Does Effective Planning Really Exist?

DOES EFFECTIVE PLANNING REALLY EXIST? CHRISTIANO LEPRATTI PAOLA ALFARO D'ALENÇON

syntagma

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DOES EFFECTIVE PLANNING REALLY EXIST?

CONTENTS

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CONTENTS

WORDS FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD

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8 DIY CITY DOES EFFECTIVE PLANNING REALLY EXIST? SELF MADE UTOPIA

Paola Alfaro d'Alençon

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Christiano Lepratti

WELCOME TO DIY CITY, AN INFORMAL CITY MODEL Davide Servente

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WHO WILL DO WHAT? FROM GROWING HOUSES, CO-DESIGNING AND ENCOUNTERS IN AND FOR THE CITY Paola Alfaro d'Alençon BACK TO THE FUTURE

Christiano Lepratti

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58 DESIGN THAT ATTENDS/RESPONDS TO NEW PATTERNS OF DEVELOPMENT AND RELATED SOCIAL-SPATIAL CHALLENGES INFORMALITY PROCESS STRATEGIES

Jota Samper

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76 INFRASTRUCTURE PLANNING THAT IS A CATALYST(S) OF POSITIVE URBAN CHANGE GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE AS CATALYST FOR THE CREATION OF URBAN COMMUNITIES Paola Cannavò

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90 HOUSING THAT IS MORE THAN JUST SHELTER LUFHERENG HOUSING PROJECT. POST-OCCUPANCY DOCUMENTATION Anne Graupner

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106 URBAN PLANS THAT INCORPORATE MULTIPLE STAKEHOLDERS AND UNDERSTAND THE ACTUAL COMPETITION FOR URBAN SPACE TAXI RANK NO. 2

Thorsten Deckler

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PLANNING THE INCLUSIVE CITY. THE UBA PROJECT FOR THE REURBANISATION OF THE BARRIO 31 CARLOS MUGICA IN BUENOS AIRES Santiago Gomes

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128 ENGAGED RESEARCH THAT CAN HELP WITH NEW MAPPING TOOLS AND METHODS TO DISCOVER AND DOCUMENT PATTERNS AND TO IDENTIFY SITE SPECIFIC APPROACHES AND ACTIONS ARCHITECTURE AND ADAPTATION: OPPORTUNITIES IN THE CHALLENGES

Nina Saunders

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142 EMPOWERING DESIGN THAT HELPS IN CAPACITY BUILDING FOR ALL STAKEHOLDERS, INCLUDING MARGINALISED GROUPS REVISITING FERROCEMENT TECHNOLOGY FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING: BUILDING KNOWLEDGE, BUILDING COMMUNITY EFFECTIVE PLANNING AND EFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

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Anupama Kundoo

Davide Servente

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DIY CITY

DOES EFFECTIVE PLANNING REALLY EXIST? Paola Alfaro d'Alençon

The 21st century has been declared the urban century. Urbanization is among the most decisive phenomena in the world. For the first time, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities. In 2050, the ratio might be as high as 75% (UN-HABITAT, 2014, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, United Nations, New York).

Although with differences among continents and countries, today it is widely recognized in international policy frameworks that the future of our cities determines more and more not only the future of our local space or nations but also that of the planet in its entirety. On a daily basis, we are confronted with such statistics, data, and concepts that attempt to rationalise this on-going and open-ended transformation. However, it is a fact that the current developments around the world exhibit increasing challenges, such as changes in demographics and production modalities, new urban forms and patterns of development, as well as the need to transform and adapt our building stock to these urban transformation processes. The responsibilities of urban researchers, designers, and architects have arguably never been greater. From this perspective, the quest for understanding emerges and it becomes clear that, despite decades of theorising standards or aesthetic guidelines, decision-making in the built-environment can never be based on value-free rational calculations.

The present publication aims to offer a platform to reflect on the broad thematic of planning in the rapid changing frameworks, that has to deal with today’s complex and uncertain urban geographies and the emerging challenges of the architecture profession.

The role of planners and architects in engaged urban and architecture practices and activism is questioned and discussed to reflect on how the built-environment disciplines can create and promote flexible and adaptive knowledge to find specific strategies and

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support innovative solutions. These aims are intriguingly based on the understanding that the acquisition of skills for conceptualizing and acting in the framework of ongoing transformations provokes questions about research methods and the involved methodological and epistemological issues about planning.

Think tank with practices and real-world settings In these veins, the aim of the research was to work beyond the borders of academia and traditional sources of knowledge and engage with social dimensions in architecture and urban development with a commitment to a critical interdisciplinary research. Since urban practices are significantly shaping our cities, a mandate to frame and to form our living environment and architecture production has always been a socio-physical process which incorporates skills from design practices and both physical and social sciences. It is clear that the built-environment disciplines serves as a catalyst for social processes; as a formative discipline whose built-spatial results become effective over extended periods on groups of people. Architecture and urbanism have always actively taken up this responsibility. These include numerous of examples as the reflections on human solutions to housing shortage: the exhibition in the 1930es by Martin Wagner Sun, Air and House for All in Berlin, mobilizing the concept of the 'growing house', for low-income groups to create well-adaptable dwellings over time. The development of process-oriented urban research that put into central concern and into account different actors in developments by concepts such A city is not a tree by Christopher Alexander in the 1960es: cities that develop organically over time possess a rich social-spatial net of overlapping connections and interrelations that needs to be further considered as to understand the richness of urban development. This means that theoretical frameworks are always challenged through the application of attained knowledge, evading the gap between theory and practice. In this context, academia has the possibility to directly set up a dialogue with practices and real-world settings, while the university becomes a think tank and a strong multiplier for the reflections on developments in the society. Possibilities to enable different dialogues formats emerge encompassing academia and society, and to develop skills for the demands for inter-disciplinary project work and activity-oriented research.

Thereby, fruitful alliances can be developed to respond to current challenges with a combination of working skills with supportive formats, such as research and design, as well as practices and theory. Hence, the concept which was laid out for this work is that urban practices present the basis for potential development in architecture and urban production, as they emerge out of dialogues between different entities and areas of knowledge in local resources, while they turn into developing appropriate building

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DIY CITY

SELF MADE UTOPIA Christiano Lepratti

«An important part of the history of this time (referring to the Official History) has been written by people who had lost their roots and their rights, and who (without giving up on violence) demanded to have a role in the new urban society». (Doug Saunders) How much is left of the social and political engagement that produced the heroic era of classical modernism with its willingness to change society and the everyday life through design?

The origins of the topics dealt with in this book are about half a century old and have several ancestors, who played a key role in the history of the 20th century architecture: the «Participation» applied to design in Giancarlo De Carlo’s experience; the investigation on the possibility for evolution in time of the architectonic form (which encourages its appropriation and personalization) in the research and the experiments of John Habraken, Yona Friedman and Hermann Hertzberger1; Aldo Van Eyck’s investigation on the production of collective space beyond the western example. They are themes which refer to the internal critique of the CIAM, in particular to the outcomes of the 8th edition, – held in 1951 in Hoddesdon, England – wherein Classical modernism had seemed to accept an unconditional surrender to the problem of composing the implications of the growth of the city, in turn connected to the right to housing for everybody and with the willingness to satisfy the needs and wishes of a society in continuous transformation.

One of this book’s intentions is therefore to discuss relevant phenomena of the past and the present, locating them within the discussion of design as it has been conducted in the 20th century; that is, all the phenomena of architectural and urban transformation that shaped the global discourse and debate at that time and are now taking place in the whole world, and in the Global South in particular. These are phenomena identifiable for their

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permanent and stable connotations and therefore to be attributed to immanent conditions, again suggesting the centrality of the issue of housing and the role of collective space. To speak of it within this frame is important because it is the only way to fully understand their historic reach and the relevance they have with respect to the contemporary debate.

A choice has been made here to analyse a series of exemplary designs and have them commented by some of the authors of this book involved in such ongoing transformations (in some cases the designers themselves). The historiographical content, in this case, is at the service of critical analysis, in a moment where it seems that postmodern critique is being re-discovered, yet not providing the elements needed to interpret the drive towards radical transformation connected to the new wave of worldwide urbanization. My opinion is that it is necessary to redirect the attention to the unfinished project of Modernity2: its rational and emancipatory traits connected to the tradition of Enlightenment.

This introduction ends with a drawing. A drawing representing a city, a city containing a range of cross-references between reality and imagination, between reality and utopia.

The city is imaginary but at the same time exists, built as it is through the superimposition of many real projects. The implicit idea of the city as a realized self-made utopia but, at the same time, alluding to all the cities of the world, suggesting a sort of continuous and multiple reinvention of the urban space, as expression of a new social and cultural reality of shared content, though constantly changing due to size and geographical location. In this idea of the city, individual and collective instances are combined. The city leaves room for the explosion of rage of homeless people, immigrants and those without rights. The ‘last in line’, together with whom takes possession of the spaces left empty both in the suburbs and in the historic centre of the city. Its social and cultural genealogy is made of a history of emancipation, dramatically unfinished because of the end of both urban models as well as urban techniques. In this sense, what the drawing proposes, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, is «the practice of design as an approach based on the rational, the objective and the universally valid principles of that used for the natural sciences»3. It is, therefore, a city continuously questioning itself, reflecting and developing its contradictions – day after day – in a direct way, to generate what Hannes Meyer in 1928 defined as the city of «the needs of the people instead of the need for luxury»4. It is the DIY City.

1. Habraken, John (1972), Supports: Alternative to Mass Housing, Praeger, Santa Barbara; Friedman, Yona (2006), Pro Domo, Actar, New York; Hertzberger, Hermann (2014), Architecture and Structuralism: The Ordering of Space, Nai010 Publ, Rotterdam.

2. Habermas, Jurgen (1994), Die Moderne, ein unvollendetes Projekt, Reclam, Leipzig.

3. Fezer, Jesko - Kuhnert, Nikolaus - Ngo, Anh-Linh - Oswalt, Philipp, Wenzel, Jan Coordinating Team, Project Bauhaus, < http://www.projekt-bauhaus.de/en/data/texts/can-the-universal-be-specific/ > [accessed 7 january, 2018].

4. Merten, Britta (2008), Der Architekt Hannes Meyer und sein Beitrag zum Bauhaus: Ein Vergleich mit Walter Gropius und Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, VDM Verlag, Saarbrücken.

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DIY CITY

WELCOME TO DIY CITY, AN INFORMAL CITY MODEL Davide Servente

DIY City does not exist.

DIY City is the product of man’s ingenuity.

DIY City is the city of compromise.

DIY City is democratic.

DIY City is built by addition.

DIY City belongs to everyone.

DIY City is possible.

Today, 39% of the world’s population living in an urbanized context1 – almost a billion individuals – lives in a slum, a continuously rising percentage based on the increasing phenomena of immigration and urbanization.

Composed of a disorganized set of buildings and shacks, these informal settlements are the most widespread urban anti-model in the world. They are the result of spontaneous self-building phenomena due to the addition of parts: waste materials and elementary construction technologies – apparently – defining a homogeneous, essential and quality-free building.

The image of these settlements cannot be defined from a single point of view: the built environment does not follow a hierarchy of form or use, the buildings do not have a univocal vocation, just a few collective buildings make up for the lack of public facilities, gaps between buildings don’t have the intrinsic properties of the encoded public space and there is no clear distinction between private and public domain.

Urban planning scarcely tries to understand and govern informal settlements. The traditional tools of analysis and design can be traced back to a functionalist paradigm:

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exhaustive and rigid codes are based on the idea of centralized and hierarchical control of the city. To formalize a spontaneous settlement by adding conventional infrastructures and services, one cannot follow the ordinary governmental practice of the city, but implement a compromise between managerial immobilism and the perpetual and spontaneous change of the city.

In the book Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;invention du quotidien (1984), De Certeau uses military terminology to introduce the concepts of strategy and tactics. Daily practices are tactical, dynamic and non-capitalizable trajectories, local logics and re-appropriations that resist homologation attempts. Strategy is interpreted as a purposeful rational action from an entity with power, which organizes a physical space2. According to this organic vision, it becomes clear that operating through precise and effective projects that give way to wider processes of transformation, is a method of intervention consistent with the informal ways of building, where parts of the existing buildings, urban fabric and architectural organism jointly contribute to define a unitary structure, which can take on different features based on the relationships that form within it between private and public needs.

If we consider informal settlements as a collection of heterogeneous materials â&#x20AC;&#x201C; by studying their construction practices, forms and uses â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the tools and equipment of bricoleur3 are the most suitable for operating. Assembly, repair, infill, and subtraction are just some of the possible actions to dismantle and reassemble the existing without necessarily following a predefined project: a tactical approach based on everyday practices, according to which urban complexity is interpreted as a relationship between form and use, image, and identity.

The informal settlements, although similar, have different names according to the geographical place and the cultural context in which they are located: bidonvilles, barrio marginal, shack, villa misery, mudun safi, favela, ghetto, mabanda4. Stepping back from the negative meanings related to social degradation and the precariousness of the built environment, it is clear how appropriate the principle of do-it-yourself, understood as the assembly of available materials and the taking care of what already exists, can describe a possible model of growth and administration.

Do-It-Yourself City does not exist, it is a model of the city.

Imagining DIY City is an exercise to define how to intervene on informal cities. DIY City is the constructive answer to the precarious living conditions of slum dwellers. DIY City is made up of architectural solutions, urban practices and virtuous uses of public

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HONG KONG ROOFTOPS Location: Hong Kong Rooftops dwellers: 16.359 (2001); 3.962 (2006) Surface (of an informal house): from 6.5 m2 to 59 m2 Rooftop communities are a type of informal housing in Hong Kong. They are urban aggregates built above buildings, without the formal approval of the goverment, by people who either intend to live in them or to sell or to rent them for profit.

Some houses are built with concrete and bricks, but others are built with cardboard and metal sheets. They are supposedly 'illegal' and 'disapproved' by the authorities, but are also tolerated and recognized by the goverment, serving the structure with a postal and water services. The inhabitants of these parasitic houses use the stairs of the 'host' building. The public utility services, such as telephone, electricity, gas, and television, are also allowed to supply these 'illegal' structures.

Rooftop structures are dwelled by immigrants (95.5% from China), who prefer to live on top of the downtown buildings near to where they work rather than in the city outskirts.

Rafina Wu and Stefan Canham wrote Portrait from above about Hong Kong's informal rooftop communities.

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GRUNDBAU UND SIEDLER Location: Hamburg, Germany Year of construction: 2013 Surface: 1.325 m2 Grundbau und Siedler is an experiment based on the realization of affordable houses in Hamburg. Developed in the framework of the IBA Hamburg 2013 for the urban district of Wilhelmsburg, the project has been created with the will of not using a prefabricated system and providing at the same time houses that cost less than €1.000 per square meter. The answer to this aim, proposed by the architectural firm of BeL, is a reinterpretation of the Maison Domino in order to give these elements to the dwellers: a basic structural skeleton, the connections for the installations in the most flexible positions, and a manual containing detailed indications for a ‘do it yourself ’ construction of the rest of the house.

Thanks to some workshops in which the future owners met the project managers, ordinary people could design their own living spaces according to their necessities. This was possible with a 1:50 model of the typical unit where the dwellers could play, moving or removing walls or displaying furniture. The value of this architecture isn’t in the final object that people reach, but in the process that brings them to the object. The four-storey building is not the result of the vision of one or few persons, but the dimension designed by them, in which twelve families can experience their home flexibility.

â&#x20AC;&#x17E;An important part of the history of this time (referring to the Official History) has been written by people who had lost their roots and their rights, and who (without giving up on violence) demanded to have a role in the new urban societyÂť.

(Doug Saunders) How much is left of the social and political engagement that produced the heroic era of Classical modernism with its willingness to change society and the everyday life through design?

Bookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intention is to discuss relevant phenomena of architectural and urban transformation that shaped in the 20th century the discourse and debate and are now taking place in the whole world, and in the Global South in particular.

Phenomena identificable for their permanent and stable connotations and therefore to be attributed to immanent conditions, again suggesting the centrality of the issue of housing and the role of collective space.