Master thesis I: "Urban Basic Services in Sub-Saharan Africa"

URBAN BASIC SERVICES IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA Integrating Service Design tools into architectural process

A thesis project by

Carla Procida Person Code: 10470604 Matricola: 884211

A.Y. 2018/2019 Supervisor: Peter Arthur Di Sabatino MSc. in Product-Service System Design Scuola del Design Politecnico di Milano

URBAN BASIC SERVICES IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA Integrating Service Design tools into architectural process

cover picture: “Library of Muyinga” by BC architects, source: http://architects.bc-as.org

A mio padre Giovanni e a Fabio, le mie stelle.

Acknowledgments I can’t help but start thanking my father, Giovanni Procida, for raising me in the way he did, and for being my strength since he left us. Thanks to my mother, Alessandra Sciarelli, for being the person who always believes in me and my capabilities the most. Thanks to everyone in my family, especially my amazing cousins, for always being present whenever I may need it.

Thank you Lamin, for coming in my life when I was least expecting it, and for supporting me unconditionally every day since then.

Thank you, Fabio. Words cannot describe the sadness I feel for losing you, and the happiness I feel for spending with you every day in three years, in wonderful company of your unique and special soul. You were there during my Bachelor’s graduation, you helped me to get it and without you, I would never be here.

Thanks to Raffaele, Claudia and most of all Raffaelino, for the mutual support we had for each other in these last, hard days.

Without it, I would have been blocked and unable to complete this work. I wish to be always able to support you however I can.

Thanks to Matteo and Caterina, for the support in the last two weeks, probably the hardest of my life since my father’s death four years ago.

Thanks to Antonio for being the certainty in my life, the one I know I will never lose, the one whose support is essential to me.

Thanks to Elisabetta for sharing the Bachelor’s three years with me. They were for sure harder that the last two, and thanks to you we overcome it together.

Thanks to Ana, Thijs and Alessandro for making the Erasmus experience preceding this thesis super funny and enjoyable.

Thanks to Sergio for being the nicest, most hospitable and supporting friend.

Thanks to all of my dear friends, especially to the ones that I see once a year but that show me nothing can and will ever change the affection we have for each other.

Thanks to the architect Mimmo Caprara, for helping me so much for my Bachelor’s thesis, without your help I wouldn’t have been to the point of writing my Master’s one.

Thanks to professor Di Sabatino, my thesis supervisor, for being present and supporting my work, giving precious inspiration and feedbacks.

Thanks to prof. Paola Bellaviti for the help in properly citing the contents presented during the Master I am attending and, together with prof. Camillo Magni, for directing the Master “Design for Development – Architecture, Urban Planning and Heritage in the Global South” that is for sure the right way in my life to follow.

Thanks Marco Ferrario and Roberta Tassi for letting me include their outstanding projects as case studies.

Thanks to Davide Caruso (Verso), the PR5 team, the LOAD team, Stefano Mori (Anna Heringer Studio), Irene Librando, Federico Monica (TaxiBrousse), Stefano Anfossi (PACO) and Chiara Gambarana for accepting to be interviewed for this work.

Thanks to professors Valentina Auricchio and Annalinda De Rosa for the nice sources suggested which helped me to overcome some tricky parts of the thesis.

Finally, thanks to Politecnico di Milano in general. I have been wandering around your rooms since 2013. I remember when I was accepted to attend the Bachelor’s Degree in Interior Design, and I felt powerful and confident to face my future, and it’s similar to the feeling I have now after completing this work. I can’t wait to see who I will be after completing the “Design for Development” Master.

05.12.2019

Index

CHAPTER 1

HUMAN RIGHTS AND URBAN BASIC SERVICES

21

WHY DESIGNING FOR HUMANITY?

22

(URBAN) BASIC SERVICES

24

WHY ADDRESSING SERVICES WITH RESPECT TO DEVELOPMENT?

27

FOCUS ON SPACE-DELIVERED URBAN BASIC SERVICES

36

CHAPTER 2

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

41

HEALTHCARE

46

WATER AND SANITATION

50

EDUCATION

54

INFORMATION

65

PUBLIC EXPENDITURE AND GOVERNMENT RESPONSIBILITY

66

RURAL-URBAN DICOTHOMY

70

CHAPTER 3

SPACE DELIVERED URBAN BASIC SERVICES

73

SERVICES DELIVERED THROUGH SPACES

74

INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION FOR DEVELOPMENT AND THE HUMANITARIAN AID

75

HUMANITARIAN ARCHITECTURE

76

SMALL SCALE BIG IMPACT

80

PROJECTS

84

HEALTHCARE

89

WATER & SANITATION

97

EDUCATION

105

INFORMATION

143

CHAPTER 4

COLLABORATION BETWEEN SERVICE DESIGNERS AND ARCHITECTS

169

PURSUING COLLABORATION

170

PARTICIPATION / INCLUSIVENESS

181

GOVERNANCE

185

DO-NOT-HARM APPROACH

185

CHAPTER 5

SERVICE DESIGN TOOLS INTO ARCHITECTURAL PROCESS

187

INTEGRABLE SERVICE DESIGN TOOLS

188

SCENARIOS ON SERVICE DESIGNERS INCLUSION

212

CONCLUSIONS

214

BIBLIOGRAPHY

217

WEBSITES

226

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List of Figures • Figure 1 - The 17 Sustainable Development Goals, source: http:// news.unipv.it

• Figure 2 -The Global Development Framework, source: http:// habitat3.org/the-new-urban-agenda

• Figure 3 - Equitable access as an entry point to sustainable cities.

From Beard, V. A., Mahendra, A., & Westphal, M. I. (2016).

Towards a More Equal City: Framing the Challenges and Opportunities (p. 4). WRI Ross Center For Sustainable Cities.

• Figure 4 - UBS Inclusion Rationales. from Wikipedia Contributors (2019). Universal basic services.

• Figure 5 - Urbanization is now happening in more low-income

countries than in the past. from Beard, V. A., Mahendra, A., & Westphal, M. I. (2016). Towards a More Equal City: Framing the Challenges and Opportunities (p. 2). WRI Ross Center For Sustainable Cities.

• Figure 6 - Cities in the Global South have the fewest public resources per capita. From Beard, V. A., Mahendra, A., & Westphal, M. I. (2016). Towards a More Equal City: Framing the Challenges and Opportunities (p. 2). WRI Ross Center For Sustainable Cities.

• Figure 7 - Highest rate of urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, South

and Southest Asia. From Beard, V. A., Mahendra, A., & Westphal, M. I. (2016). Towards a More Equal City: Framing the Challenges and Opportunities (p. 2). WRI Ross Center For Sustainable Cities.

• Fig. 8 - Child mortality, 2009. From Ortiz-Ospina, e. & Roser, M. (2019). “Global Health”.

• Fig. 9 - Child mortality, 2015. From Ortiz-Ospina, e. & Roser, M. (2019). “Global Health”.

• Fig. 10 - Child mortality, 2014. From Ortiz-Ospina, e. & Roser, M. (2019). “Global Health”.

• Fig. 11 - Life expectancy, 2009. From Ortiz-Ospina, e. & Roser, M. (2019). “Global Health”.

• Fig. 12 - Life expectancy, 2015. From Ortiz-Ospina, e. & Roser, M. (2019). “Global Health”.

• Fig. 13 - Life expectancy, 2019. From Ortiz-Ospina, e. & Roser, M. (2019). “Global Health”.

• Fig. 14 - Share of population with improved sanitation facilities, 2009. From Richie, H., & Roser, M. (2019). “Sanitation”.

• Fig. 15 - Share of population with improved sanitation facilities, 2015. From Richie, H., & Roser, M. (2019). “Sanitation”.

• Fig. 16 - Share of population with improved sanitation facilities, 2014. From Richie, H., & Roser, M. (2019). “Sanitation”.

• Fig. 17 - Portion of population with basic handwashing facilities on premises, 2009. From Richie, H., & Roser, M. (2019).

“Sanitation”.

• Fig. 18 - Portion of population with basic handwashing facilities on premises, 2015. From Richie, H., & Roser, M. (2019).

“Sanitation”.

• Fig. 19 - Portion of population with basic handwashing facilities on premises, 2014. From Richie, H., & Roser, M. (2019).

“Sanitation”.

• Fig. 20 - Gross Enrolment ratio in pre-primary

education, 2015. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019). “Preprimary Education”.

• Fig. 21 - Gross Enrolment ratio in pre-primary

education, 2009. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019). “Pre primary Education”.

• Fig. 22 - Gross Enrolment ratio in pre-primary

education, 2014. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019). “Pre primary Education”.

• Fig. 23 - Gross Enrolment ratio in primary education, 2015.

From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019). “Primary and Secondary Education”.

• Fig. 24 - Gross Enrolment ratio in primary

education, 2009. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019).

“Primary and Secondary Education”.

• Fig. 25 - Gross Enrolment ratio in primary

education, 2014. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019).

“Primary and Secondary Education”.

• Fig. 26 - Net attendance rate of primary school, 2009. From Ortiz

Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019). “Primary and Secondary Education”.

• Fig. 27 - Net attendance rate of primary school, 2015. From Ortiz

Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019). “Primary and Secondary Education”.

• Fig. 28 - Primary completion rate, 2013.

From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019). “Primary and Secondary Education”.

• Fig. 29 - Gross enrollment ratio in secondary

education, 2013. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019).

“Primary and Secondary Education”.

• Fig. 30 - Literacy rate, 2009. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2018). “Literacy”.

• Fig. 31 - Literacy rate, 2015. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2018). “Literacy”.

• Fig. 32 - Share of population with no formal education, projections

by IIASA, 2030. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2019).

“Primary and Secondary Education”.

• Fig. 33 - Total Healthcare Expenditure as Share of National GDP by

Country, 2014. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (n.d.). “Financing Healthcare”.

• Fig. 34 - Total government expenditure on education, 2014. From Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (n.d.). “Financing Education”.

• Fig. 35 - Definition of “urban” in different SSA countries. From

Heirings, P. (2019). Africapoli. Urbanization dynamics in Africa.

• Fig. 36 - Sub-Saharan Africa’s countries where the cases are located.

Original vector file designed by Freepik. Edited by author.

• Fig. 37 - Architects and related Urban Basic Services categories of projects. By author.

• Fig. 38 - Places where Healthcare cases are located. Original vector file designed by Freepik. Edited by author.

• Fig. 39 - Places where Water and Sanitation cases are located.

Original vector file designed by Freepik. Edited by author.

• Fig. 40 - Places where Education cases are located. Original vector file designed by Freepik. Edited by author.

• Fig. 41 - Places where Information cases are located. Original vector file designed by Freepik. Edited by author.

• Fig. 42 - Cases’ design teams compositions. By author.

• Fig. 43 - Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation. From Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A Ladder Of Citizen Participation.

• Fig. 44 - Scenarios of service designers inclusion. By author.

ABSTRACT ITA

E’ stato provato che il design è capace di aver un impatto e migliorare la vita delle persone (Potvin, 2018). Tutti, senza distinzione di nazionalità, razza, età e genere, abbiamo diritti umani; questo è quanto fu stabilito nel 1948 tramita la Dichiarazione Universale dei Diritti Umani. Sopratutto gli articoli 21.2, 25.1 e 26.1 dichiarano i diritti ai servizi pubblici, ad uno standard di vita adeguato per la salute e il benessere, e all’istruzione (UN General Assembly, 1948).

Questi diritti umani possono essere garantiti tramite l’apporto di Servizi Urbani di Base. Inoltre, garantire i servizi base a tutti è anche stato provato essere uno dei possibili drivrer per lo sviluppo sostenibile, perché capace di influenzare positivamente la sostenibilità economica ad ambientale (Ashebir, 2019).

Sfortunatamente, la veloce urbanizzazione che sta avvenendo nel Sud del mondo, e specialmente nell’Africa Sub-Sahariana, porta alla creazione di situazioni difficili dove i fondamentali diritti umani non sono garantiti, e i Servizi Urbani di Base non assicurati a tutti. In più, quando sono presenti non sono efficacemente ... delivered, o l’esperienza ad essi legata non è positiva. Intere comunità, soprattutto in contesti di povertà, affrontano problemi relativi alla mancanza o alla cattiva qualità di Servizi Urbani di Base, e finiscono per essere marginalizzate.

Alcuni Servizi Urbani di Base sono apportati tramite spazi, in particolare la salute attraverso ospedali e cliniche, acqua e igiene tramite bagni e lavatoi, l’istruzione tramite scuole e aule e infine l’informazione tramite biblioteche pubbliche. Sopratutto nell’Africa Sub-Saharian, tutti e quattro questi servizi non sono sufficientemente diffusi o la loro qualità non risponde adeguatamente alla domanda di una popolazione in crescita, e ancora meno quando paragonata al resto del mondo o anche al resto del Sud del mondo (ourworldindata.org).

Questi servizi/spazi di solito sono progettati da architetti che collaborano con ONG, vincendo bandi per relizzare i loro progetti oppure lavorando per organizzazioni internazioni, come ad esempio UN-Habitat. Nonostante tutti i servizi siano costituiti da un sistema molto più ampio e complesso, oltre al solo spazio in cui accadono, e nonostante i service designer siano formati per gestire e progettare tali sistemi, essi non sono quasi mai coinvolti nel processo di progettazione e implementazione di Servizi Urbani di Base, soprattutto in quelli apportati tramite spazi.

Questa tesi presenta 69 progetti di ospedali/cliniche, bagni e lavatoi, scuole/aule e biblioteche pubbliche, di piccola scala progettati da studi di architettura e ONG, e costruiti in 18 paesi dell’Africa Sub-Sahariana. Si pone l’attenzione sul fatto che l’Agenda 2030 per lo sviluppo sostenibile incoraggia le partnership tra diversi professionisti che condividono gli stessi valori, che anche sul fatto che i service designer non sono mai stati coinvolti nei team di progettazione di tali casi.

La tesi, supportata da interviste sia con architetti che con service designer, sottolinea i tanti utili, facili strumenti del service design, strumenti di partecipazione ma anche di visualizzazione, che esso può offrire al mondo dell’architettura, e ipotizza il loro uso in specifiche fasi del processo architettonico.

Infine, la tesi propone nuove possibilità di carriera per i service designer che intendono lavorare per le comunità marginalizzate che necessitano di Servizi Urbani di Base insieme agli architetti, e supporta il fatto che si consideri il coinvolgimento dei service designer in questo tipo di progetti, oltre all’apertura di posizioni per service designer negli studi di architettura.

ABSTRACT ENG

Design has been proved to be able to impact and improve people’s lives (Potvin, 2018). All people, regardless of nationality, race, age and gender, have human rights; this was specifically established in 1948 by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Especially Articles 21.2, 25.1 and 26.1 set universal rights to public service, adequate standards of living for health and well-being, and the right to education (UN General Assembly, 1948).

These human rights can be ensured through the provision of Urban Basic Services. Ensuring basic services to all has also been mentioned as one of the main possible drivers of sustainable development, while also positively influencing economic and environmental sustainability (Ashebir, 2019).

Unfortunately, fast urbanization happening in the Global South, and especially in Africa’s Sub-Saharan countries, creates challenging situations where fundamental human rights are not guaranteed, and Urban Basic Services not ensured to all. Moreover, when they are present, they are not effectively delivered, or the experience linked with their use is not positive. Entire communities, especially in poor contexts, face problems related to lack or poor quality of Urban Basic Services, and end up being marginalized.

Some Urban Basic Services are provided through spaces, in particular healthcare is provided through clinics and hospitals, water & sanitation is provided through toilets and lavatories, education through schools and classrooms, and finally information is provided through public libraries. Especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, all four aforementioned services are not sufficiently diffused or their quality doesn’t meet the demand of its growing populations, and much less when compared with the rest of the world and the rest of the Global South (ourworldindata.org).

These services/spaces are normally designed by architects that collaborate with NGOs, while winning calls to realize their project or work for international organizations, like UN-Habitat. Despite all services being constituted by a much broader system, other than the space they take place in, and despite service designers being especially trained to handle and design those systems, the service designer is hardly ever involved in the process of design and implementation of Urban Basic Services, especially the ones provided through spaces.

This thesis presents 69 projects of either hospitals/clinics, toilets and lavatory units, schools/classrooms and public libraries of small scale designed by architecture offices and NGOs, and built in 18 Sub-Saharan African countries. It poses attention on the fact that the Agenda 2030 for sustainable development encourages partnerships between professionals sharing the same values, but also on how service designers were never part of the design teams of the projects.

The thesis, supported by different interviews with architects and service designers, highlights the many useful, easy, participatory and visualizing tools it can offer the architectural world, and hypothesizes their use in specific phases of the architectural process.

Finally, the thesis proposes new possible career paths for service designers wanting to work for marginalized communities in need of Urban Basic Services along with architects, and promotes the consideration and involvement of service designers in these types of projects, as well as the opening of position for service designers in architectural offices.

Chapter 1

HUMAN RIGHTS AND URBAN BASIC SERVICES

“Ouidah One” orphanage requalification by Verso, source: www.collettivoverso.com

Why designing for humanity?

“Design is not and cannot be a neutral act. Designers create products, spaces and systems that can either hinder or substantially revitalize the quality of life for communities” (Potvin, 2018).

Architects and designers have not only the opportunity, but also the tools to contribute to a future where everyone has their fundamental human rights respected and guaranteed.

Fundamental human rights have been formalized though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a historic document proclaimed and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. By that time, not all countries that exist nowadays had gained independence, and of the 58 former members of the United Nations, only 48 voted in favour of it (Wikipedia contributors, 2018). Despite this discrepancy, Universal Human Rights “are not country-specific, or particular to a certain era or social group.

They are the inalienable entitlements of all people, at all times, and in all places - people of every colour, from every race and ethnic group” (Zeid, 2015).

Fundamental human rights are directly connected to the fact that “we all share certain basic needs that must be satisfied if we are to be able to survive and thrive, think for ourselves and participate in society. […] Human needs are not context specific, but universal across time and space” (Coote, Kasliwal & Percy, 2019). Human rights directly discern from these universal human needs.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights enlists a total of thirty articles that set out standards to be universally adopted in order to guarantee justice, freedom and dignity to all human beings. Nevertheless, some of the articles touch upon specific issues that can be more easily addressed, or contributed to, by architects, designers, and service designers in particular.

These are:

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• Article 21.2 - Everyone has the right to equal access to public service in his country • Article 25.1 - Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing,

housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

access to motorised transport and to the internet have now become essential for participation in society” (Coote, Kasliwal & Percy, 2019 - text emphasis by author).

“The social settlement established after the Second World War expressed a shared resolve that everyone’s basic needs should be met” (Coote, Kasliwal & Percy, 2019). In this framework it is particularly important to notice how these issues, such as health, education, energy and sanitation are addressed by countries and ensured to their citizens through provision of urban basic services.

Indeed, “there is a general consensus that basic social services are the building blocks for human development.

Indeed, they are now accepted as fundamental human rights” (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele, & Delamonica, 2000).

But what are Urban Basic Services?

• Article 26.1 - Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(UN General Assembly, 1948 – text emphasis by author)

“While the detail of how needs are met will vary widely, they always require certain generic ‘satisfiers’ (or ‘intermediate needs’) that do not vary. These were originally listed by need theorists as water, nutrition, shelter, secure and nonthreatening work, education, healthcare, security in childhood, significant primary relationships, physical and economic security and a safe environment. Some argue that

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(Urban) Basic Services Basic services are “a form of social security in which all citizens or residents of a community, region, or country receive unconditional access to a range of free, basic, public services, funded by taxes and provided by a government or public institution” (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019).

There are many different attempts to exhaustively enlist basic urban services, a notion that comes from a wider range of definitions including “public services”, “basic social services” and “universal basic services”, with a more focused urban perspective. Universal Basic Services are a relatively new concept “based on the established ethos of public services that has embedded in it a sophisticated evolution of democratic power, social security, and environmental responsibility” (Moore, 2000) and firstly mentioned in 2017 by the Institute for Global Prosperity, established by University College London (Moore, 2017). It is an alternative and complementary concept to Universal Basic Income, stating that the extension of basic services to all would have a

major impact in tackling poverty and any form of inequality.

Universal Basic Services are enlisted as follows: • Shelter -Homeless shelter -Public Housing

• Food security -Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program -Food bank -Soup kitchen • Health and care -Public healthcare • Education -Public education • Transport -Public transport

• Information -Municipal wireless network -Public library • Legal -Policing -Firefighting -Legal aid -Courts -Social services agencies

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(Wikipedia Contributors, 2019 text emphasis by author)

Other international organizations have also, in the years, successfully addressed the provision of basic services as a matter of primary importance.

Already in the early 1990s, the universalization of Basic Social Services have been internationally recognized as a mean of tackling specific social plagues such as maternal mortality and child malnutrition, such as World Summit for Children, 1990, later stressed by The World Summit for Social Development in 1995 and the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 1996 (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele, & Delamonica, 2000).

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), with particular respect to children’s needs and rights, defines Basic Social Services to be:

UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, has a branch called “The Urban Basic Services Branch”, which works to provide technical support in order to successfully implement basic services, especially for the poorest groups of world’s population. UNHabitat’s focus of action is on: • Waste Management • Urban Energy

• Urban Mobility

• Water and Sanitation (Dzikus, 2012 - text emphasis by author)

• primary health care

• clean water and proper sanitation • basic education (Mehrotra, n.d.)

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UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, has recently published “The Master Plan Approach to Settlement Planning”, based on ten guiding principles in order to plan shelters that support “people to recover from the impact of displacement”. Not surprisingly, Principle n. 5 is about “Supporting safe and equitable access to basic services”, as basic services are essential prerequisites to well-being, also, and especially, for people affected by a crisis (UNHCR, 2019).

major impact in tackling poverty and any form of inequality.

Given that UNHCR specifies that “basic services requirements vary from settlement to settlement, as they are largely defined by the profile and needs of the displaces population” (UNHCR, 2019), the organization also enlists services that are lifesaving or required for refugees’ protection. These are:

Universal Basic Services are enlisted as follows: • Shelter -Homeless shelter -Public Housing

• Health

• Food security -Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program -Food bank -Soup kitchen

• Water • Food

• Education

• Health and care -Public healthcare

• The rule of law -Police -Courts

• Education -Public education • Transport -Public transport

• Emergency services -fire services

• Information -Municipal wireless network -Public library

• Civil registration & documentation -birth registration offices

• Legal -Policing -Firefighting -Legal aid -Courts -Social services agencies

• Religious facilities • Leisure and sport facilities

(UNHCR, 2019 – text emphasis by author) 26

(Wikipedia Contributors, 2019 text emphasis by author)

Why addressing services with respect to development?

The great attention posed on the provision of adequate and accessible basic services proves that there is a need to address this issue deeply. Basic services are at the base of many social and economical dynamics that can leverage a community, and have a strict relation with the quality of life of individuals and communities. Indeed, “Living is defined, especially, by the relation that the individual (alone of in group) creates between his (private) space and the surrounding (called public) one and by the possibility to access the services that the city offers, or to claim them if they don’t exist” (Corallo, 2014 Original: “L’abitare si definisce, prima di tutto, nella relazione che l’individuo (solo o in gruppo) instaura tra il suo spazio (privato) e quello circostante (detto pubblico) e nella possibilità che ha di accedere ai servizi che offre la città, o di rivendicarli qualora essi non esistano”).

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“On 1 January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development — adopted by world leaders in September 2015 at an historic UN Summit — officially came into force” (United Nations, n.d.).

The SDGs set objectives that must be reached by 2030 internationally in order to achieve a sustainable development, which means “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, as stated in the Brundtland Report of 1987, being still nowadays recognized as the most exhaustive definition of sustainable development (Brundtland, 1987).

The SDGs are directly connected to the inalienable rights expressed with 1948’s UDHR’s articles reported above. They “recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and addresses a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and

• Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection” (United Nations, n.d.).

The SDGs are seventeen and they are:

• Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

• Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere

• Goal 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

• Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

• Goal 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all

• Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

Fig. 1 - the 17 Sustainable Development Goals

• Goal 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

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• Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

• Goal 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels

• Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries

• Goal 17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development

• Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable • Goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

(United Nations, n.d. - text emphasis by author)

While some SDGs are more explicitly related to climate change and environmental protection, others are more a product of a certain attention posed on social sustainability, such as goals n. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11 and 16. The coherence with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ articles 21.2, 25.1 and 26.1 is especially to be found in some of these, namely:

• Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts • Goal 14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, sea and marine resources for sustainable development

• Goal 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

• Goal 3: Good health and wellbeing • Goal 4: Quality education • Goal 6: Clean water and sanitation • Goal 7: Affordable and clean energy

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One cannot fail to notice how these goals are clearly related to, and addressable with, the provision of Basic Services, such as: healthcare, education, water and sanitation.

However, even the more specific service-related SDGs do not explicitly mention basic services and their effective, accessible and equitable provision.

The discussion in these terms is more easily findable in the United Nations efforts towards a sustainable urbanization.

The path to a full recognition of urbanization has been long and started in 1976 with the Habitat I conference held in Vancouver, a conference that even preceded the more famous Brundtland Report (1987) and Rio Summit

Fig. 2 - The Global Development Framework

(1992) in respect to sustainable development. Since 1976 the United Nations have continued their commitment to a definition of a sustainable urban development which has led to several following conferences and Agendas.

From the 17th to the 20th of October 2016, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, also referred to as Habitat III, took place in Quito, Ecuador (Habitat III, 2016).

The aim of the conference has been “to reinvigorate the global commitment to sustainable urbanization. […] The conference resulted in the New urban Agenda—a concise, focused, forward-looking and actionoriented outcome document”

“The New Urban Agenda represents a shared vision for a better and more sustainable future.” It states that “if wellplanned and well-managed, urbanization can be a powerful tool for sustainable development for both developing and developed countries” (Habitat III, 2016).

The New Urban Agenda stresses on the fact that fast urban population growth “poses massive sustainability challenges in terms of housing, infrastructure, basic services, food security, health, education, decent jobs, safety and natural resources”. The particular regard on access to basic services for all contained in the New Urban Agenda largely draws principles from 2009’s UNHabitat International Guidelines on Decentralization and Access to Basic Services for All, which it completely acknowledges (United Nations, 2017).

There is specific mention on the need to provide basic services for all citizens, equal opportunities and promote safe, accessible and green public spaces1. In particular, “The New Urban Agenda stressed the point that access for everyone to all urban basic services is an essential precondition to enable

the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Delivering appropriate water, energy and mobility as well as access to jobs, social opportunities, health and education to everyone required concerted action from the national, regional and local levels” (Lah, 2017).

The United Nations explicit commitment contained in the New Urban Agenda towards access to Urban Basic Services is expressed as follows:

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“We envisage cities and human settlements that: (a) Fulfil their social function, inclusing the social and the ecological function of land, with a view to progressively achieving the full realization of the right to adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, without discrimination, universal access to safe and affordable drinking water and sanitation, as well as equal access for all to public goods and quality services in areas such as food security and nutrition, health, education, infrastructure, mobilty and trasportation, energy, air quality and livelihoods” (United Nations, 2017).

aspect in order to reach it.

Building on the New Urban Agenda, UN-Habitat has published this year (2019) its Strategic Plan for the luster 2020-2025. The biggest point UN-Habitat’s opinion of “urbanization as a positive transformative force for people and communities, reducing inequality, discrimination and poverty” because it “can transform territories, connecting human settlements across the urban-rural continuum, including small market towns, intermediate cities and main urban centres, and ensuring access to basic services and infrastructure to all” (UNHabitat, 2019 – text emphasis by author). UN-Habitat adopts the Theory of Change in order to address specific goals. The Strategic Plan mentions three key outcomes that UN-Habitat works on, and “increased and equal access to basic services, sustainable mobility, and public space” figures as one of them (UN-Habitat, 2019). Indeed, one important goal for the luster 2020-2025 is to go from cities’ and community’s segregation to their integration2, and successful implementation and equal access to Urban Basic Services is clearly an important

Therefore, it can be concluded that for the United Nations and its Human Settlements Programme, Urban Basic Services are a priority in order to achieve a sustainable development and urbanization.

So how can Urban Basic Services truly be the driving force for sustainability?

“For a better understanding of sustainability and its implications, it is common to schematise it as three (interlinked) dimensions:

• The environmental (Planet) dimension: not to exceed the ‘resilience’ of the biospheregeosphere, that is, its ability to absorb anthropic perturbations without provoking irreversible phenomena of degradation such as global warming, ozone layer depletion, acidification, eutrophication

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• The socio-ethical (People) dimension: the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and the achievement of social equity and cohesion, where a key issue is equal redistribution of resources following the principle that everyone has the

same access to global natural resources

• The economic (Profit) dimension: economically practicable solutions, in a more or less norm-oriented market” (Vezzoli et al., 2014)

These three dimensions influence each other and need to be harmonized. “These elements are interconnected and all are crucial for the well-being of individuals and societies” (https://www. un.org/sustainabledevelopment/ development-agenda/).

The three dimensions are normally equally addressed in order to achieve sustainability.

However, some claim instead that the social dimension can be the driving force to ensure environmental and economic sustainability.

One contribution in this sense has been given by World

Research Institute Cities and Urban Mobility Program Manager Elleni Ashebir during convention “Challenges and Opportunities towards a Sustainable Growth for Africa’s Cities” in her presentation titled “The need for compact, connected and efficient cities in Africa, NOW” (Ashebir, 2019).

The scheme Ashebir presented confronts the traditional conceptualization of the sustainable development triangle with the World Resources Institute approach. The WRI has indeed published several reports in the framework of the series “Towards a New Equal Cities”, posing major focus on the social dimension, and more specifically on the equitable access to “core services”. Indeed in the framing paper “Towards a more equal city”, WRI opens the possibility to examine the role of “prioritizing access to core urban services” in order to “create cities that are

Fig. 3 - Equitable access as an entry point to sustainable cities

• Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries

prosperous and sustainable for all people” (Beard, Mahendra, & Westphal, 2016).

• Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

Indeed it claims that “without equal access to core services, cities may not be able to achieve the higher quality of life, economic productivity, and environmental sustainability that we all desire” (Beard, Mahendra, & Westphal, 2016).

as well as greatly support SDGs that are more environmentally or economically oriented, such as: • Goal 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Relating the SDGs with this interdependency of the three sustainability dimensions and the crucial role of the social dimension (directly connected with provision of Urban Basic Services) it is self evident how the SDGs aiming at addressing Urban Basic Services issues, namely:

• Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts • Goal 14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, sea and marine resources for sustainable development

• Goal 3: Good health and wellbeing

• Goal 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

• Goal 4: Quality education • Goal 6: Clean water and sanitation

• Goal 7: Affordable and clean energy

can contribute to broader socialwise and urbanization concerned SDGs such as:

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Indeed, Urban Basic Services can directly help people in:

Education can also enhance awareness on environmental issues, therefore contributing to spreading good practices for environmental protection.

Access to information as well can open up opportunities for people to find a job and sustain themselves and their families, as well as contribute to economic growth.

• “maintaining the individual’s, or the society’s, material safety • enabling the individual’s personal effort to use their skills and abilities to contribute to their society, either for remuneration or not

• allowing the individual to participate in the political system(s) within which they live” (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019).

Fig. 4 - UBS Inclusion Rationales

In particular, rationales to make health & care (including water and sanitation), education and information accessible to all are: It was here added that Healthcare also contributes to opportunity to contribute to society’s life, because, as apparent as it may seem, improving health conditions for everybody makes people more suitable to find a job, and the same can be stated when people are provided with sufficient education.

All things considered, it can be concluded that the social impact behind the provision of Urban Basic Services could really be the starting point for achieving a sustainable development and this makes another good reason to pose attention to Urban Basic Services.

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Focus on spacedelivered Urban Basic Services services such as primary health care, basic education and clean water” (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele & DelamonicA, 2000).

As previously mentioned, architects and designers can have a big impact in improving people’s life, ensuring observation of human rights and effective delivery of services.

Among the Urban Basic Services listed by the different organizations above, this work will pose particular attention on the ones that are (also) delivered through a physical space, namely:

Moreover, “the ways in which universal services are designed and delivered – and how they interact with each other – are likely to influence the extent to which they benefit the poorest, as well as other income groups” (Coote, Kasliwal & Percy, 2019).

Services will only really have an impact on universalizing human rights as well as tackling inequalities when they are well designed, therefore effective.

But, when this is faced with the rapid population growth and urbanization, the task become much more daunting.

• Healthcare – delivered through clinics and hospitals • Water and sanitation – delivered through toilets and lavatories

• Education – delivered through schools • Information – (also) delivered through public libraries

These services are crucial for people to thrive and contribute to society, but “there is a shortfall of up to $80 billion per year between what is spent and what should be spent to ensure universal access to basic social

Urbanization and marginalization

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Urbanization is nowadays happening in developing countries more than during the last century (Fig.5), and at an

Fig. 5 - Urbanization is now happening in more low income countries than in the past

unprecedented rate. The Global South cities are growing fast but with fewer resources than the ones in the Global North, as

Fig. 6 - Cities in the Global South have the fewest public resources per capita

showed in Fig. 6.

Still, the later urbanization of the Global South can learn important lessons from the quality of

urbanization that occurred in the Global North, and avoid repeating the same mistakes, such as: great greenhouse emissions, residential areas developed far from markets, infrastructure that favour cars, and so on (Beard, Mahendra, & Westphal, 2016).

It has already been claimed how environmental and economic issues can be better addressed when social needs are met. An urbanization that tends to a socially sustainable development will focus on minimizing inequalities and provide the same “opportunities and a high quality of life for all segments of society”, because “how cities grow and how cities respond to inequalities will be integral to defining their future” (Beard, Mahendra, & Westphal, 2016).

“Poverty and marginalization intersect and are often concentrated in specific locations. Spatial inequality (defined as the concentration of disadvantages in a specific location) manifests in the different experiences and opportunities that people can have, and the rights that they can exercise, between regions, across the rural urban continuum and within the same city. This is further diversified based on

people’s socio-economic backgrounds, race, migration status, ages, genders, and abilities. Unequal access to land, adequate, and affordable housing, job opportunities, basic and social services, mobility and public transport, and public key aspects of spatial inequality, often characterized by physical segregation (UN-Habitat, 2019).

Providing opportunities to all also means successfully delivering Urban Basic Services, therefore pay particular attention to underserved communities.

Being underserved, indeed, means lacking “access to one or more core services” (Beard, Mahendra & Westphal, 2016 – text emphasis by author), and it is one of the biggest drivers of marginalization. This is why UN-Habitat placed among the guidelines about Basic Services an explicit invitation to governments “to place the issue of access to basic services for all at the centre of their national development policies, with a special emphasis on filling the gaps for the poor and marginalized groups” The Governing Council of UN-Habitat, 2009).

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Therefore, urban centres of the developing countries have “great sections of the urban fabric (that) are deprived from minimum living standards and basic commodities. The population of these localities have no access to the goods and benefits produced through urban development.

They live under segregative conditions social, spatial, political and economically speaking whilst others live in sections of the city where high standards and public services of top quality do exist” (Acioly Jr., 1994).

A second evidence of the primary urgency of marginalization in the Global South is given by energy spending: indeed, while in developed countries most energy is spent for the construction sector, in developing countries it is mostly spent for transportation, a figure that shows a problem with accessibility to and proximity with services3.

Similarly, World Resource Institute urges cities “to address urgent service needs and take the greatest care to avoid locking in unsustainable urban development over the long term” (Beard, Mahendra & Westphal, 2016).

As cities in the Global South are the protagonists of today’s fastest development, these claims acquire even more value when applied to their specific contexts.

Moreover, marginalization due to inequality in access to Urban Public Services is a urgent matter in the developing world.

One evidence of this is the greater presence of informal settlements around or inside the biggest southern cities, which “typically have a lack of infrastructure, are exposed to floods and landslides, and are socially stigmatized. They are also recognised for having precarious security, social and public health problems as well as for their fragile and barely expandable houses.

Unsurprisingly, these noncity areas have marginalized communities, which exhibit both immediate and developmental needs” (Nuno Martins & Correia Guedes, 2015).

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Notes on Chapter 1

1: the concept is paraphrased from the lecture “New Urban Agenda” by Maria Chiara Pastore, held on 25.09.2019 at Politecnico di Milano in the context of the Master “Design for Development - Architecture, Urban Planning and Heritage in the Global South”, promoted by Consorzio Poliedra and that the author is pursuing.

2, 3: the concept is paraphrased from the lecture “UN-Habitat policies and actions” by Salvatore Fundarò, who presented UNHabitat’s Strategic Plan 20202025 Advanced Draft. held on 16.10.2019 at Politecnico di Milano in the context of the Master “Design for Development - Architecture, Urban Planning and Heritage in the Global South”, promoted by Consorzio Poliedra and that the author is pursuing.

Chapter 2

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

“Library of Muyinga” by BC architects, source: architects.bc-as.org

“In 1980, only 27% of Africans were living in cites. This figure increased until it reached 38& in 2000 and is expected to reach 50% in 2020 (Bekker, 2014 - Original: ”Nel 1980, solamente il 27% degli africani viveva nelle città. Questo dato è aumentato fino a raggiungere il 38% nel 2000 e si prevede raggiungerà il 50% nel 2020. […] Le conseguenze generali sono ben note: l’espansione urbana diventa onnipresente e causale, l’erogazione dei servizi come acqua corrente, fognature, raccolta dei rifiuti e i principali trasporti urbani viene gestita da gruppi informali o dagli stessi residenti dei quartieri”).

Living, and living in a city in particular, should be characterized by the presence and accessibility to services to all citizens. In the Global South, a critical situation is found in this sense in Sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of poverty, marginalization, inequalities and ultimately Urban Basic Services provisions.

As already largely mentioned in the previous chapter about sustainable development framework, and particularly important to reclaim here, the United Nations have set specific and ambitious objectives to be reached by 2030. In practice, when the shifts are “confronted with the situations typically found in the counties of SubSaharan Africa, they become on unrealistic or difficult to be operationalized (Acioly Jr., 1994).

For sure, the Sub-Saharan region is one of the most challenging when it comes to inequalities and urbanization. As shown in fig. 7 provided by World Resources Institute, Sub-Saharan African countries are expected to experience the greatest urban population growth between 2015 and 2030.

In terms of official development standards, of the 47 world’s Least Developed Countries, 33 (70.2%) are in Sub-Saharan Africa (United Nations, n.d.).and of the 40 with lowest Human Development Index, 31 (77.5%) are in SubSaharan Africa.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also the place with lowest GDP globally, but still remains the region with fastest urban population growth1.

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Fig. 7 - Highest rate of urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southest Asia

by informal groups or by the districts’ residents themselves” (Bekker, 2014 - Original: “Le conseguenze generali sono ben note: l’espansione urbana diventa onnipresente e causale, l’erogazione dei servizi come acqua corrente, fognature, raccolta dei rifiuti e i principali trasporti urbani viene gestita da gruppi informali o dagli stessi residenti dei quartieri”).

“The general consequences are well known: urban expansion becomes ever-present and casual, the provision of services like running water, sewage systems, waste disposal and urban public transportation will be managed by informal groups or by the districts’ residents themselves”

(Bekker, 2014 - Original: “Le conseguenze generali sono ben note: l’espansione urbana diventa onnipresente e causale, l’erogazione dei servizi come acqua corrente, fognature, raccolta dei rifiuti e i principali trasporti urbani viene gestita da gruppi informali o dagli stessi residenti dei quartieri”).

Indeed, in relation to services provision and accessibility, SubSaharan Africa surely shows of the most critical situation worldwide.

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Shrinking government budgets meant that in many countries basic services functioned with insufficient resources to meet operational cost. Even where governments found the resources through loans and aid to provide services, delivery and management were still poor and large segments of the population were left out. […] In the rural areas where between 60-80% of the population lived, the situation was worse than the cities. […] Donor governments and their agencies responded to the deteriorating conditions initially by providing direct local level support” (Awortwi & Bert Helmsing, 2007).

In recalling the Urban Basic Services this thesis want to focus on because (also) delivered through a physical space, therefore: • Healthcare – delivered through clinics and hospitals • Water and sanitation – delivered through toilets and lavatories

• Education – delivered through schools • Information – (also) delivered through public libraries

we here expose a short general consideration on the causes of decline of basic services provision in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as current situation and evidence of lack in provision or access to these services still nowadays.

Colonialism surely has largely, if not entirely, contributed to the last 40 years and current state of the provision of Urban Basic Services in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Indeed, “in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the disintegration of political and economic structures during the 1980s brought a sharp decline in the provision of basic services.

This situation has in the past and still today does reflect even sharper in the capital cities, which had to face important and “complicated processes of constitution of nations” (Bekker, 2014 - Original: ”complicati processi di costituzione della nazione) as well as different kind of governments, rebellions and, as already mentioned, a huge and fast urbanization and economic growth.

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With no surprise, all what SubSaharan African cities faced, especially during, and as a consequence of, colonial era, “created recognizable urban and hierarchical systems. It created segragated cities, in particular in colonial capitals, where colonizers were living in planned, therefore “formal” and provisioned with services, neighbourhoods, surrounded by informal townships deprived without any service” (Bekker, 2014 - Original: “ha creato sistemi urbani e gerarchi delle città riconoscibili. Ha creato città segregate, in particolare nelle capitali coloniali, in cui i colonizzatori vivevano in quartieri pianificati, dunque “formali” e dotati di servizi, circondati da township di tipo informale e prive di qualsiasi servizio”).

The following data are exposed in order to have an overall picture about Urban Basic Services provision in Sub-Saharan Africa compared with the rest of the world, as well as within the continent. Figures compare data from 2009 and 2015 to see possible improvements in this period of time, as well as including data from 2013 or 2014 being them, in most cases,

the most recent and more complete data gathering until now. Data from 2015 is, indeed, not complete and some countries are left out as no relevant data has been collected about them for that year. Nevertheless, when complete data from 2019 is available, it has been included.

All the maps are sourced from ourworldindata.org, which in turn collects data from World Health Organization, UNICEF, World Bank, UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, James C. Riley, Clio Infra, the United Nations Population Division and IIASA.

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Healthcare

countries lose between 5 and 20% of their children before the age of five is a worrying fact.

Life expectancy in Sub-Saharan Africa has seen a slight increase between 2009 and 2015, but still this year the average amount of years people can expect to live never exceeds 70 years old, a figure not comparable with the rest of the world. Of course, this can be caused by a million reasons, including sanitation, lack of clean water, habits, nutrition, but healthcare facilities for sure would have a positive impact if more and more successfully implemented in these countries. Indeed Our World In Data claims that health determinants globally are mainly:

“Easily preventable diseases account for the deaths of nearly nine million children in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia each year. In these two regions alone, almost 500,000 mothers lose their lives each year as a result of pregnancy and childbirth. While the underfive mortality rate stands at an average of seven deaths for every 1,000 live births in industrialized countries, it is roughly 25 times higher in sub-Saharan Africa” (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele, & Delamonica, 2000 - text emphasis by author). These two figures display a lack in access in basic healthcare facilities such as hospitals or clinics, caused either by remoteness of these facilities or by their financial inaccessibility, as well as access to medicines and treatment that are too expensive to reach all parts of the population. Maps from UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation and diffused by ourworldindata. org confirm these pieces of information.

There has been relevant improvement in child mortality between 2009 and 2015, but the fact that still most of the

• Biology and genetics (e.g. inherited conditions) • Public policy and regulation (e.g. vaccination campaigns) • Healthcare (e.g. timely treatment and diagnosis of disease) • Habits (e.g. smoking) • Social and environmental factors (e.g. exposure to crime, pollution)

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(https://ourworldindata.org/ health-meta#cross-countryhealth-determinants - text emphasis by author)

Fig. 8 - Child mortality, 2009

Fig. 9 - Child mortality, 2015

Fig. 10 - Child mortality, 2014

Fig. 11 - Life expectancy, 2009

Fig. 12 - Life expectancy, 2015

Fig. 13 - Life expectancy, 2019

Water and Sanitation separation of human excreta from human contact” (Fig. 14.).

UNICEF in its publication “Basic Services for all?” clearly explains that “lack of clean water and proper sanitation seriously undermines the positive effects of other basic social interventions. Throughout the world dirty water and lack of sanitation are among the leading causes of child illness, disease and death. At the beginning of the 1990s, around 1.6 billion people in developing countries lacked access to safe water, and 2.6 billion had no access to sanitation. Today’s figures are actually worse. The number of people without clean water is nearer 1.7 billion, and over half the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, lacks proper sanitation. Even though 80 per cent of those without safe water or sanitation live in rural areas, WHO estimates that only one quarter of all spending on water and sanitation went to those areas in the 1980s” (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele, & Delamonica, 2000).

The reported maps show a global situation about population enjoying access to improved sanitation facilities, defined as “designed to ensure hygienic

As we can observe, data from 2014 show how Sub-Saharan African countries’ populations are far the least provisioned with improved sanitation facilities, with peaks comparable to developed countries only in South Africa and Equatorial Guinea. Comparison between 2009 and 2015 also show that in six years, only Angola, Nigeria, Malawi and Rwanda have had appreciable improvements in this area. Indeed, toilets, when present, are not only mostly shared, but also characterised by pit latrines.

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Data about the portion of population with basic handwashing facilities on premises is mostly vacant globally. Chances are that most data has been collected from the Global South because handwashing facilities are mostly present in all premises of the Global North, which has eventually led to no need to collect this kind of information.

However, for what the map from 2014 can allow to appreciate, only between 0% and 55%

Fig. 14 - Share of population with improved sanitation facilities, 2009

Fig. 15 - Share of population with improved sanitation 51 facilities, 2015

Fig. 16 - Share of population with improved sanitation facilities, 2014

Fig. 17 - Portion of population with basic handwashing facilities on premises, 2009

of Sub-Saharan Africans enjoy these kind of facilities. Moreover, between 2009 and

Fig. 18 - Portion of population with basic handwashing facilities on premises, 2015

Fig. 19 - Portion of population with basic handwashing facilities on premises, 2014

2015 there has been nearly no appreciable improvement if not in Madagascar.

Education Pre-primary education in SubSaharan African countries has an average duration between two and three years, except from Gambia, Mali and Zambia, where it lasts four years (ourwouldindata.org).

Data for all countries is not available, and the most recent data, namely from 2015, only provide information about Ghana (ca. 120%), Djibouti (ca. 4%) and Sao Tome and Principe (ca. 51%).

Education accessibility and quality are two of the most challenging issues worldwide.

Accessibility and quality of education depends on many factor, such as: proximity of schools, transportation means, availability and professional preparation of teaching staff, quality and size of school spaces etc…

Education is globally divided in pre-primary, primary, secondary and tertiary education.

Completing pre-primary and primary school is of particular importance in order to ensure literacy to all, as well as equal opportunities to participate in and enjoy the society and find a job. Unfortunately, Sub-Saharan Africa still presents major problems in this sense.

Gross Enrolment Ratio is described by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) as the total enrolment within a country “in a specific level of education, regardless of age, expressed as a percentage of the population in the official age group corresponding to this level of education” (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019).

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Fig. 20 - Gross Enrolment ratio in pre-primary education, 2015

Nevertheless, as we can appreciate from the following maps from 2009 and 2014, the gross enrolment ration in preprimary school only reaches 120% in Ghana, and in most countries, it wanders around 20%. From 2009 to 2014, data available only make a comparison possible for Kenya, which went from a gross enrolment ration of ca. 51% to ca. 73%.

The same (limited) amount of information is available for 2015 concerning gross enrolment ratio in primary school, amounting to ca. 110% in Ghana, 66% in Djibouti and 113% in Sao Tome and Principe.

Despite incomplete information for 2014 as well, there has been an improvement in most Sub-Saharan African countries in gross enrolment ration in primary school, that in 2014 registered ratios from 60% to 140%.

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Fig. 21 - Gross Enrolment ratio in pre-primary education, 2009

Fig. 22 - Gross Enrolment ratio in pre-primary education, 2014

Fig. 23 - Gross Enrolment ratio in primary education, 2015

However, this reassuring numbers do not find confirmation in primary school attendance. Indeed, the attendance rate of primary school has not substantially improved in most Sub-Saharan countries between 2009 and 2015. Moreover, no country can claim 100% of attendance, and in particular, it is worrying to notice some countries’ attendance is still below 50%, such as in Chad, Niger and Liberia.

This situation could be the product of many conditions, but for sure lack of proximity and effective transportation means to connect children dwellings with

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schools are two aspect to blame.

Little primary school attendance has an alarming consequence on primary school completion.

The most complete and recent data available date back to 2013, and they show that in most SubSaharan countries, only between 40% and 80% of pupils complete primary school (which is in this case calculated on the number of pupils entering the last grade of primary school). Exceptions are registered in Cape Verde (ca.

95%), Ghana (ca. 98%), Namibia (ca. 86%), Botswana (ca. 99%), Zimbabwe (ca. 90%), Mauritius (ca. 97%) and Kenya (ca. 103%).

Fig. 24 - Gross Enrolment ratio in primary education, 2009

Fig. 25 - Gross Enrolment ratio in primary education, 2014

Fig. 26 - Net attendance rate of primary school, 2009

Fig. 27 - Net attendance rate of primary school, 2015

Fig. 28 - Primary completion rate, 2013.

Fig. 29 - Gross enrollment ratio in secondary education, 2013

Not surprisingly, the gross enrolment ratio in secondary school for the same year, despite it being vacant for some SubSaharan countries, is indeed very low in most (present) countries, averaging between 20% and 60%.

The critical situation of SubSaharan countries in respect to development obviously reflects on literacy rate, being it the ability to correctly read and write. Between 2009 and 2015, improvements have been registered in Equatorial Guinea and Tanzania. However, most countries still display a critical literacy situation: in Niger in particular only 19% of population is literate; in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Central African Republic, South Sudan and Somalia, only 35% can write and re

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Fig. 30 - Literacy rate, 2009

Fig. 31 - Literacy rate, 2015

But how to clearly interpret this data? Are enrolments, as well as completion of the school years, equally distributed among all income classes? UNICEF claims that “studies from 35 developing countries have found that children from the poorest 40 per cent of households account for up to 80 per cent of those who fail to finish five years of formal schooling” (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele & Delamonica, 2000). Poverty is often accountable as cause of lack of education because of education, transportation and material costs, as well as the marginalization of the contexts where the poorest communities live. This inequality traps the poorest into a vicious cycle where the lack of access to education makes it hard to find a job and keeps them in the same state of poverty.

This is why it important to tackle education not only in general in Sub-Saharan Africa, because of the critical situation extensively exposed; it is important to do so concentrating on marginalized communities, in a way that makes basic education a guarantee for all by 2030, in order to ensure this basic human right.

Projections for 2030 still display that about 5% of the population will still lack formal education, globally and also in most developed countries. But the worrying data is that only in Sub-Saharan Africa there will still be countries where between 20% and 40% of population will lack formal education, with peaks between 40% and 60% in Guinea (ca. 44%), Mali (ca.

50%), Burkina Faso (ca. 48%), Niger (ca. 54%) and Ethiopia (ca. 56%). This projection is far from reassuring, considering that Agenda 2030 praises for “inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” in Goal 4 of the SDGs. These figures should urge organizations and professionals to place particular effort in order to change the trajectory of these future projections to favour a future where basic, quality education can be truly ensured to all.

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Fig. 32 - Share of population with no formal education, projections by IIASA, 2030.

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Information Effective information service delivery is carried forward in many ways. Nowadays, internet has reached quite all corners of our planet, and information diffusion is happening everywhere through internet. Still, public libraries remain a valid way of spreading information, especially when considering that they are physical spaces where communities meet and share knowledge.

Despite many public and fully operative libraries being located in all Sub-Saharan African main cities, and especially connected with the main continent’s universities, there is lack of information about specific presence of public libraries, especially small, community libraries, in smaller settlements, and even fewer when considering rural areas. The existing public libraries have been used beyond their primary function, and “had always been perceived as part of the educational system, offering study-related materials and literacy services through building book collections, lending books out, running story hour programmes in the children’s section, establishing book clubs in schools, providing spaces and

resources for adult education lessons and offering reference services” (Osuigwe & Mulindwa, 2018).

However, the literacy rate of the continent, already exposed in relation to education, is itself and indicator of little or inefficient information delivery, also through public libraries.

Especially in rural areas, information delivery is quite relevant as it can facilitate participation of rural population in society. However, “these libraries and their staff contend with several challenges which, inevitably, undermine their effectiveness” (Uzuegbu, 2016).

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Public expenditure and government responsibility As the data presented above clearly shows, Sub-Saharan Africa presents an extremely unfortunate situation in Urban Basic Services delivery when compared to other countries worldwide. The situation is even more daunting if considering the contrast between the very slow improvement of services deliveries and, on the other hand, the extremely fast urbanization happening in the region. Indeed the rapid growth of populations in cities of developing countries and SubSaharan Africa as well “creates an ever-increasing demand for public services and funding for new public infrastructure and its maintenance” (UN-Habitat, 2019).

Moreover, most services are not equally accessible to all, and are particularly less accessible to the poorest, making them more and more marginalized, a condition that risks worsening with the fast urbanization happening in the continent.

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“By denying citizens access to the basic social services – primary health care, clean water and proper sanitation and basic education – governments are violating the human rights of their citizens” (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele & Delamonica, 2000).

But, unfortunately, the mere recognition of these rights does not match the reality of public spending, that is facing a “widening gap” (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele & Delamonica, 2000). Indeed, one of the main causes of the current circumstances related to Urban Basic Services is the insufficient public expenditure from governments towards a more capillary and effective delivery of these services. The following data expose percentages of total public money allocated to the delivery of the Urban Basic Services this works aims to cover, namely healthcare and education. Unfortunately, not the same information is available for public spending for water and sanitation access as well as for public libraries, but, as a general picture, UNICEF, even if not sufficiently recently, claimed that in eleven Sub-Saharan African counties object of its research, “government spending

on basic social services averages around 14 per cent� (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele & Delamonica, 2000).

For what concerns public expenditure in healthcare, despite most Sub-Saharan countries not differing too much to some other countries in the Global North, still the percentage of money placed for this kind of service is low, averaging around 5% of their total national GDP for year 2014, the most recent available.

Fig. 33 - Total Healthcare Expenditure as Share of National GDP by Country, 2014

When considering the issue more in depth, inequality problems start to come to the surface.

Indeed, less than 50% of the total healthcare spending is allocated to basic healthcare services, while the rest is spent on highly specialized hospital care, as UNICEF claims (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele & Delamonica, 2000). Also, more money is invested in healthcare where child under five mortality rate is lower than 70%, and less when it is above 140%. Moreover, some countries allocate much more financial resources in favour of urban healthcare services even in places where there is still a

substantial prevalence of rural settlements. All these figures communicate huge imbalances in money allocation in disfavour or the already marginalized groups.

Similar patterns can be recognized concerning public spending on education. As it can be observed from the map from 2014, most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa governments share no more than 4% of their national GDP, and one should not fail to notice this percentages covers not only basic education (pre-primary and primary), but all level of education, including universities.

Fig. 34 - Total government expenditure on education, 2014

Also here, less than 50% of this share is spent on basic education, in disfavour of those communities who are in need to complete at least primary school (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele & Delamonica, 2000).

Therefore, in both cases, ineffective allocation of funds to the most basic kind of services reflects in inequality in two main ways:

changed a lot in the years, as originally only central governments (CGs) were formally responsible for the provision of basic services in its entirety”, which “attracted major criticism” (Awortwi & Bert Helmsing, 2007).

• in terms of access, where marginalized and poorer groups have less chances of accessing Urban Basic Services

• in terms of quality, where marginalized groups receive less funding on existing services, which means worst quality “despite their greater needs” (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele & Delamonica, 2000).

“There must be greater and better-targeted resources for basic social services. At present, developing countries and donors place too little emphasis on the provision of services that are essential for the well-being of children and women, thus denying the human rights of millions to primary health care, basic education, clean water and proper sanitation” (Mehrotra, Vandermoortele & Delamonica, 2000).

This situation has a potential to be improved considering the distribution of responsibilities within the authorities of the single countries. This has

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In more recent times, the responsibility of basic services provision has been partly decentralized, and a share of the “responsibilities, finances, authority and management” has been allocated at first also to elected local governments (LGs), and later also to nonstate actors. Indeed, “states have further began to unbundle the production chain of services delivery into separately managed components and are sharing these with non-state actors instead of behaving like a ‘dinosaur’” (Awortwi & Bert Helmsing, 2007).

Therefore, “in many African countries, CGs’ roles in basic services provision have fundamentally changed with LGs and non-state actors beginning to play a substantial role. […] Through these changes, governments are not only encouraging multiple agents and modalities to deliver basic services, but are also addressing

Rural-Urban dichotomy

power, authority and resource imbalances arising between the CG and LGs, as well as between government and non-state actors. ” (Awortwi & Bert Helmsing, 2007). Undeniably, the transfer of part of the responsibility about services delivery to municipal authorities facilitates not only the inclusion of marginalized groups, but also the realization of a delivery that is more rooted in the specific settlements and therefore more responsive to specific community needs. On the other hand, “local authorities […] face huge challenges. Cities in developing countries, in particular, cannot reconcile available financial resources and increasing levels of municipal expenditures”, a situation that is only becoming more and more complicated with the increase of urban population (UN-Habitat, 2019). As Aworti et al. claims, “recognition of the changing role of governments and adoption of multiple institutional modalities in service provision are two things, implementation of the new approaches to deliver improved people’s access, coverage and quality of services is another” (Awortwi & Bert Helmsing, 2007 - text emphasis by author).

The discussion about urbanization and implementation of quality services does not mean that rural areas are excluded from interest in this work. A clear distinction between rural and urban settlements and communities is being challenged, and some scholars and practices claim that the borders between one and another are now very blurred especially in developing countries (Heirings, 2019 – Brillembourg & Klumpner, 2008) This position’s main reason to be is that especially big cities, in Sub-Saharan Africa as well, are expanding fast, creating greater areas around that are considered part of the city, often start including previously rural areas, and are sometimes reached by (minimum) infrastructure and services. Even the United Nations, in their efforts of implementation of the New Urban Agenda, consider “urban areas which stretch far beyond municipal boundaries and constitute an urban-rural nexus” (Lah, 2017).

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Moreover, not even among the different Sub-Saharan African countries there is a shared definition of what “urban” means. During the workshop “Challenges and Opportunities towards a Sustainable Growth for Africa’s cities”, Benno Albrecht, in the presentation “Africapolis – Urbanization dynamics in Africa”, exposed different definition of “urban” in Chad, Cameroon, Ethiopia and Angola, being:

• Ethiopia: “Localities with 2000 inhabitants or more” • Angola: “Geographical areas with a high population density and concentrated population groups with a high level of infrastructure”

This work does not take a specific position in this sense, but in presenting case studies later on, it considers projects of Urban Basic Services implementation both in rural and urban areas.

The reason for this is that situations of underserved and marginalized communities can be found in both circumstances as well as in all the intermediate level of settlements.

• Chad: “Administrative centres of prefectures and administrative posts” • Cameroon: “Administrative centres of territorial unites or any locality with 5000 inhabitants or more and with sufficient socio-economic and administrative infrastructures”

Fig. 35 - Definition of “urban” in different SSA countries

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Notes on Chapter 2

1: the concept is paraphrased from the lecture “UN-Habitat policies and actions” by Salvatore Fundarò, who presented UNHabitat’s Strategic Plan 20202025 Advanced Draft. held on 16.10.2019 at Politecnico di Milano in the context of the Master “Design for Development - Architecture, Urban Planning and Heritage in the Global South”, promoted by Consorzio Poliedra and that the author is pursuing.

Chapter 3

SPACE-DELIVERED URBAN BASIC SERVICES

“Library of Muyinga” by BC architects, source: architects.bc-as.org

Services delivered through spaces As extensively specified in the previous chapter, in this work the attention is particularly posed on four kinds of services that are delivered to communities through a physical space, namely: • Healthcare – delivered through clinics and hospitals • Water and sanitation – delivered through toilets and lavatories • Education – delivered through schools • Information – (also) delivered through public libraries When a need to one or more of these Urban Basic Services is identified for a marginalized community in a country of the Global South, therefore also SubSaharan countries, and where there is a chance in terms of budget to implement it/them, the design of the space through which the service(s) is/are delivered is fully entrusted to architects. The reason for this is not only the obvious one that architects are trained to design architectural objects and spaces.

When talking about marginalized communities in a fragile circumstance as a developing

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country, more skills are required to face such a challenge. Not all architects acquire the needed skills, not all have an ambition to work for this kind of contexts and not all are trained specifically in this sense. There are architectural specializing masters that train architects to acquire a certain sensibility as well as soft skills to be able to confront themselves with such contexts. But, in any case, architecture is a discipline that is recognized as being in between scientific/technical and humanistic, because designing spaces for humans requires mastering technical skills as well as sensibility to human interaction. During the Design for Humanity Summit 2019, architects were among the most mentioned professionals because they play a critical role in social justice when deciding about space. The architects “can bring in more light and position homes to circulate and cool the air. We (architects, n.d.r.) respect people’s culture by learning about how they cook, use their toilets, separate the lives of men and women and gather”

(Wells & Aquilino, 2018). Some architects take their skills in this sense even further and follow a vocation to work at the service of developing countries by getting involved and developing projects within the framework of humanitarian aid or international cooperation for development purposes.

Humanitarian Aid is defined as a series of logistic or material assisting actions for people who need help, traditionally addressed mostly to developing countries. It occurs when a community is facing a crisis it struggles to recover from.

Humanitarian Aid is divided in phases:

“We generically identify as Humanitarian Sector” the sum of all those scopes where we operate to benefit populations that are disadvantaged or in danger” (Consiglio Nazionale Architetti, Pianificatori, Peasaggisti e Conservatori, 2019 – Original: “Genericamente identifichiamo come Settore Umanitario (SU) l’insieme di tutti quegli ambiti in cui si opera a beneficio di popolazioni svantaggiate o in pericolo”).

The Humanitarian Sector is divided in:

When a disrupting crisis occurs, either human-made or natural, these phases specifically apply.

Humanitarian Aid is ordinarily provided by powerful and international organizations such as United Nations, and its related programmes (UNHCR, UNHABITAT, UNICEF and so on) in relation to a specific target group affected by the crisis (in order: refugees, citizens, children and so on).

Within this framework, also architects are called to contribute to coping strategies in order to minimize the impact of such crisis on the affected communities.

• Preparedness • First Aid • Relief • Recovery • Development

International Cooperation for Development and the Humanitarian Aid

• Humanitarian Aid • Cooperation and Development

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International Cooperation and Development does not necessarily work for communities affected by onetime crisis, but sees the joining of forces of economically stronger countries for the purpose of reaching (sustainable) development in countries that are currently on the process.

In this sense, international cooperation programmes put funds in order to improve the living conditions of people, even if not specifically affected by a disaster. In this framework, architects can be more actively involved and can apply themselves to call for receiving funds in order to realize their own project.

Especially phases as preparedness, relief, recovery and development potentially see great contribution from architects. When talking about preparedness, architects are asked to design shelter that will not fail in its structure when some sort of predicted disaster (bombs, earthquakes and so on‌) in an area occurs. In relief phase, architects contribute by designing simple structures that, with minimum budget and fast implementation, can provide basic shelter to affected communities, as well as providing basic services. In recovery phase, architects are asked to implement shelter that ensure minimum habitability to families and re-establish basic services as the community was used to before the crisis.

In the development phase, architects contribute to the re-establishment of previous situation as a whole as well as to its improvement, to ensure that the community will thrive.

In the context of humanitarian aid, architects are often involved as mere technicians rather than professionals using building as a form of expression, despite all the attention that is naturally posed on human factors.

Humanitarian architecture

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Humanitarian architecture and design is a very broad expression that is not necessarily limited to architecture happening in the framework of humanitarian aid. Humanitarian Architecture and Design is related in general to the use of professional skills in the fields of architecture and design for people in need, which obviously happen more often

to be located in disadvantaged contexts like developing countries. “In some sense, all design is humanitarian design […]; but time and again shelter available to different populations fails to live up to the same standards of comfort and care. Humanitarian design is, unfortunately, a necessary genre of architecture that takes as its focus the marginalised, underserved, crisis-threatened people of the world, because mainstream practices and industries have failed them” (Min & Brisson, 2015 - text emphasis by author).

Again, architects defining themselves as “humanitarian” may not fall exactly into the same context, may not have the same process, and may not have the same point of view on their specific role. Also, they may work both for humanitarian aid and for international cooperation for development.

Humanitarian architects can operate in different frameworks: they can be architects working for humanitarian organizations (UN-Habitat, for example); they could be part of smaller of bigger independent architectural offices operating on their own; they could provide their assistance to local NGOs working for the

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development of living conditions of a particular community.

What is sure is that most of them share a propensity for putting their skills at the service of communities that are more disadvantage then them, and therefore have a vocation to use their capabilities to contribute in ensuring human rights. Especially article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has inspired many architectural practitioners and offices. Article 25 is the only one in the whole Declaration that makes an explicit mention to physical space and environment.

Another mostly shared aspect is a reconsideration of the architect’s typical role of the professional figure that “imposes” its vision through a built form, to be shifted to a professional that is able to bring a shared vision to life by (also) implementing in the process some activities of facilitation and engagement. For example, humanitarian architects are generally propended at democratizing the architectural process and promote participation and inclusiveness.

Also “it may be required of the architect to intervene in legal issues and regulations, so as to enhance democracy and to render the interpretation of the

fundamental rights of the citizens of the XXI century more accurate.

The citizens go from being passive and voiceless individuals, whose opinions are of little importance in the field of architecture, to becoming cultural agents, and active carriers of knowledge, talents and responsibilities in processes of development of urban spaces and environment in which we all live” (Lobos, 2011). One example that testify a vision that includes all these issues is the Laufen Manifesto. In the particular frame of fast growing cities and related non-formal patterns found in slums and other unplanned settlements, it has been largely recognized how “the professional perspectives and toolkits of planners and designers, which are largely oriented to the formal city”, are not enough (Zöch, 2014). “In Search of Process: The Laufen Manifesto for a Humane Design Culture” has been shared and adopted by many architects in 2014 at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

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The Manifesto recites: “Too many people worldwide subsist in undeserving living conditions, and their ranks are growing by the day. As representatives of the professions collectively shaping the built environment, it is our responsibility to resist this intolerable situation. We are speaking out to define an alternative position. We must produce spaces that counter exploitation, control and alienation, whether in urban or rural landscapes. With all our expertise, creativity and power, we need to contribute more dynamically and consequentially to the global quest for equality. Across a range of pilot projects, we have begun to initiate a more humane design culture, working with a robust network of communities, craftsmen, planners, builders and organizations. These alternative practices demand not only further development, but also substantial scaling-up. Guided by a deeper understanding of individual needs and aspirations as our fundamental concern, we must urgently multiply our efforts to improve the ecological, social, and aesthetic quality of the built environment, while developing more effective design

strategies to anticipate predicted future growth on a global scale” (Zöch, 2014 - text emphasis by author).

nuances of diverse sites and territories, and communicate more profoundly with local communities and stakeholders.

In short, instil a greater social empathy. Manual skills must be developed on the same footing as digital and intellectual skills.

Designing the right process must be equally important as the outcome.”

The Laufen Manifesto is made up of seven main principles, the most relevant for this work being:

• “01 COLLABORATING EYE TO EYE We must commit ourselves to respectful communication and cooperation with residents and communities as key partners in achieving positive, measurable change. The impact of a participatory process extends beyond actual design outcomes – it should empower individuals and cultivate a constructive atmosphere with lasting effects.

The process should allow sufficient time to facilitate a dialogue striving for respect, curiosity, flexibility and care.”

• “06 EDUCATING DESIGNERS Designers are not trained sufficiently to achieve positive change for people living in undeserving conditions. Design education has to evolve radically to ensure young designers have the capacity to bridge the gap between design and construction, understand the

(Zöch, 2014 - text emphasis by author)

Many architects devoting their works for delivery of spaces and services for developing countries, including Sub-Saharan ones, signed this manifesto, including: Anna Heringer; Andres Lepik, Director of Architekturmuseum of TU München; Urban-Think Tank; Emilio Caravatti, founder of Africabougou; Dietmar Steiner, Director of Architekturzentrum Vienna; Martin Rauch, Hon. Prof of the UNESCO Chair for Earthen Architecture; Hollmén Reuter Sandman Architects/ Ukumbi, Finland; Enrico Vianello, TAMassociatti, and many more.

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communities. Both public interest design and relief work both share a common concern to identify and initiate projects that fully address complex, long-term societal problems and have broad public benefits. […] One of the qualities we might also ascribe to these public interest practices is the desire to be transparent and committed to the communities one serves […]” (Palleroni, 2018 – text emphasis by author).

Anyway, the principles, tendencies, modes and practices shared by most humanitarian architects can be found also by ones that don’t define themselves as such. One of the reasons for this is that some architects don’t like the world “humanitarian” in its association to a form of assistance, in some way putting the architect or anyone “assisting” as superior or able to offer more than what he/she can receive from the community in which they work.

Also, “humanitarian” can be associated with interventions only happening in developing countries, while some architects that might do projects for communities in developing countries also do design for other communities in their own country, therefore putting the focus only on the condition of the community, but not on the specific development level of the country they are operating in. For example, some architects identify themselves as belonging to the Public Interest Design Movement, offering “promising new models of practice that better serve the growing public needs not being served by society or practice.

This movement shares a widespread desire to solve […] any work with marginalized

Small scale, big impact

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What is common to most of the architects, explicitly humanitarian or not, is that they devote (most of) their projects to underserved communities, that for this reason find themselves marginalized because of the dynamics exposed in the paragraph “Urbanization and marginalization”.

Without deepening, at this moment, the process that leads successfully address the needs of marginalized communities, architects working in this framework often use a set of tools to make sure people’s voices are all included and represented, their needs are assessed and fulfilled and their community as a whole is

empowered. All this poses a particular attention that makes sure a deeper positive impact will be achieved with the project.

Another often shared principle to achieve greater social impact is to design in small scale. It has already been claimed how the urban sprawl that usually occurs with fast urbanization can be somehow controlled with decentralization, and that this has been one of the strategies adopted by many Sub-Saharan countries, especially in relation to service delivery. Decentralization meant “to unbundle the production chain of services delivery into separately managed components” and “sharing these with non-state actors” but also decentralizing power and giving more responsibilities to local governments to address their community’s specific issues (Awortwi & Bert Helmsing, 2007).

Decentralizing decision-making and service delivery can have the positive effect to make services be more tailored on the community. When it comes to spaces that deliver services (like the ones considered in this work: healthcare, water & sanitation, education and information), this means that often the community

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could be able to enjoy a small space that takes care of their specific needs. Indeed, on this October’s issue of Domus’s annex EcoWorld, Anna Heringer, cofounder of the Laufen Manifesto, says “as an architect, working on a small scale enables me to find trigger points and better empower the community”.

The theory that small scale can have a big impact was first found and diffused though the exhibition “Small Scale, Big Change: New Architecture of Social Engagement exhibition” in 2010, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The exhibition “showcased contemporary architects who are viewed as the new representatives of a sociallycommitted architecture. […]

Their objective is, unlike early modernism, not to improve living conditions across society for a whole country or whole city, but to specifically change spatially defined situations using architectural resources and planning, - regardless of the political background” (Lepik, 2015).

The exhibition and resulting catalogue were featuring works by: Alejandro Aravena, Anna Herringer, Francis Kéré, Jorge Maria Jauregui, Lacaton Vassal,

• The community gets the chance to build and this makes “end users identify with the building and experience and treat it with a sense of ownership. It is only through such identification that the long-term sustainability of the building is ensured” (MüllerVerweyen, 2015).

Michael Maltzan, Noero Wolff Architects, Rural Studio, Teddy Cruz, Urban Think Tank.

Small scale is seen as a sort of acupuncture that can generate, starting from a single limited community, a bigger impact all around. The main reasons for this are: • The fact that the building is small and more tailored on the community, makes it more effective and can create a bigger change in each one of the community’s life. This is particularly relevant when we talk about services like clinics, classrooms and libraries.

• The building can be built by the architects, who acquires also building skills apart from design ones, and it can be built with the community, which creates employment as well as leaving experience and skills to people participating in the building process. Some architects that build their projects form a movement called Design-Build, an approach that is even taught in under- and post-graduate programmes (TU Vienna, TU München and BaseHabitat at the University of Art and Design Linz).

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“Ouidah One” requalification of orphanage by Verso, source: collettivoverso.com

Projects All of this said, the following section of this work presents a series of buildings that were implemented to bring one of the Urban Basic Services identified above. These cases are all quite recent and they have been chosen from a variety of different authors. These authors are either: • Architecture offices (locals and not) • Independent architects (locals and not) • Architects and practices consulting and offering services to NGOs • Foundations with architcture and technical consultants

• Architecture students and related professor from specific university programmes that foster a design-build approach The architecture offices may be composed by big or small teams, and may based locally or from the Global North, the latter being much more frequent.

Many architects and offices from Europe engaging in projects in developing countries, indeed,

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have proved to be skilled to successfully undertake such a task to design for very different cultures and communities by “developing appropriate designs through precise knowledge of local conditions” (Lepik, 2014).

Moreover, they addressed central questions of coexistence in human com¬munities and offered innovative designs that nearly always possessed a model character: striving simultaneously for ecological and social sustainability and anchored in local conditions while nonetheless remaining keenly aware of global themes” (Lepik, 2014). Among these, we can find Venice-based TAMassociati, Emilio Caravatti with Africabougou, already mentioned Anna Heringer, Copenhagen-based Emergency Architecture and Human Rights led by Chilean architect Jorge Lobos and many more.

But the cases review also includes projects by African architects that founded their offices in Europe as well as keeping one office in their countries, for example Burkinabe architect Francis Kéré with Kéré Architecture and Nigerian Kunlé Adeyemi with NLE’.

In respect to the Humanitarian Sector framework and phasing, most of the projects belong to the ambit of International Cooperation and Development, as they have been implemented to support disadvantaged group; some belong to the Development phase of Humanitarian Aid, as they have been realized for a group that has faced a crisis and was on the process of improving their pre-crisis condition.

The chosen cases of spaces have been selected when presenting the following requirements:

• they are located in Sub-Saharan Africa • they deliver a Urban Basic Service belonging to these categories: healthcare, water & sanitation, education and information

• they are small-scale buildings • they address an underserved and marginalized group

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projects

37

authors

18

countries

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Fig. 36 - Sub-Saharan Africa’s countries where the cases are located

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OFFICE NAME

HEALTHCARE

WATER & SANITATION

Fabulous Urban Anna Heringer Supertecture EAHR – Emergency Architectureand Human Rights ASF Italia Kalì Workshop PR5 TAMassociati TaxiBrousse Kéré Architecture NLÉ (Kunlé Adeyemi) Building4Humanity SelgasCano CR-E-AID BC architects Architecture for Humanity Basehabitat Article25 WOLFF architects LEVS Architecten Fondazione Dogon Mass Design Group Dick Olango + Dennis Munene + OSA Sanergy Orkidstudio Patricia Erimescu Cincinnati School of Architecture Bauen fur Orangefarm Collectif Saga + Uncedo Emilio Caravatti Mary Althoff ar2com Asante Architecture, Lönnqvist&Vanamo Architects + A-direkt Yaw Kuffour Sarbeng SARCH Jan Henrik Hansen

Fig. 37- Architects and related Urban Basic Services categories of projects

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EDUCATION INFORMATION

Healthcare

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Fig. 38 - Places where Healthcare cases are located

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Project name: Centre de Santé et de promotion sociale Place: Laongo, Burkina Faso MQ: 1200 Office name / NGO / organization: Supertecture & Kéré Architecture Based in: Kaufbeuren (DE) & Berlin (DE) Timing: / (2014) Beneficiaries: locals of Laongo & surroudings Link info: http://www.kerearchitecture.com/projects/csps/ source: www.kere-architecture.com

Project name: Emergency Children’s Surgery Centre Place: Entebbe, Uganda MQ: 1200 Office name / NGO / organization: TAMassociati w/ Renzo Piano Building Workshop Based in: Venice (IT) & Genoa (IT), Paris (FR), New York (NY) Timing: ongoing Beneficiaries: children with surgery needs from Uganda and all Africa Link info: http://www.rpbw. com/project/emergency-

source: www.rpbw.com

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childrens-surgery-center

Project name: Salam Centre Place: Khartoum, Sudan MQ: 14000 Office name / NGO / organization: TAMassociati Based in: Venice (IT) Timing: / (2007) Beneficiaries: patients affected by cardiological pathologies (service for free) Link info: https://www. tamassociati.org/portfolio/ design-for-excellence/ source: www.tamassociati.org

Project name: Post-war surgical centre Place: Goderich, Sierra Leone MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: TAMassociati Based in: Venice (IT) Timing: / (2012) Beneficiaries: people in need of surgery for war-caused injuries Link info: https://www. tamassociati.org/portfolio/postwar/ source: www.tamassociati.org

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Project name: Léo Surgical Clinic & Health Center Place: Léo, Burkina Faso MQ: 1900 Office name / NGO / organization: Kéré Architecture Based in: Berlin (DE) Timing: / (2014) Beneficiaries: 50000 people and mother from Léo and surroundings Link info: http://www.kerearchitecture.com/projects/ clinic-leo/ source: www.kere-architecture.com

source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: Konokono Vaccination Center Place: Turkana, Kenya MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: SelgasCano Based in: Madrid (ES) Timing: / (2015) Beneficiaries: women and children of the mostly nomadic and pastoral population of Turkana Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment. org/project.

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php?id=536#!prettyPhoto

Project name: Vaccination post & infocentre Place: Sangha, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: LEVS architecten Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: / (2016) Beneficiaries: Dogon women and children Link info: https://www.levs.nl/ projecten/#!vaccinatiepost-eninfocentrum&gid=2&pid=4 source: www.levs.nl

Project name: Butaro Hospital Place: Burera, Rwanda MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Mass Design Group Based in: Kigali, (RWA) Timing: 3 years (2008-2011) Beneficiaries: the 320000 Butera inhabitants lacking access to basic health Link info: https:// www.domusweb.it/en/ architecture/2011/08/26/ source: www.domusweb.it

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butaro-hospital-rwanda.html

Project name: Rwinkwavu Neonatal intensive care unit Place: Kayonza District, Rwanda MQ: 1294 Office name / NGO / organization: Mass Design Group Based in: Kigali, (RWA) Timing: / (2014) Beneficiaries: mothers Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment. org/project. php?id=518#!prettyPhoto

source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: Roche health center Place: Roche, Tanzania MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Cincinnati School of Architecture Based in: Cincinnati (OH) Timing: / (2011) Beneficiaries: Roche villagers Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=53 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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Water & Sanitation

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Fig. 39 - Places where Water and Sanitation cases are located

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Project name: Infrastructure and Biofil Toilet Hubs Place: Lagos, Nigeria MQ: / Office name: Fabulous Urban Based in: ZĂźrich (CH) Timing: / (2018) Beneficiaries: Daramola, Orisunmibare, Itun-Agan, Abete Ojora, Ofin, Sabokodji, Baiyeku Communities Link info: https://www. swiss-architects.com/en/ fabulous-urban-zurich/project/ infrastructure-and-biofil-toilethubs?nonav=1 Project name: Mobile Dry Diversion Toilet Place: Lagos, Nigeria MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Fabulous Urban Based in: ZĂźrich (CH) Timing: / (2019) Beneficiaries: low income families without household sanitation Link info: https://www.worldarchitects.com/en/fabulousurban-zurich/project/mobile-

source: www.swiss-architects.com

source: www.world-architects.com

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dry-diversion-toilet

Makoko Neighbourhood Hotspot Place: Lagos, Nigeria MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Fabulous Urban Based in: Zürich (CH) Timing: / (2017) Beneficiaries: people of Makoko (fishermen’s district on water, victims of eviction) Link info: https://www.swissarchitects.com/en/fabulousurban-zurich/project/makokoneighborhood-hotspot?nonav=1

source: www.swiss-architects.com This case is particularly interesting for this thesis. Makoko is a very well known informal settlement in Lagos, Nigeria. It is famous because, unlike other slums, its population lives on water. The Makoko people, divided themselves in different groups, were the original population of Lagos, and have been in the years gradually pushed away from the dry land until being forced to live on stilt houses. They are a flourishing community that lives thanks to fishing and selling materials out of the trash that sorrounds their houses and their water. They declare to be happy and satisfied, but they need recognition. Indeed, they have been victim of repeated evictions by the local government, and their houses are not officially recognized on the map of Lagos. This critical situation has raised their fame and the interest of some architects.

Famouse Nigerian architects Kunlè Adeyemi (NLE’) has designed and built a floating school for the children of Makoko, and Swiss architects from Fabulous Urban have included it in a publication of Urban Planning Processes, apart from implementing this hotspot of water and toilets. The interesting aspect about this project

is the attention posed on the experience. The architects not only brought a much needed service to the community (that normally fulfills their physiological needs in the same water they fish in), but ensured that the experience of using it was safe and the use of the hotspot was easy to understand.

Indeed, people using it need to take the water from the tank and bring it to the toilet to flush. Being the tanks and the toilets located on two different levels, the toilets are provided with taylor-made illustrated instructions for all to understand the functioning of the toilets.

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Project name: Compressed earth brick Toilet block.

Place: Maji Moto, Massai Village, Tanzania MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: CR-E-AID Based in: Moshi, (TZ) Timing: / Beneficiaries: Maji Moto villagers Link info: https:// www.instagram.com/p/ Bqw6TdjHThD/ source: www.instagram.com

Project name: Green (Rose) Toilet Place: Nairobi, Kenya MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Dick Olango + Dennis Munene + OSA Based in: Tokyo (JP) Timing: / (2014) Beneficiaries: Mukuru slums dwellers Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment. org/project. source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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php?id=472#!prettyPhoto

Project name: Fresh Life Choo Place: Nairobi, Kenya MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Sanergy Based in: Nairobi (KE) Timing: / (2012) Beneficiaries: informal settlements dwellers of Nairobi Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment. org/project. php?id=247#!prettyPhoto source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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103

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Education

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Fig. 40 - Places where Education cases are located

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Project name: Ofin School Place: Lagos, Nigeria MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Fabulous Urban Based in: ZĂźrich (CH) Timing: ongoing Beneficiaries: informal settlements dwellers in Lagos Link info: https://www.italianarchitects.com/is/projects/ view/ofin-school

source: www.italian-architects.com

Project name: Kindergarten Place: Chaseyama, Zimbabwe MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Anna Heringer Based in: Laufen (DE) Timing: / (2012) Beneficiaries: PORET permaculture community Link info: http://www.annaheringer.com/index.php?id=78

source: www.anna-heringer.com

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Note on the interviews: The fact that service designers haven’t been included in the process of the cases presented will be proved later by seeing the composition of the design teams in Fig. 42.

Interviews, therefore, do not have the aim to represent a general situation of exclusion of service designers, nor to represent a shared process used by all teams.

Interviews are a qualitative research mean, and for this reason they have been used by the author in order to get insights on the personal approaches and visions of every team, and to better understand specific aspects of the single cases. Most of the interviews have happened in person, while few of them (when specified) from remote. As usually used and useful, during in person interviews the author has used probing: making unplanned questions, building on aspects addressed in previous answers.

All of the above applies not only to the interviews related to the cases review in this chapter, but to all the interviews included in this publication.

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Ropi, Ethiopia. He’s one of the best and more transparent cooperants I know. And that’s how I found out about Anna.

What we mean as marginalized community? It’s not an easy question, I never asked myself.

I see cooperation is wrong if you think you’re superior, that you’re helping, but it is mostly like that. For someone, it is a way of making oneself useful, but do we ever ask ourselves why?

For me it’s about the exchange that can happen, in that way cooperation works. I don’t like the word ‘marginalized’, it’s just a different way of living. But this is my opinion, and not necessarily shared by the whole Anna Heringer office.

Interview with Stefano

Mori

Anna Heringer Studio (24.10.2019) Can you tell me about Anna Heringer Studio in general?

It’s a very small office making very particular projects that are becoming quite famous now. We use natural materials and build in particular contexts.

Do you usually work for marginalized communities?

Yes, especially in the beginning.

I was interested in that, and I was working since before with earth as material. We did some ecovillages, and in Africa I was working with an architect, Lorenzo Fontana, that works in

How do you think your projects have a positive impact on the communities?

The main thing is about the materials we use normally, rammed earth. It is locally sourced and sustainable, but the main thing is that it is labourintensive: you activate the whole community to work with it.

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How does the process of your projects work?

Normally we are contacted by someone that works in the context and knows that there is

is a need for a project, and NGO normally, and sometimes they have also funds already. Having a network is a fundamental aspect to start with, starting a project without it is a risk for the future of the project and its functioning.

A project that works needs a community that works already.

You have been the project manager of the Kindergarten project in Zimbabwe, can you tell me about that?

It was one of the first ones I did.

I started to design in May 2012 and in December of that year I was already in Zimbabwe. It was only me and Anna in the studio at that time. We had a contact with a carpented in Laufen, and she had worked in Zimbabwe already as a volunteer for two years.

We couldn’t use earth because it was not good in the region so we used wood, and her help was fundamental. The first week it was only me and her and we formed the carpenters’ teams. We took the wood from a mountain in between Mozambique and Zimbabwe, very near to the project site. Then only I stayed there, for two months.

What about the research on the children?

Anna was there the year before, but another local person working with the Poret community asked for the kindergarden. They live with permaculture, and have a very arid areas. The head of the community started to grow some food and people started to get interested and little by little they formed the community. The community lives 6km far from the main road, and after that kids had to walk still 5km more to reach a school. They had no kindergarden and decided to start from a basic need such as education in order to improve their conditions. They told us what they needed, two classrooms and for how many children. They had the teachers, but they didn’t have a space.

Do you think you brought a service to the community?

Yes, but it’s more what I learn.

I learnt a lot, and opened my mind. Bringing something coming from the design world can bring people to look at things differently, but especially you yourself learn how to think in their way, because you have to, they are already used to work in their own contexts and with their own materials.

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Interview insights

Who provided the funds for the project?

Crossing Borders, an Austrian organization.

• Community participation starts from a good network of knowleges of community representative, which is fundamental to grasp.

On the website there is written that the place has a lot of insects and that therefore the building could even fall down and return to the earth, what do you mean?

Don’t you think it would be negative for the children if their kindergarden disappeared?

Yes, this is a bit of a naive way of seeing the project. In general we aim at making something that will last. But the positive thing is that we worked a lot with this group of carpenters, so if something will break they will perfectly know how to repair it, they will be independent.

It’s way better to invest on the people and on the know-how, rather than on the physical building itself. That’s maybe what Anna intends on the website.

This cooperation for sure was useful for both us and them. It must always be a 50/50 work.

• Marginalized communities feel the need to start from basic services to improve their conditions.

• Effective community participation can also result in great advantages in terms of maintenance of the spaces, because they can deal with it independently when they are involved in the project from the beginning and know everything about the project.

Do you know what service design is?

Not before you told me!

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Project name: Makenene Primary School Place: Makenene, Kenya MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Supertecture Based in: Kaufbeuren (DE) Timing: / (2014) Beneficiaries: children of Mekenene Link info: https://www. supertecture.com/studio/keniamekenene-primary-school-01/ kenia-mekenene-primaryschool-02/

source: www.supertecture.com

Project name: Maniquenique School Place: Maniquenique, Mozambique MQ: 200 Office name / NGO / organization: EAHR Based in: Copenaghen (DK) Timing: 2002-2003 Beneficiaries: community women, children and all people affected by floods (it become shelter when there is a flood) Link info: https://ea-hr.org/ source: www.ea-hr.org

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maniquenique-school/

Project name: Mbakadou School Place: Mbakadou, Senegal MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Architetti senza Frontiere Based in: Milano (IT) Timing: / (2017) Beneficiaries: children of Mbakadou Link info: https://www. facebook.com/pg/asfitalia/ photos/?tab=album&album_ id=10155687242522649

source: www.facebook.com

Project name: KalĂŹ Pavilion Place: Okorase, Ghana MQ: 6 Office name / NGO / organization: KalĂŹ workshop (Irene Librando e Nadia Peruggi ) Based in: Napoli (IT) Timing: 2018 Beneficiaries: children of Okorase Link info: https://www. archdaily.com/911206/kalipavilion-irene-librando-andnadia-peruggi

source: www.archdaily.com

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Interview with Irene

Librando

Kalì Workshop (25.11.2019) from remote How long did you develop the concept before delivering it for the competition?

We started to think about the concept already in November 2017, because we were making studies about vernacular architecture for our thesis. We started studying the traditional houses in the different regions of Ghana, because the theme of the competition was “reinventing the African mud house”, which clearly recalled a particular attention to the traditional building methodologies.

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To design the classroom, what kind of research did you conduct about the community and its needs? If there had been a research on the community, did you make it by remote or did you go to Ghana? What kind of research methods did you use?

We have been volunteers in Ghana (in the Sang village, in the Northern Region near Tamale) between September and October 2018 and we started to develop the first project ideas for the competition. In Sang, we took part in the construction of a dormitory for the school complex of the village, and at the same time we observed the building sites of the other classrooms. We didn’t believe in a research from remote, because the traditional buildings already change from region to region of the same country, and so do the traditional materials.

During the experience in the Northern Region we tried to gather as much information possible on the construction techniques, observing the houses and understanding their weaknesses and strengths, also learning from the local labour (also and especially by working with them on the building sites).

We were still not sure about the possibility to take part in the

competition when we were coming back, we only knew that it was launched every year (or almost), but we didn’t know which village it would have been.

So by that time we only focused on our thesis.

In general, can you describe me all the architectural process starting from the research until a possible phase of monitoring after the completion of the construction?

-Research (mostly done in the site) concerning the building techniques and the traditional houses; -Concept development; -After having been announced winners of the competition, we refined to concept and developed it into an executive project. We were in contact with a responsible person from the NGO, but the communication was neither easy nor fast.

The project was therefore developed so that we could modify it while building it in case we had problems on the building sites or related to budget. Meanwhile, we carried on a long and complex work of promotion of the workshop, funding and volunteers recruitment; -We organized the journeys for the volunteers, verifying with the

NGO that all was ready and that everybody had their documents are medical care that were necessary to reach Ghana. We managed to recruit 18 volunteers from all over Europe; -Arrived in Okorase village, in the Ashanti region (central part of Ghana), we talked to the head of the village, some members of the community, the responsible person of the NGO and we actually modified the project, because we were asked the classroom to host most kids.

Luckily, all the materials we planned to use were easy to get; -During the construction, we had a team of specialized local workers, so we had to carefully monitor the budget and the materials’ purchase.

For example, the presence of the NGO responsible was very important in this sense, because he often mediated, because other people tried to sell us overpriced materials.

-After the completion of the work, we could see the final classroom and still today we are in contact with some workers, and the NGO sometimes updates us on the news and about life in the village. The school works and the kids are very happy.

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Apart from the construction, can we say that also the concept generation has been participatory from the community?

The concept phase hasn’t been very participatory, but we posed a lot of questions to the NGO and its responsible before going there. We needed to go there very well prepared already, because we only had three months for the construction, which was built completely with no electricity and no electric tools. But since we had chance to modify the project a little bit there, little requests from the community were accepted.

donations and participation fees from the workshop volunteers).

In any case, these kind of initiatives are made for three main reasons: give an adequate school to the community (or any kind of building they require), favour the village’s and the country’s economy using local labour and local materials, and last in order to not forget the traditional techniques, that are more effective in peculiar climate like the African’s, also for public buildings.

How was the project team composed of? Did you have designers or service designers in the team?

Project responsible: Irene Librando e Nadia Peruggi; NGO local responsible: Frank Appiah Kubi; specialized and unskilled workers; volunteers.

Can you describe me all the tools you used during the process?

In particular di you use any ethnographic tool to research or to co-design with the community?

There was no particular tool used, the most important element in this sense has been the previous experience in Ghana.

Did you care for making an analysis of the stakeholders involved in the project? If yes, using what tools?

I don’t know if in this case it is correct to talk about stakeholders because the project was entirely self-funded (though

Interview insights

• When there is time and budget constraints that prevent field missions, architects make an easily modifyiable project to later adapt, instead of using tools to grasp preferences from remote.

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• There is a need to have more participation also in concept phase.

Project name: Maji Moto Primary school Place: Maji Moto, Tanzania MQ: 60 Office name / NGO / organization: PR5 (+ CR-E-AID) Based in: Milano (IT) Timing: 2019 Beneficiaries: children of Maji Moto village Link info: http://pr5studio.it/ progetti/maji-moto-school/

source: www.pr5studio.it

Project name: Carpentry school Place: Dakar, Senegal MQ: 150 Office name / NGO / organization: TaxiBrousse Based in: Parma (IT) Timing: 4 months (2019) Beneficiaries: returned Senegales immigrants from Italy and kids living in the streets Link info: https://www. taxibrousse.it/falegnameria_ dakar/ source: www.taxibrousse.it

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Project name: Matondo secondary school Place: Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo MQ: 650 Office name / NGO / organization: TaxiBrousse Based in: Parma (IT) Timing: 1 year (2015) Beneficiaries: children of Limete district Link info: https://www. taxibrousse.it/scuola-dimatondo source: www.taxibrousse.it

Project name: Carpentry school Place: Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo MQ: 850 Office name / NGO / organization: TaxiBrousse Based in: Parma (IT) Timing: 10 months (20182019) Beneficiaries: children of Goma Link info: https://www. taxibrousse.it/scuola_goma-2

source: www.taxibrousse.it

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projects have to aim to truly reflect the image of our work.

How many projects have you realized in Sub-Saharian Africa?

Daniela: For the moment only the school classroom in Maji Moto. In particular, me Alessia, Diego and Valentina (Ronzoni) went there to build it. We are planning to also design and build the toilets for the school, they demanded us. Potentially, these four of us would like to go there again for the toilets.

Alessia: Apart from my involvement in PR5, I’ve been in Maji Moto last year and, together with local NGO CR-E-AID, we created all the additional spaces near the school.

Interview with PR5 (Daniela Landi, Diego Astuto and Alessia Macchiavello (18.10.2019)

When was PR5 founded?

Diego: Since 2015, but me, Alessia and Daniela joined two years ago.

What competences are there inside the office? Are you all architects? If yes, what specializations do you have?

Diego: We are all architects. We are specialized in residential projects, offices, and projects with a social impact. For example, we were involved in the requalification of Piazzale Corvetto, and we did it with the neighbourhood’s commuty. Some

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How did you get the opportunity to work on the new classroom for the Maji Moto school? Why did you accept to do it, despite it being very far and different from your usual works?

Alessia: As I said I had been there the year before, and CR-E-AID had already detected the need for a new classroom, because the kids were too many for the existing school. Then, as PR5 we reflected on what we could have done to improve the situation.

Daniela: Personally, I had wanted to work on such a project from

a long time, but it started from a real necessity and it was essential to have a local link.

convinced by Alessia’s previous experience. But if we wouldn’t have succeeded in reaching the initial budget, we would have donated it for the improvement of the existing classrooms.

What was the role of the NGO CRE-AID for this project?

Daniela: CR-E-AID was our intermediary with the place and the community.

What kind of process did you follow, and what tools did you use?

Alessia: The longest part has been the mediation with the local NGO and their mediation with the community.

You organized a lot of events in Milan before going to Tanzania to build the classroom. What was the purpose of these events?

Diego: Of course the promotion of the project, but mainly to raise funds to make it a reality.

What kind of research did you carry out? Did you manage to go to Maji Moto during the research phase?

Daniela: Alessia knew the community from her previous experience, but we as PR5 couldn’t go before the construction. C-RE-AID reported to us the structural problems with the existing school and the school’s director requested us a blackboard for the exterior and glass for the windows, a choice we didn’t agree with, for the kids’ security, so we renegotiated that when we went there. We paid local workers with the donations, there were five permanent workers and fifteen coming once in a while.

Talking about previous research, we couldn’t do any research on the kids and their needs.

Did you also apply for calls to receive funds?

Daniela: No, we didn’t. The only ways we raised money were the events, so voluntary donations, and sponsorship from companies in exchange of advertisement.

We also sold some gadgets and involved professionals with a workshop.

What was the plan in case the project wouldn’t have reached the needed budget?

Daniela: We only had a preliminary project, and the executive project came after the finalization of the collaboration with C-RE-AID, and for that we had other donors, which were

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We only knew that the classrooms were small and overcrowded, so the project foresees 5 more classrooms developed two by two. CRE-AID had a lot more chance to work with the kids. So the only information we had were provided by CR-E-AID. We did a timeline of the works, we assigned roles to our volunteers, but a lot changed when we went there, so we established weekly aims. Anyway we noticed a lack of specific research by CR-E-AID

was spent at the local bar and seamstress by more than forty people.

How could you think of this service / space in a systemic way?

Daniela: We are a bit confused by this question, but looking at the broader picture the school should be better linked with the existing infrastructure and with the city and other urban settlements. For example, kids there don’t have electricity. Some people in the village never left it and they have never been to the city. It should be better linked.

Do you keep documentation of the process?

Alessia: Not really, but we had a floorplan provided by CR-E-AID and a relief of the school; also they gave us minimum standards for school in Tanzania.

Do you see your project as a service to the community?

Alessia: Yes, definitely. It was clear on the opening day that it was a service to the community, there has been a party, they were very grateful. We only provided a human service on the community on the long term, because we used local labor, so there is great exchange. We kind of activated an economic system in the village: for example, the hosting families were paid, and also money

Interview insights • Also they share the same problem about time constraint to make research on the children before starting with the project.

• The link and networking with locals is fundamental.

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In general, the construction times are faster than in Italy, but there are many variations that can stop or slower the construction.

For the two schools, did you follow a different architectural process? Could you describe them, highlighting the research phase on the community and the related tools used? Were the processes of design in some way participatory?

If yes, what tools did you use to include the community?

MATONDO – for the initial project, we won a competition. In the second phase (final project) we carried on an analysis of the community with a mission on field (mostly done with interviews). For what concerns participation, we included the teachers’ board and the students’ representative who studied the preliminary project and asked for some variations. The students themselves chose the colour of the school, based on renders we sent to them.

GOMA – we did a research from remote through interviews with the community leaders, religious figures and the school’s teachers.

The project is the first phase of a bigger masterplan that we defined with the participation of the teachers’ and the community’s representatives.

Interview with Federico

Monica

TaxiBrousse (25.11.2019) from remote For what concerns the Goma School, the Matondo school and the Dakar carpentry how long did it take to realize them, since you accepted the job until a possible phase of evaluation?

GOMA SCHOOL- about 10 months since the beginning of the concept phase until the end of the construction (but with a two-months stop because of political disorders in the area).

MATONDO SCHOOL- about 1 year of waiting since the finalization of the design phase, and then 7 months to build it.

CARPENTRY - 4 months

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We were required different space distributions of the classrooms which we implemented. We had a very short time (1 month for design phase) and a very complex context (very seismic and underserved area).

Unfortunately the difficulty to frequently communicate prevented us to follow the construction step by step and to expand the participation for other choices.

CARPENTRY – we carried out a research from remote with direct meetings in Italy with the senegalese migrants there were interested to participate. The budget was very small, so we co-created a project that would allow us to save money on some structures and tools.

Can you describe the tools you used in the process? Was there a phase of reiteration for each project?

Normally the processes are very linked to the features of the place and to aim of maximizing the results in relation with the available resources.

MATONDO – We had very little available spaces in a context of urban periphery. We gave ourselves some priorities like maximizig the natural light and the ventilation inside the

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classrooms to enable various activities. From this we chose to have separated but close classrooms and the Aula Magna with movable walls.

GOMA – The choice to create more blocks of three classrooms each separated from one another was born from the necessity of adapt to the ground made of lavic stone, very hard to excavate.

The project foresaw parallel blocks but the teachers asked for a solution that could create an internal court, that was more similar to traditional typologies of buildings; therefore we figured out a different solution.

CARPENTRY – The Senegalese community contacted us and involved us in this case, it was their idea to make the carpentry.

The objective was to reuse the existing foundation as much as possible, therefore to find a shape that would easily adapt to it. Another one was to use as much wood as possible in order to realize the pieces directly in the carpentry, so that it would cost almost nothing.

In general, when we are asked to develop a project, we receive simple sketches with an idea of the spaces and the necessary square metres. On the base of these sketches, we start to elaborate two or three solutions

that we discuss later with the community, and together we choose for the one of them or we formulate together a new one.

What kind of professional figures did you collaborate with, for the three projects?

We collaborated with engineers, specialized technicians (for solar energy, rainwater harvesting etc‌), but in the case of the Matondo school we also collaborated with educators with experience in Congo.

Sketches received by the clients on their request idea. Credits: studio Taxibrousse

Did you have the support of designers or service designers?

Not for these three projects. In other cases yes, service designers as well as app developers collaborated with us, but for projects that are still not realized.

Sketches of alternative proposals to discuss with students and teachers. Credits: studio Taxibrousse

Interview insights • Depending on the project, they can have time/budget or not to make in field missions and research • Participation is sometimes limited to only a choice between option produced by them

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Visualizations of color options for children to choose from. Credits: studio Taxibrousse

Project name: Dano secondary school Place: Dano, Burkina Faso MQ: 510 Office name / NGO / organization: Kéré Architecture Based in: Berlin (DE) Timing: / (2007) Beneficiaries: students of Dano Link info: http://www.kerearchitecture.com/projects/ secondary-school-dano/

source: www.kere-architecture.com

Project name: Gando primary school Place: Gando, Burkina Faso MQ: 520 Office name / NGO / organization: Kéré Architecture Based in: Berlin (DE) Timing: / (2009) Beneficiaries: children of Gando Link info: http://www.kerearchitecture.com/projects/ primary-school-gando/ source: www.kere-architecture.com

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Project name: Lycée Schorge Secondary School Place: Koudougou, Burkina Faso MQ: 1660 Office name / NGO / organization: Kéré Architecture Based in: Berlin (DE) Timing: / (2016) Beneficiaries: children of Kougoudou Link info: http://www.kerearchitecture.com/projects/ lycee-schorge-secondary-school/ source: www.kere-architecture.com

Project name: Naaba Belem Goumma Secondary School Place: Gando, Burkina Faso MQ: 4800 Office name / NGO / organization: Kéré Architecture Based in: Berlin (DE) Timing: / (2011) Beneficiaries: children of Gando Link info: http://www.kerearchitecture.com/projects/ secondary-school-gando/ source: www.kere-architecture.com

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Project name: Makoko Floating School Place: Lagos, Nigeria MQ: 220 Office name / NGO / organization: NLÉ (KunlÊ Adeyemi) Based in: Amsterdam (NL) & Lagos (NG) Timing: / (2012) Beneficiaries: Makoko kids Link info: http://www. nleworks.com source: www.nleworks.com

Project name: Gando primary school Place: Nairobi, Kenya MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: SelgasCano Based in: Madrid (ES) Timing: / (2017) Beneficiaries: children of Kibera slum Link info: https://www.dezeen. com/2017/01/05/selgascanodesigned-pavilion-transformedinto-school-for-kenyas-kiberaslum

source: www.dezeen.com

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Project name: Kutamba AIDS Orphans School Place: Bikongozo, Uganda MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Architecture for Humanity Based in: San Francisco (CA) Timing: / (2008) Beneficiaries: children of Bikongozo affected by AIDSdeceased parents Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=52

source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: ITHUBA primary school masterplan Place: Johannesburg, South Africa MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: BASEhabitat Based in: Linz (AU) Timing: / (2009-2010) Beneficiaries: children of Magagula Heights township Link info: https://www. basehabitat.org/en/projects/ ithuba-primary-school source: www.basehabitat.org

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Project name: BAYA kindergarden Place: Johannesburg, South Africa MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: BASEhabitat Based in: Linz (AU) Timing: / (2005-2006) Beneficiaries: children of Teddybear Nursery school Link info: https://www. basehabitat.org/en/projects/ baya/ source: www.basehabitat.org

source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: Bethel secondary school Place: Gourcy, Burkina Faso MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Article 25 Based in: London (UK) Timing: / (2014) Beneficiaries: children of Gourcy Link info: https://www. article-25.org/bethelsecondary-school ; https:// architectureindevelopment. org/project.

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Project name: Child support Tanzania inclusive pre-school Place: Mbeya, Tanzania MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Article 25 Based in: London (UK) Timing: ongoing Beneficiaries: Disabled and Able-bodied Children of Mbeya Link info: https://www. article-25.org/cst-school

source: www.article-25.org

Project name: Collège Amadou Hampaté Bâ Place: Niamey, Niger MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Article 25 Based in: London (UK) Timing: ongoing Beneficiaries: low-income families’ children Link info: https://www. article-25.org/college-amadouniger source: www.article-25.org

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Project name: CherĂŠ Botha School Place: Cape Town, South Africa MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: WOLFF Architects Based in: Cape Town (ZA) Timing: / Beneficiaries: children with autism Link info: https://www. wolffarchitects.co.za/projects/ all/special-needs-school source: www.wolffarchitects.co.za

Project name: Usasazo Secondary School Place: Cape Town, South Africa MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: WOLFF Architects Based in: Cape Town (ZA) Timing: / Beneficiaries: children of Khayelitsha Link info: https://www. wolffarchitects.co.za/projects/ all/first source: www.wolffarchitects.co.za

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Project name: Practical Training College Place: Sangha, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: LEVS Architecten Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: / (2013) Beneficiaries: 800 students in Sangha Link info: https://www.levs.nl/ projecten/#!praktijklyceum

source: www.levs.nl

Project name: Primary School Gangouroubouro Place: Gangouroubouro, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: LEVS Architecten Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: / (2013) Beneficiaries: students of Gangouroubouro Link info: https://www.levs. nl/projecten/#!basisschoolgangouroubouro source: www.levs.nl

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Project name: Primary School Tanouan Ibi Place: Tanouan Ibi, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: LEVS Architecten Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: / (2013) Beneficiaries: students of Tanouan Ibi Link info: https://www.levs. nl/projecten/#!basisschooltanouan-ibi source: www.levs.nl

Project name: Primary School Balaguina Place: Balaguina, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: LEVS Architecten Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: / (2012) Beneficiaries: students of Balaguina Link info: https://www.levs. nl/projecten/#!basisschoolbalaguina source: www.levs.nl

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Project name: Primary School Place: Sono Ma, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: LEVS Architecten Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: / (2014) Beneficiaries: students of Sono Ma Link info: https://www.levs.nl/ projecten/#!basisschool-sonoma

source: www.levs.nl

Project name: Shool Sangha Place: Sangha, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Fondazione Dogon Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: / (2011) Beneficiaries: children of Sangha Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=112 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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Project name: Technical school Mopti Sevarre Place: Mopti Sevarre, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Fondazione Dogon (Joop van Stigt) Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: 2005-2011 Beneficiaries: craftsmen of Sevarre Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=107 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: School Ghama Place: Ghama, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Fondazione Dogon Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: / (2011) Beneficiaries: children of Ghama Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=111 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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Project name: School Kani Kombolé Place: Kani Kombolé, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Fondazione Dogon Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: / (2011) Beneficiaries: children of Kani Kombolé Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=77 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: Banani School Place: Banani, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Fondazione Dogon Based in: Amsterdam (NL) Timing: / (2011) Beneficiaries: children of Banani Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=110 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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Project name: Ilima Primary School Place: Ilima, Democratic Republic of Congo MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: MASS Design Group Based in: Boston (MA) Timing: / (2016) Beneficiaries: children of Ilima Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=572 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: Mahenzo Goes Green Place: Mahenzo, Kenya MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Orkidstudio Based in: Nairobi (KE) Timing: / (2016) Beneficiaries: children of Mahenzo Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=638 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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Project name: Ithuba School Mzamba Place: Mzamba, South Africa MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Bauen fĂźr Orange Farm Based in: MĂźnchen (DE) Timing: / (2011) Beneficiaries: children of Mzamba Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=402 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: Silindokuhle Preschool Place: Port Elizabeth, South Africa MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Collectif Saga + Uncedo Based in: Nantes (FR) Timing: / (2011) Beneficiaries: children of Port Elizabeth Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=751 138

Project name: Community School in N’Tyeani Place: N’tyeani, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Emilio Caravatti (Africabougou) Based in: Milan (IT) Timing: 2005-2006 Beneficiaries: children of N’tyeani Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=407 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: Tongo School Place: Tongo, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Mary Althoff Based in: / Timing: / Beneficiaries: children of Tongo Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=174

source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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Project name: Scarab School Place: Timbuktu, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: ar2com Based in: Darmstadt (DE) Timing: / (2011) Beneficiaries: Tuareg-Kids without Global Communication Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=155

source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

source: www.dezeen.com

Project name: Econef Children’s Center Place: Kingori, Tanzania.

Office name: Asante Architecture, LĂśnnqvist & Vanamo Architects + A-direkt Based in: Stockholm (SE) Timing: / (2011) Beneficiaries: chidren of Kigori Link info: https://www. dezeen.com/2019/09/30/ econef-childrens-center-kingoritanzania-asante-lonnqvist-vana mo/?fbclid=IwAR0ux8TMhfBn8 ctHl84ujLELGbgedje5Sy7WHxwj 140 O6E8vlz8LdawprENyCg

Project name: THE AKAA PROJECT Place: Asiafo Amanfro, Ghana MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Yaw Kuffour Sarbeng Based in: Kumasi (GH) Timing: / Beneficiaries: children of Asiafo Amanfro Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=692 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: Ithuba Community College Place: Ekurhuleni, South Africa MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: SARCH Based in: / Timing: / Beneficiaries: children of Ekurhuleni Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=207 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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Project name: High school of Gandiole Place: Gandiole, Senegal MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Jan Henrik Hansen Based in: ZĂźrich (CH) Timing: / Beneficiaries: children of Gandiole Link info: https://www.worldarchitects.com/en/jan-henrikhansen-zurich source: www.world-architects.com

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Information

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Fig. 41 - Places where Information cases are located

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Project name: Makerere Institute (library expansion) Place: Kampala, Uganda MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: TAMassociati Based in: Venice (IT) Timing: / Beneficiaries: students of Makerere Institute Link info: http://www. tamassociati.org/portfolio/ makerere-institute/ source: www.tamassociati.org

Project name: Gando School Library Place: Gando, Burkina Faso MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: KĂŠrĂŠ Architecture Based in: Berlin (DE) Timing: / (2012) Beneficiaries: pupils of Gando primary school Link info: http://kerearchitecture.com/projects/ school-library-gando/ source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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Project name: Pexice Public Library Place: Ilha de Pexice, Guinea Bissau MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Building 4 Humanity Based in: Coimbra, Portugal Timing: / (planning) Beneficiaries: Pexice children Link info: https://www. building4humanity.com/post/ copy-of-female-wrestling-teamsets-a-new-world-record

source: www.building4humanity.com

Project name: Library of Muyinga Place: Muyinga, Burundi MQ: 140 Office name / NGO / organization: BC architects Based in: Brussels (BE) Timing: / (2012) Beneficiaries: pupils of Muyinga Link info: http://architects. bc-as.org/filter/100-1000/ Library-of-Muyinga ; https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ source: www.architects.bc-as.org

project.php?id=493 146

Project name: Njoro Children’s Library Place: Mailisita, Tanzania MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Patricia Erimescu Based in: Romania Timing: / (constr. 3 months 2015-2016) Beneficiaries: 408 students of Njoro Primary School Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=575

source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

Project name: Quarter Library in Katì Cokò Place: Bamako, Mali MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Emilio Caravatti (Africabougou) Based in: Milan (IT) Timing: / (2003-2004) Beneficiaries: youngsters of Bamako Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=376 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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Project name: THE AKAA PROJECT library Place: Asiafo Amanfro, Ghana MQ: / Office name / NGO / organization: Yaw Kuffour Sarbeng Based in: Kumasi (GH) Timing: / Beneficiaries: children of Asiafo Amanfro Link info: https:// architectureindevelopment.org/ project.php?id=692 source: www.architectureindevelopment.org

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Plus A couple more cases have been analysed, that do not belong to the Urban Basic Services selected for this work. One case is a design team designing both the requalification of an orphanage and the design of a new one in Benin, and the other is the construction of a earthen building to spread the knowledge on local materials and construction techniques in the Abetemin Arts Village in Ghana. The first case is a positive example of how some simple tools of participation and time spent to know the community, also from remote, can result in an impactful, despite simple, implementation that really benefits the community involved.

The second case illustrates a situation of dissatisfaction of the design team, related to lack of communication and collaboration by the representative of the promoter NGO, and this case creates a valid example of project that could have benefitted from the use of service design tools, in the way that will be proposed later on.

Despite this negative aspect, the process of the whole project has been reported in detail, which is an important aspect that can

foster an important iteration work on the architectural process followed and possibly have a big impact on the team’s next project.

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from all over Italy. This workshop represented the first experience of our association, and it was made up of two sections: conferences and practical skills.

Interview with Dario

Caruso

Verso, Ferrara (14.10.2019) How and when was Verso born?

Verso was officially born in January 2015, but theoretically it was conceived after my Erasmus experience made in Vienna, where a professor introduced me to some specific topics useful for this project. When I came back to Ferrara, I decided to involve one of my Italian colleagues to this project, in order to develop an innovative model which may change the perspectives of some topics in the university of Ferrara. In this regard, we sorted a workshop, named “Limiti Urbani�, in which we involved a large number of academics, between professors and students,

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Are all Verso team members architects? Or do they have different backgrounds?

At the beginning, we were all architects, since we were all colleagues in the University of Ferrara. Now, we are looking to expand our association involving people with different backgrounds, in order to be more competitive on the market. Currently, we have two partners, who are hydraulic and energy engineers, and we are going to involve also an expert on international cooperation to improve our networking.

Moreover, we plan to include a communication expert and a legal advisor.

How many projects did you make in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Actually, just one. We made it in September 2019, in Ouidah in Benin, called Ouidah One. This project was based on the requalification of one of the orphanages in Ouidah. Naturally, we have other projects on mind.

In this regard, thanks to the success of the project in Ouidah, we are planning to make

building the one in Allada.

another similar project in Allada, commissioned by NGO “La Maison de la Joie”. The space they have is too limited. This work is based on the building of an orphanage, which is considered essential for the local community.

To better comprehend how orphanages may operate in that area, some of my colleagues went to Allada for checking the status and the structures of these buildings. It is important to state that all of these orphanages are managed not only by NGOs, but also by the clerk and the local government. Among these orphanages, there is the one of Sainte Marie de Toligbe, where we did the workshop Ouida One. This one is managed by the clerk, but the conditions were very bad, so we decided to do the workshop there and implement some improvements.

How and when was the project in Ouidah born? Who conceived it?

The idea of the orphanage requalification in Ouidah was born in March of the current year 2019, after having attended an architecture conference in the University of Ancona. Some of my colleagues came up with this original idea in order to start our networking for making this kind of projects in Benin, before

Did you already meet the orphans hosted in Ouidah?

Some yes, but actually the focus groups that you saw on our website we only did them with the children of “La Maison de la Joie”, who we hosts us when we go in Benin and commissioned us the Allada orphanage.

Unfortunately we couldn’t do any workshop or activity with the kids of the orphanage in Ouidah, because there was no time.

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Is the organization of “La Maison de la Joie” directly linked with your association? Or not?

No, we are not directly linked with them. We have only got in touch with them through our personal contacts. “La Maison de la Joie” is a ONG, which was born by an idea of an Italian, who married a local lady in Benin. Together, they built a house in Ouidah that became an important orphanage. Since they live in Italy, they found other investors interested in helping them with this project for Benin’s community. Now, they are looking to expand this organization with an Italian group, “Insieme per crescere”, which has other ONGs. It is important to state that “La

Maison de la Joie” is an Italian ONG, and simultaneously is an organization registered in Benin.

and the local government are different by the ones managed by the ONG, e.g. by “La Maison de la Joie”. The management structure of “La Maison de la Joie” consists in two major figures: la Maman, who may cook and make all house services, and the childcare worker, who educates children in behaving in a particular way in the daily environment.

Naturally, there are also other figures as social workers or external supporters who may help orphans to do homework or something else.

How was the interest with “La Maison de la Joie” born?

Since we decided to make this project in Benin and this organization is one of the most important NGOs there, we got in touch with them thanks to one of our partner’s links with them.

Through this link, “La Maison de la Joie” proposed us to work about a project concerning the building of a new orphanage.

Once accepted this project, we also decided to perform the workshop about the orphanage requalification in Ouidah by ourselves.

Is there difference between orphanage and family home in Benin?

In Benin, the reality is totally different from Italian one. There, social workers are mediators between families and orphanage managers, also because some orphans are not completely without parents. In case the orphan cannot stay in the family home, this last may be accepted by the orphanage.

In consideration of the orphanages management, the ones managed by the clerk

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What stage are you with the realization of the orphanage project in Allada?

Actually, we are at a standstill, since there are several bureaucratic slowdowns because of the granting of permits concerning the building. These slowdowns are mainly due to the local political dynamics. Despite that, the portion of land where it is possible build the orphanage is available. In replying to your question, I suppose that the times concerning the realization of this project are indefinable.

The project may take one year or more. Everything depends on the flexibility and collaboration of the local governmental authorities.

relation to this, in this project we must to consider to build some spaces useful for all children, for allowing them to be comfortable with the building, such as the area where they may pray, the area where they sleep in peace, the canteen, etc… They do most of the things together.

Anyway, there are many aspects that we found out in regard to the children’s needs that have to do with the way they conceive their living and some of their habits, that have to be together as a family.

What about the funds?

A percentage of this project will be directly financed by the NGOs, such as “La Maison de La Joie”, and other percentages will be financed by donations or other campaigns aimed to the requalification of these territories.

Which kind of activities did you perform for the project in Allada and which kind of tools did you use?

Sincerely, I was not in Benin last year, so I could not supervise everything that my colleagues did in that period. I may say that they sorted some cards in which local people had to draw a small graphic rendering.

Moreover, they had some personal interviews explaining what they expected from this project. From these interviews, my colleagues highlighted all the needs of the local people, in order to develop the most appropriate project for the building of the orphanage. In

What tools did you use during the workshops? Did you produce these tools or were they used in other experieces?

We used focus groups for the Allada orphanage, and they were partly already organized in Italy with the help of a professor of sociology from the University of Bologna. We needed her help because working with children can be stimulating but presents other problems. Focus groups with children are different from the ones with adults, and they also expressed their dreams and wishes, and on this base we designed the Allada orphanage.

The focus groups were done with some papers where the kids were asked to draw, the some conversation about their dreams on the orphanage, and finally there was a phase of researching about their way of living.

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What were the aims of the focus groups?

Mostly to understand how they live and imagine, but not specifically to visualize the spaces, because probably it would have changed anyway.

they gave us an oral restitution.

What phase were you when you had these activities with the kids?

The project was still not there, only ideas. After the workshops, we defined it and presented it both to the NGO and in a small event in Carpi to get some donations. Their evidence of how they used the space influenced the project a lot, also to define were to put the rooms of the “maman” and of the educator. The NGO comprised the time for these research phase in the time given, which was very helpful. The NGO is made of volunteers, so they didn’t have the competences to provide this information, so we had to do it.

But I want to specify we’re also not experts in cooperation.

What data did you collect and how did they influence the project?

Yes, as I said it was more about understanding how they live, they spend most of their time between the school and the orphanage.

You said that for the Ouidah workshop you couldn’t go and meet the kids before. Why? We were not able in such a little time to organize a trip to go before the construction. It was already complicated to make the requalification project and the organization of the workshop together.

How did you fund the project?

With crowdfunding and free donations from privates and institutions.

How helpful were the tools in visualizing the data about the space?

Some were written, they we asked for the drawings, and after

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Since one month is passed, do you have news on the level of satisfaction of the kids?

Of course, not everything went as planned, but in some way we did more than we expected. So we are very satisfied. The kids use the space better. Before, they were bored, so they were sleeping a lot. After doing the playground, they started to develop their fantasy, they were very excited about it as soon as we started to build it.

Allada?

Yes we have the drawings, videos and so on.

Now it’s rain season, so they use the covered part more. Also the beds made a good improvement.

Will you publish the results about the impact that the Ouidah requalification had on the kids?

Yes, we think so. We want to go back there next year, but for sure before that someone from La Maison de la Joie will go there to see how the kids are doing and they will give us some feedback.

We are also in contact with the priest, that would like us to do more for them, like new toilet units for example. But we can’t do anything now, on one side because we should collect funds ourselves, and on the other because we don’t really agree with a certain form of assistance, we are not there to solve all their problems.

Who were the stakeholders?

La Maison de la Joie gave us a big help, because they hosted us, and gave us the tools to work and build, despite the fact that in that case we were not designing for them, because the orphanage in Oudaih is managed by the clerk, as I said. The NGO was worried for the conditions of the kids, that is why they helped us. Then, we had three local workers from a small construction company, which was absolutely essential to build in the proper way. The priest also helped.

To what extent did the Ouidah project follow the needs of the kids?

Not much, there was only an evident need not to sleep on the concrete floor. About deciding the kinds of plays to put in the playground, we decided by ourselves with recycled materials found there. We had more of them, but we had to take some off because they were using them in the wrong way.

Do you think that with this project you were trying to respond to the kids’ rights to inhabit and play?

For sure in the future the aim is to give some joy to these kids, but mostly it was a way to send a message: an orphanage doesn’t necessarily have to be a place to sleep and eat, but it can also be a place to have an acceptable childhood.

Do you keep documentation of the workshop activities carried out and the results obtained for

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Thinking both about the present and past projects of the office, and of the future direction you want to give it, would you define yourselves as ‘humanitarian architects’?

No, not humanitarian. Maybe the concept of ‘humanitarian’ is a bit too elevated. On our business card we wrote “social architecture”. We believe in helping societies to grown and improve, to live with dignity maybe also despite the poverty.

For us ‘humanitarian’ is too linked with a state of emergency.

We would like to support development in any part of the world.

Do you see the project as a service to the community? If yes, what kind of service did you bring?

Yes for sure. These kids will be adults one day, and I hope our project contributed even only a bit to their positive growth. Probably such a limited intervention in such a small space doesn’t change much in their life experience, but I think it will also contribute in educating them to use the spaces in the right way. They were used to sleep on the floor and to use outdoor areas as toilets. It’s important to show them which are the right places to do these

things.

Do you know what is service design? Do you have service designers in the team? Do you know any service designer?

Before you told me what it is, I had no idea. I don’t know if anyone from the team know any service designer.

Do you see these two projects as part of a system?

We try to not see the project only in the physical form, that’s why we define ourselves as ‘architects for the social’: we need our projects to have an impact on different levels. It’s not just about creating a beautiful space, but it needs to be convivial, helping people to communicate and integrate. Moreover, for sure if we could expand our competences, we would like our projects to be bigger and start with good research and analysis about the people. We know that to have a project that works, onl creating a space is not enough.

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all pictures source: www.collettivoverso.com

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Interview insights • It’s important to get insights at an early stage of the process so that people’s preferences can influence the project more

• Not always is easy to conduct in field research • Their studio, with little to no knowledge about service design, makes use of limited participation tools, mostly focus groups, interviews and observation

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Drawings and ideas from children coming from focus groups.

All pictures credits: Verso and “La Maison de la Joie�

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Do you collaborate with NGOs, and if yes, big or small ones?

The other NGO is quite big, it operates in many countries at a global scale, NKA we wouldn’t define it an NGO.

What competences do you have inside LOAD? We are all architects except for a team member that is expert in international cooperation.

How did the project for the Village of Arts start and when? Could you go to Abentim, before starting the design process?

The projects started from an official call from NKA Foundation, but unfortunately we didn’t manage to go there before the implementation, therefore the construction of the eARThouse.

We went there with a project, but after being there for a while and talking with the people, we changed it a lot. Rain and in general aspects related to weather can create big problems, but you don’t really realize it from Italy.

Interview with LOAD, Bologna (19.10.2019) from remote

When and how was LOAD born?

We founded it in 2016, when we decided as a team to take part in a competition launched by NKA Foundation. We wanted to come together as a team from before, the competition was an excuse.

Do you see yourself as humanitarian architects?

No really, our philosophy is to base the project on the analysis of the context and the use of local materials. The approach would be the same in Italy. To us, it doesn’t sound fair to only focus on one half of the planet.

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What kind of research did you do on the community? What needs did you identify and how?

We expected the foundation to have already done it, we thought of going there as technicians,

but they hadn’t. The Arts Village is quite far from the actual village, and people were not very interested in the work we were conducting there. Only the young people working for the construction were returning there more often. Actually we didn’t know the community before going there, we only knew one young man producing stoves with earth, and we had only him as initial target, but for time constraints we couldn’t do interviews while being there.

We know the representative from NKA Foundation in Ghana was sent back home. We are in contact with a professor of the local university that goes there from time to time. He says the eARThouse is being used by the kids, but we are not sure how.

Do you think the projects reflects the real needs of the community?

Not really, because the call launched by NKA was based on nothing.

Do you know what service design is?

No, we don’t.

How are you monitoring the project since it was built?

source: www.load-project.com

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As we can see, none of these teams designing a space to deliver Urban Basic Services has included a service designer in the process, and none of these teams have a service designer as its member. Only EAHR, Emergency Architecture & Human Rights, based in Copenhagen, benefits from the consultation of Hanne Klintøe, Change Strategist from platform “44”, but she has unfortunately not been involved in the Maniquenique School in Mozambique.

All the cases reviewed show an effort from the architects to meet the communities’ aspirations and needs. Indeed, when building for fragile contexts like poverty in developing countries, the architectural process is automatically more concerned and attentive about the community it is aiming to serve. Dealing with a community properly implies a certain effort to implement in the process some elements of social innovation. After all, the building is only a physical mean to achieve something bigger, which is social impact. Therefore, especially humanitarian architecture has evolved its process to incorporate tools coming from other disciplines like social innovation, as well as to create effective partnerships with different kinds of professionals, psychologists for examples.

Nevertheless, projects that aim at implementing Urban Basic Services are mostly entrusted to architects. The teams composed to design these buildings are:

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OFFICE NAME

Architects

Engineers

Fabulous Urban Anna Heringer Supertecture EAHR – Emergency Architecture and Human Rights ASF Italia Kalì Workshop PR5 TAMassociati TaxiBrousse Kéré Architecture NLÉ (Kunlé Adeyemi) Building4Humanity SelgasCano CR-E-AID BC architects Architecture for Humanity Basehabitat Article25 WOLFF architects LEVS Architecten Fondazione Dogon Mass Design Group Dick Olango + Dennis Munene + OSA Sanergy Orkidstudio Patricia Erimescu Cincinnati School of Architecture Bauen fur Orangefarm Saga + Uncedo Emilio Caravatti Mary Althoff ar2com Asante Architecture, Lönnqvist&Vanamo Architects + A-direkt Yaw Kuffour Sarbeng SARCH Jan Henrik Hansen

Fig. 42 - Cases’ design teams compositions

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Urban planners Service designers Other

“holistic design”, “co-design”, “strategic design”, “design for social innovation” and so on, all disciplined that are often mastered together by the same professional figures (Meroni, 2019). But there is something that all these different but related disciplines have in common, which brings us to the second point:

It is not common indeed for architects, in any architectural work regardless of the context, to collaborate with service designers. Two main reasons for this could be identified:

• The definitional aspect: it is hard for service designers themselves to explain what a service is and therefore what is the work of a service designer.

“The definitional difficulty regarding his work is, for the service designer, an issue far from being solved“ (Meroni, 2019 - Original: “La difficoltà definitoria rispetto al proprio lavoro è per il service designer una questione tutt’altro che risolta”). Indeed, the service, despite being one of the oldest assets of society, has “only recently been formalized as “object” of design in its aspects of sense, function and experience (Meroni, 2019 - Original: “[…] solo recentemente formalizzato come “oggetto” di progettazione nei suoi aspetti di senso, funzionali ed esperienziali”) And specifically because of its broad and intertwined nature, the terminology of service design is often used along with and substituted by terms like “design thinking”, “(user) experience design”, “system design”,

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• The immateriality: indeed, services are not physical objects, therefore the way service design is expressed and represented rather “contemplates elements of quality that are not limited to the physical dimension of artifacts” (Meroni, 2019 - Original: “contempla elementi di qualità non limitati alla dimensione fisica degli artefatti […]”). This immateriality can be very hard to understand. It is necessary to consider that “the working parameters of architects were created during the twentieth century, they mainly focus on the object, in the form of physical buildings […]” (book Architecture for Humanitarian Emergencies vol. 2 text emphasis by author).

Therefore, for an architect that is used to design physical artifacts it can be challenging to imagine a way of designing something abstract like, for example, a

being the most commonly offered). Indeed, in the world there have been mapped 194 Degree programs that are either explicitly dedicated to service design, that explicitly include service design, or that significant presence of courses about service design (https:// www.servicedesignmap.polimi. it/), and none of these is offered in Africa. On the other hand, Architecture Universities are much more diffused, present in 98 countries worldwide and each of them presenting one or more school, with one or more degree programmes. Therefore, globally speaking, also for this reason it is hard to find an architect that knows what service design is.

system or an experience.

• The academic presence of service design: most of the schools of design derived either from art academies or from architecture schools. Academies of art and design offer a design education that is more artistic and speculative, while design schools founded by architects have a more industrial and technical nature. From the latter, also service design has been formalized as an object of design study. Service design is a young discipline if compared to other fields of design, therefore the first generations of service designers had an architectural background.

This means that (most) service designers, especially the first generations, are very familiar to the architecture practices and tools. Unfortunately, on the other hand, all the others, that have continued to practice architecture, have a very limited understanding of what service design is.

This is slightly attenuated in universities that offer courses in both service design and architecture, but service design courses are not as diffused as architecture, nor as other forms of design courses (product, communication or fashion

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A perfect case that illustrates the lack of mutual knowledge and communication between architects and service designers is the case of the “Neev – digital tool for resilient housing”. The project belong to mHS City Lab, a Dehli-based “Social Venture with the aim to design scalable solutions to tackle urban poverty and in particular problems related to housing”. The team of mHS is composed by an architect (Politecnico di Milano alumno Marco Ferrario), a business manager, project coordinators, creative director, a software developed and a coder. Despite the lack of inclusion service designers in the team as well as external consultants, Neev is a service-app, whose conceiving process is typical of service design. Neev project has been presented during the Master “Design for Development” promoted by Consorzio Poliedra of Politecnico di Milano, that the author is pursuing. Neev works for people aiming at selfconstructing their house, but lacking technical knowledge. The user can specify location, number of storeys, materials, available budgets and more details, and the app generates a construction manual specific for every project.

During the presentation, many

tools and methods of service designed has been used to introduce to Neev, including: focus groups, brainstorming, offering map, positioning map and system map.

credits: Concept and incubation of NEEV: mHS CITY LAB

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Notes on Chapter 3

1: the concept is paraphrased from the lecture “Tools for project management” by Luca Bonifacio, held on 14.10.2019 at Politecnico di Milano in the context of the Master “Design for Development - Architecture, Urban Planning and Heritage in the Global South”, promoted by Consorzio Poliedra and that the author is pursuing.

Chapter 4

COLLABORATION BETWEEN SERVICE DESIGNERS AND ARCHITECTS

“Library of Muyinga” by BC architects, source: architects.bc-as.org

Pursuing collaboration Despite all these discrepancies and difficulties of dialogue and integration, it is really desirable and necessary that a collaboration between architects and service designers becomes more diffused, if not mainstream, especially when architects are asked to design a space to deliver a service.

As we have seen in the chapter about Urban Basic Services diffusion and delivery in SubSaharan Africa, the situation in this context is very critical.

Already the Agenda 2030 and the SDGs have made it clear that partnerships between actors, communities and other professionals are the keys to achieve a sustainable development. “When we look at the scale of the problem and at the vastity (targets and indicators) of the UN SDGs framework, we might find ourselves asking how each of us can give a meaningful contribution to sustainable development” says Paolo Cresci, Sustainability and Building Services Team Leader at Arup Group, on Domus October’s issue’s annex EcoWorld. “I believe there are many ways, both on an individual level and

on a systemic, collaborative level, the latter of which is more effective. Goal 17 pertains to partnership, indicating it as the only way to achieve the goal by 2030. In order to work together we must share objectives and speak a common language to understand each other. And ultimately, to do so we must share the same values […]” (text emphasis by author).

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The same concept has been supported by Jo da Silva, Director of International Development at Arup Group on the same issue, who says: “sustainable development requires us to join hands with others fighting for the same values, and work collaboratively across sectors and disciplines” (text emphasis by author). Therefore, if service designers and humanitarian architects find themselves sharing a vocation to make use of their competences to reach the same goal, to effectively deliver Urban Basic Services for communities that need it the most, why not trying to collaborate? Why not trying to work together and implement a

process that includes all of the tools and best practices that are more useful for the aim, coming from both disciplines?

The inclusion of service designers in the Humanitarian Aid sector is already happening and has already generated many innovative projects.

Nevertheless, the examples of service design projects for the Humanitarian Aid have seen service designers address critical sectors, especially healthcare, mostly by implementing apps or platforms. This work wants to focus on exploring opportunities for service designers to join forces specifically with architects, in order to reach a more effective service delivery for the marginalized groups that are in need of Urban Basic Services the most, therefore the ones living in Africa’s Sub-Saharan region.

The delivery of Urban Basic Services for marginalized groups, as extensively exposed in the first chapter, calls for more than one of the SDGs’ fulfilment, therefore, matched with a fast-growing urbanization, it is certainly one of the most challenging of the planet’s problems. “Considering the complexity of the SDGs framework, the importance of a systemic approach is evident”

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(Paolo Crespi Domus EcoWorld), and architectural tools could end up being insufficient (Architecture for Humanitarian Emergencies vol. 2). That is one of the main reasons why especially humanitarian architects should consider fruitful collaboration with service designers. Indeed, the aspect of implementing a systemic thinking is crucial, and it is one of the main pillars and strongest competence of service designers. Architects and service designers surely share design thinking skills as well as principles of “good design”, but service designers are trained to consider elements of the project, stakeholders, interactions, touchpoints and impacts as interrelated and to design services in this perspective.

The focus is not on the space, nor on the touchpoints, nor on the interactions, but on the effective functioning of the whole system, as well as its economic, environmental and social sustainability. “The UN SDGs challenge us to think of our projects as part of a wider system, rather than as individual assets. Our focus must shift from minimising social and environmental impact to providing long-term social,

environmental and economic value” (Jo da Silva Domus EcoWorld).

Therefore, if in the perspective of an architects the focus is on the space, service designers will most likely tend to shift the attention on the bigger system, where the space is only one of the many elements of a service, even if maybe the only physical touchpoint. An interesting comment in this sense comes from architect Joel Van Dyke from Freeman & Major, who investigates the commonalities and overlapping of design methods used in architecture and service design. He says “I think architecture is a part of the service delivery ecosystem. The service concept and emotional aspect of the service delivery must be defined before the space is designed in order to have an integrated whole. If this is not the case, the architecture can become an obstacle to the delivery of the customer experience rather than supporting it. […] I see service design impacting architecture when the architect thinks outside of the normal bounds of architecture and looks at the whole service delivery ecosystem. Then architecture can be a tool to get more leverage and power into the delivery of the service and customer experience”1.

One outstanding case in this sense is the project of the user experience redesign of the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. The one-week project undertook by Frog and led by Roberta Tassi has seen a team of ten professionals gather in Kigali to re-design the experience of the Genocide Memorial in order for it to “drive people towards activation” (Tassi, n.d.). The project has seen an extension of the experience time and a re-organization of the space and the physical elements of the exhibition. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the redesign dealt with the exhibition spaces, setting up the exhibition in a different way has only been a mean to deliver a completely different experience to the visitor of the memorial, visualized through an emotional journey map. This case does not deal with Urban Basic Services, nor with an underserved community, but it provides a great example in order to understand how the design or re-design of a space can happen despite not being the final outcome of the project, but as the (major) mean of delivery of something greater such as the experience and the system.

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credits: UX for Good, Rethinking the Memorial Experience.

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The cases of spaces displayed above all come from the Development phase of Humanitarian Aid or from International Cooperation for Development. The reason for it is that the collaboration between architects and service designers that this work envisions is more likely to happen in these frameworks. Projects undertaken by architects in the phases of emergency, relief and recovery have a big constraint: time. In these cases, the architects find themselves to be used more as technicians because of their knowledge of water, energy of sewage systems rather than their capabilities of interpreting visions through a built form. In emergency, relief and recovery phases, the priority must be on the mere, but fundamental, delivery of the service in a way that brings dignity to the affected community.

“In projects of development […] the “time” factor allows for inedited experimentations both in construction and in forms of social participation. […] It seems that architecture, in this contexts, “gives the best of itself”. […] The obligation to abandon the reassuring methodologies and the consolidated customs of our actions paradoxically facilitate design processes.

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A renovated attention to the place (paradoxically often unknown), to materials and local construction technics are found.

(Magni, 2019 - text emphasis by author – Original: “Nei progetti di sviluppo […] il fattore “tempo” consente inedite sperimentazioni sia nella costruzione che nelle forme di partecipazione sociale. […] sembra che l’architettura in questi contesti “dia il meglio di sé”. […] L’obbligo ad abbandonare le rassicuranti metodologie e le consolidate consuetudini delle nostre azioni paradossalmente facilita i processi progettuali. Si riscontra così una rinnovata attenzione al luogo (paradossalmente spesso sconosciuto), ai materiali e alle tecniche costruttive locali”).

From the words of Camillo Magni, professor at Politecnico di Milano’s Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, as well as director of the Design for Development Master, it seems clearer why in projects happening within the framework of Development, an integration between service design practices and tools into the architectural process is more easily viewable: the smaller time constraint allow for more experimentations in terms of process, as well as greater space for focusing the attention on the communities we design for.

and expanding. With Pierandrei Associati, me and Fabrizio were making service design since years but we were feeling that the structure of our practice was the one of old architecture offices. So we founded PACO connecting with the people that were already around us, so people from Politecnico di Milano, people from PSSD, people involved in the Global Service Jams and of course us from Pierandrei Associati. We started by meeting once every two weeks all together, and discussing our aims (social innovation), about expanding the team (with sociologists, psychologists etc…) and doing it collaboratively. We started to auto-organize to tackle the new challenges of design and of the other disciplines. PACO is fiscally/legally an association, but we don’t recognize ourselves in the definition of “association”, what differentiates us is that we are a group of professionals trying to work in the world of social innovation and behavioural change. We believe in design as mediator between professions.

Today PACO mostly works in the academic / institutional world, participating in European calls to innovate, also the third sector.

Interview with Stefano

Anfossi

PACO Collaborative (22.10.2019) Hello Stefano, can you tell me about PACO and how it started?

It is a perfect mix of architects and service designer, which is not common. How did you create this mix? Which values do you share?

PACO started four or five years ago and after one year of incubation, because me and Fabrizio Pierandrei wanted to understand the new evolutions of design beyond the typical themes of design, like product, construction and communication, and the new ways of acting as designers. During those years the world of designing was opening

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As architect, what made you so interested in social innovation and what led you to found PACO? With Pierandrei Associati, we always had an approach based on the comprehension of the context and of the people living our projects. We always called ourselves “behavioural designers and architects” because we were basing most of our approach on observing people’s behaviours, more as sociologists rather than architects. We were already seeing the limits of the architecture world and of its process. It is sometimes so isolated that it struggles to understand the context in which it is acting, we always preferred a holistic approach to better understand people’s needs. Doing good for the world is a value, a positive push factor.

Working for social innovation has been a natural step forward. But we don’t see it as volunteering, instead it is a professional contribution.

As architect, do you think service design is known as a discipline in the world of architecture?

Very little, partly because the world of architecture is very self-referential, it needs a “king”, the architect, that struggles to collaborate in the process /

project, the other professionals around the architect normally have a technical impact, not a conceptual one. But it’s always clearer that the architect or interior designer is not enough anymore. The complexity of some projects is such that it’s not enough for the client to tell us why they want to build, the content is much more important than the container.

The building has to communicate what happens inside. Instead, normally architects start from the shape, not the people.

Have you ever had the chance, with Pierandrei Associati, to complete an architectural project starting from a more service design-oriented process?

We always did it, all our projects always have a design thinking approach, so closer to service design for sure, but it was not formalized. We needed external people to formalize the tools and make design thinking more explicable to the outside. But I must say that in general Italian architects always and historically had an approach focused on people’s needs.

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What do you mean by marginalized community?

For us, a marginalized community is a group of people that, for one reason of another, is forced away from the social and communitarian life of the given area. This social life can, for example, mean access to jobs, access to education and so on. Very often, marginalized communities are also minorities.

How did you integrate the processes of the two disciplines, architecture and service design?

The big difference is that architecture has a physical, “rigid” output that is the building, while the outputs of service design are dynamic, flexible, evolving. Service design is based on prototyping, and prototyping a service is a lot easier than prototyping a house or building, indeed the “prototyping” for architects is the final scale model, but it’s not the same thing.

How can service design tools make a difference in developing countries and when dealing with marginalized communities?

I think service design can help a lot in better identifying the internal problems in the community and the untapped resources and capabilities.

Service designers can optimize the work of team working with them, which are normally made-up of sociologist and psychologists, therefore professionals that are very good conceptually and communication-wise, but less trained towards the formalization of a project.

To have an impact and be performative, service designers give a form to the problems of the communities, of course also using tools “borrowed” from other

To what extent can service design tools be useful to architecture?

For sure they can make certain aspects more readable and be analysed and represented more scientifically, which is the aim of the tools. The great problem about service design tools is that very often they are seen, and used, as tools to fill-in, not generative ones, while the real aim of a tool is to be generative.

To fill-in a tool without generating a result is useless.

So yes, service design tools can be very useful to architecture, but it depends on if they are correctly used. Today, designers also have to think of designing tools to expand the collaborative capability of people.

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disciplines, but always keeping the most peculiar aspect that distinguish designers: the need to do. Designers can bring the capacity of realization in a world that is very verbal.

Anyway, there is a limit in what an architect or a service designer can do alone, therefore a service designer has to be able to bring people to sit at the same table and work together. Of course this is something that more collaborative architects do, but they don’t have structure of a process of listening, which service designers have certainly structured. It’s a matter of having a certain attitude in the way we interact with people, it’s about soft skills of a process. It’s at the base of our work, but it’s very difficult to visualize or to turn into tools. In order to have a real impact, we need to put ourselves on the same level as men and women, and not as the “professional-saviour”, and earn the trust of the community.

Another big trend nowadays is what I call “populist design”.

Some designers act only as “needs-gatherer”, which is a very limiting approach. It’s necessary to design with people, but we cannot rely on them for the projects. We cannot ask to the people to have the envisioning

capabilities about a project, it’s the role of the designer to guide them to see beyond. Instead nowadays it’s more and more common to ask the people to foresee and envision, while this is specifically the peculiar aspect of the world of design. This confusion between “populist design” and co-design is making a lot of damage. This is also PACO’s battle: to change from seeing the designer as a mere facilitator to its real role of co-designing to bring a vision to the people, for them to be more responsible and satisfied while making use of the project, knowing that it’s really based on their needs and desires.

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What pushes you to work a lot with marginalized communities in Sub-saharan Africa?

Opportunities. The University of Lapland got to know about PACO, and around 15 people from the university came to meet us. Then, they called us to collaborate in a project for the San community, or Bushmen, in order to use service design and design thinking, The aim was to lead them to develop services to use in their own community, so find capabilities in the community, organize them and lead them to develop the services. In this moment, Silvia Remotti is in Cape Town to help

create a process inside marginalized communities, a process of building selfesteem and knowledge of oneself and others within the communities, for them to gain confidence to address their problems in a collaborative way. We still couldn’t get to the point of building a physical space, that would be a much longer process. This is the problem with social innovation, it can only work through donations and donations imply time constraints, which make processes hardly strategic in the long-term. Calls are based on single projects, not strategies.

in designing a kindergarten for one of the townships of the city.

Exactly what role is PACO having in this project?

There is a Pacoer, Andrea Couvert, as social mediator and he developed certain aspects of the kindergarten including the legal aspects, involving a local architect. PACO Central in Milan was asked to send members in order to educate future workers of the kindergarten on design practices applied to education.

With the local architect, Andrea Couvert used design thinking, but more for relational rather than conceptual aspects. A good way to have long-term impact, especially in the realm of education, is to work with the teachers rather than the pupils. Especially when a project is funded for four years, the important thing is not to create dependency on you, but to ensure the projects goes on after you leave.

The toolbook is very interesting and inspiring. Have you ever tried to integrate these tools in a proper architectural project?

No we didn’t, because the aim of the tools included in the toolbook was not to support a real architectural project, but to

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Can you tell me more about the Cool School project?

In Africa, one of the biggest problems with education is that it is very rigid and mostly only based on the transfer of notions.

The children’s creative aspect is very neglected. The workshop’s theme was “redesign your school”, so it was generally aiming at redesigning all aspects of the school, also functional ones, but most of them ended up redesigning spaces because it’s easier and more tangible. Of course also their space redesign can tell you a lot about they wish the functional aspects to work.

source: www.pacollaborative.com

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Participation / Inclusiveness

However, it is evident that any work happening in the Humanitarian Sector, specifically because always dealing with fragile communities, must follow strict and specific protocols as well as be in line with the certain principles. Specifically, the principles of the Humanitarian Sector are:

Participation and inclusiveness are two similar but distinct concepts. Participation is a contact of (normally, mutual) exchange between the designer/ architect and the users or target of the project/space and it can happen on many levels. The most famous article talking about the different level is for sure Sherry Arnstein’s “A ladder of citizen participation” (Arnstein, 1969). The ladder introduced

by Arnstein in 1969 is still the most referred to in design projects and it explains the many levels in which community participation can happen, from mere consultation to more radical citizen control, passing through more common forms of partnerships.

But participation can even only be made with a certain category of people inside the community.

This is way in the Humanitarian Sector it is particularly important to also match it with inclusiveness, which means to “make sure that all the voices of the communities are heard” (Bonifacio), therefore without making a distinction because of gender, age, cast, etc...

• Resilience • Participation / inclusiveness • Preparedness • Governance • Do-not-harm approach

Resilience means the ability to cope, adapt and react quickly to the distress caused by a situation of crisis, while Preparedness “refers to measures taken to prepare for and reduce the effects of disasters” (IFRC Disaster Response and Preparedness, n.d.). These two principles are more related to phases of Humanitarian Aid earlier than Development. For what concerns Participation and Inclusiveness, Governance and the Do-not-harm approach, it is more evident that these are elements that can be better achieved with the support of service design.

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Fig. 43 - Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation

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Often participation and inclusiveness are implemented in such a way that they not only generates benefit for the project, but makes a longer impact on the community’s skills and competences possible. This is what happens in processes of capability approach, happening through capacity building.

Participation in architecture is obviously not a new concept, and especially humanitarian architects or architects working for marginalized groups in general pose a lot of attention in always design in response to the real needs of the community and, more than often, to actively involve them in activities of codesign.

“It is fundamental to involve people and communities […]

Dialogue between architects and the community has positive effects for both parties regarding the design project and regarding the strengthening and advancement of the community.

Architects themselves must believe in this partnership first.”

Natalie Mossin EcoWorld In this framework, it seems clear that the traditional position of the architect as the possessor or all reason and knowledge is no more sustainable. Architects that want to work in contexts

of fragility and marginalization have to go through a destabilizing process of redefining their role.

In this sense, “the architect ought to become more a facilitator, a social and cultural activist, who creates systems which would pave the way for a more direct inclusion of individuals or groups of individuals who engage in these projects“, as expressed in the book “Architecture for Humanitarian Emergencies vol.

2” by Jorge Lobos, founder of Emergency Architecture and Human Rights. Urban-Think Tank, the architecture-focused, interdisciplinary design studio led by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Kumpner, expressed the same vision in one of its Slum Lab publications, affirming that “SLUMLAB would like to recast the role of the architect from a top-down type of authoritarianism to the architect as interpreter and facilitator or the needs and desires of a particular community” (Brillembourg & Klumpner, 2008). We find an analogous commitment expressed during the Design for Humanity Summit 2018: “Designing for humanity does not mean creating ‘widgets’, but designing systemic approaches grounded in community participation.

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It does not mean testing shiny new products, but developing methodologies and tools to find not simply technical solutions, but globally structural and political solutions. This pursuit requires that we design not for, but alongside the populations we are aiming to serve” (Potvin, 2018 - text emphasis by author).

It seems direct now to say that traditional architectural tools and processes may need a support of other kinds of tools, a task for which service design can do a lot. In the book “Architecture for Humanitarian Emergencies vol. 2”, author Jorge Lobos explicitly addresses this problem specifying that “if our (architects’, n.d.r.) traditional mode of doing things is not socially efficient, we could attempt to increase participation of various subjects in project activities, and to use systems of analysis which have already proved to be effective – such as ethnographic techniques and feasibility possibilistic studies, rather than products already concluded and readyto-deliver. This implies creating open, flexible and responsive systems which can be used to approach various social problems. […] We do not know how a project will end, but only assume a set of rules to

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guide the process towards an indeterminate conclusion”.

“For a service designer the necessity to co-create and interact with a multiplicity of subjects from diverse cultures, sub-cultures and disciplinary backgrounds is an essential condition that requires the development of dedicated hard and soft skills […] Social and emotional intelligences are useful […] when the activity of designers extends to socially and pshychologically delicate and fragile areas “ (Meroni, 2019– Original: “[…] per un service designer la necessità di co-creare e interagire con una molteplicità di soggetti provenienti da culture diverse, sottoculture e background disciplinari è una condizione imprescindibile che richiede sviluppo di capacità dedicate sia hard che soft. […]

Intelligenza sociale ed emotiva sono utili […] quando l’attività dei progettisti si estende in aree sociali e psicologiche delicate o fragili”). As we will see in the next chapter about service design tools, there are many tools that can generate a greater and more democratic participation of community members, mostly because they are simple and friendly, and can even be taught by community members to

include other members. Others, and in this sense a striking example is ‘personas’, can assure the inclusiveness of all voices, because they make sure that all end users are adequately represented.

organization doesn’t let them.

Tools like system maps or offering maps could be simple tools to directly communicate about all the resources really needed and about efficiency strategist.

Governance

Do-not-harm approach

As a different but related concept to ‘government’, ‘governance’ is defined as “the decision-making process between the actors involved in a collective problem, that leads to the creation, strengthening or reproduction of social norms and institutions” (Bonifacio). Already an effective participation and inclusiveness of the community can deeply affect decision-making, therefore if design team are able to increase the participation, this can already have an impact on governance.

But another crucial aspect that has to do with governance and decision-making is, especially in the case of architects working for international organization, is the standards that the organization forces the architects to follow. Sometimes architects find themselves in the situation where they could design better with less resources, but the

The last important principle to address is the Do-notharm approach. It is based on the fact that sometimes the good intentions of aid, be it development, peace building or humanitarian assistance, could also end up in worsening the situation, and in critical cases also to unintentionally support conflict (Bonifacio). If the design team is aware of this risk, it can implement coping mechanism and strategies, the most important one being to deeply understand the context, the culture, the political situation of the place of implementation, which also enables to predict future problems. Service design can be a help to respect the Do-not-harm approach, because it presents a variety of tools that help to better understand the context and the interaction between the intervention and the context, and between the users and the project.

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Notes on Chapter 4

1: the concept is taken from a comment posted by architect Joel Van Dyke from Freeman & Major, in response to the topic: “service design thinking in architecture� proposed by a user on http://www. designthinkingnetwork.com.

Chapter 5

SERVICE DESIGN TOOLS INTO ARCHITECTURAL PROCESS

“Library of Muyinga” by BC architects, source: architects.bc-as.org

Integrable Service Design Tools • Iteration: concept check with the aim to identifying critical aspects and adjust them.

As already mentioned above, Service Design does not have a physical object as outcome of its process. The immateriality of the service design object makes it necessary for service designer to formalize and visualize all the information through some maps. These maps are generated using tools, and service designers use a variety of tools, each of them having also some variations, aiming at expressing specific aspects of the pre-implementation situation or of the service. The service design process is normally divided in phases, namely:

• Project Cycle Management: final formalization of the service, including all specifications, touchpoints, offerings and stakeholders.

• Prototyping: prototypation phase to try out different aspects of the service, or the service as a whole, as if it was really implemented.

• Monitoring and evaluation: phase that starts after the implementation of the service in order to keep track of the impact made with the service on the users and of the community, often made with the use of specific Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

• Research: desk or field research, field research being also possible in remote, as we will see.

• Analysis: an understanding and synthesis of the information collected during the research, that can be useful to the project.

• Concept generation: formalization of the service idea and the user’s experience.

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Since services are often implemented for specific communities or target groups, it is very common and normally desirable for service designers to get in direct touch with the communities they aim to serve, and when possible, to allow and

facilitate a participatory process.

In this regard, it is clear how the research phase can often be very much focused on the community’s wishes, habits, problems, aspirations and so on. All in all, research and analysis phases are useful to the designer as a way to (also) know and interpret the community and its members. Indeed, “it is now recognized in every field of design the necessity to comprehend the social and cultural contexts, people and their needs, the history and the traditional heritage, in order to act as designers. For a service designer all of this become primarily important, because services have to shape, and be shaped around, the behaviours of people made possible by different circumstances.

As a consequence, service designer extensively plunder ethnography to obtain tools of observation, listening, comprehension and, obviously, design” (Meroni, 2018 - text emphasis by author - Original: “E’ ormai riconosciuta in tutti gli ambiti del design la necessità di comprensione dei contesti sociali e culturali, delle persone e dei loro bisogni, della storia e del patrimonio delle tradizioni, per agire come progettisti.

Per un service designer tutto ciò assume importanza primaria, perché i servizi devono modellare, e si devono modellare su, i comportamenti delle persone resi possibili da diverse circostanze. Di conseguenza, i service designer saccheggiano ampiamente l’etnografia per ricavarne strumenti di osservazione, ascolto, comprensione e ovviamente progettazione”). Therefore, there is no surprise in finding, among service design tools, some coming from or slightly modified from ethnography tools.

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can be taught to or easily used with the communities served.

These tools are:

This paragraph enlists a series of tools that could be successfully integrated inside the architectural process by architect and teams willing to design a small-scale building to bring one Basic Urban Service in a marginalized community.

The tools have been selected, among a greater list, from:

• Diary study: “Collect deep insights by asking users or employees to track and observe their behaviours over time What is it: The diary study is a research method inspired by cultural probes, in which participants are asked to monitor and report specific data over a defined period of time. The diary can be analog or digital, request to simply log specific information or even take photos and videos. It could help with remote research, and facilitate self-reflection prior to an in-depth interview.

Use it to: Analyse repetitive actions and daily behaviours, things we don’t pay attention to.” (servidesigntools.org)

• the divulgation platform servicedesigntools.org;

• “Design for change in marginalized communities – A toolbook for NGOs, social entrepreneur and practitioners” published by PACO Collaborative (an architecture and service design collective based in Milan);

• housinglab.it, an association for collaborative housing

Moreover, some tools have been excluded because never encountered nor used by the author during her studies at the Product-Service System Design degree at Politecnico di Milano.

Finally, some of the tools have been chosen because very simple and direct. The simplicity of the tools have a double benefit: they can be easily learned, mastered and quickly implemented by the architects themselves, and they

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• Interview Guide: “Get ready for user research by listing all the questions you want to ask.

What is it: The interview guide (or discussion guide) is a logical sequence of topics and questions that help the researcher conduct an interview session. The guide is organized in sections according to the different topics that need to be explored during the research; each section comes with a detailed set of questions

that help cover that topic.

While during the interviews the conversation may go in many different directions, the guide helps the researcher remember all the key aspects to explore.

Use it to: Get prepared to moderate the interview and make the most out of it.” (servidesigntools.org)

Use it to: “Understand the relation between you, the community and the external world. Identify which are the physical or the virtual touch points.” (Anfossi et al. 2019)

• Issue Cards: “Support the conversation around complex matters by breaking down the subject into physical cards.

What is it: The basic concept behind issue cards is to isolate a specific element into each card, and then use the cards as starting point for a 1:1 or group conversation. An issue card can contain an insight, a picture, a drawing, a feature, a keyword, a description, etc. based on the specific need. They act as prompts to suggest new interpretations of a problem and induce considering a different perpective; they can be used in many different ways, from identifying priorities to discussing relationships or simply facilitating the conversation.

Use it to: Guide a creative conversation, making it open and fun, avoiding the creative block.” (servidesigntools.org)

• The big 4: “The big 4 consists of a simple map divided in 4 parts.

Each part to be used to identify a topic related to themselves.”

Use it to: “To map the priorities of their lives.” (Anfossi et al.

2019)

• Paper collage: “Paper collage consists of images and words put together on a board in a visual depiction to represent the way participants perceive their present. It can be an individual or a group activity.”

Use it to: “Facilitate conversations on specific topics such as careers, lifestyles, family and beliefs, through the use of visual language.” (Anfossi et al.

2019) • In & Out: “In & Out is a visualizing poster that shows the relationships of the individual with the local and global community.”

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• Draw and share: “This tool is a visual brainstorming but instead of using written words and sentences, it uses drawings as means of communication and collective conversation. The final output is a visual representation of shared or frequent problems, challenges and wishes within the community or a group of people you are working with.”

Use it to: “Create a collage of visual conversation around an issue or experience. To highlight common aspects and challenges within the community you are working with.” (Anfossi et al.

2019)

• Observation Notes: “Make contextual observation highly efficient in complex field settings What is it: Writing notes during observations sessions help make the most out of that research activity, making sure to capture insights as well as data concerning what’s happening around (e.g. how many times an action is repeated, how long it takes, steps covered, etc.). Preparing a dedicated support such as a printed grid or notebook with specific investigation areas to fill during the session could be valuable to guide the researcher by suggesting data points to capture, and so avoid to forget any important aspects.

Use it to: Align different team members on the same methodology for data collection and be able to run multiple observation sessions in parallel.” (servidesigntools.org)

• Insights generation: “This paper tool is to collect wishes/ challenges from the community and then interpret them into insights.”

Use it to: “Transform problems and wishes into opportunities.”

(Anfossi et al. 2019)

• Community on a map: “A team work in which participants are asked to recognize and mark places on a local map relevant to the community.”

Use it to: “Identify the focal points of local community interactions and their significance.” (Anfossi et al. 2019) 192

• Empathy Map: “Share key assumptions around user attitudes and behaviors.

What is it: The empathy map is a canvas split into four quadrants (says, thinks, does, and feels), all positioned around the user.

Filling the map allows to produce an overview of who the user is, and to identify inconsistencies

in the perception of the same user from various team members (and so intervene to mitigate the conflict). Use it to: Put all the existing knowledge on the table and identify missing information.” (servidesigntools.org)

is an extension of the usual experience journey map (or customer journey map) that associates an indication of the emotional status of the user at each stage of the experience. The emotion can be represented by a curve floating from moments of frustration to delight, or by adding emojis and pictograms to the specific steps of the journey.

Use it to: Add a more qualitative dimension to the analysis of the functional experience.” (servidesigntools.org)

• Personas: “Narrate the different types of users, based on clusters of behaviours and needs.

What is it: Each persona is a reference model representative of a specific type of users.

Technically, they can be called behavioural archetypes when they focus on capturing the different behaviours (e.g. “the conscious chooser”) without expressing a defined personality or socio-demographics. The more the archetypes assume a realistic feeling (e.g. name, age, household composition, etc.), the more they become real personas, fully expressing the needs, desires, habits and cultural backgrounds of specific groups of users.

Use it to: Remember who you design for and get inspired by their specific life and challenges.” (servidesigntools.org) • Emotional Journey: “Analyse how the user perception changes throughout a service experience.

What is it: The emotional journey

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• Journey Map: “Describe how the user interact with the service, throughout its touchpoints What is it: The journey map is a synthetic representation that describes step-by-step how a user interacts with a service.

The process is mapped from the user perspective, describing what happens at each stage of the interaction, what touchpoints are involved, what obstacles and barriers they may encounter. The journey map is often integrated an additional layers representing the level of positive/negative emotions experienced throughout the interaction.

Use it to: Depict the whole user experience, representing the process as well as pain points and emotional flows.” (servidesigntools.org)

with two axis (level of influence and level of interest or engagement in the process), or as a more complex motivation matrix (detailing what each stakeholder brings to each of the other ones through the service project).

Use it to: Reflect on the different positions and define how to deal with each of them.” (servidesigntools.org)

• Brainstorming: “First diverge and generate as many idea as you can, then converge around solid concepts.

What is it: Brainstorming is a common technique used to generate ideas. The brainstorming is often organized by first allowing each participant to collect their own thoughts individually, then start sharing and building one on top of each other idea, in order to get to a broad set of possibilities (divergent moment). In the final part of the brainstorming, the goal is usually to cluster, analyse and prioritise the different items in order to identify the most promising solutions or directions, and define next steps (convergent moment).

Use it to: Explore a wide range of ideas and solutions without feeling limited by possible constraints.” (servidesigntools.org) • Stakeholders Map: “Identify the role of each stakeholder, and relation dynamics What is it: The stakeholder map is a representation of all the stakeholder involved in a project, aimed at clarifying roles and relationships. Depending on the specific need, the map can be created as a simple quadrant

• Offering Map: “Describe what benefits a service can bring to its users.

What is it: The goal of the offering map is to clarify what the service provides to the users, detailing the value proposition into more specific clusters of features. There’s not a standard model for this tool: the offering could be described with words, images or through a simple graph. As services grow in complexity, the offering map can also become more articulated, showing distinct macro-areas of offer, and then narrowing them down into more specific areas and functions.

Use it to: Shape and explain the service model to an expert audience.” (servidesigntools.org) 194

• Value Proposition Canvas: “Describe the value offered by the service in simple words.

What is it: The value proposition canvas is a framework that helps designers ensure that there is a fit between the product-service idea and the market. It gives a detailed look at the relationship between customer segments and value propositions, highlights roles involved, pains and gains and how the service eventually matches with the proposition and its pain relievers and gain creators.

Use it to: Validate and strengthen a concept solution before moving forward with development.” (servidesigntools.org)

Use it to: give a visual representation of the sequence of events, the touchpoints and the users’ interactions and reactions towards the service.

• User Scenarios: “Explain the envisioned experience by narrating a relevant story of use.

What is it: A user scenario is a story that describes, in an exemplificatory and narrative manner, how the user is going to interact with the service during a specific situation of everyday life. Writing user scenarios require to identify a specific context in which the action takes place, as well as characters and needs that defines the attitude of the user. The scenarios can be first written as stories, describing the experience step by step, and then supported with drawings, pictures or clips of the experience, adding a visual layer to it.

Use it to: Guide the definition of specific features and start the detailed design (especially for digital services).” (servidesigntools.org)

• Build your dream city: “Designing a shared dream city with every participants’ contribution.”

Use it to: Help participants work together towards a common goal.” (Anfossi et al. 2019) • Storyboard: The storyboard is a common tool used mostly for storytelling and videomaking that can be used to represent the chronological sequence of moments happening before, during and after the use of a service in the form of cartoon or illustrated scenes.

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• Mapping: It is a map divided in 5 main parts: when, who, where, how and what. It’s a visualizing tool, useful to better understand the phases of a specific service.”

vision. There is a confrontation with the ones having a different vision […]” (housinglab.it – Original: “Uno strumento che permette il confronto tra i vari componenti del gruppo riguardo la visione individuale e collettiva della desiderata abitazione futura. Al gruppo vengono presentati scenari diversi […].

Ogni individuo sceglie lo scenario che più gli appartiene e poi si posiziona con gli altri che hanno una visione simile. Ci si confronta poi con chi ha una visione diversa […]”).

Use it to: “verify a (almost) unique vision inside the group; verify the vision of every individual” (housinglab.it – Original: “verificare una visione unica (o quasi) all’interno del gruppo; verificare la visione di ogni individuo”).

Use it to: “Understand which actions should be done by the provider of the service and the user of the service and to understand what is needed for the interaction.” (Anfossi et al.

2019)

• Business Model Canvas: “Plan and understand in advance the business model and constraints of the service you are designing.

What is it: The business model canvas is a synthetic chart providing an overview of the service in terms of value proposition, infrastructure, types of customers and financial model. It helps understand what activities are needed in order to build and deliver a service, and identify potential trade-offs.

Use it to: Describe, design, challenge and pivot your business model.” (servidesigntools.org)

• Co-housers visions: This is a tool used in co-housing projects.

“A tool to enable confrontation between the members of the group on the individual and collective future house. The group is introduced to different scenarios […]. Every individual chooses the most relatable scenario and then position him/ herself with others with a similar

This case is an example of how a service design tool specifically developed and used for another context, like the housing one, can be reinterpreted to benefit projects of service-space implementation. About the integration of service design and architecture in the process, the author has interviews Chiara Gambarana, service designer and member or HousingLab. 196

Interview with Chiara

Gambarana

HousingLab (26.10.2019) from remote As a service designer, are you often involved in projects that include the design of spaces?

I work for projects of collaborative housing, so the dimension of sharing spaces and services and the relationship with the neighbourhood are very important. In projects like this, that imply the design of services, the collaboration between architects and service designers is a win-win situation. As service designer, and with my colleagues, I am in charge of analysing the needs of the communities, mapping the context, the accessible or missing services, and the connections with the rest of the town. We reason about the kind of services needing to be included inside the complex, the building(s). So we design systems of welfare around the houses, shared spaces and platforms to enable contact among dwellers.

After that, architects design the spaces based on our work. With HousingLab, we collaborate with an architecture office called OAU for projects of co-housing, and we bring a dialogue with and among dwellers, we bring

Alessio Roncaglioni, architect of PR5 previously interviewed, has collaborated with Chiara Gambarana, service designer, to propose a project of co-housing in Cernusco sul Naviglio. She explains her experience in merging together the architects’ and service designer’s process, and about the challenges of finding a common language.

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methodologies for co-design.

Sometimes we deal with situations were 80 or 100 families live and commons spaces are already present but not used, so we had to re-organize the spaces with these families.

desk research in order to map the present and missing services.

Also, we used a kind of ministoryboards to represent the interactions; in this, architecture and their drawings can be very “cold” sometimes. In one of the deliverable tables for the competition, we included these storyboards as well as an offering map. We used moodboards to create a shared vision, and a tool we created withing HousingLab called “La casa, tra private e pubblico” (“The house, between private and public”). Some tools we used had a teambuilding purpose, others were aiming at creating shared visions, others to co-design. When communities are already living together, what we do more often is to lead them to design by bringing templates that they can use independently.

How do you think service design can make a difference in architectural projects, especially when dealing with services?

I personally think that the inclusion of service designers in the process can make a bigger difference when it happens in earlier stages of a project. When architects design common spaces, even if functions and experiences are not properly addressed, they have to fill them up with furniture, which not always works. But when service designers are involved earlier, we can work with the people from the beginning, and share visions; the architects adapt later. But unfortunately the contrary is more common.

With Alessio Roncaglioni from PR5, you collaborated for a design competition of a co-housing in an ex-industrial area of Cernusco sul Naviglio. What tools did you use?

In which phases did you use them?

For the competition we, as service designers, did a lot of

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Did you have to change the visualization of the tools for architects to fully understand them? Did you have to find a common language, and how?

The competition tables were done in synergy because they couldn’t look only like service design tables, but they also didn’t want them to all look like architectural tables as well. So, yes, we had to create a common language, learn each other’s

Interview insights

terminology. The real challenge was to make the service design tools understandable by the competition jury, made entirely of architects.

• It’s important to include service designers in early stages of the process when they can make the bigger difference.

• service designers and architects need to understand each other’s discipline and find a common language.

Competition tables by the design team. Pictures by author.

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links (e.g. flows of materials, energy, information, money, documents, etc...). The system map clarifies how the different service components and roles are connected one to the other, highlighting the values they exchange.

Use it to: Understand the service dynamics, detect gaps and opportunities.” (servidesigntools.org)

• Concept Walkthrough: “Show a service idea to its potential users or providers through a step-bystep imaginary tour.

What is it: The concept walkthrough allows to gain feedback on a service idea at very early stages, by walking some users or experts through the new desired experience and ask to comment. The concept walkthrough only needs some low-fidelity mock-ups, sketches or images to support the explanation.

Use it to: Engage with users at very early stages and gain quick feedback on your idea.” (servidesigntools.org)

• New partnerships map: “A visualization of the network and the relationships between the actors.”

Use it to: “Identify opportunities of equal benefits for the stakeholders involved and to build new partnerships.” (Anfossi et al. 2019) • System Map: “Visualise all the actors and components involved in a service delivery.

What is it: A system map is a synthetic representation that shows in one single frame all the different actors involved in a service delivery, and their mutual

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• Service Blueprint: “Map out the entire process of service delivery, above and below the line of visibility.

What is it: A service blueprint is a diagram that displays the entire process of service delivery, by listing all the activities that happen at each stage, performed by the different roles involved.

The service blueprint is built by first listing all the actors involved in the service process on a vertical axis, and all the steps required to deliver the service on the horizontal axis. The resulting matrix allows to represent the flow of actions that each role needs to perform along the process, highlighting the actions that the user can see (above the line of visibility) and the ones that happen in the back-office (below the line of visibility).

Roles can be performed by

human beings or other types of entities (organizations, departments, artificial intelligences, machines, etc.)

Use it to: Understand crossfunctional relationships and align front-stage and back-stage processes.” (servidesigntools.org)

co-design sessions, to allow everyone to visually translate specific thoughts into tangible objects and interfaces, and make design considerations.

Use it to: Make the vision immediately tangible, and start discussing and iterating on it.” (servidesigntools.org)

• Rough Prototyping: “Quickly mock-up ideas using simple assets and materials, already available on the spot.

What is it: Rough prototypes simulate specific service components with the goal of better explaining a service idea in front of other team members, and start discussing the specific requirements of each touchpoint.

Rough prototypes can be simply built with paper (e.g. a flyer, a wayfinding signage, a mobile phone interface, etc.) or with preassembled interface elements (e.g. wireframe kits, UI kits, etc.).

They are a powerful tool during

• Service Prototype: “Test the service by simulating a real interaction with one or more touchpoints.

What is it: The service prototype has the objective of replicating,

• Proto-acting: “It is a prototyping tool based on role playing.”

Use it to: “Learn to test ideas as they would be implemented in reality. It helps to examine the idea and give potential to refine the concept and define its details.” (Anfossi et al. 2019)

• Experience Prototypes: “Simulate the service experience by prototyping one or more touchpoints.

What is it: Experience prototypes allow designers to show and test the solution through an active participation of the final users, that interact with mock-ups of specific service touchpoints.

There could be one (or more) prototype for each touchpoint, to collect input on that specific interaction as well as on the overall flow from one touchpoint to the other.

Use it to: Learn how to refine and further develop the service experience while still designing it.” (servidesigntools.org)

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impact of the project from the individual to the society level.”

(Anfossi et al. 2019)

as much as possible, the final experience of interacting with the service, in order to test and validate all the design choices.

The complexity in the simulation is due to the fact that the service only exists once it’s delivered, and while testing the experience of using a specific touchpoint (such as a mobile app) could be relatively, verifying the whole journey touching upon different service components is always challenging (especially when there are physical places or interactions with service staff involved). The more the service expands across different touchpoints, the more the service prototype needs to be orchestrated as a big ‘mise en scène’, with a specific plot to follow. Touchpoints could be simulated with different levels of fidelity but at this stage are typically quite well-defined.

Use it to: Observe how the overall experience is orchestrated and refine all the design specifications.” (servidesigntools.org) • Impact evaluation: “It is a qualitative evaluation of the positive and negative effects of the project’s activities, in the short and long term.”

Use it to: “Help evaluating the

• Success Metrics: “Define a set of KPI to measure the project outcomes and service success.

What is it: The success metrics are a set of criteria defined alongside the service development as key factors that will define the success of the project itself and of its final implementation. It’s always important to distinguish amongst these two levels (project and final service outcomes) as they generate different types of values.

Once the metrics are defined, it’s also important to identify a strategy for their measurement (how data is collected and when), keeping in mind the importance of accessing that information in several moments of the process, and being able to use it to adjust the workflow and features developed.

Use it to: Monitor the project and service outcomes and keep iterating to improve.” (servidesigntools.org)

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How and when can these tools be integrated inside the architectural process?

The question does not have an easy answer. As seen in the previous paragraphs and interviews, the architects’ process is not and cannot always be the same. Some projects are architects’ winning proposals to competitions, which makes architects obliged to adapt to the time and constraints defined in the call. Other projects are part of big organizations’ programmes (like UN-Habitat), therefore the architect usually works as a technicians and has limited time and freedom to carry out research and participatory processes; on the other hand they are more often sent on the field for research, or spent the whole time of the project in the country of implementation.

Other projects are taken over by independent architectural offices and teams, which can manage their own time and budget, but on the other hand need to independently look for funds, which can highly influence the possibility to make field missions and only allow them to go in the country for the construction.

Many more are local architects that can therefore have plenty of time for field research, but

maybe have a very classical architectural background that doesn’t allow them to apply useful ethnographic research tools, or know the community already but need tools to gather the information and formalize it in a visual that is accessible and understandable. All of this variations make it hard to identify one common way of using service design tools in the architectural process, but they can surely facilitate each of the phases of the process.

Research from remote Especially for firms are offices located far from the countries of implementation, it’s not always easy or possible for one or more members of the team to go on a mission for field research, which makes it necessary to make research on the community on remote. If the architects have direct contacts with local NGOs or community representatives, they could propose the following tools:

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• Diary study: it could be asked to the community representative to make the community keep a diary and keep track of specific habits, events etc… that will lately influence the way the service/space is conceived.

and a sense of agency are actually quite basic needs. Fulfilling them can unlock an opportunity for people to build a better future for themselves in the earlier stages of things. Rethinking that hierarchy and building solutions that meet the need that people have for clean water as well as the need that people have for a sense of confidence and dignity and safety and security. All of those things need to happen at the same and doing it well is a really daunting task. […]

Architects tend to design from the outside, but we really should design from the inside out. So invite people to tell you how they share their time, define intimacy, protect their privacy and work together. Invite them to tell you their stories” (Wells & Carey, 2018 - text emphasis by author).

In this sense, especially the tools derived from PACO’s toolbook can be particularly effective.

• Interview guide: since the interview guide is a tool to structure and help the interview to start and proceed, it could be prepared by the team and later provided to a local contact to carry out the interviews.

In-field research For what concerns in-field research, meaning when the design team have the chance to spend time in the implementation site for (ethnographic and not) research, there are many service design tools that are not always known or mastered by architects, but that can really make a difference.

With time constraints, some of these tools could sound superfluous or useless, but it is sometimes necessary to use them to create awareness and raise curiosity among the project at the future stages of it. During the Design for Humanity Summit 2018, it has been stressed on the fact that “often, we think of needs as a hierarchy. We start with the most basic and they become more intrinsic, things like cell phones might come at the end. But I think what we learn from people when we actually talk to them is that things like confidence and fulfilment and self-efficacy and a sense of

• The big 4: this tool can be used in field research as starting point to get to know the community, and for them to start to have self-awareness in order to later address their needs.

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• Paper collage: this tool can build on the previous one (they could even be proposed during

the same day) and it’s a way to go further in the process of expressing oneself and identify their own priorities in terms of lifestyle, career etc… that have to be later addressed in the concept generation phase.

• Issue cards: this is a simple tool to discuss topics, and the great thing about it is especially its directness and simplicity; they can start relevant discussions on the problems related to the state of the services for the addressed community one at a time.

• Diary study: also, as we’ve seen, useful from remote, the diary study can be used in field to collect everyday impressions.

• Community on a map: the chance for the community to indicate individual and shared points of interest in the area is of primary importance because the later implemented servicespace cannot be in any way disconnected with the other relevant places in the area.

• In & Out: this tool will be very useful for the design team when they need to address the stakeholders map later on.

It is useful to understand the relations between the individual and the community, so it could be used to understand who in the community is more relevant and trusted, that could be identified as a representative and can be given responsibilities related to the project later.

• Observation notes: observation and shadowing are other great ways of collecting qualitative data about the experience of the community related to the vacancy or low quality of the services that need to be implemented, and the great thing about them is that the experience is directly observed and is not influenced or changed during direct discussion.

• Interview guide: again, interviews are a relevant tool for qualitative research, and if they can be made on the field it is even better for the design team, in order to already start creating bonds and mechanism of trust between them and the community members.

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Analysis (also from remote)

• Personas: being architypes of the user clusters, this tool is an easy, but kind of ignored tool by architects. It can be really helpful especially when the community addressed by the service is very heterogeneous and very different voices have to be taken into consideration.

• Draw and share: while brainstorming is more usually used to start a process of concept generation, the visually conceived brainstorming called Draw and share can be an easy way in which the community can express problems and impressions about the experience related to the services, and at the same time the visual aspect of it allows for an immediate analysis of the shared impressions and opinion.

• Emotional journey: even if this tool is mostly used for expressing the emotions derived by the new service proposed, at the analysis phase it can be used to map the experience of the community members in relation to the lack of the service, or to low quality of the present one. For example, the distance between houses and pit latrines (“toilets”), or between the children’s houses and their school, forces people, children and women to walk long distances alone. The related negative emotions can be expressed through this map in order to know which aspects must be later addressed to improve the users’ emotional response to the service.

• Insights generation: after collecting the impressions of the community, it is important to formalize them into insights so that the design team can more directly address shared problems and needs. This tool can work in this sense, and it is so easy that it could even be made independently by the community members.

• Empathy map: this tool can be used to come back to the individual sphere and try to represent each individual’s thought, opinion and feelings. It is important to do so as first step to later build personas.

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• Journey Map: the journey map can be used in a similar way as the Emotional map, but including more information not only regarding the emotions, but the experience as a whole, the lack

of necessary touchpoints and the physical configuration of the preimplementation situation.

informative, material) between the stakeholders themselves are more clear.

Concept generation

• Offering Map: the offering map is one of the most important tool that, in the author’s opinion, should always been included in an architect’s process, because it can help the architect’s to have a broader picture of what the service is offering, also immaterially, to the users apart from the physical space.

• Brainstorming: brainstorming is not a tool specific for service design. It is used in many disciplines, but service designers make a gigantic use of it, that should be definitely transferred into the architectural process, especially to begin with the concept generation phase.

• Value Proposition Canvas: along with the offering map, this tool is also important to consider the values provided to the user beyond the space provided to fulfil a need to enjoy a basic service. It is important to understand what value(s) the provision of the space and the service brings to the users.

• Co-housers visions: an tool plundered by the co-housing context to understand individual and communitarian visions about the space to implement. It can be used in the same way, but to share individual and common visions of the service-space to implement.

• Stakeholders Map: while especially architects working for international organizations tend to use the stakeholders analysis matrix, which analyses the interests, gains and possible oppositions of all the stakeholders, it is desirable that this is joined to a stakeholders map, because in this map also the relations and the nature of the relation (financial,

• Build your dream city: this playful tool is a way for the community members to envision not only the service-space inserted in their neighbourhood/ village/settlement, but also to dream about the link between that and, for example, their houses or other important spots in their neighbourhood.

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The two maps should be ideally confronted in order to visualize the emotional improvements brought. Moreover, the steps that still foster negative emotions can be addressed more easily by visualizing them.

• Storyboard: telling the sequence in which the users experience the service can be a starting point to better identify all the touchpoints, not only the space, that the service has to provide in order to function properly and to give value to the users.

• Business Model Canvas: while not being properly a service design tool, it is largely used by service designer to start understanding the economical sustainability of the service.

It can be equally useful to the architects and the design team, as well as to start understanding the budget needed and to better envision a possible economic benefit and its impact for the community.

• User scenarios: this tool can be used to visualize the experience of single users or personas interacting with the service.

It can help to address single users’ needs in the sequence of a service delivery.

• Mapping: an initial tool to start to map the sequence of the users in a more structure way before deepening the understanding of it with the following journey maps.

• Emotional journey: the use of the emotional journey has already been discussed previously for describe the emotions of the users facing the lack or the low quality of the service. This time, during the concept generation of the service-space, the emotional map can highlight the negativity or positivity of emotions before, during and after the use of the service implemented.

Iteration

• Concept walkthrough: an easy way to allow some users to experience the concept with low-fidelity materials, in order to get immediate feedback on what aspect of the service-space needs to be addressed before the concept is developed into a more detailed stage and funds are spent towards it.

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Project Cycle Management

• Service blueprint: this map can truly be useful to the design team in order to have a clear and complete understanding of who provides what in the service.

This can also greatly help to understand how the service will work independently after the design team leaves, therefore to understand who can take responsibility for certain aspects and stages of the service delivery.

• Stakeholders Map: a new stakeholders map will be needed, since during the definitions of all the details of the service-space, new stakeholders will surely appear to be needed.

• New Partnerships Map: this tools has the same aim as the previous, to implement new partners and stakeholders in the project, but the simplicity of this tools makes it easy for the community members in first place to imagine and visualize these new partnerships.

Prototyping “When the stakes are high, it is really hard to think about things like testing, prototyping, and experimentation. We are talking about millions of people lacking clean water, millions of children lacking an education.

With such fierce problems and such real consequences, it can be challenging to test anything new” (Wells & Carey, 2018). As much as using disadvantaged context as a way to test ideas is inherently wrong, it is also necessary to prototype a service in a more detailed way, when time allows it, in order to still spent the last moments in the field to adjust before the construction. Prototyping can go from easy tools to more detailed kind of trials.

• Journey Map: the same that has been sad on the emotional map can be stated for the journey map at this stage. The difference is that, in this map, the design team can also better identify the resources and the touchpoints needed at every stage and for each persona.

• System Map: at this stage, it is crucial to physically insert the service-space in a map that describes all the interactions between the service and each other element involved, as well as the kind of ownerships regarding the resources included in the service.

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Monitoring and evaluation

• Proto-acting: a playful way of starting a prototyping phase by giving roles to community members and help them identify gaps and problems in the sequence of the service.

• Diary study: the tool that has been used as a first way of collecting personal impressions by the beneficiaries of the project could also be used at the end, and from remote, to collect impressions of how the users’ experiences related to the services have (possibly) improved. The previous diaries and these ones could even be compared in order to have a qualitative kind of measure of the (positive) impact achieved in the daily life of the users.

• Rough prototyping: this way of prototyping with rough materials can be harder to use when we are talking about 1:1 spaces, but on the other hand even rough scale models of the service space, as well as paper characters used to represent personas, can be a funny and playful way to engage the community in identifying gaps.

• Interview guide: again, also interviews make a good tool to collect opinions on the quality of the implementation carried out.

• Experience prototypes: to prototype single touchpoints can be very relevant because it can pose the attention of touchpoints inside the space that could be more easily ignored when designing the whole space, as well as touchpoints external to the space but that can make a big difference for the effectiveness of the service delivery.

• Impact evaluation: with this tool, the community members can express themselves and their opinions on the impact that the project had at an individual as well as collective level. This could work quite well to collect impressions from remote.

• Service prototype: the last and more complete prototyping tool should be carried out before the executive project is delivered and construction started.

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• Success metrics: this tool is also not specific of service design, but to identify, ideally prior to the implementation, some Key Performance Indicators and will help to have a scientific, both

quantitative and qualitative, idea of the impact made.

the most critical situation in this regard. Moreover, there are some architecture offices that work for the Humanitarian Sector or International Cooperation that realize most, if not all, of their projects in this region. Therefore, they could and should be the first ones to consider benefiting from the integration of service design, in order to surely see an improvement in the impact they can provide with their projects. But after seeing how the integration of methods and tools can happen, it is important to understand: how can the architects – service designers collaboration become a reality?

In conclusion, we can say that service design and service designers have a lot to offer to the architecture world, especially for the implementation of services. As beautifully affirmed

by Shelter and Settlements expert Joseph Ashmore of UN Migration Agency during the Design for Humanity Summit 2018, “we (architects, n.d.r.) do not need your (designers’, n.d.r.) widgets, but we do need design thinking to think through processes and design effective programs and projects” (Ashmore, 2018 - text emphasis by author).

At this stage, it should be more clear how service design and its tools can support the architectural process for services – spaces delivery. As much as this contribution could benefit all these kind of projects worldwide and in the whole Global South, this work envisions a first, and possibly urgent, integration of service design methods in projects for the implementation of Urban Basic Services in Sub-Saharan Africa, being it, currently, the place that presents

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source: “Lo Spazio morale - Assistenza umanitaria e cooperazione allo sviluppo” by Ordine degli architetti, P.P.C della provincia di Milano

Scenarios on service design inclusion When talking about the integration of service design in independent firms, on the other hand, there could be different scenarios that allow it to happen.

The graph shows how the inclusion of service design(ers) can happen internally or externally with respect to the office. Another variation is whether the project is led by the architects or by the service designers.

Service designer could be included in the process in different ways. When envisioning an inclusion of service designers in international organizations like UN-Habitat, there is not much to do rather than exposing the benefits of service design methods and tools and hoping for them to open defined positions for service designers in relation so space-delivered service projects.

Fig. 44 - Scenarios of service designers inclusion

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The scenario where a service design office hires or consults architects, the integration of the two disciplines would happen differently than how described in the previous chapter, because it would configure more as a way of integrating the architectural modes and tools into the service design process. With respect to projects that include the construction of a space, it is much more common that the lead is on architects, and in this case service designers can be included as external trainers, consultant, collaborators or partner, as well as being hired inside the office. Offices and organizations asking for trainings in order to learn design thinking and systemic, service design tools are already very common. Indeed, “the “demand” of learning of service design competences is becoming always more explicit […]. Previously, the majority of clients externalized full projects and, even if taking part in workshop and field works, they never really engaged in learning service design competences.

The situation has changed when organizations started to see the strategic and permanent importance of service design.

This is pushing service designers to assume the role of trainers,

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regardless of the single projects” (Meroni, 2019 – Original: “[…] la “domanda” di apprendimento delle competenze del service design sta diventando sempre più esplicita […]. In precedenza, la maggior parte dei clienti ha esternalizzato interi progetti e, pure prendendo parte a workshop e lavori sul campo, non si è mai realmente impegnata nell’apprendimento interno delle competenze di service design.

Questa situazione è cambiata quando le organizzazioni hanno iniziato a vedere l’importanza strategica a permanente della progettazione dei servizi. Ciò sta portando i progettisti di servizi ad assumere un ruolo anche di formatori, a prescindere da singoli progetti”).

Of course, being a trainer is a possible career for service designers. But in this framework, for architects that want to be included in architectural project, this is not the most desirable option. Indeed, the work of service designers in this case would be limited to a mere transference of knowledge, methods and tools, without any inclusion of the service designer in the specific project the office needs service design methods for.

A way for service designers to be more involved in the

specific projects, and therefore challenge themselves to adapt service design tools to a specific and unusual situation, could be that of becoming consultants or collaborators to the architecture firm.

The difference is in the lead, or the level of decision-making and influence that the service designer can have both on the process than on the outcome.

Indeed, the service design consultant will be more likely only asked to give his/her advice in specific steps of the architectural process without a real chance to influence it, while a collaborator ideally supports the architects throughout the whole length of the project.

Equal partnerships between architecture offices and service designers of service design team would naturally result in a shared and equal decisionmaking where both parties have the same power to influence the project, and also where the space and the service/system are addressed with the same importance and even allocated the same percentage of budget.

Finally, an option that the author is mostly looking forward is architecture firms working for the implementation of many services – spaces in developing

countries to open positions in their offices for service designers.

Conclusions

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The interest in merging tools, methods and processes of architecture and service design is increasing, and research labs, doctorate thesis and postgraduate thesis are going in this direction. Some works even envision the generation of new, hybrid tools that mix some diagrams of architecture and space design, with typical service design tools. All of this is an evidence that an integration is possible and desirable, and that service designers and architects have a great potential to fruitfully work together, not only in academia and research labs, but, as we have seen in the last scenarios paragraph, it could be possible to integrate the service designer in the design team of practicing offices.

This work would like to stress on the disadvantaged condition of underserved and marginalized communities in the Global South, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, and issue that should be addressed first, and this fruitful integration of two professional figures sharing the same values should

be urgently applied in these contexts. This work encourages more and more research and practice to go in this direction.

It has been extensively exposed in the first part of the work how tackling Urban Basic Services has the potential not only to greatly improve these communities’ lives, but also to positively influence the economic and environmental aspects, and ultimately contribute to reach a sustainable development. In 1999, in his book “Development as Freedom”, Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has defined development as “a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy” (Sen, 1999). He claims that “focusing on freedoms contrasts with narrower views of development, such as identifying development with the growth of gross national product, or with the rise in personal incomes, or with industrialization, or with technological advance, or with social modernization”.

And focusing on freedom is strictly connected with the guaranteeing the respect of Human Rights to all. Providing Urban Basic Services, and doing it in an effective way so that the provision comes from a greater

partnerships of all professionals involved, is a way of ensuring to all the rights to education, health and well-being, all in all the right to “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being”, as in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Ensuring these rights means to give the people the freedom to be healthy, to learn and to enjoy well-being.

Therefore, in this sense, service designers working along with architects for common good can greatly contribute to the expansion of “the real freedoms that people enjoy”.

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