manifest on the spatial: the geographical, territorial levels of regions and locales. Thus, ‘space’ plays an essential part in understanding how intangible forces impact, sometimes in very powerful ways, material reality. Cities are especially prone to this type of analysis, since it is upon the built environment where material changes manifest most clearly (or visibly), producing and evidencing important systematic and structural changes. A changed spatial relationship -in spite of being socially produced- forcefully reflects and generates further changed relationships between individuals, entire groups and communities, and society at large. In addition to looking at the ‘large scale’ it may be useful to focus on the ‘complex scale’ as well, since this allows the observation of processes to register meaningful change. And there is arguably no better vantage point to observe and register these

changes than from within their origin, namely from within the urban. This realization necessarily raises the issue of what precisely the urban is, and more importantly, it should trigger ‘new urban questions’ for the twentieth-first century, inquiries that may well be the continuation and extension of the only partially answered Urban Question of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Problematique Urbaine today, or the Urban Question Revisited

Over the two hundred years that capitalism has been around, most cities in the West -and after the Cold War most cities around the globe, have evolved along the line and rules of capitalism, determined in a significant way by an intensifying global markets. How can we make sense of two of the greatest global phenomena of the world today -capitalism and the city- at a time when urbanization will determine the future of the majority of the world’s population? This question is significant because, as Harvey points out, “the qualities of urban living in the twenty-first century will define the qualities of civilization itself ” (1996, 403).

The concerns of the consequences that industrial capitalism unleashes on cities are not new and have been central in much of the critical theories and discourses since the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

[1] Formulated more generally as ‘social questions’, which inquired on the destructive forces of capitalist production (Marx), underscored the growth of calculative rationality (Weber), or emphasized the disintegration of moral cohesion (Durkheim), these concerns formed the corpus of Marxist theory at the time. This, many scholars agree, is a theory of the changing basis of social relations brought about through the development of capitalism, and not a theory of the city.

But it is at the dawn of the twentieth century - the century of massive urbanization- that the relationship between the city and capitalism begins to be theorized in a substantive way when thinkers and scholars narrate (sometimes in sheer amazement,

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sometimes in sheer horror) the emergence of the modern metropolis under clearly capitalist modes of production and material exchanges. Kracauer, Simmel, Benjamin, to name just a few observed the deep changes that industrialization was provoking on European cities and towns, and continuing the work of Marxist intellectuals, they extended the critique of massification, standarization and alienation to degrees, domains and levels that encompassed society and the individual in ways never attempted before, thus inaugurating a field of enquiry that extended to the subjective and social dimensions of the urban. They argued, for instance, that the ‘new’ modes of existing in the modern metropolis triggered psychic responses on the individual, who overly stimulated by the array of metropolitan living, went into a state of ‘blasé” (Simmel). Or how the new modes of mechanical reproduction changed the very meaning of objects -the loss of aura- and produced apperception in the individual (Benjamin). Or how, in alientation, the metropolitan masses, and crowds behaved in incomprehensible ways not registered before (Kracauer).[2] As technological developments transformed modes of production and social exchanges, they were also making all sorts of tools and techniques available -via representation- to the aesthetic register, and as was the case with the arrival of cinema (an urban phenomenon)-, these were changing the very structures of feeling of society.

But all the advances in technological development and innovation could not avoid being distributed in an unbalanced way. These were geared towards the interests of capitalism: increasing profitability through efficiency and effectiveness. This only superficially covers the magnitude that these sudden changes during the early twentieth century must have had on the individual, society and space. In this age of ‘new uncertainty’ cities were becoming too complex to be comprehended with the eighteenth or nineteenth century mind; they had evolved from towns to cities to metropolises to urban areas in a matter of very little time.

During the 1920s and 1930s the discussion on what precisely cities were, and how they should be

understood from a position that regarded the social was fore to a wide domain of disciplines. This was not a gratuitous interest: if the modern metropolis shined in all its dynamism and excitement, it also manifested the darker existence of the poor, the worker, the ‘proletariat’, the lower class. Large portions of cities still bore the ugly face of early industrialization, and immersed in a flux of economic crises and rapid change, the conditions to which the less fortunate were exposed disclosed more than physical and material decay. The need to intervene was unavoidable for many reasons: as social, economic, political and electoral strategies thought as antidotes for anarchism and rebellion, as philanthropic initiatives to alleviate social suffering, to increase efficiency via the ‘betterment’ of the living conditions of the workers, etc. From social engineers to architects-turned-urban planners, the focus was placed either on a hygienicist approach of ‘healing’ the city from the malaises that it suffered, or conversely, on envisioning completely new cities where the social and spatial problems of the old, crowded and chaotic Western city were avoided by rationally planning them in an ordered fashion ‘from scratch’ following a utopianism that would not wane until later in the century.[3] The approaches did change the morphology of many cities around the world, and shaped the ideology of modernism at large. Later this would turn into functionalism and the International Style, which became very popular in the Interwar period. But it also determined a very particular attitude of planners, who more often than not, would hinge their intentions to the interests of politicians and the ruling classes, rather than to incorporate or facilitate the participation of those to which these new forms of urban living were aimed at, and who would have to live in them.

The divide was now widening between ‘the makers of the city and its dwellers’. And this translates into all sorts of urban-related phenomena that are in a sense an indication of uneven development and a symptom of an ideology of accumulation: suburbanization, inner-city decay, slum clearance in the West and slum creation in the developing world, continuous growth, etc. The role (and responsibility) of planners and architects in this should not go unnoticed.

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The failures of modernism have been amply discussed and consensus has long been reached, so much so that today it would be futile to question the negative outcomes on both space and society of many of the projects that were designed and built throughout the globe during these four decades.

The critique against modernism and its urban version began to take shape and strength during the 1950s in the work of the likes of Jane Jacobs, who vehemently claimed that modern urbanism -in its attempt to clear and clean, of regaining “order”- had killed street-life, weakened healthy social exchange and eroded the everydayness of the city. This antimodern urban critique echoed theoretical positions at the time that challenged the notions of ‘totality’ in the face of an evidently complex and fragmented reality in which meta-narratives, universal truths and modern mythologies were insufficient and flawed. The keywords became fragmentation, complexity and contradiction; the sentiments conflicted: oscillating between modern disenchantment and optimism (later classified as early signs of postmodern ‘drunkenness’) they conveyed attempts to understand the city through its manifestations, from semiotic material (semiotic machines) to cities as collages. Much emphasis was placed on the aesthetic and apparent qualities of things and objects, including the city.

But it is during the period between the early-1960s and late-1970s when the critical voices against the precepts of modernity in relation to the city were once again clearly linked to a Marxist perspective, this time around focusing on the disjuncture between the social and the spatial; the ebb of wellbeing brought by the recovering economies in Western Europe and North America nevertheless clashed with the antagonism of the Left, and the 1968 generation. The rediscovery of the problem of the city, the emergence of urban social movements, the decline of urban public services, environmental desecration and uneven development more generally, made patent in the work of Henri Lefebvre, for instance, brought to the fore a renewed interest in the urban question. Differently than a century earlier it was structured around the particular and indissoluble geographical and land-contingent phe-

nomena that came into existence as capitalist social and property relations are mediated through the dimensions of urban space.

Particularly influential during this moment, was the work of young sociologist Manuel Castells, who in 1977 published his now famous book The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach in which he analyzed a term that was being mentioned and discussed widely since the 1950s, namely the ‘urban’. Castells asserted that, ‘“urban culture” is neither a concept nor a theory. It is …a myth which provides the keywords of an ideology of modernity, assimilated, in an ethnocentric way, to the social forms of liberal capitalism”. (1970, 57) In that sense to refer to ‘urban culture’ was to suggest, “the hypothesis of a production of social content [the urban] by a transhistorical form [the city] … but the city creates nothing…”

(57) To him the urban was a concept that could be understood only through ideology, and was thus suspect. Whoever studies the city, he argued, must also engage capital, production, distribution, consumption, politics, everyday life, grass roots politics, and so on. His specific problematic -formulated as ‘the urban question’- attempted to disclose whether there was such a thing as “urban unity” or even “urban area” in a time when the dichotomy between town and country had been dissolved. This is a prototypical Marxist position in that it underscores the impossibility of the existence of a distinctive ‘countryside’ in opposition to a defined ‘cityscape’ under the monopoly phase of capitalism. It was evident that the compact line between city and country has been erased, albeit according to the dictates of uneven development. Following on Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of space as socially produced, Castells concluded that the problem is precisely how to define a new urban form or specify the organization of transfigured space in advanced capitalist societies (Boyer 2001) The theorizations put forward by Castells were widely debated and have led in part to the development of urban sociology today. The urban question that he revived, however, remains partially unanswered to date. The problem of Castlells’ ‘urban question’ lays in that the “built environment”, seen as a material production, and the “city” as a culturally established artifice, were not solved

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on the level of their mutual “attachments”, namely through “society”.

“We are all neoliberals now, even when we are being critical…”

Harvey’s comment on the impossibility of thinking and acting, of locating our intellectual or professional positions beyond or somehow outside of the climate produced by the forces of neoliberalism, “even when we are being critical” (2007) is sobering. The inevitability of the contemporary conditions brought about by neoliberalism, comparable perhaps to meteorological forces beyond our control, has a crippling, paralyzing effect on how we think and make, on how we act.[4] This, however, does not mean that it is impossible to ‘think and make’ from a position that challenges the fact that neoliberalism is an unavoidable phenomenon, and that proposing alternatives to it are in fact necessary. What, then, does it mean to be ‘critical’ under the sign of the times?

When we consider today as our point of departure, and look at the very uneven developmental paths that cities around the globe have taken from the 1980s onwards, it becomes urgent that we ask, what are the new urban conditions brought about by the liberalization of the global economy? Who are the stakeholders in the decision-making that produces these conditions? And to what end? What is occurring in regions in which the transition has occurred in partial occlusion, or invisibility? If we consider the cost of progress, modernization, technological developments and globalization especially on the more vulnerable it becomes almost evident that we are facing a question, which if for the lack of anything else, should at least contain a dose of ethicopolitical awareness. This posits the problem of just what constitutes a balanced -but not ‘equal’- relationship at all levels, and this in turn, raises issues on (distributive) justice, agency and participation.

But in a so-called ‘postindustrial’, ‘postcivil’ society in which divisions between what constitutes the domains of ‘the private’ and ‘the public’, or ‘shared’, have been muddled -where in fact it is becoming increasingly difficult to speak of ‘society’ in the con-

ventional sense-, we begin to see just how much has changed under the advancement and evolution of neoliberal capitalist development. In the apparent dissolution of dichotomies, the waning of political tensions and the weakening of public participation, however, the burning questions remain: where has the ‘public realm’, and the ‘social realm’ been exiled?

Can we still speak of ‘public space’ or ‘social interest’ in the conventional sense under conditions of commercialism and the attrition of the political at a time when the world is becoming increasingly urban? What are the implications for the city? How are the architect and the urbanist acting and reacting to these changes in a time of so-called ‘postplanning’? (Ranciére 2004) Difficult as it is to formulate ideas and proposals to move forward without falling into dogmatism, normativism or pure rhetoric, or falling pray to paralyzing attitudes it is nevertheless imperative to be aware of the ‘climate’ in which we live our lives and conduct ourselves and our practice giving priority to an ethical positionality, rather than one based on “individualism” and “freedom”. One step to achieve this is to rethink and question what the ‘infamous’ term ideology means today. From a rather reduced definition and moralizing discourse, intended to conceal material interests, we might turn to Dumont’s definition, namely one that regards ideology as a set of shared beliefs inscribed in institutions bound up with ‘actions’ and hence anchored in reality (1986).

Here, however, there should be a word of warning. A position necessary involves the acknowledgement of the subject as an observer, and as such, the position taken by anyone in relation to the world is never innocent. There are responsibilities and necessary ‘sacrifices’ to be made no matter what position we decide to take. There is also the difficulty to think of a “critical practice” such as architecture or urban planning and design. Being ‘critical’ is an attitude, not a design parameter. There can never be a “critical architecture”, as Graafland (2006, 689) and others have amply shown.

This means that the understanding of how we think and how we make are joined at the hip, but not through the same pins. Theoretical inquiries are a backbone to design alternatives and can be the force behind con-

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ceptual issues for architecture and urbanism as they can, for instance, shape the rationale and frame the problematique of a ‘project’ taking its social relevance or component as a point of departure. How we make things, reflects our actions, and our actions are necessarily informed by our thoughts. This is agency.

As entire cities rise from scratch in what was previously desert, and the peripheries of urban giants in the Third World consolidate into hyperslums, the agency, the role and the responsibility of the architect and the urbanist is called into question. Are we responding to the new urban problems and questions from an informed (critical) perspective, or are we perpetuating with our reactionary practice the “minor infractions” that will shape the contradictive cities of the twenty-first century?

In the following three contributions by participants of the DSD Future Cities: Urban Asymmetries Graduation program, a set of specific topics are explored in depth and analyzed from a perspective that regards theoretical positions as central to the establishment of argumentation and discourse formation on today’s urban problematique. Whether questioning the ‘loss’ of notions of community, social bonds or collectivity to individualism, and the subjection of ‘the right to the city’ to neoliberal urban policies; or reflecting on the theoretical (and concrete) implications of dubious formulations to the informal; or exposing land speculation as a serious form of criminality, these contributions nevertheless are exemplary of the concerns that young architects and urbanists are developing in relation to their roles and positions within society and their professions.

The contributions published here are the result of the DSD New Urban Question lecture series and the DSD Architecture Thinking Thesis seminar, and have been specially edited for inclusion in this month’s issue of Atlantis.

Dr. Heidi Sohn is Assistant Professor at the DSD and coordinator of the DSD Urban Asymmetries Special Research Project.

End Notes:

1. See for instance the influential work of Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, translated into English in 1885, where he exposed the the dire living standards of the workers and the poor in Britain.

2. In addition to the original sources by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, for instance Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny, Essays in the Modern Unhomely of 1992 (for Benjamin and Simmel) or his Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture of 2000.

3. For an in depth analysis on this, see Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development of 1976.

4. Illustrating in this is that “the role of the urban theorist or planner is reduced to that of a seismographer, carefully registering the vibrations of the urban field, at best predicting explosions, but ultimately impotent in the face of the socio-spatial mutations s/he encounters” (BAVO 2007).

Works Consulted

BAVO (ed.) (2007) Urban Politics Now. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Boyer, Christine (2001) ‘The Urban Question in the 21st Century: Epistemological and Spatial Traumas’, unpublished lecture notes presented at the DSD Inaugural Conference, June 11, 2001.

Castells, Manuel (1977) The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. London: Edward Arnold.

Davis, Mike and Daniel Bertrand Monk (eds.)

(2007) Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism: Evil Paradises. New York: The New Press.

Dumont, Louis (1986) Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Graafland, Arie (2006) ‘On Criticality’, in Arie Graafland and Leslie Kavanaugh (eds.) Crossover:

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Architecture, Urbanism, Technology. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. pp. 688-773.

Habermas, Jürgen (1997 [1983]) ‘Modernity: an Unfinished Project’ in Maurizio Passarin d’Entreves (ed.) Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press. pp.38-58.

Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity, an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change.

Cambridge & Oxford: Blackwell.

-------- (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell.

-------- (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

-------- (2006) ‘Neo-liberalism and the Restoration of Class Power’, in Spaces of Global Capitalism. London: Verso.

-------- (2007) ‘Presentation of A Brief History of Neoliberalism’, from the audio lecture of Prof. Harvey at Cornell University, June 2007. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkWWMOzNNrQ Jameson, Fredric (1990) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso.

Ranciére, Jacques (2004) Malaise dans l’esthéthique.

Paris: Galillée.

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thesis Towards a Unitary-Relational Urbanity…

Phillip Lühl

Introduction

“The only way to ‘arouse the masses’ is to expose the appalling contrast between the potential constructions of life and its present poverty” (Situationist International 1960).

The deeply schizophrenic character of the contemporary city is evident: as a social phenomenon that is - by definition - a collective entity it is increasingly dominated by individualism and the private in spatial as well as in social terms. In his Architecture of the City Rossi noted that “the private and the collective, the community and the individual oppose each other and, at the same time, converge in the city” (Rossi 1966, 377). However, in the contemporary city, as I will try to show further on with the case of Mexico City, it appears that neoliberal policy, which “seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market” (Harvey 2005, 2), based on the belief that only within a free market, the individual human being can fully realize itself, is the single most influential force of urbanization that suppresses all collective aspirations. These policies favour the private above the collective as competition between entrepreneurial entities is seen as the main propelling force behind human development.

What is profitable is also good for the common is the belief. This has entrenched the ideal of individualism in the sense that the core family unit becomes the highest degree of collectivity like Margaret Thatcher asserted, “there is no such thing as society.

There are individual men and women and there are families” (van Toorn 2007, 270). This then also becomes the major concern for development, the realization of the American Dream where every family

has its own, completely private place in this world, which amongst others furthers the immense urban sprawl of cities where more and more people are living in the single-family houses of suburbia. What we see in Mexico City though is that this dream that is propagated as ultimate freedom and prosperity, has become abstracted into a form of urbanization that sells itself through the image of this dream, while providing the opposite of what it propagates, creating endless gated communities where society and space becomes totally fragmented and isolated. The urban question that arises is what, in all this, constitutes the idea of the city as a collective social and cultural construct today?

The conflict between individualism and collective was thoroughly analysed by Simmel in ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ at the turn of the twentieth century. He posed that ‘individuality’ arose through the division of labour within growing cities that required more personal freedoms than were achievable within the tight-knit community of the town and that this later evolved into ‘individualism’ – the urge to distinguish oneself from others (Simmel 1903, 79). This phenomenon reaches its peak in the current neoliberal era or late capitalism - evermore astonishing, as the world is supposedly growing together through means of communication and mobility. This networking of the world and society however connects large distances while disconnecting small distances or rather fragmenting space, as modes of communication do not rely on spatial proximity anymore. At the same time, the issue of communication and mobility becomes a problem of participation and exclusion, closely related – still – to the ownership of means of production. The

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In terms of making the city, mainstream architecture and urbanism have largely become a form of service delivery to the ‘haves’ within a neoliberal society, with seemingly no ambition towards wider social goals at all. In line with the widespread mantra that “there is no alternative” to capitalist development (Fukuyama 1992), in itself a very disabling argument as it forecloses any contemplation on possible alternatives. Going with the flow of capital to realize “Architecture” is seen by many architects as the only way to be professional. Ideology is finally buried as anybody that argues for finding alternative ways of being together collectively is either dismissed as ‘communist’ or ‘totalitarian’, in the best case seen as utterly unrealistic. Under neoliberalism, social spending is cut back and national assets and resources are privatized to create profitable markets where previously there were none (Harvey 2005, 2). This includes social housing, which previously seen as a core responsibility of the state, was made a highly profitable market segment. Hereby, also architecture has become exclusive: not only in physical terms does it exclude large populations from benefits of the city, also on an expressive level it becomes exclusive to those that are within the discourse of architecture against those that are outside – ‘the people’. This situation confronts us with the second, ethical question of the role of the architect and his or her contribution towards the making of the city.

PART ONE: The Idea of the City.

City as Oeuvre

Man has over the centuries created towns and cities the world over, that were always related to an idea of collectiveness that bound specific concentrations of people together in space. In the earliest stages of human existence collectiveness was strongly related to the need of collective action within the overwhelming powers of nature that are hostile to human habitation on the one hand and enabling on the other.

This produces, according to Simmel, an “almost entirely closed” social organization within which “the individual member has only a very slight area for the development of his own qualities and for free activities for which he himself is responsible” (Simmel 1903, 74). The suppression of the individuality meant that all activity was directed towards collective goals and desires. The creation of the city, the spatial consequence of this concentration of social relations in space becomes the major work of man’s self-realization or, according to Rossi “the definitive and last given in the life of the community” (Rossi 1966, 376). At first born of pure necessity, architecture soon became more artistically refined and ordered, with the city emerging as “the act and oeuvre of a complex thought” as Lefebvre calls it (Lefebvre, Kofman et al. 1996, 154) – “a work in which all its citizens can participate in the public sphere” (van Toorn 2007, 270). For Lefebvre the oeuvre is a right that can be claimed collectively as it is based on social needs that are hard to quantify: “the need for creative activity, for the oeuvre (not only of products and consumable material goods), the need for information, symbolism, the imaginary and play” (Lefebvre, Kofman et al. 1996, 147).

Following on the analysis of my case study, presentday Mexico City did possess these characteristics in its earliest stages, which made it the oeuvre of its complex society. It was established within conditions very favourable to human existence. After conquering settlements of established local tribes, the Mexica, a migrant population arriving from the north to the valley of Mexico, established the city of Tenochtitlán on an island in the middle of

thesis - Towards a Unitary-Relational Urbanity - Phillip Lühl

participating and the excluded may live in close spatial proximity while relating to extremely different social worlds. I might be more related to someone living halfway around the world than to my nextdoor neighbour who basically shares the same space. Furthermore, social polarization, inherent to capitalism but taken to unseen levels in the last four decades, is manifesting itself simultaneously on different scales globally and especially within our everincreasing cities and metropolises.

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lake Texcoco in 1321, where according to the myth, they found an eagle devouring a snake while sitting on a cactus, as Figure 2.1 shows. Tenochtitlán divided in four quadrants surrounded by the lake soon became the capital of the emerging Mexica Empire. Two main axes formed the backbone of the city development culminating in the central square where the stone temples, markets and palaces where constructed, emphasizing a very centralized form of theocratic-political power. The scarce remaining representations of the founding of Tenochtitlán include a lot of aspects of social and spatial formations in more abstract, relational ways, including nature, myth, symbolism and social relations in its depictions.

With technological advancement and the increasing ability to regulate natural forces in a way to make them productive in the service of man, the city expanded as it forms the centre for exchange and trade. A productive hinterland was crucial in the sustaining of the city that produced only man-made artefacts; the agricultural hinterland being the supplier of basic necessities of the city in exchange for protection. The Mexica engaged in the natural environment of the lake through an intricate water management system based on canals and aqueducts, and a unique way of cultivating chinampas, an extremely productive model of waterbased agricultural production, deceivingly referred to as floating gardens. Land, including chinampas and milpas -or cultivated fields, was held in calpulli, a strictly hierarchical communal land tenure system based on the tribe as its constituent entity. In this form, land has no exchange value of its own and thus cannot become private property, but only its productive capacity gives the one who works it the right of usufruct. This decentralized agrarian production went along with local trade concentrated in the huge market at Tlatelolco, where at the time of the Spanish conquest in 1521, some 60 000 people converged daily to engage in trade.

Trade and exchange that forms the basis for the city emerging, brings up the question of surplus. In Spaces of Global Capitalism Harvey states that, “all societies generate surpluses, defined as use values great-

er than those required for immediate consumption, for survival. […] The only interesting questions are: who gets to do the appropriating, how much surplus can be appropriated and how does the surplus get used” (Harvey 2006, 90). In these early societies, which as Simmel argues were more defined by the community, surplus was generally used to further the collective oeuvre in the Lefebvrian sense, as there was little else that was worth accumulating individually. Therefore, architecture and the city was the main arena to express common achievements,

Figure 2.1 Frontispiece of Codex Mendoza - The Foundation of the Great City of Tenochtitlán, 1542. the shared values and beliefs of a society.

Metropolis

Once the direct relationship of labour in order to physically sustain oneself and one’s family started to disintegrate through the emergence of trade and ex-

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As touched upon only briefly in the introduction, individualism was born out of these developments.

Referring to Simmel, the previous “bonds of a political, agrarian, guild and religious nature” had become superfluous and that out of the inequality they had produced and maintained the call for the “full freedom of movement of the individual in all his social and intellectual relationships” was born (Simmel 1903, 79). The next step, he goes on, is that from this liberated “individuality” sprung the tendency to distinguish oneself from the other, what we would call individualism today. What furthers this development is the fact that the market becomes more and more detached from the actual place of production, resulting in an ever-wider gap between producers and consumers of goods which cause “a relentless matter-of-factness, [a] rationally calculated economic egoism” (Simmel 1903, 71).

It seems paradoxical at first that the increasing size and density of social interaction of the city produces an increasingly individualized society. If seen in the light of Simmel’s analysis of the ‘blasé attitude’ this individualization makes sense, as a kind of selfpreserving reaction to the overload of sensual impressions one is exposed to in the metropolis. “An immoderately sensuous life makes one blasé because it stimulates the nerves to their utmost reactivity until finally they can no longer produce any reaction at all” (Simmel 1903, 73).

Harvey notes that “in transforming our environment we necessarily transform ourselves” (Harvey 2006, 88). His call to investigate new social relations within the city as well as the relation to nature, in short, new mental conceptions of an urban world, highlights the fact that the ways in which urbanization has changed us and vice-versa is still not fully understood. Clearly, there can be no separation between nature and human evolution. This prevents discussions of the kind that see human development as counteracting nature as if the perfect natural state would be one where the human element does not exist. It is more realistic to say that a form of human development that has growth as its core value, tends to deplete resources for the sustaining of future generations, be it ecological resources or social development.[1] Harvey quoting Marx in this regard: Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations [...] these elements are plainly not static but in motion, linked together through ëprocesses of productioní that guide human evolution. [...] All of these elements constitute a totality and we have to understand how the mutual interactions between them work. Uneven development between and among the elements produces contingency in human evolution.[2] At some points in history the mental conceptions changed more abruptly and violently as in the case of the western colonization of the world that made different civilizations clash and ultimately merge.

Coming from a feudal background, the Spanish conquest under Hernán Cortés led to the near total destruction of Tenochtitlán in 1521. As the manifestation of their “cultural superiority”, the Spanish imposed their colonial grid onto the imperial city by destroying existing temples and erecting the first church that will later become the Metropolitan Cathedral. The church, the governor’s palace, the court and commercial buildings surrounded the newly conceived square or Zócalo, concentrating not only political power but also increasingly eco-

thesis - Towards a Unitary-Relational Urbanity - Phillip Lühl

change between ever larger concentrations of people the ground was laid for the division of labour and the introduction of abstract ways of relating to one another through money. This marks the beginning of what Simmel calls the “money economy”.

He argues that “the metropolis has always been the seat of money economy because the many-sidedness and concentration of commercial activity have given the medium of exchange an importance, which it could not have acquired in the commercial aspects of rural life” (Simmel 1903, 71). This relationship was reciprocal, as at the same time the emergence of markets facilitated increasing concentration of people and thereby further centralization of urban development.

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nomical power at the heart of the city. While the Spanish settled near the centre in stone houses in the European fashion, the indigenous population was left scattered in the surrounding areas, introducing for the first time the notion of a periphery and fixing racial segregation in space. As the Spanish did not fully appreciate the intricate water management system of the Mexica that was built on an embedded understanding of the landscape of the lake and instead imposed their own conception of a relation to nature which was however based on a foreign understanding, focused on the desiccation of the lake rather than the adaptation to this unique environment. Ironically, this lead to the city falling victim to reoccurring flooding and is the origin of the main problematic the city still faces today, a dysfunctional water management.

Orchestrated Society

In the wake of industrialization the attracting force, the promise of the city as the place where to find the basis for sustaining one’s existence and that of the family, gained immense proportions that it has not lost to this day. The thus unleashed urbanization of large parts of the world increased the necessity for a radical rethinking of the city and housing provision.

Within the political climate of a emerging WesternEuropean social-democracy between and after the two World Wars, that found itself confronted with the enormous task of rebuilding a modern society, the welfare state was able to unify “administrative power and intellectual proposals” to find ways of approaching the question of the city (Tafuri 1976, 112). The situation demanded “architecture (read: programming and planned reorganization of building production and of the city as a productive organism) or revolution”, as Le Corbusier famously claimed (1976, 100).

The central European ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ adapted the method of designing to the idealized structure of the assembly line. […] From standardized element, to the cell, the single block, the housing project and finally the city […] each ‘piece’ on the line, being completely resolved in itself, tended to disappear or, better, to for-

mally dissolve in the assemblage. The result of all this was that the aesthetic experience itself was revolutionized. Now it was no longer objects that were offered to judgement, but a process to be lived and used as such.

The user […] was the central element of this process (1976, 101) .

While the making of the city and therefore the conception of the city became more process driven, the architectural and urban environments that were thus created are generally very static in the sense that they allow very little adaptation or evolution once they are completed. This architecture preferred the technological processes of building production above everything else, neglecting all the other processes that lie outside a purely technical approach to the city as a process of reorganization, more related to history and collective memory, social formations and economical relations. Modernist planning implied minimum involvement of conflicting interests, as well as reduction of cities complexities to abstract models and forms that were planned as absolute, often without the possibility of the city dwellers to contribute anything in their own lived reality. This together with technological standardization often led to homogeneity, as an urban phenomenon that contributes to further alienation by lack of urban identity and fuelled the dream of the private house.

In Mexico, where the Revolution had already happened because of an array of unresolved social inequalities stemming from colonial times, the changes drafted in the 1917 Constitution did not materialize until Lázaro Cárdenas was elected president in 1934. He aimed to diminish social inequalities through governmental institutions and syndicates, prescribing the institutionalization of class struggle and its integration into party politics that would later lead to the alienation of his PRI party from its political support base. He enforced a more decentralized development of the country based on import substitution industrialization to curb ruralurban migration that remained extremely high, transforming spacious inner-city colonial mansions into ‘vecindades’, housing 20 families per house or more.

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Figure 2.2 ‘Sueño de una tarde dominical and la Alameda Central’ [Dream of a Sunday in the Alameda] (1947).

Fresco over transportable panels. Mexico City, Museo Mural Diego Rivera. Photo by Phillip Lühl, 2008.

Following Mexican presidencies focused on investments benefiting the middle classes, engaging in slum clearance in the south of the city in order to invest in big public developments like the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, built in the early 1950s. This project played a pivotal role in the revolutionary project of creating a national identity as it integrated architecture, art and science, merging modernism with the Muralist movement in order to create a icon of a modern Mexico. It embodied the modernist belief in the power of the built environment to transform social behaviour.

Tafuri further claims that the modernist architectural experiments were informed by an “anti-urban ideology” that tried to induce the metropolis with the values and characteristics of the town or village.

“The aspiration to the ‘Gemeinschaft’ (community) … was destined as a bankrupt hypothesis to succumb to the “Gesellschaft” (society), to the imper-

sonal, alienated relationship of a society organized in and by the great metropolis” (Tafuri, 124). Also Cacciari criticizes this fact in Simmel’s final synthesis in ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ that “recuperates the value of the community in order to reaffirm society” (Cacciari 1993, 12).

The modernist project, while trying to recreate a society around the values of the community, based the idea of the city increasingly on the individual cell. Hilbersheimer famously expressed this in his writings on the city, claiming: “The single room as the constituent of the habitation, and since the habitations in turn form blocks, the room will become a factor of urban configuration, which is architecture’s true goal” (Tafuri, 104). This trend, accelerated in the massive post-war restoration and rebuilding of Europe was rightfully criticized by Superstudio amongst others in their 200-ton City of 1972. This Florentine collective pursued a very different strategy of architectural resistance, born out of the social unrest of the sixties, at a time when modernism itself was in crisis. “Post-war modernization was wreaking havoc on Italian society and decimating the surrounding urban landscapes [by laws that] were designed to promote private investments to the exclusion of all else” (Lang 2003, 31).

The dawn of mass consumer culture went hand in hand with alienation and the breaking up of traditional social structures and habits. Superstudio was putting forward a very unambiguous form of social critique, an anti-utopia, applying, in Natalini’s words “the rhetorical devices of metaphor and al-

thesis - Towards a Unitary-Relational Urbanity - Phillip Lühl

On a cultural level big strides were made during the years prior to Cárdenas, such as the cultural emancipation program of José Vasconcelos, minister of education, who commissioned young Mexican artists to create huge murals on the walls of the most prestigious public buildings, as Figure 2.2 shows.

Their works contain radical political positions and, since they were accessible to the public, also served to further the socialist cause. For the first time there was a unique relationship between radical national politics and a cultural formulation of a national identity that recognized the need to return to preHispanic cultural origins.

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legory and the tools of irony and imagination” (Natalini 2003, 25) in order to reveal the ultimate dystopian consequences if the rapid and un-reflected postwar modernization was to be further pursued, “demonstratio per absurdum” (Riley 2002, 31).

The 200-ton City exists as a square grid of endless buildings made of cubes or cells that contain one individual each that is supplied in all his physiological needs by modern technology, living in perfect equality and superseding the need for death. Only the absurd thought of rebellion makes the ceiling literally collapse on the unworthy citizen to make space for a new beginning (Superstudio 1972). In this scenario, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is finally materialized: “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” (Debord and Knabb, 7). Here life is reduced to a solitary cell amongst millions that encompasses all lived reality mediated by technology and thereby reduced to pure spectacle.

Free Market Rule(s)

In our contemporary condition the idea of the city is deeply induced with the logics of the neoliberal order. Previous ideals of the orchestration of society from above that shares the benefits of technological advancement within all citizens have been largely abandoned and pure economical thinking has taken over all fields of making the city. In The Culture of New Capitalism Sennett traces the cultural implications that the turn towards neoliberal politics has on modern society and the main differences with what he calls “social capitalism” that was characterized by stability, long-term thinking, loyalty and paternalistic relationships between the owners of the means of production and the workforce. Like many others he puts the dismantling of the Bretton Woods agreements in the early 1970s as a major point in the retreat of strong governments.

Under Bretton Woods, currencies were related to material value in gold, stockpiled in national banks and thereby stabilizing global economies, but at the same time preventing the easy flow of capital across borders in its constant search for quick profits (Sen-

nett 2006). The acceleration of the movements of capital and technological innovation has put its mark on contemporary society that is now characterized by buzzwords as flexibility, adaptability and change. “In theory”, David Harvey notes, “the neoliberal state should favour strong individual property rights, the rule of law, and the institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade. … Private enterprise and entrepreneurial initiative are seen as the keys to innovation and wealth creation. … Through trickle down, neoliberal theory holds that the elimination of poverty can best be secured through free markets and free trade” (Harvey 2005, 65). This thinking of the right of the fittest is then consistently extended into the individuals responsibility for “his or her own actions and well-being”, doing away with the state’s responsibility to safeguard its citizen’s welfare, education and health care (Harvey 2005, 65).

After Cárdenas short-lived socialist period in the late 1930s public spending in Mexico was once again centralized in the Mexico City and was largely directed towards the middle classes, with an increasing indifference to the low-income inhabitants that came swarming in from the rural areas in search for labour opportunities. These migrants, the workforce that shouldered the Mexican economic ‘miracle’ of the 1940s until the mid 1960s was accommodated in informal low-density developments around the industries in the periphery. The Volcker Shock of 1979 made an end to the credit financed public spending as the increase in US interest rates doubled Mexico’s foreign debt overnight. The US and IMF-prescribed neoliberal remedy, deregulation, privatization and cuts in public spending, initiated the final shift towards private development. The turn to neoliberal politics and free market ideologies culminated in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994, opening up Mexican markets to foreign investment, mainly from the US (Harvey 2005, 99). This financialization did not make hold in front of ‘social interest housing’, that in the 1990s saw a final shift towards a profit-oriented housing production for the most needy, resulting in exponential massive suburban sprawl beyond the municipal boundaries to the

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Figure 2.3 Formal and Informal urban development in Mexico City. Photo courtesy of Jose Castillo, 2007.”

The recently erected CBD of Santa Fe built on former dumpsites and cleared of previous slum dwellers, spatially extended the existing economical power axis of Paseo de la Reforma towards the west in a bold example of the centralizing forces of capital. The re-densification of the central “Bando Dos” municipalities and the renovation and beautification of the historical centre lead to gentrification and emphasizes the priorities of the government

of servicing the city’s core, while neglecting the peripheries.

With priorities given to the (few) ones in society that can take full advantage of the freedom that a neoliberal society provides, the formal, top-down model of making of the city is increasingly overshadowed by the informal, that which lies outside the reach of state or other regulation. Turner idealized the squatter settlement as the inhabitants ultimate freedom to create his environment according to his own demands and desires (Turner 1976).

While there exists a certain freedom of regulatory frameworks if not total anarchy in the informal, this ‘freedom’ is usually counteracted by economic misery governing this sort of urban development, which directly and consistently cancels out all the prospects that such a freedom would bring. The informal organizes the city out of contingencies, out of the bare necessity to create an environment more

thesis - Towards a Unitary-Relational Urbanity - Phillip Lühl

north and east into municipalities with less regulations on cheaper ‘ejido’ land, its privatization made possible by changes in the constitution in accordance with NAFTA. This led to the development of lower-middle class gated communities in the peripheries, mimicking the exclusivity of their elite counterparts in the western parts of the city and their parasitic relationship with the city as pockets of formal urbanization within a sea of informality as Figure 2.3 shows.

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or less suitable for inhabitation. It is pure empirical process, the constant re-negotiation of all the involved interests including those of the government and private capital. It is tactical rather than strategic, with a very short-term horizon of action, limited by way of economical possibilities as well as restricted knowledge and expertise. In his book Planet of Slums Mike Davis comments on the romanticizing of the informal, which he sees as an attempt to put up a ‘smokescreen’ of “helping the poor help themselves”, meant to cover up the retreat of the state in commitments towards housing and infrastructure provision (Davis 2006, 72).

With the retreat of the Welfare State the informal takes on proportions of unimaginable dimension.

However, this reality of the city is a consequence of deregulation that allows the direct coexistence of these two models of development, leaving pockets of formalized city within the sea of informality. The contemporary city shows a high degree of political, economical and spatial centralization: public spending prioritizes city core(s) while private investment in housing provision pursues profit maximization at the long-term expense of a public living in undignified urban conditions.

PART TWO: The Role of the Architect.

What is of interest here is the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture. That is to say, what it has taken away in general from ideological prefiguration. With this, one is led almost automatically to the discovery of what may well be the “drama” of architecture today: that is to see architecture obliged to return to pure architecture, to form without utopia; in the best cases, to sublime uselessness (Tafuri 1976, ix)

Crisis of the Profession

The crisis of the architectural profession, as described by Tafuri back in 1973, remains relevant to this day. This is to say if one does not measure

the value of architecture in economical terms. The last decennia have seen the rise of the star architect that knows to transform architecture into a major advertising machine for cities, regions and even whole countries. In the previous chapter it has been outlined how neoliberal policies have become the main force of urbanization, which has inevitably had its influence on the way architecture is practiced today.

In his essay ‘Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form’ Michael Hays proposes “a critical architecture, one resistant to the self-confirming, conciliatory operations of a dominant culture and yet irreducible to a purely formal structure disengaged from the contingencies of place and time” (Hays 1998, 15). In the same essay he states that, “the individual consciousness is a part of and is aware of the collective historical and social situation. Because of this awareness, the individual is not a mere product of the situation but is an historical and social actor in it. There is the choice and therefore the responsibility of a critical architecture” (1998, 27). This being an actor within our condition, once fully understood in all its far-reaching consequences, must lead to a re-claiming of political agency, as architects are concerned with imagining spatial worlds that will profoundly influence other people’s everyday life.

As Hays goes on, he proposes the architecture of Mies van der Rohe as critical architecture, in the sense that it sets itself apart from others. Even Hays attempt to define a critical architecture here is still largely concerned with “Architecture” as a cultural object as if the built object itself is the goal in man’s constant quest for development. Habermas defines the architectural movements of the 1980s, both postmodernism and deconstructivism as “literary movements” basing their discourse on either “visual historical” models like Philip Johnson or “abstract intellectual” models like Peter Eisenman (Bauer 1996, 21), the latter however being quite detached from reality. While the easily reproducible postmodernism ala Johnson proved extremely profitable to dress corporate identities of the 1980s and 1990s, the abstract intellectual models of Eisenman were often misinterpreted as critical architecture.

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Izabel Gass’s observed that “we live in a society where intellectuals have declined to publicly voice political opinion as citizens, regardless of their work in the ivory tower” (Gass 2007). This alone however is not enough, as Walter Benjamin reminded us that “before I ask: what is a work’s position vis-à-vis the production relations of its time, I should like to ask: what is its position within them” (Benjamin 1982).

This failure of taking a consistent critical stance, of being political let alone taking actions that are politically informed is the real crisis of our profession.

This is not a common position among architects, that are busy proclaiming like Zaha Hadid that “the sole responsibility of the avant-garde architect is to innovate. His or her work is a manifesto; its value transcends the immediate task of the building at hand. The responsibility of the mainstream architect is to adopt what can be adopted according to circumstance” (Hadid and Schumacher 2003).

There are also those that take a less self-indulged, pragmatist position in order to approach what some call a “projective practice” that can overcome the proclaimed incapacity of critical architecture to bring about change. For example Michael Speaks proposes to work within the possibilities of the free market ideology in order to innovate by ‘design intelligence,’ making use of the full extent of technology and not relying on given ideas or ideologies (Speaks 2003). Klaus-Jürgen Bauer argues that also in the European context we find these kinds of post-seventies practices that exchanged ideology for pragmatism, however approaching it from a very different angle. He argues in his dissertation that these practices take the everyday, the banal and the common as an inspiration for their actions within the possible, an approach that has a longer tradition in Europe, which he dates back to Adolf Loos. He sees Loos’s battle against the ornament as an ‘ethical principle’ that counteracts the Zeitgeist

of the aesthetical exterior and becomes an ‘index of culture,’ defining a paradigm for the 20th century (Bauer 1996, 42). The new pragmatic approach, he claims, is based on a renewed interest for unspectacular architectures, cheap materials and the simple details, subverting the avant-garde architecture of the ‘big discourses’ (Bauer 1996, 21). Bauer uses more specifically the work of Herzog & de Meuron as a case to exemplify his thesis. Little over a decade later however, once these practices successfully subverted avant-garde architecture to become part of the star-architect circle themselves, an assertion of banality in the work of Herzog & de Meuron that are realizing ever-more expressive buildings of ‘high architecture’, seems a bit out of place. The problem lies within the lack of ideology that, even though it might be pre-configured, can still guide architects in the way they approach their practice.

Responsibility of Architects

As touched on lightly above, the responsibility for architects and urbanists stems from not being a product of, but rather being a “historical and social actor” within our own urban condition. The profession has however a much stronger influence than most other professions might have in this regard, as it shapes part of our physical environment and thereby has a real impact on the everyday life of the cities inhabitants. Isabelle Doucet formulated her position on this issue very strongly, as the “duty to design” rather than the right to design, based on the professional expertise and specific education that architects can contribute to the making of the city.

To clarify this position, Edward Said’s writings on the intellectual are useful. He makes the distinction between the specific intellectual on the one side that is concerned with practical issues internal to practice, and the intellectual that “is endowed with a faculty of representing: … to as well as for a public” (Said 1994). The latter’s ‘raison d’etre’ is, according to Said, to “represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten”, based on universal principles (1994). On this definition of the intellectual, Roemer van Toorn builds his vi-

thesis - Towards a Unitary-Relational Urbanity - Phillip Lühl

The assumption hidden in naming Eisenman the father of a critical architecture ... is that there is somehow an equivalence between a political critique (as adumbrated by historians and theorists like Tafuri) and an aesthetic critique (as adumbrated by architects like Eisenman (Martin 2005).

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sion of the architect as ‘public intellectual,’ with the basic challenge of ‘knowing your enemy’ or ‘deciding which side you’re on’ (van Toorn 2007, 272), in other words the question of whom to represent, therefore becoming an ethical question. However it is also important to keep, at all times, a critical distance to the work and the conditions within which it is being realized, to not be ‘co-opted by governments or corporations’ (van Toorn 2007, 272), in other words to safeguard the autonomy of intellectual thinking.

As argued before, in contemporary times it is mostly money that is represented, which in itself has “has no principles and identity of its own” (Graafland 2006, 689) and obviously does not represent the ones routinely forgotten, but the very few that are at the helms of a neoliberal system.

Especially in the developing world where social inequalities are the most compelling and the need for architectural interventions and solutions is the highest, the importance of professionals that represent the side of the ones that are left out becomes more pressing. This is not easy to achieve as in those contexts highly educated professionals are nearly by definition part of the elites that service only the functioning core of those countries and disregard the conditions of the majorities that live in undignified environments.

combine the critical or analytic with the projective or speculative in order to become meaningful in the everyday life of people. Therefore a big part of regaining agency lies in utopian thinking in the sense that Hilde Heynen puts it as ”the most important aspect of the legacy of the Modern Movement: its capacity to criticize the status quo, and its courage to imagine a better world – and to start building it” (Heynen 2003). However, this task should not be reserved exclusively for architects and urbanists in a classical top-down operation, but should be a collective effort in cooperation with wider civil society, with social movements that represent people and processes in the urban field and that need to be orchestrated to become a meaningful force for revolution.

David Harvey argues that we can achieve this end by demanding our collective “right to the city”, which according to him is “not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire”, a claim that is based on the belief “that we change ourselves by changing our world and vice versa” (Harvey 2003, 939). The idea is thus not to revert to the “glorious” times of high modernism and the master architect that shaped our common world, it is rather to architects and urbanists as spatial interpreters of this constant change, to imagine urbanity based on collective action to recover collective rights of property and usufruct and not merely react to private market demands as the projective practice proposes.

Regaining Agency

Based on the formulation of a social or public responsibility of the architect and the urbanist above, only changing professional practice will make a difference. A critical practice should be strongly rooted in critical theory in order to “confront dogma and orthodoxy, rather than producing them” (van Toorn 2007, 272). However, Tafuri clearly defines the distinction between the architectural critic as someone that can historicize retrospectively by negative thinking and projective practices like architecture and urbanism, which imagine and design for the future and thus cannot be critical in their own right ( Jameson 1985). A critical practice must

In this sense the critical architect and urbanist is an essayist, someone that puts forward a hypothesis, a design or rather a counter-proposal, “an uncertain stab in the dark” as Graafland calls it (2006, 695) that can then only be evaluated retrospectively.

Analogous to utopias like Thomas Moore’s, that should be read as a critique to his contemporary condition rather than the spatial design for a perfect world, architectural and urban proposals can be read as a critique to the current condition as they might confront common ways of practicing. The architecture itself cannot be critical as it is, once realized, a constant factor in a continuously evolving and changing social condition.

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“To aim at the pacific equilibration of the city and its territory is not an alternative solution, but merely an anachronism” (Tafuri 1976, 173).

1. The main professional problem remains the integration of the two extreme models – the bottom-up forces of city dwellers and top-down planning by architects, urbanists and other public intellectuals - in ways that allow for maximum contribution by dwellers in order to arrive to a continuous negotiation that ensures a cohabitation based on social relations to people rather than to material things.

David Harvey argues that we can achieve this end by demanding our collective “right to the city”. It is not intended to revive participatory design as the banal interpretation of countless demands and wishes of individual dwellers by the architect, but rather the insertion of planning expertise into existing social movements or collaborations that have already identified collective goals. The involvement of the dweller in the making and workings of the city also counters alienation that may have many different causes as described by Simmel. These social relations will not and should not take the form of community relations of the town or village as they have been described in Part One. The aesthetics of this urbanity will emerge, merge and be reconfigured continuously as they should not follow a preconceived visual ideal, but rather reflect a dignified quality of life.

2. Social gathering as it is intended always implies centrality. Nevertheless, this does not forcefully mean the polarizing centrality of the capitalist metropolis, but rather multiple dispersed centralities on the scale of the neighbourhood that should be still identifiable by the dweller, taking into account his pedestrian horizon.

3. The role of the government (State) in the making of the city has to be strengthened again after decades of deregulation and privatization, as this is the closest to any form of broader collective organization

4. There needs to be a re-conception of the relation to land, not in the sense of defensible territory in absolute terms, but land as the basis for human habitation and sustain as well as part of an urban identity. This might be possible through the recovery of collective rights of property.

5. In the light of predictions on future world population growth, an increasing importance must be given to density. Only part of this conception of density is based on the necessity for nominal density of inhabitants per area, the more important aspect to density is that of “social exchanges” as architect Teddy Cruz defines it (Cruz 2007, 215).

This density of social interaction was undermined in the modernist city where density was calculated in statistical terms that totally failed to consider the value of social friction and spatially constricted open space in order for it to become public space.

6. Therefore, the street must be re-valued as a social condenser that can become elemental in a relational urbanity. Other than that there can be no formal architectural considerations or models, as the fact remains that the majority of the urban development is happening along informal lines and is constantly in flux.

7. Architectural models do not have to be re-invented as is implied so often by the so-called avantgarde, what needs to be reinvented is the way we collaborate and negotiate the making of our cities including as many different actors as possible including social movements and local governments.

A ‘Unitary Relational Urbanity’ is based on the involvement of the city dweller in the constant process of re-making the city. It relates the dwellers to the land as the basis of their existence while at the same time relating them to each other by increasing the density of human interaction in space. It does not conceive any spatial form other than that of the

thesis - Towards a Unitary-Relational Urbanity - Phillip Lühl

OUTLOOK: towards a Unitary-Relational Urbanity.

that exists. It further has to assure the distribution of collective wealth back into collective concerns and projects and to curb private profit-maximization in the name of social-interest development.

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street as a social condenser, a place of social friction that creates urbanity.

End Notes

[1] In 1989, the United Nations Brundtland Commission articulated what has now become a widely accepted definition of sustainability: “[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (www.wikipedia.org: sustainability).

[2] This quote comes from an unpublished essay by David Harvey called “On the deep Relevance of a certain Footnote in Marx’s Capital”, which he referred to as the introduction to a workshop he held in our Urban Asymmetries design studio in DSD, TU-Delft in February, 2008.

Works Consulted

Bauer, K.-J. (1996) Minima Aesthetica, Banalität als Strategische Subversion der Architektur. Fakultät Architektur, Stadt- und Regionalplanung. Weimar, Bauhaus - Universität Weimar.

Benjamin, W. (1982) ‘The Author as Producer’, in Victor Burgin. Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan, pp. 15-31.

Cacciari, M. (1993) Architecture and Nihilism: on the Philosophy of Modern Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Cruz, T. (2007) ‘Levittown Retrofitted’, in C. d.

Baan, J. Declerck and V. Patteeuw (eds.) Visionary Power. Rotterdam, NAi Publishers.

Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums. London: Verso.

Debord, G. and K. Knabb (1977) Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press.

Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.

Gass, I. (2007) ‘After Theory’, in Manifold.(no. 1): 27-37.

Graafland, A. (2006) ‘On Criticality’, in Arie Graafland and Leslie Kavanaugh (eds.) Crossover. Architecture, Urbanism, Technology. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. pp. 688--703.

Hadid, Z. and P. Schumacher (2003) ‘Manistreams

and Avant-gardes’, in Jennifer Sigler (ed.) Hunch, the Berlage Institute Report, no. 6/7. Amsterdam: Berlage Institute, pp. 225-9.

Harvey, D. (2003) ‘The Right to the City’, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27(4): 939-941.

-------- (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

-------- (2006). Spaces of Global Capitalism. London: Verso.

Hays, K. M. (1998) Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Heynen, H. (2003) ‘The Need for Utopian Thinking in Architecture’, in Jennifer Sigler (ed.) Hunch, the Berlage Institute Report no. 6/7 Amsterdam: Berlage Institute; pp. 241-3.

Jameson, F. (1985) ‘Architecture and the Critique of Ideology’ in Joan Oackman (ed.) Architecture, Criticism, Ideology. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 51-93.

Lang, P. (2003) ‘Suicidal Desires. Superstudio: Life Without Objects’, in Peter Lang and W. Menking (eds.) Superstudio: Life Without Objects. Milan; London: Skira; Thames & Hudson.

Lefebvre, H., E. Kofman, et al. (1996) Writings on Cities. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.

Martin, R. (2005) ‘Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism’, in Harvard Design Magazine (Number 22).

Natalini, A. (2003) Superstudio: The Middelburg Lectures. V. Byvanck. [Middelburg], De Vleeshal : Zeeuws Museum.

Riley, T. (2002) ‘The Changing of the Avant-garde: visionary architectural drawings from the Howard Gilman collection’, with contrib. by Terence Riley, et al. New York, Museum of Modern Art. Rossi, A. (1966) ‘De Architectuur van de Stad’, in Hilde Heynen (ed.) Dat is architectuur: sleutelteksten uit de twintigste eeuw. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

Said, E. W. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual: the 1993 Reith Lectures. New York, Pantheon Books.

Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of New Capitalism.

Cambridge: Yale University.

Simmel, G. (1903) ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’, in

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thesis - Towards a Unitary-Relational Urbanity - Phillip Lühl

Neil Leach (ed.) Rethinking Architecture: a Reader in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge.

Speaks, M. (2003) ‘Design Intelligence’, in Jennifer Sigler (ed.) Hunch, the Berlage Institute Report no.

6/7 Amsterdam: Berlage Institute, pp. 416-21.

Superstudio (1972) ‘Twelve cautionary Tales for Christmas: Premonitions of the Mystical Rebirth of Urbanism’, in Peter Lang and W. Menking (eds.)

Superstudio: Life Without Objects. Milan; London: Skira; Thames & Hudson.

Tafuri, M. (1976) Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Turner, W. (1976) ‘De Squatternederzetting: een architectuur die werkt’, in H. Heynen (ed) Dat is architectuur; sleutelteksten uit de twintigste eeuw.

Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. van Toorn, R. (2007) ‘Contesting Neoliberal Urbanization’, in Visionary Power. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

28

Essay Solidarity and the Informal Economy: The Case of Karachi Shirin jaffri

Introduction

In Karachi, Pakistan, the major part of the population lives in poor neighbourhoods; the estimates vary from 9 to 15 million people (Hasan 2006, 453). Many of them live in illegally built houses and is operative in the informal economic sector (2006, 454) Just like the formal economy, the informal economy plays a determining role in the ordering of human lives. [1] In times of an economic crisis the situation becomes even more acute: it drives more people from formal to the informal sector, as a result of which workers at the bottom of the economic ladder experience even greater competition.

One of the solutions for the informal economy comes from the German neo-Marxist Elmar Altvater. His concept of the ‘solidary economy’ urges grassroots organisations, comprising of workers from the informal economy, activists, academics etc., to develop initiatives that benefit themselves/ the poor. At the basis of this concept lies the view that governments are not competent enough to fully tackle urgent issues, and that bottom-up initiatives can anticipate upon, as they originate from, local problems. I will present this concept more extensively in the next paragraphs.

In the following paragraph I will argue that Altvater’s plea for a ‘solidary economy’ is indeed attractive but however is problematic as well for several reasons. I shall develop three aspects of this problematic more extensively: the solidary economy requires a more or less democratic cooperative political environment, the broad solidarity of the selforganizations could mean that the specific interests of a group become diluted due to competition of interests and because official recognition of the selforganisation and its claims is necessary.

Finally in paragraph three, I shall try to explore three possibilities for empowerment that are in the line of Altvater, but help overcome the stated problems. Possible solutions as complementary to the ‘solidary economy’ must take a multiplicity of factors into account: legal legislation, education, equal partitioning of energy, interventions by umbrella organisations, etc. [2] Four possible empowerment strategies are: facilitating people in acquiring skills and knowledge to function more effectively, unifying informal labour e.g. through collective purchasing, transportation and sales (as such not completely avoiding any form of competition as Altvater suggests), seeking alliances with other poorer groups instead of striving for isolation, and finally holding governments accountable for their responsibilities: the solutions must not just arise bottomup but must also be pursued by governments. This last point raises the question if this leads to ‘governmentality’: disciplining of the inhabitants in a neoliberal context. I will argue that this is not necessarily the case, at least not in the way Altvater thinks that it occurs.

Altvater’s Solidary Economy

Several solutions have been put forward to empower people from the informal sector. An interesting, but problematic solution (as I shall demonstrate in the next paragraph) comes from neo-marxist Altvater (2003). He has developed a critique on De Soto (2000). To understand Altvater’s solution for the informal sector we must first understand De Soto and Altvater’s critique on this.

The basis of De Soto’s view is that people in the informal economy own a fair amount of property but that they are unable to profit from it because

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… order comes back thanks to those techniques which Michel Foucault described as “technologies of the self ” … The counterpart of non-governability of modern cities is “governmentality” (gouvernementalite), i.e. the emergence of a mentality of the governed which allows the government (and its elitist allies) to govern the people. The dialectics of surveillance, punishment and a mentality of self-discipline … is a powerful basis of a “neoliberalism from below” … peoples organise their life by making use of even poor market chances, and by doing so they are following on a low and predominantly local or regional level the same logic of action which the elite and the big transnational actors apply on a higher and global scale. (Altvater 2003, 14-5) In other words Altvater states that De Soto does not present a real solution. Assuming the critique that De Soto defies the disadvantages of neo-liberalism with neo-liberalism is just, I shall develop a critique on Altvater’s use of Foucault’s term ‘governmentality’ when countering De Soto. I shall develop this in the paragraph ‘Possible solutions’. For now the observation that the solutions presented by De Soto simply result in more neo-liberalism is sufficient.

Fortunately Altvater accompanies his critique on De Soto with a solution for the problems of the informal economy: he presents the concept of the ‘solidary economy’. The solidary economy replaces competition for cooperation in the form of ‘self-organisations’: grassroots organisations comprising of occupants of illegal settlements, activists, universities etc. These self-organisations develop initiatives that benefit the poor.

The ‘solidary economy’ is... a choice of work and lifestyle, in which co-operation and solidarity are preferred to competition everyone against each other. It is a way of conceiving the world (Weltanschauung) that has been critical of capitalism in Brazil and everywhere else for the last two centuries. So it is not only a response to need – although that is the main point

On the other hand these initiatives on a local level must according to him be paired with ‘global regulations’ (think of trade treaties) because poverty, and therefore the informal existence, is rooted within the context of globalisation.

Though his solution therefore consists of two parts, Altvater strangely enough has much attention for the first part of his solutions, the self-organisations, but hardly addresses the second aspect, the global regulations. In my opinion Altvater justly criticises De Soto, but his own solution, in the form of the ‘solidary economy’, for the empowerment of people living in informality is problematic. I shall develop this argument in the following paragraph and indicate the aspects that make the solidary economy problematic.

Problematisation of Altvater’s Solidary Economy

In Karachi self-organisations exist that work in the line of Altvater’s solidary economy, e.g. in the form of the Urban Resource Center. The URC is an organisation comprising of occupants, academics etc.; it collects information, analyses urban development plans and lobbies (Hasan 2007, 277-8). This is partially successful: there is media attention for their situation and interaction (although very little) with politicians (2007, 287-8). However this grassroots organisation is also partially unsuccessful in achieving its aims: “The major constraint faced by the URC has been the power of the nexus of contractors, consultants, bureaucrats and politicians” (Hasan 2007, 288). In other words: self-organisations in Karachi, such as the URC, experience a lack of cooperation from financial and political strongholds. How does that rhyme with the solidary economy of Altvater?

In his elaborations on empowerment Altvater states that action must also be undertaken on the global scale: governments must work at poverty reduction, for instance, by making trade contracts more favourable for workers in the informal economy.

Here, I argue that Altvater does not sufficiently ad-

essay - Solidarity and the Informal Economy: The Case of Karachi - Shirin Jaffri

this has not been legalized. And once their ownership is recognised in legal documents, their property becomes an economic good. His solution thus boils down to formalising ‘illegal’ property. Altvater reacts to this: in a violent criticism on De Soto he argues that formalising the informal is a form of ‘governmentality’:

– it is also a choice... It also represents a new response by left-wing parties and unions, church members, Indians and small peasants to the demands for a better society, combining individual freedom, social and economic security with equality... (Paul Singer, unpublished manuscript, quoted in Altvater 2003, 18).

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dress the position of the State, which in the case of Pakistan is not democratic enough or willing to take measures (Altvater discusses the situation of Brazil, that is more democratic than Pakistan, not to mention some African dictatorships or anarchies).

The problematic of Altvater’s proposal is therefore the context in which self-organisations must operate: in unwilling political environments grassroots organisations can bring no (large) changes (2007, 289).[3] And this causes very basic problems for anyone wanting to develop economic activities even on a small scale: “The lack of mechanisms for business disputes resolution, low levels of education and awareness, and unstable energy supplies are the main operational obstacles to investment in Karachi. The uncertain law and order is a pervasive background factor (Qutub 2005) from abstract.

It is therefore very problematic that Altvater hardly addresses the states responsibilities. From a neoMarxist you would expect an underlining of the functioning of the state; the Pakistani government functions in service of the ‘haves’ instead of for all citizens. This creates strong oppositional forces, or at least: generates a malfunctioning, with which the informal sector cannot cope.

A second problem that I have with Altvater’s version of the solidary economy is the dire position of the self-organisations: instead of acting jointly they, due to poverty, have been forced to compete against each other. As such trade unions in Karachi hardly have any information, and in case that they do, they use it in order to not weaken their own position (2007, 289). At the level of communicating information with other organisations the specific interests of an organisation will become diluted in favour of public interests. That will be disadvantageous for e.g. women in Karachi: within the informal existence they stand at the bottom of the ladder, the result being that their specific interests can become diluted in favour of public interests of ‘the poor’.

Fighting poverty by developing grassroots initiatives therefore also has its disadvantages: it divides ‘the poor’ into separate groups who consequently view each other as competitors rather than as fellow-sufferers. An issue that stems from this problem becomes apparent in the example of the ‘cocinas populares’ or popular soup kitchens in economic

enterprises of women in Peru based entirely on the principles of solidary economy. “The turn-up [of the ‘cocinas populares’] is pretty good, and the experiment is considered to be extremely successful.

It has however, its downsides: … it fails to address deeper social problems such as the divide of income and opportunities of education and employment in the formal sectors for women in low-opportunity conditions” (Sohn 2008, email exchange) Such deeper social problems cannot be resolved without the government: that stipulates income distribution in e.g. the tax system. And can therefore also ensure that the poor are not subdivided into smaller groups that compete against each other; in fact the government can promote solidarity, and with that the solidary economy. Governments must be addressed on this responsibility.

The third point is that besides grassroots initiatives and government responsibility there must nevertheless, despite the critique on De Soto, be a partial formalisation: the URC and similar organisations cannot operate without official recognition of its plans at all governmental levels: “in addition, the URC recognizes a need to nurture and institutionalize the space that it has created for interaction between people, politicians and government planners and bureaucrats. This cannot take place without local government accepting the concept and then supporting it institutionally and financially (Hasan 2007, 291).

Altvater ignores this aspect of formalisation too easily. Thus, because he does not sufficiently involve the government, and does not recognise the competition of grassroots initiatives, his solidary economy partly lacks solidarity: in his version of the solidary economy there is no relation with other victims of the informal economy and neither with political institutions! He appears to assume that a number of people can unite and can improve their situation independently from their context. This tends towards an autonomy that is impossible due to the (reciprocal) dependence of groups of people, the government, institutes and the global economy. As such Altvater’s concept of the solidary economy seems slightly naive. It is however in its basis still a good starting point in seeking solutions for the disadvantages of the informal economy. But it must be complemented with potential solutions for the

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Potential Solutions

As mentioned above the concept of the solidary economy has a number of good starting points: people can achieve solidarity, informal sector workers possess agency, a striving towards economic security and equality must be the central issue, there is a critique on the negative aspects of capitalism etc. However the approach presented by Altvater requires supplementary views to become effective.

I shall present three potential solutions for the disadvantages of the informal economy to make the concept of the solidary economy operational.

A first exploratory solution is the setting up of central facilities for equipping people with skills and access to information, knowledge and training that enables them to perform effectively. These could be related to aspects of income generation, administration, planning and collaboration. Training and education are moreover crucial in preventing the intergenerational transfer of poverty. The government could be a partner in this.

Secondly it is possible for the workers in Karachi’s informal economy (self-employed in the handicraft and cleaning industry, for instance) to share their investments and business expenditures: sharing their purchasing and transport costs helps them benefit from economies of scale. This would strengthen their entrepreneurial position in relation to wholesalers and increase their profit margins. This deviates from Altvater’s idea of avoiding competition in every possible manner.

Thirdly, groups of people must form alliances with other informal economy workers. These groups must not experience or engage in competition with other poor groups: for this their position is too weak or could lead to the exclusion of another, even weaker group.

Finally, the government must also be addressed on its responsibilities. This for two reasons: it must avoid the focus on partial successes (such as the ‘cocinas populares’) at the cost of other groups and deeper social problems, and support is necessary in

the form of formalisation of citizen initiatives and results, cooperation with (government) institutions and measures on the global scale (trade treaties as quoted earlier).

The last point is an interesting point of discussion: is involving the government with grassroots initiatives a form of ‘governmentality’? As we have already read in the above paragraph Altvater’s ‘solidary economy’, he certainly thinks it is. He views De Soto’s formalisation of informal possessions a form of ‘governmentality’. I agree with Altvater’s critique that De Soto defies the disadvantages of neoliberalism with neoliberalism. But that does not make it ‘governmentality’ (at least: not as Altvater explains it). Altvater links governmentality to other Foucauldian concepts such as ‘surveillance’, ‘punishment’, ‘self-discipline’ and ‘mentality’.

The critique I have on this is that Foucault examines Western societies and discourses specifically, and that Altvater in no manner demonstrates how Foucault can be related to non-Western societies and modes of thought. To illustrate this with an example: Foucault’s use of the term ‘self-discipline’ is narrowly linked to (the inheritance of ) the Enlightenment. Control no longer takes place from outside the subject like in the Middle Ages (where God and the earthly dictator kept their subjects in harness) but gradually enters our thinking; morality becomes internalised instead of an externally imposed set rules (Foucault 1995). Foucault therefore localizes discourses both in history and in specifically Western societies. From my own experience I can state that Pakistani society is much more collective than any Western society. And collectivism tends to observe externally imposed rules, whereas individualism from Western societies actually brings a form of self-discipline in the Foucauldian sense.

If Foucault’s concept is specifically derived from contemporary Western thinking the question arises how Altvater can employ Foucault’s terms as a critique on De Soto: De Soto explicitly discusses nonWestern societies. Altvater indeed states that neoliberalism has global dimensions to it, but this only demonstrates that Altvater has hardly made Foucault’s concepts operational. What then, is according to Altvater the relation between neoliberalism (and: is there only one type of neoliberalism which

essay - Solidarity and the Informal Economy: The Case of Karachi - Shirin Jaffri

problems this concept addresses. I shall discuss these solutions as complementary to the concept of the solidary economy within the next paragraph.

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is the same worldwide?), culturally specific modes of thought, governmentality and the neo-Marxist primacy of the material? Altvater does not provide an answer to this (since he does not even pose the questions), as a result of which his use of Foucault is not very persuasive. An answer to these questions concerning the applicability and relevance of the Foucauldian view on the State - Society relationship in non-Western countries is necessary to solve the issues of informality and the informal economy in the twenty-first century.

Despite agreeing with Altvater’s critique on De Soto I question the manner in which he develops and executes this critique. De Soto employs neoliberalism as a remedy for neoliberal symptoms. The critique can however not be developed by employing Foucauldian concepts such as governmentality: these are specifically linked to the contemporary Western culture. To make them useful as a critique on De Soto, Altvater should have made them operational for a non-Western context.

If his use of Foucauldian terms is not persuasive (I do not say that it is not at all applicable, only Altvater does not make them operational in a nonWestern context!), how must we then assess De Soto? In my opinion the critique on the neoliberal attitude of De Soto is justified. De Soto defies the disadvantages of neoliberalism with neoliberalism.

Without pouring the critique in terms of governmentality, self-discipline etc. this is a strong comment on De Soto. But my critique is that De Soto makes formalisation the centre of reforms: formalisation is partly useful -and necessary in the case of the URC, as Hasan stated already (2007), but cannot be central in the solution. Formalisation is useful besides (and subordinate to) the primacy of the cooperation between community-based organisations and governments.

In short, although I agree with the basic idea of Altvater, namely that of facilitating solidarity between and among people, or activating the potential of poor, I consider his version of solidary economy insufficiently developed. For this reason I have presented four potential supplementary solutions: increasing the skills and knowledge of women, unifying their informal labour without entirely avoiding competition, forming alliances between groups of informal economy workers instead of striving for isolation and addressing governments on their responsibilities. My critique on Altvater must not be viewed as a rejection of his basic viewpoints, but as building upon his main conceptual points in the hope that an effective solidary economy can arise.

Only then the position of people in the informal economy can be improved.

Conclusion

End Notes

In Karachi several initiatives, such as the URC, can be termed self-organisations. Altvater’s concept of the solidary economy offers a guiding principle for these initiatives: he demonstrates the strength of grassroots organisations. However, I have formulated several points of critique on Altvater. Three points concern his conceptualisation of the solidary economy. The fourth point concerns the manner in which Altvater has formulated his critique on De Soto.

1. Altvater argues that, ‘the formal economy is providing positive gratifications for those who are working in it, the informal one is providing precarious jobs and insecure living conditions. Human security -– from public security to health- and food security, to education and shelter - is a real experience only for parts of the city, and not for all people concerned’ (Altvater 2003, 10).

2. These potential solutions are partly in the line of Qutub (2005).

3. This makes it possible to think that there could be room for an ‘umbrella’ of international nonprofit or non-government organizations, such as the United Nations. Altvater, however, does not mention this.

The problems concerning the solidary economy that I have identified are that Altvater has no answer to unwilling political contexts, that self-organisations are sometimes obliged to compete against each other, and that governments are necessary to officially recognise the needs of the people of the informal economy.

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Works Consulted

essay - Solidarity and the Informal Economy: The Case of Karachi - Shirin Jaffri

Altvater, E. (2003) ‘Globalisation and Informalisation of the Urban Space’, working paper, www.polwiss.fu-berlin.de/people/altvater/Altvater-informal.pdf (Last accessed: retrieved October 2008).

De Soto, H. (2000) The Mystery of Capital. Why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else. New York: Basic Books.

Foucault, M. (1995) Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London: Vintage.

-------- (1991) ‘Governmentality’, in Burchell, G., C. Gordon & P. Millers (eds.) The Foucault Effect.

Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hasan, A. (2002) ‘The changing nature of the informal sector in Karachi as a result of global restructuring and liberalization’, in Environment and Urbanization. Vol. 14, No. 1 2002: 69--78.

-------- (2006) ‘Orangi Pilot Project. The expansion of work beyond Orangi and the mapping of informal settlements and infrastructure’, in Environment and Urbanization. Vol.18, No. 2, 2006: 451--80.

-------- ‘The Urban Resource Centre, Karachi’, in Environment and Urbanization. Vol. 19, No. 1, 2007: 275--92.

ILO Employment Sector (2002) Women and Men in the Informal Economy: a statistical picture. Geneva: International Labour Office.

Qutub, S. (2005) ‘Karachi. A case of asymmetric inclusion in the current globalization?’ in Richardson, H. & Ch. Bae, (eds.) Globalization and Urban Development. Berlin: Springer.

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thesis Urban Malaise: The Relation between Space and Crime Idan zveibil

Introduction

The Theory of Crime: a very Brief Overview

This Thesis deals with the issue of how crime affects space, and departs from the hypothesis that there is a distinctive relation between space and crime, and that crime is socially, rather than individually located. By observing the development of the study of crime and how this development influenced crime itself, society and space I hope to achieve some understanding on the relation of the urban environment and the sensation of discomfort, investigating the causes, and focusing primarily on the relation between fear and society. This is traditionally the field of criminology, but it also plays a significant role within the urban realm, and thus, it holds implications for urbanism, architecture, politics and the economy. Hence, the main aim of this Thesis is to advance a sociological understanding of crime in its relation to space in order to answer a set of key questions that may reveal the relation between urban space in its various forms and crime. What is the relationship between fear, crime, control and space? What is the ecological study of crime? How is crime surveyed, presented, used and by whom?

What kinds of modification are available to prevent crime and what kind are they?

Crime is a socially and artificially constructed concept (Foucault 1977, 104) that has been a recurrent concern in human history. By simple definition it is the sum of all those actions deemed as ‘violations of criminal law’. Criminal laws are not fixed or permanent in any society. A good point of departure would be Plato’s Theories of Punishment where he discussed the concept of the prison system and the notion of punishment. His philosophies influenced the ways in which crime and punishment have been understood and approached in Western societies. During the Middle Ages, for example, the approach to crime was that punishment was publicly displayed as a strategy to instil fear and thus retain control over public behaviour. Infliction of punishment was used to exemplify the immediate consequence of the deviant action, more than the actual infliction of the punishment on the subject itself.

Although property speculation and speculation over vacant land have so far not been considered specifically as ‘crime’, the profit margin achieved in these ‘operations’ usually occurs under the auspice of corruption, and thus in detriment of the public.

In order to be able to present viable proposal of development it is crucial to become aware of the imminent reality and the need for a new method of planning. Society must reconsider criminal definitions in order to achieve the awareness required for transparent planning. To avoid possible exploitation of the citizen’s “right to the city” it needs to consider each party’s interest in a transparent manner.

Modern society, it is said, has taken a more “humane” approach and banished the exhibition or public displays of punishment. Punishment ceased to be a spectacle. However, “punishment became the most hidden part of the penal process. Punishment stopped to directly affect the body. The body only served as an instrument, if imprisoned, it is in order to deprive the individual of his liberty” (Foucault 1977, 11) Imprisonment, in other words, no longer punishes the offence, but instead attempts to control individuals by surveillance, to neutralize their dangerous state of mind and criminal tendencies, and ultimately to reinsert the offender into the frame of law and enforce re-adaptation to society.

The consequence of the humane approach towards crime is that “punishment leaves the domain of everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness. Its effectiveness is seen as a resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible inten-

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Spatial Relation to Crime

The studies of crime as a spatially organized phenomenon began at the late nineteenth century. But it is not until the Chicago School established a spatial relation to criminology that the link between urbanisation and crime was formulated within an ecological structure. By conceptualizing the interactions of inner-city life, and establishing an areabased theory of crime, they formulated models of urban crime and deviance in terms of ‘social disorganization’ and cultural transmission, as ‘part of experience or a property of social structure during periods of rapid change’ (Heidensohn 1989, 19). As a result crime was seen as a socially, not individually, located phenomenon. In spite of its over-simplification -‘not everyone in a criminal area need to be a criminal’ (Leas and Young 1984, 39)-, it nevertheless provided a framework as a structure on which

to build a more dynamic and complex model based on a significant number of complex interactions and negotiations between different groups and actors. They were thus able to condense the concepts of the city and city structure into schematic models, as shown in Figure 4.1. The outcome shows that “they have recognized the spatial conflicts in the inner city.” (1989, 19) They have produced fascinating organizing concepts, penetrating insights and useful tools of analysis. For example labelling areas in relations to the social status of its inhabitants or by the function of the city in that area. Beside this, the Chicago School provided the framework or structure from where to build a more dynamic and complex model. As Castells work exemplifies, it is possible to go from the Gold Coast and the slums to analyzing housing types and reconceptualising the inner city as an area of conflict. (Castells 1978) During the 1970s the spatial relation to crime was further developed. Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space studies the ecological factors of crime using Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). Newman analyzes the spatial forma-

Figure 4.1 ‘The Concentric (zonal) Circle Model’ [Burgess Model] (1925). Source: Chainey, Spencer (2005) GIS and Crime Mapping. UK: Wiley.

thesis - Urban Malaise: The Relation between Space and Crime - Idan Zveibil

sity. It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime” (1977, 9).

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tions that produce certain social disadvantages. He defines three principles, which explain how crime is made easy to commit and difficult to prevent: anonymity, lack of surveillance and the presence of alternative routes. His analysis of architectonic elements of inner cities results in the identification of four elements that contribute to the creation of secure environments: territorial definition where the residents adopt proprietary attitude to their living habitat, surveillance as ‘natural surveillance’ which is participating the resident himself by the positioning of windows towards the public spaces, building forms that avoid the stigma of peculiarity, locating residential developments in functionally sympathetic urban areas (Newman 1972, 14--5).

His empirical research and a scientific approach investigates why some spaces prone to crime and take this as a stepping-stone to propose design criteria for specific sociological behaviour, and to develop a design model to prevent crime.

“Designing-Out Crime”

Newman’s extensive survey focused on two adjacent neighbourhoods (Van Dyke and Brownsville) located in eastern Brooklyn, New York, characterized by their 1950s modernist typologies for low-income public housing. Newman focused on these neighbourhoods because of their close proximity to each other and their similar housing density (Brownsville was medium-rise and Van Dyke was high-rise).

He carefully analyzed the architectonic articulation of each typology in relation to data collected on criminal activity in each area, and looked at the relation of private and public domains and their relation to the residents. By constantly comparing high-rise and low-rise typologies, he assembled the information in a diagram that related the number of floors and frequency of crime, as seen by the dotted rising line in Figure 4.2. This diagram exposes the vulnerability of public space to crime and vandalism in its particular architectonic articulation, as lack of surveillance or inaccessibility. At the same time he presents information such as the age of victims, the number of times the assault repeated and in its precise location (in a public or private space) and its characteristics. He concluded that the highest crime rates were registered in six-level buildings or beyond the fourteenth floor. This did not mean that low-rise housing was not affected by criminal

Figure 4.2 Diagram showing building height and felony rate. Source: Newman, Oscar (1972) Defensible Space. New York: Macmillan. incidents.

His studies revealed three principles that explain the recurrence of crime and the difficulties to prevent it: anonymity, lack of surveillance and the presence of alternative routes. Newman’s conclusions may be understood as a relational scheme that illustrates territorial definition reinforced with surveillance.

His diagram showed an evolving hierarchy of defensible space that ascends from public to private, and illustrated how the understanding of the relation between private and public may assist in crime prevention. Starting from what could be called public, the sequence continues to a semi-public space, and from there, to a semi-private space that leads finally to fully private space. This sequence is used to better define space and allow people to identify their own private space and for others to distinguish what is public and what is private. This articulation of space permits the control over the space and thus its security. This scheme is also applicable for high-rise structures.

Newman also conducted a thorough analysis of the architectural articulation of residential structures,

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His findings have set guidelines for future preventive design techniques based on four main elements that contribute to the creation of secure environments: 1. Territorial definition (residents adopt proprietary attitude to their environment).

2. Surveillance as ‘natural surveillance’ (residents participate in surveillance from their windows- oriented to the public spaces).

3. Building forms that avoid the stigma of peculiarity.

4. Locating residential developments in functionally sympathetic urban areas.

Mapping Crime: Crime Monitoring for Control

Newman’s intentions when studying the relationship between crime and space were triggered by very different motivations than those, which traditionally support policing purposes. For Newman, this spatial analysis was based on the social structure in relation to physical space, and his main objective was to prevent crime. Contrary to this, the police develop these methods of mapping criminal patterns to locate clusters of crime, and thus their main function is to monitor and control. This brings the problem of the guiding intentions to the fore.

While Newman’s approach was clearly preventive and hinged on the design of space as a key factor to prevent crime from happening, the interest of police authorities is rather to locate and identify the ‘problem’ and intervene by applying the full force of control. Recent studies are however showing a growing interest within the official police authorities to incorporate urban design and planning as one more element in the ‘fight’ against crime. This points towards a willingness to consider prevention as a crucial aspect. Crime mapping has long been an important part of crime analysis, evolving from the static nineteenth century maps (usually with ‘pins’ attached to them) to complex interactive data representations today. Crime mapping is usually conducted within certain official departments (in charge of public safety), and usually these studies are intended to inform the approaches and interests of these instances. It is unimportant if it concerns

the demographic or police department; the fact that these studies are utilized within their boundaries.

Even if there is an intention to try to unite common interests and join forces among different authorities and instances the different techniques and the difficulty to correlate data produce technical problems.

This is especially true today with the use of raw digital data. To bridge this problem GIS programs have been designed to provide a more friendly system to accommodate all types of data, thus allowing a possible interchange of information. Even though this type of mapping is quite widespread today not enough instances are familiar with it and it is usually kept for professional use within government departments. The need for data integration is becoming more important for the better management of our society. “Local and State governments are finding that data gathered by one agency might be valuable to others. This is not surprising, given the baffling complexity of social problems, including crime. Social scientists have long recognized that social systems are in some ways like natural ecosystems… these and many more factors influence patterns of crime. It makes sense to give crime analysts access to the rich variety of data they need to help them answer the widely varied questions that come their way” (Harries 1999, 133).

It is crucial for a better understanding of the social conditions, labour relations, public relation and the political influences in relation to crime, and using mapping as a management tool through the observation of several issues such as ‘hot spot’ mapping, crime displacement and the implications of demographic change can conduct this. A good example for such an approach can be seen by the New York police department initiative of 1994 when New York City’s Computerized Statistics (ComStat) was introduced. Its objective is to increase the flow of information between police agencies executives and the commanders of operational units, with emphasis on flow of crime and the quality-of-life enforcement. This initiative has been very successful and has been implemented in many other cities.

The analysis of an area involves locating problematic zones referred to as ‘hot spots’: a condition indicating some sort of clustering in a spatial distribution.

Not all clusters are ‘hot spots’ because in addition to the environments in which crime is recurrent, the places where people actually are also tend to form

thesis - Urban Malaise: The Relation between Space and Crime - Idan Zveibil

whether buildings or entire blocks, and related this to a conception of fear as perceived by people beyond the context in question.

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clusters. Consequently in an area of higher density a higher amount of crime activity will most probably be registered as well. This can be deceiving and compromises the integrity of the analysis. In fact this is a major issue of debate that goes beyond the definition of hot spot and stretches to the debate between the distinction of spaces and places. Analysis might identify a “hot spot” but will fail when trying to define it. In spite of this possible pitfall, it is

Figure 4.3 ‘Auto burglaries and land use map’ (fragment). Source: Harries Keith (1999) Mapping Crime, Principle and Practice. Washington: NCJ. nevertheless possible to locate hot spots and understand high-risk probability area of crime activity.

Defensible Space and the Government

The concept of ‘crime prevention by design’ or CPTED is based on the premise that the proper

design and effective use of the built environment can reduce the recurrence of crime, decrease the fear of crime and improve the quality of life of residents ( Jeffery 1997). This premise is prominent in Jeffery’s work, which has been adopted by the US government and implemented in a variety of demonstration programs and pilot projects. This has resulted in a more eclectic use of the concept of CPTED, whose main guiding principle is that design for security should be unobtrusive and reinforce, rather than supplant, natural, informal processes of crime control (Ekbolm1995). These principles have been used in the redevelopment of several of the most notoriously crime-ridden subsidized public housing projects throughout the US. The US government’s interest in the theory began with Henry Cisneros, secretary of the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) signed the charter of the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) in 1996.

Significantly, this act represented the shared agenda between the New Urbanism and the HUD. Here, it may be useful to recall that the design principles of New Urbanism aim at organizing development into neighbourhoods that are diverse, compact, mixed-use, pedestrian oriented, and transit friendly (Bohl 2000). Soon after the signing of the charter, the principles of New Urbanism were applied to the Homeownership Zones Program and the HOPE VI Program.

In 2001 the American Planning Association published the book SafeScape (Zelinka 2001), which shows how certain urban designs can make neighbourhoods safer environments, an approach based on Newman’s Defensible Space. The APA often cites Newman’s known phrase ‘eyes on the street’, but this is a misinterpretation of Newman’s real concerns and motivations. Newman’s ‘eyes on the street’ clearly will not work unless the grounds around each dwelling are assigned to specific families (The Antiplanner 2007) and not through closed circuit television or CCTV as is commonly done.

It is clear that Newman based his security theory on personal attachment, a personal relation between the space and the tenant, and on the societal factor in the relation between space and crime. He claimed that property provokes feelings personal responsibility. A common mistake in the applications of Newman’s theory is that they exclusively regard physical structure and spatial organization in the construction of a model for secure spaces. The

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Illustrating in this are various recent examples of how New Urbanism (from now on NU) applies this misunderstood method of planning to prevent crime. Urban Design Associates, a firm affiliated to NU, for instance, apply the principles of Secured

by Design in their Diggs Town project, in their redefinition of what is public and what is private.

This they illustrate with “before and after” images of a site plan of a redevelopment scheme. Revealing in this is the British Operation Scorpion of 2003 and the study of police force officer Peter Knowles, which show how a survey of New Urbanism’s ‘defensible design’ disclosed that in areas, which had been designed under NU’s precepts had higher crime rates than those (re)designed under principles of defensible space. Originally commissioned to evaluate the cost benefit comparing the two approaches to spatial planning and architectural design, this survey nevertheless is also significant in that it highlights the raising interest of the police force and other authorities in the possible qualities of architecture and urban design.

Neither the New Urbanism nor CPTED can claim to prevent crime. With the evidence available to us, it is possible to claim that site design can reduce crime levels. (Cisneros 1995) In response to that I would argue that crime is displaced rather then reduced. Another weakness in CPTED is that not all types of crime can be prevented by design and planning, especially in premeditated acts, such as homicide or murder, as well as other, more ambiguous crimes such as rape. On the other hand, there is no proof that crime is inevitable.

Instead of restructuring physical environments it is possible to think that a different approach would harvest better results. It is not the built environment alone that is ‘responsible’ or accountable for criminal behaviour. It is society that defines what is deviant. Building a ‘community’ as NU attempts to do is enhancing class division. This sort of ‘community’ exists only in so far as it alienates other communities around it. Instead of whiffing up entire new communities, a better and satisfactory service provision should be made available to tenants and residents of ‘problem areas’ as this improves living standards and reduces inclinations to commit crimes. It is always more productive to prefer a healthy social mixture

to insure better distribution of politics. Contrary to this NU favours spatial form over and against social processes. But these preferences are not much different then their modernist predecessors. A more complete approach should analyze the site and the factors that cause the interference. It is crucial to understand the social situation in order to comprehend the reasons for which problems arise. Police survey of crime is still spatially oriented and usually tends to be a pinpoint on a map. There are not a lot of attempts to understand social processes in relation to crime. But the planners, either affiliated to NU or not, follow the same attitude. They do not conduct studies to understand the social problem or attempt to intervene with a process rather than a form. David Harvey explains that there is a need “to understand the urbanization as a group of fluid processes in a dialectical relation to spatial forms to which they give rise and which in return contain them… to promote a more ecologically sane mix of spatio-temporal production processes.” (Harvey 1997)

The Ecology of Fear: Social Control

In her compilation Architecture of Fear Nan Ellin unites perspectives that address social and urban transformations. The condition of fear and its influence on urban form is predominant in today’s urban environment. The fear factor has certainly grown, as indicated by the growth in locked car and house doors and security systems, the popularity of “gated” or “secure” communities for all ages and income groups, the increasing surveillance of public spaces, not to mention the unending reports of danger emitted by the mass media. (Ellin 1997, 25) It may be that “we” are to blame for the conditions of unsafe space, as Massumi puts it. (1993) Nevertheless, “we” need to challenge and question the forces that control and manipulate the powerless. Even if it still is very much “with us”, ideology no longer defines the global mode of functioning of power. “We don’t receive meanings as messages, the intensity (affect, effect) of media resonates.”

The affect, which figures in the mode of operation in governing, is fear. Massumi develops an intricate explanation to how fear and threat operate in the Bush-doctrine of preemptive action after 9/11 and the Iraq War (Massumi 2005). This highlights the asymmetries that are formed when political acts be-

thesis - Urban Malaise: The Relation between Space and Crime - Idan Zveibil

social process is neglected completely.

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come social behaviour. In Zizek’s words: With the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zerolevel of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today's subjectivity… the predominant version of ecology is the ecology of fear, fear of a catastrophe - human-made or natural - that may deeply perturb, destroy even, the human civilization, fear that pushes us to plan measures that would protect our safety. This ecology of fear has all the chances of developing into the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion: it takes over the old religion's fundamental function, that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits (2007).

The use of fear to manipulate public opinion for resolution of speculative schemes is often used for private gain. In Visions of Social Control Stan Cohen analyzes what he calls, ‘master patterns’ of the organized social control associated with the birth of the modern state. Cohen observed the parallel of ‘moral panic’; he suggested that media amplified deviance to the public, thus provoking exaggerated responses. (Cohen 1972) Guy Baeten in his essay ‘The Uses of Deprivation in the Neoliberal City’ claims that the Fox news is worried about the possible downfall of the western Christian city, and that this new item is an example of how the fate of the deprived urban neighbourhood is systematically misrepresented to serve peculiar political interests.

(BAVO - Baeten, 2007) It is a historical process that leads to a general common belief. The condition is thus defined by the general opinion. Arie Graafland puts it in a genuine manner when he explains that homelessness is a term that has been adopted by the media: around Christmas time the newspapers deal with the subject in great depth. In the USA “homelessness” is connected with real-estate speculation and gentrification. (Graafland 2000)

Crime of the Powerful

The powerful control the powerless by means of mass propaganda or by speculation. Being part of society in reach of the governing powers permits the manipulation of the law to serve their own in-

terests. Richard Quinney builds power into deviance-defining process by arguing that these are political acts. (Quinney 1973) The new criminology theory proposed by Quinney is simply explaining how the powerful control the powerless. This sort of deviancy is nothing else but crime. A crime that is so deceiving and cunning that it is kept almost unnoticeable. It is well integrated into the system’s niches and cracks of bureaucracy that sometimes it can even not be defined as crime. Liazos mentions, ‘deviance is treated as normal and not pathological, socially constructed, the very use of the term deviant acts as a ‘label’ setting both the subject and the subject matter apart. Political deviance is thus ignored or misconstructed and crimes of the powerful are not considered.’ (Liazos 1972). This is only strengthen by Kinsey’s statement ‘in the inner cities crime is a social problem, second only to unemployment. It is a problem of the poor, the weak and the vulnerable.’ (Kinsey 1986) How can these citizens afford to even consider spatial reorganization, in fact not even the state can afford to alter their spatial habitat?

Property Speculation

The control methods and social conception of crime are also common in the decaying inner cities, where white-collar crimes are the predominant type of deviancy. Compared to local juvenile criminal acts of vandalism, or even ‘common’ criminality, these crimes have a much broader impact on society, the economy and the city. The extent of these crimes is unknown but is estimated into the billions of dollars. According to the FBI it costs the United States over 300 billion dollars a year. (FBI 2009) The figures are not easy to monitor for the nature of the crimes. Property speculation is a white-collar crime, which has a direct impact on urbanity. It is not easy to represent the social relations among landlords and between landlords and tenants, revealing that these significantly limit the ability of metropolitan rental market to respond freely to changes in the supply of such housing. (Gilderbloom 1987) An alarming figure is presented in studies of property ownership in different cities across the US. The findings show that fewer than 50 owners typically account for over half the rental housing stock. In addition in some cases two of the largest owners account for more than 80% of all units. A multiple

regression analysis determined that the greater the concentration of ownership in a suburban market area, the higher the rent. That is, a relatively small number of owners may raise prices in order to increase total revenues. (Gilderbloom 1987, 263) In other cases landowners keep land out of use, waiting for a higher price, people who wish to use the land must resort to poorer land, because the price asked for better lands is more then they can pay.

This creates an artificial scarcity of land throughout the economy, and forces wages down. Inner city gentrification process is practically made possible by speculators In 2006 Scott Stringer, president of the New York Office, in collaboration with the Picture the Homeless group carried out a research on Manhattan’s vacant properties. The ‘No Vacancy’ report found that 492 million square feet of residentially zoned land was held off the market by speculators (Stringer 2007). The gentrifying process can be seen not only in already gentrified cities but in other cities as well.

Local government keeps vacant property taxation at a low rate. As a scarcity condition arises, landowners still make a profit from an annual increase of their property value, much higher then the fine tax they need to pay for having the property empty.

The government’s attitude not only encourages such speculation. It actually benefits from it: a the appeal or desirability of certain areas increases, this attracts more investors and new residents. Under the supposition of giving the local economy a boost through higher and more competitive consumption, this nonetheless comes at the cost of former citizens who no longer can afford living at such rent prices and living expenses. This creates social segregation and benefits only the higher segments (elite) of society.

The Scars from Speculations

In the 1960s cities throughout the United States had started to be gentrified as the white property owners and residents fled to the suburbs. This, among other things, was the result of long-standing reorganizations of real estate interests of the Federal Housing Program, resulting in the systematic exclusion of black and other minorities from suburbs. Among

these groups were the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the National Association of Lumber Dealers and the Producer Dealers (which represented powerful materials interests).

This lobby, which rose from Federal involvement at the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, had as its principal objective the moulding of federal housing programs to their own advantage (Thabit 2003). The national organization had set a series of real estate courses in universities across the nation to intensify the white preference. As early as 1935 the FHA (Federal Housing Administration) issued the Underwriting Manual, which guaranteed mortgage insurance only for segregated developments.

As a result, black were excluded from the suburban boom. White exclusivity was the device with which they lured the affluent to the suburb. The railroad companies encouraged this as railroads were all ready and needed commuters, and the same was for the automobile companies. The black population on the other hand had less residential options and had to settle with what it found available, usually very poor living conditions in the inner city. Violence caused from social conflicts that led to criminal activity grew in the area. The banks red lined the area. Tenement s landlords could neither reinforce nor sell their building to legitimate buyers. Many started harassing white tenants out in order to get rent increase from black tenants. Re-parcelling the units to achieve higher number of tenants for additional profit. This made it possible for blockbusters and speculators to work on the fears and prejudices of white owners to sell. Agents deliberately were moving black families into a block and moving them from one block to another to scare off white owners. The agent appeared offering quick cash, enough to pay the down payment on house in a safer area in the suburb developments. Then reselling to a black owner for a major profit.

There were attempts to solve this problem and to prevent ghettoization. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson issued an executive order directed to all big cities in the US with the intention to solve social (and obviously also racial) segregation by opening occupancy in white areas to minority people. This act, however, was unsuccessful and the FHA con-

thesis - Urban Malaise: The Relation between Space and Crime - Idan Zveibil

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tinued encouraging white families to move to the suburbs. This made it possible for speculators to practically ‘rape’ impoverished urban areas and milk black families dry. Other attempts also tried to set a limit on the poor by setting a minimum percentage on black occupancy to prevent projects from “going all black”. These proposals and solutions were heavily criticized and never got implemented.

The Empty City: the Safest Space

The failure of these measures and proposals were blocked by public opinion. Taking advantage of this, and spinning the situation even further, the FHA and its profitable scheme continued for decades before it started being really profitable. By obtaining powerful position and influence on the government, for instance, and by issuing legislations and regulations that aimed at keeping people in general from making profit, it was thought that social cohesion would be maintained. Nevertheless, the profit margin was so high that even regulation set to control such speculation from happening was futile. In some cases the monopoly is caused by speculative vacancies, simply leaving properties empty thus reducing availability, manipulating the property value and push up prices for the average person. This, although not directly so does push individuals to consider and engage in criminal acts just to put food on the table. Speculative holding of unbuilt lots and speculation on vacant land and vacancies can create ‘Engel’s style’ monopoly rent. Thus rent theory suggests there may be effects on class and intra-class conflicts. Urban condition as result of this sort of speculations causes suburban heaven of a time to transform into a ghetto in another. Social processes are not considered in the studies of crime in relation to space. And as a result these manifestation of crime are not noticed and taken in consideration in the research and planning process. The process of personal gain and profit of those in power must be considered and analyzed. If these sort of speculative acts could be regarded as acts of crime it would be possible to monitor the real development of the space. It would be also possible to avoid situation in which citizens are deprived from their rights.

Consciousness, Ethics and Design

One imperative issue is to comprehend that the relation between space and crime -in all its levels- is dependant on the specificities of context and process. How a minority is observed in order to locate ethnic groups and determine the overall degree of ethnical diversity as well as understanding what are their institutions and facilities, for instance, may show the relation between crime and ethnic group that leads to a conclusion, which explains how a simple ‘linguistic’ problem can cause misunderstanding in addition to the fact that each group’s perceptions of what is legal or illegal can be different from the local norm.

A more complete approach should strive at a better understanding of the social and processual situations involved in each case. The use of different data collected for a host of disciplines, such demographic statistics and crime rates, could provide a wider view on various situations. By superimposing such data of different categories reveal new or hidden circumstances explaining a situation from a different point of view, for instance, or the combination of data from different regional entities as a way to produce knowledge based on a wider scope of additional information. This arguably will also allow more appropriate interpretations of the relation between acts of deviance and criminality within high levels of society and its reflection on the built environment. The persistence of the problem of ‘spatially’ motivated crime at all levels, however, points to the difficulty for planners and architects to visualize the processes that cause undesirable social behaviour, and to represent this in a map. This is paralleled with the fact that until now surveillance (policing) is still very much spatially oriented. It is imperative to explore alternatives to represent situations and processes from the conventional angle, namely from a perspective that focuses on “problem” sectors -the poor, the marginal, the deviant- as well as high into the power-structure, revealing cases of speculation and high-notch corruption cases. Without understanding the correlations exposed in this Thesis, satisfactory proposals that address the social and reveal possible strategies and processes for improvement, will be virtually

impossible. A satisfactory solution, or proposal towards it, should not be misunderstood or reduced to a “before-after” type of image where improvement is not more than a two dimensional fiction, as the case of communities designed under precepts of NU shows. The task is not simple, and the process will be lengthy and problematic. But it is up to our generation to find productive levels of communication across all actors of society that manages to transcend a class-structure and effectively modify and influence the power-relations that produce the built environment.

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Newman, Oscar (1972) Defensible Space. New York: Macmillan.

Operation Scorpion (2003) ‘Bedfordshire Prime Crime - Designing Out Crime – The Cost of Policing New Urbanism’ in American Dream Coalition http://www.americandreamcoalition.org Power, Anne (1987) Power Before People. London: Allen and Unwin.

Quinney, Richard (1973) ‘Crime, Control and Capitalist Society’, in Criminology, vol. 8. No. 1: 74-99 Stringer, Scott (2007) M. Office of Borough.

See: http://www.mbpo.org/uploads/NO%20VACANCY.pdf Thabit, Walter (2003) How East New York Became a Ghetto. New York: New York University Press.

The Antiplanner (2007) ‘New Urbanism and Crime’ in http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=66 Zelinka, Al & Brennan, Dean (2001) SafeScape: Creating Safer, More Livable Communities Through Planning and Design. Chicago: American Planning Association.

Zizek Slavoj (2007) ‘Censorship Today’, in http:// www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm

thesis - Urban Malaise: The Relation between Space and Crime - Idan Zveibil

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DSD URBANASYMMETRIES mexico city

The DSD Urban Asymmetries is a research and design project that unites inquiries on contemporary urban conditions under a collaborative framework.

Its main objective is to understand the processes and conditions that produce uneven urban development -or urban asymmetries- from a critical perspective.

In this year’s first graduation studio we explore the

contemporary situation of two Latin American capital cities considered epitomes and ‘laboratories’ of neoliberal capitalism: Mexico City and Santiago de Chile. Based on a critical analysis of the historical and politico-economic processes that shaped these cities from their foundation to the present the studio indentifies the material consequences of the advancement of the neoliberal model on the produc-

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Santiago de chile

tion of the urban: the dissolution of social housing, the prevalence of low density, uniform peri-urban sprawl, and the erosion of urbanity. The critique of the studio argues that this form of urbanization generates social-spatial and ‘class’ polarization, thus reflecting unbalanced power relations between the makers of the city and its dwellers.

Focusing on one specific site in both cities, the stu-

dio searches latent socio-spatial potentials within these areas, which may guide the redefinition of housing modalities as the engine to generate better urbanities and improve current material relations.

Based on a set of ‘unitary urban strategies’ the studio departs from collective counter-proposals to each site as the locust for relational architectural and urban interventions.

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URBAN UNITIES ECATEPEC, mexico city

Ecatepec, Mexico City presents the challenge of uniform, low-density peri-urban sprawl in the form of privately developed gated communities for the lower income groups. The main objective of this project is to propose alternatives to low-income housing, amplifying local skills and cultural consciousness, facilitating autonomy through local production and trade, as well as creating the possibilities of political manifestation through the strengthening of communal facilities.

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LA Victoria, Santiago de chile

La Victoria, Santiago presents the challenge of socio-spatial vulnerability. This centrally located community functions as an urban enclave characterized by its strong sense of identity, its selfsustaining ‘subversive’ processes and its subtle, but sophisticated mechanisms of self-preservation. The main objective of this project is to strengthen the position of this site within its urban context by applying a set of integrated, relational strategies that emphasize connectivity, density, public space and local modes of production.

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ecatepec - mexico city URBAN UNITIES

Model

production Water agriculture intervention Agriculture

0

500 1000

1500 km

Areas of intervention

A Unitary-Relational Urbanism is based on the involvement of the city dweller in the constant process of (re) making the city. It relates the dwellers to the land as the basis of their existence while at the same time relating them to each other by increasing the density of human interaction in space.

The conditions in the city are a glimpse to a very poor future. This is valid not only for this particular municipality, but for any megalopolis. It is simply an example of bad urban developments. The urban plan for Ecatepec is a unitary urban strategy which enables the reorganization of the city. The strategy follows three main themes that allow the formation

of a counter proposal for the existing devastating form of urbanity. The themes address environmenWater agriculture tal issues in combination with densification and Agriculture production in a methodological analysis of all the existing factors which form and constitute the city 1500 km 0 500 1000 and the everyday life in it. This is why our main point of study is informality, where the asymmetries are brutal and confronting nature. The proposal of a Unitarian Urban Plan which envisions and makes actual feasible alternatives possible, a programmatic strategy that takes into consideration all these highly dynamic environments and their potential.

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A UNITARY-RELATIONAL URBANISM

Intervention model.

Unitarian strategy

The urban program gives general directions and a series of programmatic interventions which are closely interconnected and related in order to provide a cohesive and feasible system of strategies. The projective plan of the Unitarian Urban Strategy is further developed into Unitary-Relational Urbanism, in the three main layers and in the relations between them. In the bottom page the intervention are signed in red: additions, modifications and alterations, are united together and generalized in order to provide rules and an interventional guideline. The generic section through the Ecatepec is cutting transversally the problematic and present-

ing an approach towards alternative proposals that re organize, rehabilitate and re qualify the urban image and the social integration of its inhabitants.

As explained in the theoretical base as introduction, the counter proposal we offer is aimed to oppose the current uneven geographical development, for the creation of an efficient and more socially oriented urban development.

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SEC

TION

wastelands

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MAKING WASTELANDS PRODUCTIVE The project focuses on the use of urban voids created throughout the city, caused partly by the uneven – or asymmetrical development of the city and partly by the disjointed policies between the municipality and the state, leaving huge portions of land leftover in the proximity of big scale infrastructure elements such as power lines or highways.

In these urban voids we propose to enhance the local means of production in strong relationship with new housing units, as an alternative for mono-functional planning of the current profit driven developments of the area. The main intension is to reduce dependency on the city centralities and to create an alternative for the alienation within the contemporary urban condition, caused by consumerism and division of labour.

A cooperative structure will bring together different initiatives for local production (which are already emerging on site) consisting of urban agriculture and small scale workshops – like workshops for crafts, car repair etc. – in order to provide the condition for a strong sense of community and the ability to recycle profits back into the community.

These profits are, with support from municipal funds and state funds, invested in housing for the members of this cooperative. By using the leftover spaces next to a highway the architectural intervention will also connect and interweave the urban fabrics of the surrounding neighbourhoods dislocated by this highway.

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RECONNECTING THE SOCIAL The area of intervention is on the border of two urban fabrics juxtaposed to each other. The first model is composed of self-evolved, low-rise private housing within a planned grid. The second model is a recent, equally low-rise but uniform and serialized gated community development by a large-scale private development company. This model is becoming the usual form of urbanization of the still untouched land in the peripheries of the city. The two urban fabrics are separated by a concrete wall as the spatial manifestation of existing social inequality and segregation. This division also causes problems of mobility of public and private transportation as well as limiting economic and productive activities on both sides; it prevents normal urban life in general.

The main aim of the intervention is to enable the interaction and social exchange between these two separated spaces, improving the urban quality of both. Among other strategies the main focus is encouraging the process of densification.

The current process of densification of existing housing is similar on both sides. Addition of levels or occupation of adjacent free spaces happens when the demand for space increases with the growth

of families or for commercial purposes. The main characteristic of this kind of densification is that it is uncontrolled and based solely on private initiative.

Three strategies of densification are proposed: Fig. 1 - Possibility for a collective initiative of local inhabitants to densify their houses provided with legal status and professional expertise. Fig. 2 - Option for cooperative initiatives of building on unused plots of land. Fig. 3 - Mechanisms of big scale projects with the aims of densification of entire urban blocks. The strategies imply public – private collaboration, creating alternative schemes for financing the initiatives, promoting mixed ownership models for land, housing and commercial spaces as well as securing housing for the low income population.

The strategies are not site specific but are addressing the very generic problems of the peripheries: the economic and political dependence on the city center. Increasing density does not mean just increasing built floor area or population per certain area, but increasing the density of social exchange, which implies more locally based commercial and productive activity, less dependence on centralities and better quality of everyday life.

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Fig 1

SEC

Fig 2

TIO

N

C

B

Fig 3

A

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Proposing alternative urbanities The wasteland in between the Las Americas gated community and the dried-out Lake Caracol is zoned for industrial use as in its current condition, it is not fit for housing developments due to soil and dust pollution (fig 1). The proposal is to improve the environmental condition by making the 900 ha former lake productive through water-based agriculture with related processing facilities along its border (fig. 3, A). The proposed agricultural model is based on chinampas, a pre-Hispanic agricultural system with productive fields within a large body of water, which is still practiced in contemporary Mexico City.

This will allow to urbanize the wasteland in order to propose an alternative model for urbanization with 14 000 units, approximately the same as Las Americas (fig 2). The aim of the architectural design proposal is to develop a new model for urbanization that will counter previously mentioned

urban problematics, based on higher urban density, meaning not only volumetric built density, but also mixed functions, less open space and rather more usable public space which will ultimately lead to an increase in density of social relations. Specifically, housing typologies will be developed that relate closely to the production and processing project mentioned above as well as other small-scale commercial activities (fig. 3, B).

Seeing the low density and the mono-functionality of Las Americas, densification and introduction of new planned land uses within its suburban fabric becomes a key strategy. As the priority given to cars is what provides this low density, the proposal is to invade excessive public space of roads through the addition of housing as well as commercial functions (fig. 3, C). The final objective is to link the existing suburban fabric to the new mid-high density urban development that is proposed above.

Fig 4. COMPARED DENSITIES. Above we can see a comparison of the density of Las Américas (left), Jardín de Morelos (center) and the preliminary proposal (right), considering a plot of fabric of roughly the same size. The factors to compare these densities are the ones used in “Spacemate: The Spatial Logic of Urban Density” (Per Haupt, Delft University Press, 2005). Floor Space Index (FSI) is defined as the quotient of built area and the total area; Groundfloor Space Index (GSI) the quotient of the footprint area and the total area, Open Space Ratio (OSR) the quotient of built area and the open groundfloor area. Layers (L) is the quotient of built area and its footprint.

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la victoria - santiago de chile urban unities

La Victoria, Santiago de Chile 1:15000 La Victoria is situated at the threshold of three different urbanities. The settlement comprises of lowrise privately owned dwellings situated on a grid structure of plots measuring 8 by 16 meters. The 4 lane intercity ring Avenida Departemental marks the edge of the settlement to the south. On the west the railway line on the Avenida Maipu forms a barrier to Lo Valledor (Santiago de Chile’s largest meat and agricultural wholesale market that services 80%

of the metropolitan region)1 and its adjacent social housing area. The low-income neighbourhoods of San Joaquin and Lo Valledor (north and west respectively) comprise of mid-density privately owned residential building blocks placed on poorly articulated open spaces. The buildings and public space lack maintainance and its inhabitants experience lower levels of attachment to their environment as compared to La Victoria.

Contreras, C. ‘Landscapes of waste’. Universidad Católica de Chile (lecture November 24th, 2008) 1

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Self-organisation and auto-construction La Victoria (victory) was the first organized massive land seizure in Latin America. The seizure withstood initial eviction efforts by public forces and the inhabitants received land ownership. This settlement pattern makes La Victoria incomparable to other poverty areas in Latin America such as ‘favelas’ and ‘callampas’. The construction of the settlement was entirely selforganized; the use of basic building materials and construction techniques give the neighbourhood a distinct appearance.

Social structures The appropriation of territory and rejection of external authorities within the self-controlled spaces enforced a sense of belonging of residents to their neighbourhood; the settlement is built upon extensive matriarchal neighbourhood nets and the use of the streets for private festivities is not uncommon. The settlements creation of a non-state power has also effectively isolated the neighbourhood within the distict and is one of the causes of its current low land-values.

Borders and barriers Major infrastructural axes around La Victoria reinforce its isolated status within the distict. However the borders, through their uses, can also be viewed as the potential to ‘re-connect’ the neighbourhood to the district and metropolitan scale.

Markets Twice a week two streets in La Victoria are used as markets. Its visitors are not only ‘locals’ of La Victoria, but also inhabitants of the surrounding communes.

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Site analysis la victoria - santiago de chile

Internal urban facilities and accessibility to surrounding urban facilities In the metropolis of Santiago the co-existence of electronic toll highways (connecting the Central Business District to other sub-centralities) and a public transportation system, used by the high- and low-income groups respectively has, despite the spatial proximity among groups furthur manifested the social differences within the city.2 The municipality of Pedro Aguirre Cerda (in which

La Victoria is located) is however characterized by relatively more heterogenity; small-scale commercial functions and urban facilities are located in primarily residential typologies. There is no ‘centre’ or homogenous zone of commercial activity.

Large-scale urban facilities located in the vicinity of the municipality are well accessible by car; however car possession in this municipality is as low as 0,145 car/inh.3

Burgess, R. “Technological determinism and urban fragmentation: a critical analysis”. Oxford Brookes University. P: 5 3 PAC communa, http://www.pedroaguirrecerda.cl (accessed April 20th, 2009).

2

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Discontinuity The district Pedro Aguirre Cerda is enclosed by large scale infrastructures that provide good car accessibility, but at the same time cause large barriers of discontinuity in the urban fabric and therefore weaken connections with neighbouring districts.

Within the district the same happens on the scale of the neighbourhoods. Different morphological configurations of the neighbourhoods create an irregular patchwork that leads to discontinuity of the fabric at the borders, where often the more important infrastructural roads are located. The neighbour-

hood La Victoria has internally hardly any discontinuities, which makes it in its interior a very ‘fluid’ area. However, this continuity stops at the edges of the neighbourhood where almost every street runs against an ‘urban wall’. These slight jumps between the street patterns do not really cause a big connectivity problem in the sense of access, but rather one in the sense visual flow. The discontinuity clearly marks the borders of the area which emphasizes the exceptional (and stigmatized) status of La Victoria.

Border strips The urban fabrics of the different neighbourhoods of Pedro Aguirre Cerda are poorly intergrated.

Changes in morphology, street patterns and building typologies emphasize the discontinuity in the area and the differences between the neighbourhoods that result in the ‘island effect’. La Victoria is a good example of such an ‘island’; interventions on the borders of these neighbourhoods shall allow for a greater permeability of the spatial divide.

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Local modes of production The Avenida 30 Octubre [see model-nr.1] is an important east-west oriented street in La Victoria. (Informal) local shops and small bars are located on street corners. The many murals built by the community give a sense of place and belonging.

Social housing West of La Victoria lies the social housing area of Lo Valledor isolated by large infrastructures as well as the Lo Valledor market on the north [see model-nr.2]. The neighbourhood suffers from dilapidated housing quality and a lack of spatial and social integration with its surrounding neighbourhoods.

Public space The streets of La Victoria –the predominant public space- represent the social cohesion within the community. It is the space where people organise markets and assemblies and where the murals show the political history of the settlement. The park along the railway line is the one of the scarce larger open spaces in La Victoria [see model-nr.3].

Derelict space San Joaquin, the social housing area north of La Victoria, is characterized by a modernistic layout of residential building blocks placed on poorly articulated open spaces; these open spaces lack maintanence and are underused. The inhabitants of the San Joaquin experience lower levels of security [see model-nr. 6].

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N 1 3

2

7 4 6

5

1. Interventions along 30 de October to strengthen its character as a main commercial street 2. Improvement of the housing stock in south Lo Valledor 3. Improvement of existing parkland along Vila Sur and introduction of public functions 4. Establishment of better transit connections North-South 5. Connection made between 2 de Abril and Ave. Maipu to facilitate neighbourhood integration 6. Infill within San Joaquin building fabric to utilize underused open spaces north of La Victoria 7. Interventions along 2 de Abril to strengthen the street presence of the building fabric to the north

connectivity layer

ENTAL AVENIDA DEPARTAM

E

2 5 5

ENTAL AVENIDA DEPARTAM

3

BLES CLOTARIO

T AVENIDA

T AVENIDA

T AVENIDA

ENTAL AVENIDA DEPARTAM

BLES CLOTARIO

ENTAL AVENIDA DEPARTAM

T AVENIDA

T AVENIDA

AVENIDA

4

1

(1) Maintaining good internal connectivity (2) Railway Crossing (3) Road Crossins (4) Morphological permiation (5) Internal reconfiguration

T AVENIDA

T AVEN

ARIO BLES IDA CLOT

T AVENIDA

T AVENIDA

T AVENIDA

T AVENIDA

ARIO BLES IDA CLOT

BLES CLOTARIO

BLES CLOTARIO

BLES CLOTARIO

BLES CLOTARIO

BLES CLOTARIO

BLES CLOTARIO

BLES CLOTARIO

T AVEN

T AVENIDA

BLES CLOTARIO

BLES CLOTARIO

AVENIDA DEPARTAM

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N

Desired Connected Area Masterplan Boundary Existing Connected Areas Railway Desired Connections Neighbourhood boundaries Main Streets AVENIDAGALOGO Connectivity strategies 1 Railway Crossing Pedestrian Railway Crossing Intervention References Urban Walls Dead-End Streets Junctions Interventions

Strategy Infrastructural and morphological connections will improve La Victoria’s economic and social exchange. and its spatial integration with neighbouring areas. Crossings of the railroad and large roads create a permeation of barriers. Improvements of internal road structure connects neighbourhoods.

Interventions Improvements on connectivity are gained by subtle interventions in the morphological structure of La Victoria and San Joaqim. The railroad is a physical barrier between Lo Valledor (and further) and La Victoria. In order to improve connections between these two, we propose an additional crossing in the continuation of Avenida 30 Octubre, thus physically connecting the Lo Valledor social housing area and La Victoria.

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Density layer

(1) Open space, low density (2) Renovation (3) Additions, sectional adjustments (4) Redistribution (5) Building New

Neighbourhood Boundaries Masterplan Boundary Maintainance of Existing, Densification Border Redevelopment for commercial uses Construction Additions, Reconstructions, Concentration Maintaining Existing Railway Public Space Maintainance Context underpinings Strategy Reference Building Footprints Interventions Main Streets

Strategy Infrastructural and morphological connections will improve La Victoria’s economic and social exchange. and its spatial integration with neighbouring areas. Crossings of the railroad and large roads create a permeation of barriers. Improvements of internal road structure connects neighbourhoods.

1 AVENIDAGALOGO

Interventions Improvements on connectivity are gained by subtle interventions in the morphological structure of La Victoria and San Joaqim. The railroad is a physical barrier between Lo Valledor (and further) and La Victoria. In order to improve connections between these two, we propose an additional crossing in the continuation of Avenida 30 Octubre, thus physically connecting the Lo Valledor social housing area and La Victoria.

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modes of production layer

(1) Gas production (2) Self sufficiency (3) Commercial permiation (4) Site specific production modes (5) Creation of new modes

Neighbourhood Boundaries Masterplan Boundary No modes of Production Border Redevelopment for commercial uses Railway Commercialization, Redevelopment, Addition Commercial uses Selfsufficiency Context underpinings Organic Waste Collection Routes Gas Supply Light Commercialization Strategy Reference Gas Production Interventions

Strategy Improved spatial conditions, via new physical connections and morphological transformations, facilitate and enhance the development of local modes of production. Small-scale interventions are placed along the borders and main arteries of La Victoria. New self-sustainable programs will build upon its strong social cohesion of the community and improve its economic position.

1

Interventions On the Avenida 2 de Abril we introduce new building typologies that combine living and working. On both sides along the railroad the street profile allows commercial activity and room for public space; a transformation from a barrier into a lively urban zone. New small scale commercial activities and accommodation related to the Lo Valledor market are planned on the market side of the railroad, forming an urban edge. As a local mode of production, a Biogas system can be introduced. The Lo Valledor market provides the organic waste. La Victoria will have the opportunity to take advantage of its central location in the city.

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public space layer

(1) Additions, Concenration, Redistribution (2) New space for production and commerce (3) Green space maintanance

Neighbourhood Boundaries Masterplan Boundary Maintainance of Existing Border Redevelopment for commercial uses Railway Public Space Redevelopments Context underpinings Strategy Reference 1 Public Space Interventions

Strategy Transformation of morphology and density creates conditions for better definition of public space.

Presence of public and commercial facilities improves the use and quality of the public space. Existing open space offers opportunities for changes in morphology and density.

Interventions The definition of the street profile of 2 de Abril will be improved and adapted to developments in modes of production like the street market and small commercial activities. Additions on existing buildings will define a clear street faรงade. On the Westside a square will be created to enhance public collective facilities. Between the rail track and the school there will be a pedestrian and children play zone.

Along the railwaytrack the open space will be intensified by adding small scale public facilities. Maintenance interventions will take place on the street 30 Ottubre.

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De paradox van de Delftse stedenbouw Bart Stoffels

Stedenbouw is geen wetenschap. De stedenbouwkundige opleiding in Delft doet evenwel haar uiterste best zich op wetenschappelijke wijze te profileren. In deze paradox schuilt de beperking van de Delftse stedenbouwschool. Nu ik na 10 jaar afwezigheid de afgelopen twee jaar het POLIS-bestuur heb mogen steunen kom ik tot dit – wellicht helemaal niet zo revolutionaire – inzicht. Toen ik in ’96 van de Berlageweg afzwaaide was mijn blik op de wereld echter anders. Ik was opgeleid om steden te tekenen. Analytisch onderlegd, in staat te ordenen naar schaal, scenario’s, varianten. Onderzoek doen, hoofdstructuur opzetten, programma erin, uitwerken. Volgende plan graag. Misschien had ik ook vliegtuigen kunnen ontwerpen, patiënten genezen of software kunnen schrijven in dit rationele stramien, maar steden hadden nou eenmaal mijn fascinatie, als kind van vijf eigenlijk al.

Dat de werkelijkheid anders is, daar had ik dankzij een Erasmusbeurs in Barcelona al een voorproefje van gehad. De route van opgave via analyse naar ontwerp waarmee ik was opgevoed, werd daar niet in zeven, maar in één week afgelegd. En dan: de confrontatie met de praktijk. Van de 25 studentenplannen aan de muur selecteerde een Q-team van ervaren stedenbouwers de in hun ogen vijf beste voorstellen. Rond deze vijf werden teams van studenten gesmeed die in onderlinge samenwerking en op basis van de – op praktijk gestoelde – kritiek van het Q-team de ontwerpen gingen aanpassen. De ‘winnende’ auteur kreeg de rol van eerste ontwerper die met zijn of haar team tot een werkelijk uitvoerbaar plan moest zien te komen. Zo kon je oefenen met realisme, tegenslag, samenwerking, leiderschap. Met als eindresultaat een veel beter plan.

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Confrontatie met de maatschappij vinden we in Delft een eng idee. Of hooguit interessant, zo lang het de Delftse methode maar niet in de weg staat. Of, misschien nog iets interessanter als die praktijk zich naar de methode kan vormen. In Almere ben ik veel studenten tegengekomen die in atelierverband afstudeerden op deze fascinerende nieuwe stad. Wat ik echter zelden aantrof was nieuwsgierigheid naar ervaring, naar mechanismen van stedelijke ontwikkeling. De afstand tussen de Delftse analyses en de Almeerse praktijk werd zelden als een interessante uitdaging gezien, eerder als een probleem. Studenten werden vooral naar de polder gestuurd om er informatie te halen voor de casus, maar niet om werkelijk in contact te raken met de specialisten ter plaatse. Stel je voor dat de praktijk de wetenschap zou beïnvloeden.

Dat is natuurlijk geen goede zaak voor de jonge ingenieur in spé.

Vanwaar die wil tot wetenschap, die rug naar de praktijk, het totale gebrek aan proces inzicht in de stedenbouw? Is dat een cultuur die onlosmakelijk verbonden is met het TU instituut? Stedenbouw is in de kern geen wetenschap. Het is een ontwerpopleiding, die zich onderscheidt van architectuur doordat ze zich richt op een grotere schaal, langere termijn en complexere processen. In deze context moet een stedenbouwkundig ontwerp kunnen rijpen, volwassen worden. Natuurlijk kan je wel op een wetenschappelijke manier onderzoek doen naar de stad. Verkeerssystemen en duurzaamheidsambities zijn bijvoorbeeld meetbaar. Maar onderzoeksconclusies leiden nooit lineair tot een ontwerp voor de stad. Een ontwerp is immers een interpretatie, geschraagd door ervaring, door referenties, door de visie

van de wethouder, door de grillen van de markt. Gelukkig maar. De geschiedenis heeft geleerd dat waar de stedenbouwkundige als technocraat een volmacht krijgt, dit leidt tot verschrikkelijke steden. Vult u uw eigen voorbeelden maar in.

Dat het anders kan heb ik bij de academie van Bouwkunst ervaren. Daar vormt de praktijk de kern van de opleiding. Dat zit in de combinatie van werken en studeren én in het docentenbestand dat volledig bestaat uit stedenbouwers uit de praktijkwereld. Academiestudenten hebben daardoor in de regel een andere grondhouding jegens de praktijk. Ze zijn doordrongen van het feit dat confrontatie met de werkelijkheid hun plan sterker kan maken in plaats van zwakker.

Het zou voor de Delftse stedenbouwschool goed zijn om iets van de academie aanpak over te nemen. Grijp de nieuwbouwplannen aan om ook het onderwijs te vernieuwen. Terug naar de ‘lange gangencultuur’ met rijen afgesloten docentenkamers…. ik kan het me eigenlijk niet voorstellen.

In plaats daarvan zie ik een transparant gebouw, dat nieuwsgierigheid naar de omgeving uitstraalt. Een ontmoetingsplaats voor ervaringen in plaats van een pseudowetenschappelijke vesting. POLIS zou hier met haar alumninetwerk, sponsors en praktijkleden een rol in kunnen spelen als het nieuwe bestuur dat ambieert. In dat geval – maar ook los daarvan – wens ik haar veel succes.

Bart Stoffels

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From low-level rules to

higher level sophistication Pieter van der Kooij

Although cities have been around for circa 5000 years and “the general phenomenon of urbanism [is recognised] as a self-organising process” (Portugali, 2000: 5), the science of self-organisation is relatively new. Johnson (2001: 21) has shown that we are now in a third phase of understanding self-organisation, which has started halfway through the nineties.

We stopped analysing it and began creating it. The problem however is that the preconditions for an urban design, that consciously facilitates this process, are not clear yet.

Self-organisation challenges the common Dutch approach of large-scale urban development and renewal and explains both the scientific and societal relevance of the topic. The RPB (Gordijn, 2003) (Netherlands institute for spatial research) has shown the current need for more bottom-up initiatives in the Dutch spatial policy. First of all there is a demand for more private initiatives in housing. Next to that the development of the creative industry in cities should be facilitated. Finally a need in older urban districts exists to make more entrepreneurship, employment, social and cultural development possible. The future of the Dutch socio-economic policy is not in a directive policy or central planning anymore, but in the creation of spatial preconditions for success.

The aim of this article is to try and define rules for this. To answer the question: What are the spatial preconditions that can or should be created in order to enable the self-organisation of an urban district in the Netherlands?

Development of scientific thought The basis for understanding self-organisation is to realise that a city is a problem of organised complexity. In the final chapter of her book ‘The death

and life of great American cities’ Jane Jacobs explains this, based on Dr. Warren Weaver (1958). He divided the history of scientific thought into three broad camps. The first was to deal with problems of simplicity. In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as science learnt to analyse one or two-variable problems. An example is the rotation of planets. Around 1900 science discovered how to deal with problems of disorganised complexity.

These are problems which can deal with billions of variables and which have become approachable by the probability theory and statistical mechanics.

These tools make the financial stability of a life-insurance company possible. ( Jacobs, 1961: 429,430) However this does not describe all problems with which science has to deal. There is a middle region which deals with problems of a sizable number of factors, which do not act randomly, but show signs of organisation. Based on this Jacobs continues to explain how cities can be described as problems of organised complexity: “They present situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways. Cities (...) do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains all. (...) The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are ‘interrelated into an organic whole’.”( Jacobs 1961: 433) Introducing Van Dorst and Salingaros By reviewing the work of Van Dorst (2005) and Salingaros (2000) the answer to the research question is given. Salingaros abstracts the city as a network made up out of nodes, connections and hierarchy.

(Salingaros, 1998) Van Dorst views the city from a humanistic standpoint, from the perspective of

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its people. This presents two extreme concepts of urbanity which are interesting to compare to find preconditions for self-organisation.

In his dissertation Van Dorst formulated a pattern language for the privacy-zoning of living environments “[which] are applicable to each living-environment where the goal is to create a self-regulating habitat.” (Van Dorst, 2005: 285) This associate professor of environmental design, puts the perspective of the user central in the formulation of his patterns.

Figure 1 shows how a field of design solutions was mapped out. However, this field does not show one ultimate solution to design. Solutions to specific problems are connected to each other. That is why here the choice was made to also discuss the patterns which are directly connected to the one answering the research question.

In this context the pattern ‘A sustainable livingenvironment is flexible and changeable’ is the key pattern to answer this question. The two patterns directly connected are ‘Personalising the living-environment’ and ‘The hybrid zone’. All three patterns are made up of a position, an explanation, a utilisation and references which demonstrate them.

tion of the city as a problem of organised complexity. “The proposals are based on rules for geometric coherence derived from the complex systems theory.” (Salingaros, 2000: 315) Based on his paper ‘Complexity and urban coherence’ (2000) an attempt was made to map out Salingaros’s eight rules for urban coherence for the local scale, that of a district. This is done in a similar manner as Van Dorst, shown and described above.

Figure 2 shows a field of options ordered by relations, based on privacy zoning. This method was chosen, as Portugali suggested that “in each timespace context […] it is possible to theorize the relations between urban elements from the point of view of privacy.” (Portugali, 2007: 174) In figure 2, the primary rule ‘couplings’ is put central. This rule suggests couplings between the different elements in urban space. (Salingaros, 2000: 306) After careful studying of Salingaros’s argumentation the field could be drawn. The arrows can be interpreted as ‘is needed’. For instance diversity ‘is needed’ to allow elements to couple.

Rule 6 Hierarchy

Rule 4 Forces

Rule 7 Interdependence

Rule 3 Boundaries Rule 2 Diversity

Rule 1 Couplings

Rule 5 Organisation Rule 8 Decomposition Rules for privacyzoning Condition for rule

patterns related to privacy zoning

Fig. 2 Salingaros’s rules mapped

Fig. 2 Salingaros’s rules mapped Fig. 1 Patterns for privacy-zoning Salingaros, a professor of mathematics, has defined eight rules for urban design based on the abstrac-

The focus will therefore be on the first five of eight rules Salingaros has stated (Salingaros, 2000: 293):

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Rule 1. Couplings: Strongly coupled elements at the same scale form a module. There should be no unconnected elements inside a module.

Rule 2. Diversity: Similar elements do not couple.

A critical diversity of different elements is needed because some will catalyse couplings between others.

Rule 3. Boundaries: Different modules couple via their boundary elements. Connections form between modules, and not between their internal elements.

Rule 4. Forces: Interactions are naturally the strongest at the smallest scale, and weakest at the largest scale. Reversing them generates pathologies.

Rule 5. Organisation: Long-range forces create the large-scale from well defined structure at the smaller scales. Alignment does not establish, but can destroy, short-range couplings.

base the design. (Herzberger, 2002) As Salingaros and Jane Jacobs, whose observations he scientifically proves, go to great lengths to argue against Le Corbusier and his principles of design, it seems only logical to take the inner-city of Paris as an example.

Le Corbusier developed his ‘Plan Voisin’ for this in 1925, demolishing the inner-city and rebuilding it as ‘the City of Tomorrow’. It can be seen in figure 3.

Fig. 3 Plan Voisin model by Le Corbusier projected in a model of Paris

As the theorist Salingaros only describes preconditions for urban space based on the principles above, the choice is made to use a case. With this case, Salingaros’s rules can be illustrated with images of urban space. For a designer, this is vital as the first thing to do is to collect many images on which to

Comparing Van Dorst and Salingaros Van Dorst concludes on essentially the same preconditions as Salingaros. Firstly, Van Dorst argues that the carrier of the environment should be durable and the build-in elements adaptable. This can take on many forms, for instance a network of water, roads or green space in which parts of a

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neighbourhood can change form. This corresponds to Salingaros’s basic vision of the city: A city which shows urban coherence is vital and allows its inhabitants to adapt the urban fabric. Figure 4 shows an example of this.

Fig. 5 Amsterdam Nieuw-Sloten: before and after intervention of residents. (Van Dorst, 2005: 299) Fig. 4 A carrier built-in solution with dwellings that are adaptable, Japan, Osaka. (Van Dorst, 2005: 311) Secondly, he shows that dwellings should allow for the personalization of space. To do this users should be able to make their own territory readable, to control the interaction between private and public. This pattern states that “residents must have the possibility to supply the living-environment of personal additions, by this interference in the physical surroundings a place is taken possession of by the user(s) and is this place recognisable for others as such” (Van Dorst, 2005:298). People can in the most extreme case (collectively) design their neighbourhood, the other extreme are additions to the windowsill. An example, which is somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, can be seen in figure 5.

Salingaros also shows the need for clear boundaries of different urban modules. It is assumed here that a dwelling and its domain make up a module.

Thirdly it is shown that a hybrid zone should be added to buildings to soften the transition from private atmosphere into public space. A front garden, a height-difference in the pavement, a space in front of the door created by a relieved façade or several flower boxes can all create this zone. The hybrid zone creates a zone from which social interaction can be engaged; 80 % of all informal social contacts in a neighbourhood start from a front garden.

This again is supported by Salingaros, he also pleas for an intermediate zone to soften the changeover between these two domains. Figure 6 shows an example of this.

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Fig. 6 A broad hybrid zone (Schiedam, Sveaparken) and a minimal hybrid zone (Middelburg) (Van Dorst, 2005: 291)

Fig. 7 View of the Sacre Coeur and the city of Paris.

Fouthly, coupling forces between urban elements are strongest at short distance, which implies creating a compact district. The compact inner-city of Paris, shown in figure 7, is an excellent example to show the forces of attraction which Salingaros is talking about. It also shows Salingaros’s diversity rule: The compactness of Paris, combined with its hilly topography, allows for quite diverse experiences in a half hour stroll. Different urban elements are coupled into modules -the street, the interior and exterior of the buildings etcetera- are coupled to form a module- for instance the Latin quarter. One of Van Dorst’s 16 patterns, not directly answering the research question, also calls for this: A small scale fabric easily absorbs changes. (Van Dorst, 2005: 314)

An approximate linearization can be seen in the figure 8. Rule 5 ‘organisation’ implicates that the idea behind a grid alignment is false. A bad organisation between modules can destroy all couplings at the lowest scale, an approximate linearization however leads to a clear urban ordering. Again one of Van Dorst’s 16 patterns, not a direct answer to the research question calls for this: Approximate linearization creates spaces to stay, a grid creates spaces of flow. (Van Dorst, 2005: 306)

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Fig. 8 The Promenade PlantĂŠ in Paris, a succesful park with a clear boundary.

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Conclusion: 5 low-level rules By adding Salingaros’s rules regarding the city scale to Van Dorst’s concrete rules for the scale of the neighbourhood, the article’s main research question can be answered. The spatial preconditions that should be created in order to enable the selforganisation of an urban district in the Netherlands are summarised: - The carrier of the environment should be durable and the build-in elements adaptable to man’s needs, the livability.

- Buildings should allow for the personalization of space. Users should be able to make their own territory readable and the zoning in the dwelling should allow for the interaction between private and public.

- A hybrid zone should be added to buildings to soften the transition form private atmosphere into public space.

- Forces of attraction needed to couple urban elements together are strongest at short distance, this implies creating a compact district.

- A bad organisation between modules can destroy all couplings at the lowest scale, an approximate linearization leads to a clear urban ordering.

This list has been made in the realisation that also this does not pose the ultimate answer, just as Van Dorst could not guarantee before. Researchers -several PhD students at the department of urbanism as well- are studying the concept self-organisation.

This was also put forward in this paper’s problem statement: We are in the process of learning to consciously create self-organising environments.

Bibliography Gordijn, H. et al, 2003, De ongekende ruimte verkend. Rotterdam: NAi uitgevers Herzberger, H., 2002, Creating space of thought. In De Jong, T., ed. Ways to study and research urban, architectural and technical design. Delft: Delft University Press. Ch. 42.

Jacobs, J., 1961. The death and life of great American cities. New York: Vintage books, a division of random house, inc.

Johnson, S., 2001. Emergence. London: Penguin books Portugali, J. 2000. Self-organization and the city.

Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-verlag Salingaros, NA., 2000, Complexity and Urban coherence. Journal of urban design, Volume 5, no. 3, 291-316 Salingaros, N., 1998. Theory of the urban web, Journal of Urban Design, vol.3, no 1, 53-71.

Van Dorst, M., 2005, Een duurzaam leefbare woonomgeving, fysieke voorwaarden voor privacy regulering. Delft: Uitgeverij Eburon.

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Call for Submissions Atlantis 21.1

We hope we can welcome our next issue sooner than the time you have had to wait for this one! For our next issue we welcome any contributions from members, urbanism studio’s, teachers and students interested in voicing their opinions, presenting their projects like the DSD Urban Asymmetries Studio has done in this issue.

Your contributions make this Atlantis magazine possible, as we do not have a fixed editorial staff to provide content.

What we did not manage to provide during our board’s year was an issue on our original themes, today’s ISMS in Urbanism. We have a variety of articles ready pursuing this theme, any addition is more than welcome. Traditionalism, Escapism, Futurism, Terrorism are a number of themes that will be touched upon.

As every year, teachers and students come and go. As a person very dear to Polis will soon leave our faculty, we would like to have contributions regarding his work here in Delft. Edward Hulsbergen has been a source of support, information and enthousiasm since Polis was founded in 1989. His help has been of incredible value and must not go unnoticed. We will approach anyone interested in contributing in Atlantis soon.

Any contributions can be emailed to polis@bk.tudelft.nl or can be mailed to our office at BG West 160 in the Faculty of Architecture, Julianalaan 134, 2628BL Delft.

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Main Editor Pouyan Medizahdeh Atlantis Magazine for urbanism, a publication from POLIS, podium for urbanism.

20th year, number 1, June 2009 quantity: 500 issues

Editors DSD Urban Assymetries Edoardo Felici Adress of the Editorial Office POLIS - Faculteit Bouwkunde BG West 160 Julianalaan 134 2628BL Delft

Printer Drukkerij Tan Heck, Delft Advertisements Information at the address editorial office

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Articles Articles, admissions and reactions can be offered to the address of the editorial office.

Author guidance are available at the editorial office. Copyright with the permission of authors and acknowledgement of sources.

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Polis-yearcontribution: Students: € 10 Alumni: € 15 Practicalmembers: € 30 companymembers: €60 Previous issues: pdf versions available

Cover: DSD Urban Asymmetries Layout: Pouyan Medizahdeh © 2009 Polis, Podium voor Stedebouwkunde ISSN 1387-3679