Urban stories reader final hs 14&fs 15

URBAN TOOLBOX urban design I / II : urban stories READER HS ’14 / FS ‘15

PROF. BRILLEMBOURG & PROF. KLUMPNER

|

COORDINATOR : HARIS PIPLAS

URBAN-THINK TANK

|

CHAIR OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN

LECTURE COURSE

URBAN STORIES URBAN DESIGN I/II

CHAIR OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN PROF. BRILLEMBOURG | PROF. KLUMPNER COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

TEACHING PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG | PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER | HARIS PIPLAS ORGANIZATION AND COORDINATION HARIS PIPLAS STUDENT ASSISTANTS MIHAI RADULESCU | STEFAN CARANOVIC (LAYOUT&GRAPHICS) PREVIOUS COLLABORATORS MARCOS L. ROSA | LEA RUEFENACHT | DANNY WILLS | DOMINIK WEBER | JONAS RYSER SOPHIE CHANSON THANKS TO OUR INVITED LECTURERS AND RESEARCHERS CHARLIE KOOLHAAS (GUANGZHOU) | CHRISTIAN SCHMID (HAVANA) PUBLISHED BY ETH | D-ARCH | CHAIR OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN | ZURICH 2014

ADDRESS ETH ZURICH D-ARCH URBAN-THINK TANK CHAIR OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN PROF. BRILLEMBOURG & PROF. KLUMPNER ONA J 17 NEUNBRUNNENSTRASSE 50 8050 ZÜRICH SWITZERLAND CONTACT PIPLAS@ARCH.ETHZ.CH

5

INTRO

INDEX SÃO PAULO BERLIN

30

ZÜRICH

44

CARACAS

58

MEXICO CITY

6

14

80

ATHENS

100

SARAJEVO

132

CAPE TOWN

160

NEW YORK

176

CAIRO

200

DETROIT

222

GUANGZHOU

238

HAVANA

252

MADRID

276

LOS ANGELES

300

SHENZHEN

330

URBAN DESIGN AND THE URBAN PLANET Since the turn of the century, for the first time, more than 50% of people live in cities. While cities only cover 2% of our planet’s surface, they are responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. Still it is expected, that in the next decades, the urbanization boom will continue and another hundred million people will move to cities. The majority of them will belong to the urban poor, people who are dwellers of underprivileged, impoverished slum areas of cities in the Global South.

This processes illustrate a need for urban designers, and particularly teachers of urban design, to rethink the fact that in the past our profession largely ignored how the majority of human beings live. For decades, the focus has rested comfortably on the global north; collectively, designers’ books, magazines, and projects have mostly gazed above the socio-economic equator. Not only has this limited our field’s creative palette, but it has depleted our field’s legitimacy. If designers and architects are to improve cities and impart meaningful strategies to subsequent generations, we must begin to look southwards with creative curiosity.

The slums of Latin America, Asia and Africa, and the recently impoverished suburbs of North American and European cities, cast doubt on the traditional notion of city growth as selfcontained and rational, born of the logic of the functional organization of space. Fast growing cities in the developing world and shrinking cities in the developed world present us with two faces of the same coin, joined by the phenomena of informal development.

We have come to an understanding that the conditions and the wealth of cities in the western world are the exception. The rule is what we have documented over the last decade in the cities of the south: Urban development without institutional assistance; overstretched infrastructure; lack of resources; and policies of exclusion. Cities, whether deliberately or not, are moving toward a less formal, more flexible order. It is therefore critical that designers recognize that informality provides a large-scale, conceptual framework of cooperation between stakeholders (NGOs, policy makers and industry parnters) and architecture and urban design profesionals. Such cooperation would establish a global agenda of open-design framework that accepts cultural, social, and ideological differences. Thus, we must shift the

7

emphasis of contemporary architectural practice and education from a form-oriented to a process-driven concern.

URBAN STORIES LECTURE SERIES

The authorities often imply outdated and unadapted urban policy frameworks. The results of such policies are too frequently catastrophic. As undepriviledged communities are often constructed in the least favorable areas for formal development—such as land with extreme slopes and weak soil resistance or areas subject to seasonal flooding or earthquakes—they are at permanent risk.

The Urban Design I/II: Urban Stories lecture series introduces tools for reading contemporary urban conditions, urban models and operational modes. In order to have urban development deciphered, we present operational tools that are extracted from cities where they have been tested and became exemplary samples. They are therefore relevant for providing the understanding of how urban landscape has taken shape as well as inspiration for future practice.

Understanding these behavioral processes is critically important especially for architects who intend to work in the “developing world.”

On the other hand, cultural gaps and differences largely remain in place and impede a productive flow of information, skills, and development within the knowledge transfer processes between the ‘developing’ and the ‘developed’ world.

In the work of the Urban-Think Tank Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, young architects are being trained to respond to the named challenges and foster the export and import of ideas across the hemispheres.

A re-orientation within the architectural profession is necessary in order for it to incorporate the developing world into our understanding and definition of urban studies. It is necessary that this exchange of ideas is a two-way bridge between the developed and the developing worlds. Successful change comes from collaboration between international expertise and local knowledge. It is essential to have input from the best consultants and to remain connected to the most advanced solutions and technologies.

In many ways, this re-orientation can most easily happen within architecture and urban design education. These developments raise our expectations for a more equitable global exchange of architectural and urbanistic ideas. In the future, we anticipate that even more universities will show much more presence in the developing world.

Our experiences have taught us that architects must become advocates for the people and active agents of change. But that change must come accomplished thoughtfully and carefully, one step at a time, so as to be viable and durable. We strive to bring citizens in their cities closer together, to create a greater sense of individual responsibility for a stronger community and an active civil society. All the investigations we make and solutions we propose are tested by one over-arching question: are people better off than they were before we arrived.

Rather than imposing change, our Chair engages the real world and attempts to provide a set of tools, a toolbox for students in order to give them both better understanding of theory and derive operational and practical knowledge.

Future generations will judge our success by the applicability of our solutions and their capacity to improve living conditions for everyone, everywhere. Our agenda in devising and applying the toolbox in our Lecture Course is two-fold: to shift the emphasis of contemporary architecture and architectural education from form-driven to purpose-oriented; and to eliminate the gap between design and its social impact.

8

LEARNING GOALS How can a glossary of tools be used as a basis for reading cities and recognizing in them current trends and urban phenomena? This lectures series produces a glossary of operational urban tools with collected urban knowledge that provides students with a Toolbox to navigate through theories. Urban Design I/II: Urban Stories is a lecture series that aims to enrich the student’s repertoire of urban instruments and empowers them to read cities and to critically reflect on the urban environment. The course approaches a series of case studies, employing an analytical, research-based model for crosscutting scale, political, economical and social components. Through this lens, and with our toolbox, we aim to tell the fundamental story of our cities from today and provide information, analysis and knowledge to help students prepare for justifiable own contributions and interventions in the future. Also the aspect of knowledge transfer will be considered in order to sensibilize the students to understand how to operate in an international context.

COURSE DESCRIPTION How did cities develop into the cities we live in now? Which urban plans, instruments, visions, political decisions, economic reasonings, cultural inputs and social organization have been used to operate in urban settlements in specific moments of change? Which cities are exemplary in illustrating how these instruments have been implemented and how they have shaped urban environments? Can these instruments be transcripted into urban operational tools that we recognize within existing tested cases in contemporary cities across the globe?

Urban form cannot be reduced to physical space. Cities are the result of social constructions, under the influence of technologies, ecology, culture, the impact of experts and accidents.

Urban unconcluded processes respond to political interests, economic pressure, cultural inclinations, along with the imagination of architects and planners and the informal powers at work in complex adaptive systems.

Current urban phenomena are the result of an urban evolution. The facts stored in urban environments include contributions from its entire lifecycle. That is true for the physical environment, but also for non-physical aspects, the imaginary city that exists along with its potentials and problems and with the conflicts that have evolved over time. Knowledge and understanding along with a critical observation of actions and policies are necessary to understand the diversity and instability present in the contemporary city and to understand how urban form evolved to its current state.

9

STRUCTURE OF THE TOOLBOX This lecture series will present urban knowledge and the way it has introduced urban models and operational modes within different concrete realities, therefore shaping cities. Urban knowledge will be translated into operational tools, extracted from cities where it has been tested and become exemplary samples, most relevant for providing the understanding of how urban landscape has taken shape. Case studies will be identified to compile documents and an archive, which we use as templates to read the city and to critically reflect upon it. The presented contents are meant to serve as inspiration for positioning in future professional life as well as to provide instruments for valuable contributions and interventions.

For that we organize urban knowledge in what we call Urban Tools – a set of different filters (urban plans, instruments, visions, political decisions, economic reasonings, cultural inputs and social organization) that allows students to read specific urban morphologies, processes and environments.

For each city, three tools are used to study specific urban phenomena. Each tool derives from existing plans and theories.

EXERCISE Students received an exercise after each lecture that aimed to help to test the knowledge on a topic discussed during each lecture. The exercises also train the student’s ability to understand and apply the tools to other urban conditions or situations. The Exercise tasks are the simulation of the question format of the Exam. Therefore, it is valuable preparation for the Exam to finalize all weekly Exercise tasks, as an individually conducted piece of work.

ADDITIONAL READER TEXTS You will also get a reader that works as a guide for each city. It contains the reference literature, read this in order to deepen your knowledge on specific facts behind each tool. The questions in the exam will also be based on these texts.It represents mandatory exam preparation material.

10

11

SCALES & THEMATIC CLUSTERS “Micro/Temporary Programs” presents a

M

S

new form of urban appropriation and reactivation of leftover and residual spaces, activating them for limited time mainly with recreational and educational functions and encouraging a direct interaction between the space and the user. It also describes a phenomenon of nomadic urbanism, which means a space in constant transformation. Usually, in an bottom-up manner, individuals start to take proactive roles by carrying out their own ideas, making use of the space available, overcoming the lack of budgets with their creative potential.

MICRO scale interventions, which are mainly bottom-up and

temporary initiatives but with an immense impact on the urban context. In the case of Sao Paulo, the tool “Microplanning” showed the creation of urban creative practices in the existing urban fabric as a response to the need for communal spaces for leisure, recreation and sporting activities.

M “Community Projects” include social infrastructure

M

M

City”

includes the inter-connection and mutual dependence of informal and formal parts of cities. Often informal and formal structures overlap and influence each other, creating a hybrid urban environment. The coexistence and symbiosis of these two are visible in different cities.

“City Extension” includes new large-scale

“Destruction/Reconstruction”

shows the issues of de-urbanized and destroyed cities and the processes of their renovation and re-structuration that often produces new urban identities and new functions.

where buildings and landscapes with educational, recreational and cultural functions are being strategically implanted into the urban fabric.

“Informal/Hybrid

“Housing” includes social housing development schemes and the ones delegated to private real estate developers. This produces often a new model of vast rows of uniform and mass-produced homes, with minor access to public facilities and detached from the city center. Often, inhabitants start to create solutions for their own necessities by organizing and adding basic services.

M

MEDIUM scale interventions implemented in the city’s urban

fabric. In the case of Mexico City, the tool “Network of Green Infrastructure” explained the implementation of “The Green Plan”, an urban policy seeking to address issues such as air pollution and traffic congestion by introducing infrastructural projects such as the Bus Rapid Transit System.

“Ecology/Landscape”

explains the implementation of ecological/landscape architectural interventions in the urban fabric.

Mostly these measures deal with local resources and are directed towards dealing with environmental problems in order to implement sustainable development scenarios.

L

projects that usually have the aim to add new neighborhoods to the city, often provoked by mega-events or the vision to provide to the city the missing functions, from residential to commercial and industrial ones.

“Suburbia” shows how a new mode of urbanism pushes the

growth of the city to the periphery, leaving entire downtown areas empty and abandoned. Here new transportation networks, detached single family house typologies and the location of new shopping malls define the urban landscape of mostly peripheral areas of the city.

L

“Governance/Policy” presents initiatives that come

from governmental entities intended to (re)shape a city or to initiate territorial restructuring of a larger scale.

L

MACRO scale urban plan or project, provoking a massive urban

transformation in great part of the city.

If we remember the case of Berlin, the tool “Megascale Planning” showed the implementation of a massive urban expansion plan for Great Berlin. In the following decades another city-scaled project sought to convert Berlin into the capital of the Third Reich.

L

“Public

infrastructure

/

Mobility”

presents plans for the construction of highways, railway networks, bridges, tunnels as well as new public transport systems and environmentally friendly modes of mobility for the constantly growing cities.

TOOL MAP Critical (Re-) Construction Temporary Urbanism Megascale Planning Generating Suburbia

Active Infill

Berlin

Shrinking City

Revitalizing Industry Mixed Use

Detroit

Planning the Metropolitan Area

DeUrbanization

Z端rich

Horizontal Vertical Grid

Turbo Urbanism

Control

New York

Fragmented Suburban

Repurposing Infrastructure

Los Angeles

ReDensification

Revisiting Complexity

Creating Informality

Identity Construction

Sarajevo

Madrid Places for Experimentation

Periodisation

Network of Green Infrastructure

Mexico City

Inventing a Capital

Mapping as a Research Tool

Developer as Architect

Athens

Social Production of Public Space

Usergenerated Urbanism

Recovering Waterscapes

Oil and the Automobile City

Coincidental Master Plans

The Hybrid City

Caracas

Shenzhen

Post Olympic Urbanism

Handshake Urbanism

Cairo

Macro-scale Social Housing

Guangzhou

Urban Villages

Mapping as an Analytical Tool

Havanna

Pragmatic MultiCulturalism

Gated Communities

Megascale Neighbourhoods

Desert Cities

Top-Down Urban Planning

Rebelious Informality

Multiple Hubs

Sao Paulo Urban Mobility

MicroPlanning

(Infra-) Cultural Design

S

Development through Distribution

Cooperation & Dialogue

Masterplanning Segregation

Cape Town

Micro / Temporary Programs

M

Destruction / Reconstruction

M

Ecology / Landscape

L

Public Infrastructure / Mobility

M

Informal / Hybrid City

L

Governance / Policy

M

Housing

L

Suburbia

M

Community Projects

L

City Extension

6400 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

1495 km2 / 7950 km2 11 mil.

/ 19 mil.

TOOLS

Sﾃグ PAULO URBAN MOBILITY // PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE / MOBILITY

(INFRA)CULTURAL DESIGN // COMUNITY PROJECTS

City Administrative Border Urban Footprint

5 km

transportation means

29%

28%

29%

unemployment

156 bil.

5% green space

4 m2 / person

GDP

MICROPLANNING // MICRO / TEMPORARY PROGRAMS

SAO PAULO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: URBAN MOBILITY THEMATIC CLUSTER: PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE/ MOBILITY YEAR: 2012 URBAN PARANGOLÉ Main stakeholders: Urban Think Thank proposal for Audi Future Award 2012

Rapid urbanization throughout São Paulo’s greater metropolitan region has created a conditions in which the established, rigid systems of mobility are no longer effective. Since the 1930s, government investment has focused on the growth of extensive automobile infrastructure, a trend that has diminished investment in alternative modes of mass transit and resulted in the current issues of congestion and infrastructure limitations. This is a key component of the larger, asymmetrical urbanization process, in which population density in parts of the central region of the city has diminished, while the occupation of peripheral areas, especially in the sprawling gated communities and favelas (slums), has exploded. As a consequence, the majority of people within Sao Paulo face both social and territorial immobility. Innovative new modes and pathways of transport are needed to make São Paulo an accessible and inclusive city for all of its inhabitants.

Image 1: Average traffic jams in Sao Paulo: 118km/day, average speed by car in Sao Paulo: 19.3km/h

Urban Parangolé is based upon the central belief that mobility liberates the form of the built city, making it productive, healthy, and vibrant. Central for the success of the future city is a dynamic rhythm, presenting its population with choices for multiple pathways of motion that emerge from intelligent planning, local culture, and grassroots creativity. Urban Parangolé seeks to foster interaction between formal and informal mobility systems, creating flexible spaces where they can influence and negotiate each other’s presence. In essence, Urban Parangolé seeks to redefine how city-dwellers move and how their city moves with them.

A radically open system of mobility allows movement along new three-dimensional pathways. This liberates the ground plane, opening it up to a new spectrum of programs and typologies accessible for popular modification and self-determination. Through mobile digital infrastructure inhabitants customize new territorial reference points, which change the perceived scale of the city and allow all classes of citizens to move between multi-purpose hubs of varying sizes. Physical interventions and zoning policies foster spontaneous, informal gatherings that revive street life and encourage productive activities.

Responding to tensions between micro needs and macro infrastructure, Urban Parangolé proposes multi-scalar mobility prototypes, forming an alternative vision for the city, one where movement is an activity of both utility and pleasure.

Image 2: Image of Urban Think Thank’s Urban Parangole Proposal for Audi Urban Future Award 2012

16

17

SAO PAULO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: (INFRA)CULTURAL DESIGN THEMATIC CLUSTER: COMMUNITY PROJECTS YEAR: 2000

Image 3: CEU network / google base overlayered with Sao Paulo district division from EMPLASA, LUME’s urban evolution map and CEU location. (Marcos L. Rosa,version in: Archplus magazine 190, p. 71)

CEU 2000-2004 CENTROS EDUCACIONAIS UNIFICADOS Main stakeholders: Alexandre Delijaicov, André Takiya and Wanderley Ariza

São Paulo will be forced to address the rampantly growing city that has been remodeled by infrastructural plans. The modern way of thinking in São Paulo is connected to the idea of systematic thinking and architectural urbanism, strongly tied to social-political arguments.

The CEU will be used as a late case study of city architecture as strategic implants in a metropolitan network.

The complexes combine several programs such as a school, a day care, a library, TV and study room, theater, sport, and leisure areas. CEUs offer exclusive activities not found in other schools or sports centers in the outlying areas. They operate as centers of personal networks gravitating around each unit, and they give the communities a metropolitan dimension (1).

CEU were precisely implanted into an existing urban fabric characterized by illegibility and exclusion, depicting a reality of social inequality in the peripheral areas of São Paulo. These interventions aimed at re-organizing a fragmented territory by encouraging human contact, providing it with the necessary tools. The “architecture of the program” – of the equipment – becomes the architecture of the place. “The place was then set as C-E-U 2 [Centros de Estruturação Urbana] Centers of Urban Structuring” (3), defining the CEU as structuring poles of the neighborhood and the periphery, establishing a metropolitan network.

When put into new geographic circumstances, and re-framed in new realities, each new surrounding is re-discovered by the gaze of its citizens, making it a reference point in the urbanscape, recognized as the meeting point inside a neighborhood unit.

Image 4: CEU (Photo: David Rego Jr. from EDIF Municipality of São Paulo archive, 2006)

18

(1) Franco, Fernando de Mello; et. al. São Paulo. Redes e lugares. Arquitextos, São Paulo, 07.077, Vitruvius, oct 2006 Online: http://www.vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/ arquitextos/07.077/307/en_US (2) Formally, CEU stands for “Centros Educacionais Unificados” as presented from the Municipal Administration of Sao Paulo (3) Delijaicov, in: Mascare. 2004, p. 10.

19

SAO PAULO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: MICROPLANNING THEMATIC CLUSTER: MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS YEAR: 2008 URBAN CREATIVE PRACTICES Main stakeholders: Urban creatives, local inhabitants

As a counter point to modern controlled design, in the case of São Paulo, we will investigate how, on the micro scale, people are ‘riding’ these infrastructures (a result of a research field work, 2008-2009), redefining their role by identifying potential and articulating present references for built spaces of coexistence, therefore questioning the modern project.

Microplanning situates the action of the micro scale in terms of its social practices and collective appropriations, calling attention to the importance of ‘bottom up’ initiatives in the configuration of the urban landscape.

Image 5: Tools (Leite Rosa, Marcos. Micro Planning. Urban Creative Practices. 2010. P 110 - 111)

It reveals fields of action, tools, and handling concepts that indicate ways to operate on a local scale and tactics to improve quality of everyday life. It points to the enormous potential of these projects to describe the local scale and its urban tactics as another way to think about the city.

“But is there such a thing as a truly public space today? These fragile, isolated acts engage the notion of responsibility: if there is a hole in the sidewalk, why does a city employee fill it in, and not you and me?” (1) The strategy concentrates on the re-articulation, the reprogramming, and re-codifying of present references. It points at the potential of projects to articulate and cross reference, making use of what has already been produced, what’s already there, suitable for us in search of the ‘real city’.

As strategic micro intervention networks, these case studies demonstrate social networks of metropolitan scale - circuits of resistance to the generic city that provide the city with microenvironments. They identify micro-architectures that can superimpose functional ones, providing them with complexities capable of inducing quality urban spaces. (2)

(1) Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction. 2002, P 80.

(2) Rosa, Marcos Leite. Microplanning. Urban Creative Practices. São Paulo. 2011 20

Image 6: Garrido Boxing (Leite Rosa, Marcos. Micro Planning. Urban Creative Practices. 2010. P 92) 21

SAO PAULO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Sao Paulo Tool : Urban mobility and Microplanning

In order to get a better understanding of this complex relationship and its influence on the urban forms and processes, please choose four out of the six questions from the list on the left side.

As shown during the lecture, tackling the various urban challenges of megacities in the Global South includes a holistic understanding of all ingredients of urban design. The planning of infrastructure, buildings and open spaces stand in sensitive, interrelated connection. In addition to that, the processes of their (re)functionalization, (de)construction and (re)programmation deserve attention of urban designers.

Based on the input form the lecture and your own perception, thoughts and imagined scenarios, please try to offer explanations to the chosen questions that will provide a more grounded and extended understanding of the presented case.

in the picture below we present the overlapping of two different tools which, even characterized by different scales, create, in correlation with each other, a very specific urban context. Some questions immediately arise: 1. Is there a shift in the target group/profile of users from different social groups?

2. How did it change the public life and lifestyle of the residents?

3. How does it influence the local economies?

4. How does it affect the traffic flows and the development of transportation infrastructure?

5. How does it affect the trends in architecture and landscape project-related activities in the surrounding area?

6. How does it change urban policies (e.g. informal activites becoming formal ones)?

Example of the correlation of two tools and reprogrammation of a space

22

23

SAO PAULO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

24

25

SAO PAULO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

26

27

SAO PAULO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

28

29

3900 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

890 km2 / 6180 km2 3.5 mil.

/ 4.5 mil.

TOOLS

BERLIN MEGASCALE PLANNING // CITY EXTENSION

CRITICAL RECONSTRUCTION // DESTRUCTION / RECONSTRUCTION

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

30%

26%

29%

unemployment

131 bil.

11% green space

205 m2 / person

GDP

TEMPORARY URBANISM // MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS

BERLIN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: MEGASCALE PLANNING THEMATIC CLUSTER: CITY EXTENSION YEAR: 1910S THE LEGACY OF A DELAYED METROPOLIS Main stakeholders: Hermann Jansen, Albert Speer, Hans Scharoun and others

Urban development with all its various mechanisms is being dictated by different societal phenomenons. In addition, in some cases, urban development is extensively dependant on political decisions. In Berlin, an urban design competition was the trigger for a new era of urban development in the following decades. Urbanists created provocative visions for an emerging World city-Great Berlin.

As many other cities during industrialisation, Berlin was an overcrowded city with heavy problems regarding infrastructure and hygiene. Being delayed in having a World City, after the historically renowned cities like London and Paris but also emerging North American Cities, Germany started creating its own “World city”. The ideas emerged in the second half of the 19th century but Berlin had to wait until 1908-10 for the Great-Berlin official competition that was won by Hermann Jansen and his collaborators proposing a concept named “Within borders of possibilities”.

Image 7: First vision of Great Berlin by Jansen

In 1920, the merge of Berlin and its surrounding was finally decided by the authorities. Shortly after, the rise of modernism and works of Hilbersheimer, Taut, Wagner and many others started shaping the new era of Berlin - until the Nazi regime took over the power. According to Hitler and its main urban planner, Albert Speer, Berlin should become the biggest World Capital, called Germania. As those ideas dissapeared in the fire of Allies’ bombs and the division of the city during Cold War, Berlin lost its international significance, and additionally, became the showcase for architecture and urbanist ideas of the East and West “Blocks”, e.g. probably best seen on the example of Stalinallee and Hansaviertel projects.

Berlin, as a city with a highly dynamic development and a wide spectrum of very diverse ideas never managed to reach and keep the character that was intended by its planners.

Much more the city became a laboratory and developed its own ever-changing character that created a unique environment. Even today, two decades after the unfification and after new significant changes in the socio-economic and political context and rigid urban visions about its development, Berlin, through its own mechanisms, still keeps its unrestrainable and wild character.

Image 8: Germania-The World Capital planned by the Nazi regime Harald Bodenschatz (Ed.): Berlin und seine Bauten-Teil 1, Staedtebau, Berlin. DOM publishers 2009.

ARCH+ Magazine, Numbers 201/202, Arch+ Verlag, March 2011 32

33

BERLIN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: CRITICAL (RE-) CONSTRUCTION THEMATIC CLUSTER: DESTRUCTION / RECONSTRUCTION YEAR: 1990S URBAN IDEOLOGIES OF POST-WALL BERLIN Main stakeholders: Josef Paul Kleihues, Hans Stimmann and others

After realizing the failures of the modernist city, in West as well as East Berlin during the end of 1970s and 1980s, different initiatives had been started to recover the values of the traditional city. One example is the IBA (International Buidling Exhibition 1984-87) in West Berlin. After te re-unification of the city, the city administration started with an extensive campaign of critical “re-contruction” that led to a vivid discourse which still heavily influences the urban development of Berlin today.

Following the fall of the Berlin wall and the immense social change, the disfunctional and over-zoned modernist city of Berlin, espeacially its Eastern part, was perceived as outdated and was overwhelemed by problems of deteriorating infrastructure, housing shortage and urban scars on post-wall, post-industrial and other types of brownfields. Nevertheless, the lack of identity as the old-new German Capital was the main trigger to start re-introducing the urbanity of pre-war Berlin.

Image 9: Post-wall construction on the wall’s ex-death-stripe at Leipziger Platz (yellow)-Alex Klausmeister (Ed.): Denkmalpflege für die Berliner Mauer-Die Konservierung eines unbequemen Bauwerks, p.45

The main idea was to define the central role of the city and “invent the contemporary equivalent”, returning to traditional urbanism of pre-war Berlin. Conservative building tyopology and the promotion of the block-structure, as well as a “dress-code” for building facades of stone and glass, are witnesses of the idea to cover up the “wild” Berlin and the legacy of its historic layers of a divided city and annihiltated Nazi metropole.

The urban design “general model” (=Leitbild) in form of, for example, the Planwerk Innenstadt from 1999, endeavours a re-urbanisation and re-vitalisation of the inner-city area, aiming to restore the functionality of the Prussian-era and Weimar Republic-era Berlin. Such concepts, promoted by the urban planning authorities and the Chief Urban Planner of the City of Berlin, Hans Stimmann promote a design theory which, besides a return to traditional urbanism qualities with development schemes that preserve or re-discover the old patterns (example of Leipziger Platz) also propose an introduction of new typologies (example of Hans Kohlhoff’s Alexanderplatz proposal). In both cases, controversies of different idea streams and political ideologies still rule and heavily define the urban development of Berlin.

Image 10: Kollhoff’s winning entry for Alexanderplatz in 1995 Phillip Oswalt,Rudolf Stegers: Berlin, Stadt ohne Form-Strategien einer anderen Stadt. Prestel. 2000.

Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin 1987, Projektübersicht. Offizieller Katalog. Bauausstellung Berlin GmbH. 1987.

34

35

BERLIN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: TEMPORARY URBANISM THEMATIC CLUSTER: MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS YEAR: 2000S URBAN PIONEERS Main stakeholders: Raumlabor and other small-scale offices, Berlin city government

Temporary use projects are increasingly of strategic importance for urban development, as space pioneers open up new development prospects. Urban pioneer practices situate the architectural discipline as an active gesture towards the city spaces, by introducing core cells and generators for triggering new types of urbanism and demonstrating a new understanding of what architecture could be.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the temporary, spontaneous, often illegal use of wasted urban land or empty buildings has been one of the central themes of discussion in the contemporary city of Berlin of the last two decades. Urban contemporary conditions demand an architecture opene to change and transformation, informed by diversity and complexity of its lived-in spaces.

Image 11: The Kitchen monument. Raumlabor Berlin

‘Urban Pioneers’ makes reference to individuals that have taken proactive roles in small scale environments, being makers, realizing their own ideas and making use of abundance of space, creative potential and lack of money.

The importance of the urban pioneers for the development of Berlin is attached to a long story and tradition with the unplanned, which intensified after the wall was torn down.

In 2007, the Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin compiled temporary projects as local tactics that have been developed into a sort of a manual that supported the argument of a possible urban restructuring based on the creative industry. “Urban Pioneers” is part of the discussion of the branding of the city of Berlin as a creative hub.

Temporary use projects such as the mobile Kitchen monument or the Badeschiff are just some of the successful examples of creative urban practices in Berlin.

Image 12: Badeschiff. Photo: Marcos L. Rosa (1) Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin (Ed.).Urban Pioneers. Berlin. Jovis Verlag 2007.

(2) Maier, Julia/ Rick, Matthias. Acting in public. Raumlaborberlin. Berlin. Jovis Verlag 2008.

36

37

BERLIN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Berlin Tool : Temporary Urbanism Temporary use projects are increasingly of strategic importance for urban development, as space pioneers open up new development prospects. This approach can inspire to re-discover the specifics of a space and its relevance for the surrounding context. Berlin is the model city concerning temporary, small scale interventions. The architecture office “Raumlabor” developed a mobile sculpture which can be staged in different places, transforming them into temporary collective spaces that re-define the processes on the site itself as well as the influence on the neighbourhood. The Hardbrücke area with its transformative character can be considered as a field for transitory uses, giving a unique image to the district in relation to the city. In the picture below one can find a imaginary scenario of undefined space under the bridge, which has the potential to be converted into a space of temporary use and beyond.

1.

Design a proposal and visualize it through drawings or collages on the picture below.

2.

Justify your concept and objectives with clear and critical argumentation. How does your concept integrate itself in the specific urban context and urban processes of the Hardbrücke site? Which target groups of visitors are included? What are the potential negative implications? Does your idea show a potential to be institutionalized and translated into a long-term project?

Kitchenmonument | Raumlabor | Berlin

2.

38

39

BERLIN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

Berlin, Stadt des 20. Jahrhunderts

10/11/10 11:25 AM

Philipp Oswalt | 1998 Close Window

Berlin, City of the 20th Century More than any other city, Berlin has made its mark on the history of the 20th century: The city was the scene of major events and trends in this century - the Modernist movement of the twenties, the First and Second World Wars, National Socialism and the Holocaust, the Cold War and the collapse of socialism, capitalism and revolt - and, at the same time, these events have shaped the city. Berlin, which in the 19th century had been a boomtown without any tradition of its own, absorbed these influences and gave them an expression. In a process of 'automatic urbanism' recurring destruction, planning and reconstruction -, the city developed into a montage of contradictory ideological fragments. The city has become a text which tells its story and, in doing so, reflects the history of the 20th century.

Unlike other cities, Berlin does not stand out on account of its classical beauty, it is neither a composition which is the result of an ideal plan nor is it the product of organic growth; discontinuities and contradictions, diversity and emptiness characterise the city. Berlin is ugly and, at the same time, its intensity and its individual character are a source of fascination.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a trend in architecture has gained the upper hand which is fundamentally opposed to this and aims to turn the fiction of an unbroken history of Prussia and Berlin into a model for architecture and urban design. In the name of 'history', it denies this history and removes its traces. The International Building Exhibition (IBA), under the direction of Josef Paul Kleihues, was already pursuing the idea of reconstruction of the city layout of the 19th century in the Berlin of the nineteen-eighties. Perimeter block development and corridor streets formed the central idea and their implementation led to a removal of the evidence of destruction by war, the Cold War and the car-orientated town planning of the fifties - a development which architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Hans Kollhoff criticised at the time as nostalgic. Whereas the IBA provided a forum for a liberal conception of architecture as part of the concept of the so-called 'critical reconstruction' and involved a large number of very different kinds of architects to achieve this, the debate on Berlin architecture became far more radical after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.

SIMULATING HISTORY From then on, the protagonists - apart from Josef Paul Kleihues particularly Hans Stimmann, who was the Senate building director and is now an under-secretary -, called for homogeneity of architecture and accomplishment of a socalled Berlin-Prussian style. They used the following criteria to define this so-called 'Berlin style of architecture': - homogenous perimeter block development with eaves 22 metres high; - division of the block - at least optically - into small individual house units; - facades of stone with a tectonic structuring of facades, upright window and the use of natural stone for facings.

Buildings are intended to be monolithic and embody solidity.

These rules were elevated to become a universal principle and used in every conceivable situation, whether in the historical district of Mitte, at Potsdamer Platz or - in a slightly modified version - in the new housing estates on the outskirts of the city. Their premises did not only apply to new buildings. The same recipe was also to be used to transform existing districts of the city and adapt them to fit into a homogenous urban landscape as part of the 'Planwerk Innenstadt' (master plan). Stimmann said quite openly: 'The cities which I like are the ones which are homogenous.' For him, architecture in Berlin was to be 'disciplined, Prussian, subdued in its colour schemes, of stone, in straight lines rather than curved'. For example, Stimmann praised the 'Hofgarten' project conceived by Kleihues because here the 'architects do what once happened automatically, [architects] who feel they are part of Berlin and are not interested in recreating America in Berlin ... It is disciplined architecture.' The architecture critic Martin Kieren even goes so far as to speak of the 'uniform as a model' to characterise the Berlin style of architecture. Stimmann was able to implement his ideas for a Berlin style of architecture owing to the dominant role he played in numerous competition juries, the influence he was able to exert on what building permits were issued and by intensive public relations. The architecture theoreticians Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm and Fritz Neumeyer developed the ideological foundations, and Hans Kollhoff, who prior to 1990 had still advocated modern and experimental architecture, became the most determined champion of The call for 'Berlin architecture' and a 'Prussian style' was justified by a line of the 'new style of Berlin architecture'. argument which was a classic example of the cultural pessimism described by the historian Fritz Stern in his book entitled The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961). Wholesale simplifications are used to generalise problems of Western civilisation and an idealised past is evoked which - according to the architecture theoretician Fritz Neumeyer -is to be demythologised and remythologised. Modernity and liberalism are actively opposed and a community is longed for. The sentiment is anti-American and opposes everything which is 'alien to Berlin'. Hence, it is hardly surprising that the concept of 'Prussian style' is borrowed from the right-wing thinker and nationalist Moeller van den Bruck, who published a book with the same title in 1916, in which he used concepts such as tectonics, monumentality, uniformity, massiveness and discipline to describe the Prussian style - the same concepts which form the basis of the present debate. What today finds expression in the debate on architecture in Berlin is a feeling that it is time for a resurgence of European nationalism following the end of the Cold War and the desire for a 'normalisation' of German history. Berlin is to become a normal European city, Germany a normal country and, following the end of the post-war era, its unfortunate history is, if possible, to be erased from the collective memory of the city and society. And at the same time, the 'Berlin style of architecture' is the post-modern concept of a decorated shed for a globalised real estate market which reduces architecture to the role of styling the consumer article building with the help of stereotyped images.

GLOBALISATION Typical of the Berlin debate of the nineties was that the main emphasis lay on achieving a conservative cityscape and that questions relating to infrastructure, use or ownership issues playing no role. While, for example, most of the Potsdamer Platz site was sold to the global players Daimler Benz and Sony for a fraction of its market value, a condition of sale was that they were to create the image of a 'European City' in formal terms. Stimmann said quite openly: 'I'm for the investors. I try to keep them in check with aesthetic categories.' And so, although Berlin had the historic opportunity of shaping the structure of the city, all decisive urban design questions were left up to the real estate market or bureaucrats. A large proportion of the vacant areas in central locations which were to be developed belonged to the state, essential infrastructure such as the main railway station, an airport and a number of principal roads had to be built from scratch. The city had an enormous additional building requirement (per capita it only had one quarter of the office http://www.oswalt.de/en/text/txt/berlin_p.html

40

Page 1 of 4

Berlin, Stadt des 20. Jahrhunderts

10/11/10 11:25 AM

space of Frankfurt, only one third of that of Munich), and the relationship with the area surrounding it, which was still virtually unsettled as a result of the division of the city and the planned economy of the former German Democratic The building boom in Berlin coincided with a restructuring of the real estate Republic, needed to be redefined. market, which became dominated by completely different kinds of investors in the wake of the globalisation of markets.

Investors who built to meet their own needs - characteristic of the post-war economy in Germany and still typical when the centre of Frankfurt was developed in the eighties- were replaced by international investors in the form of real estate funds, life insurance companies and developers who invested in the real estate market for speculative reasons and had property to be let or sold built entirely on the basis of financial considerations. In such a constellation, architects are degraded to the role of service providers, expected to develop readily marketable property on a tight budget and time schedule, and have to relinquish most of their former powers to project managers, developers and quantitiy surveyors.

The combination of aesthetic conventions with economic and town planning laissez-faire has led to the emergence of a homogenous services centre and government district in the area between Spreebogen, Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstraße. According to Rem Koolhaas, this new business district constitutes an extreme degree of Americanisation with all the disadvantages of America and none of its advantages. The remark made by Kurt Tucholsky in 1919 has come true again. 'Berlin combines the disadvantages of a major American city with those of a provincial German town.'

DUMMIES In terms of architecture this means packaging the contemporary speculative office building in historicising facades, which also simulate the small-scale. As no legal limitations had been placed on the degree of use and only the permitted maximum height had been prescribed, buildings were extended downwards: the Friedrichstadtpassagen have It could be said up to five underground stories, some buildings on Pariser Platz achieve a depth of 100 metres. sarcastically that the Berlin conventions have in fact proved to be innovative as they have produced a new kind of building. A typical example is the Kontorhaus Mitte in Friedrichstraße: the block is owned by a group of investors; Kleihues designed the entire block, the ground-plans of the buildings, the stairwells, the courtyard, the courtyard facades etc. He invited three further architects to design the street facades, whereby stone was the prescribed material. In other words, their contribution was confined to selecting the natural stone to be used, deciding the proportions of the windows and designing the details of the facades. The building which is homogenous on the inside presents itself on the outside as six houses with six different facades. The Italian architect Aldo Rossi collaborated with the architects Bellmann + Böhm to achieve the same result without outside help for the Quartier Schützenstraße. On a property owned by a single investor, the team of architects developed a building complex which is continuous on the inside and externally simulates the historical parcelling of the property by presenting approximately twenty different facades. The Neue Hackesche Höfe (1 investor, 1 building, 12 facades) and debis at Potsdamer Platz (1 investor, 1 property, 6 architects, 12 'buildings') are further examples of this approach. In the case of the shopping mall of debis at Potsdamer Platz, simulating history has meant that some buildings were designed by three architects as is the case in a Surrealistic cadavre exquis. While the architects office of Christoph Kohlbecker was responsible for the underground stories of the entire complex, the office of Renzo Piano was commissioned to design the shopping mall, which also includes the covered gallery and the first two above-ground stories of the adjacent buildings, and the Richard Roger Partnership was responsible for designing the upper half (second to eighth stories) of the building. The project was not only shared horizontally but also vertically: The Roger's office designed the park facade, Piano's office the facade facing the shopping gallery.

The contradictory desires for homogeneity and small-scale produced finished buildings with 'stuck-on' facades which seemed like oversized exhibits of manufacturers of facades at a trade fair of the building industry. The impression is one of a confusing diversity of yellowish, reddish, greyish and greenish facade facings made of granite, sandstone, travertine, brickwork etc. New dormitory suburbs, located on the periphery of the city, came into being at the same time as the developments taking place in the city centre. The estate of Karow-Nord, the model project of the former Senate building director, is a typical example. The point of departure for planning this residential project, which is located in former East Berlin and provides 5,100 dwellings for 15,000 residents, was an 'imposing image for a new suburb' (Stimmann); this was defined with the help of design statutes comprising several hundred pages. In particular, the form of the boundaries, the shape of roofs, redbrick bases, upright window formats and a maximum window area of 50 per cent were intended to create the picture of a traditional suburb. In contrast, the questions of access to public transport services, the progammatic mix and reduction of costs were more or less ignored. It is significant that the office of Moore, Ruble, Yudell, which developed the master plan for Karow-Nord, was also involved in the planning for Celebration. Celebration is a settlement which the Walt Disney Company created in Florida in the nineties using the Hollywood notions of a fictitious 'traditional' American town.

A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO HISTORY Whereas building policies in Berlin in the nineties have used theme park methods to simulate a continuous tradition, there are a number of architects who have involved themselves with the complex history of the city since the seventies.

In addition to a number of young Berlin architects, these include Rem Koolhaas, who began his career as an architect with a study on 'The Berlin Wall as Architecture', 1972, and Daniel Libeskind, whose focus on Berlin began in the late eighties. In their dialogue with Berlin, both architects developed a number of themes which are not only central to their own work but have also had an impact on the international debate on architecture in the eighties and nineties.

Nevertheless, Rem Koolhaas has been a persona non grata since his public criticism in 1991 of official development policy in Berlin; Libeskind was tolerated as an oddity and allowed to build the Jewish Museum.

The particular character of Berlin in terms of architecture and urban design was first described in 1977 in a study entitled 'Stadt in der Stadt' (City in The City) by Oswald Matthias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kollhoff et al.: 'The diversity and variety which are manifest in the historical quarters of the city are what give Berlin its individual character and reflect the quality of its urban design. It is a city in which opposing elements have always articulated themselves and which has never been successful in its attempts to achieve a single standardising principle.' A few years later, the designs by Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture for the IBA showed how this special quality of Berlin can be translated into a new kind of urban design. For example, the design for the southern part of Friedrichstadt develops the heterogeneity and openness of the location and, at the same time, incorporates it into a coherent spatial structure. Baroque urban fragments, tenement buildings from the 19th century, elements of classical Modernism and post-war urban development are supplemented by two further typologies - houses with courtyards and slabs - to achieve an urban fabric. Rem Koolhaas was of the opinion that a 'conceptual framework is necessary that relates buildings in conflicting forms of architecture and creates anchors for new insertions. A retroactive manifesto which makes sense of http://www.oswalt.de/en/text/txt/berlin_p.html

Page 2 of 4

41

BERLIN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

Berlin, Stadt des 20. Jahrhunderts

10/11/10 11:25 AM

the existing randomness.'

A number of works by different architects used the dialogue with the Berlin that existed to develop a number of themes which provide a conceptual framework for the identity of the city and, at the same time, transform these into contemporary architecture. I would like to use a few of these works as examples to describe this other conception of Berlin.

VOID The Berlin of the post-war era was characterised by large empty lots in the centre of the city. The NS regime, the destruction wrought by war and post-war planning as well as the building of the Berlin Wall had created huge empty areas which constituted a new kind of urban space and made possible a wide variety of temporary and spontaneous uses. Rem Koolhaas discovered the theme of emptiness, which was later to occupy such a central position for him, in his study 'The Berlin Wall as Architecture' He saw these empty areas as having a liberating potential: 'Where nothing exists, everything is possible.' In contrast to the definitions of uses by architecture, empty spaces have the quality of programmatic uncertainty. By the end of the eighties, he had developed this theme further in projects such as the urban design for Melun-Sénart or the Très Grande Bibliothèque for Paris to create a new concept of architecture and urban Less well-known outside Berlin are the works of Andreas Reidemeister, who as long ago as 1982 argued design. against the urban wasteland in the southern part of Friedrichstadt - the result of the planned motorway route - being redeveloped with new buildings - something which the IBA did a short time later. Instead, he proposed that the empty space, which had been created by war and demolition and now permitted spontaneous forms of use and possessed unique spatial qualities, should be preserved and given architectural articulation. He proposed breaking up the block structure by a public green area and providing rhythm in the form of accompanying residential buildings. Reidemeister took this idea a stage further in 1992 and proposed preservation of the large empty areas in the centre of the city, which were so typical of Berlin - the former railway installations, the course once followed by the Wall and the banks of the River Spree - and placing these in the context of urban design by building offices and residential towers along their As similar approach was adopted by the Dutch office MVRDV for its design for Bornholmer Straße, which was edge. awarded 1st prize in a European competition in 1991, but was not realised. The building is conceived as a vertical block marking the empty space formed by the void in the urban space left by the Wall and the course of the S-Bahn. The east-west alignment of the building volume in the former border area draws attention to the different halves of the once divided city and makes them tangible. Empty spaces have been cut out of the slab, these spaces accommodate the community and public programmes and, at the same time, formulate the emptiness as an architectural topic. The mass of the building consists of a three-dimensional puzzle of apartments of varying cubatures, thereby creating great spatial In contrast with the projects already mentioned, the theme which and programmatic diversity within the building.

Daniel Libeskind developed in his work was that of emptiness. To him, emptiness did not only characterise Berlin physically but also psychologically. The numerous empty spaces which war had left in the centre of the city, such as those at Potsdamer Platz, in the diplomatic quarter and the Spreebogen, are, in his eyes, visible symbols of loss, destruction and discontinuity. Whereas Rem Koolhaas was fascinated and inspired by the spatial and programmatic qualities of this particular urban landscape, to Libeskind it represented the loss of the rich Jewish heritage in Berlin, the break in the history of Jews in Germany, in the history of German Jews and Germans. 'An absence which cannot be filled, a break which cannot be healed.' His design for the Jewish Museum transforms the existing urban voids into the structural centre of the building. A fragmented emptiness, interrupted at several points, forms the central element of the Museum. The building is built around a centre which is absent, a void which cannot be entered and cannot be filled.

The second central theme of the Jewish Museum is the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the city. The complex form of the building reflects the heterogeneous elements of its surroundings - a Baroque city palace, high-rise apartment blocks put up in the sixties, urban villas of the eighties - and integrates these into a spatial structure. It is only its complex geometry which makes it possible to relate the urban fragments to one another and integrate the new building into a context which is heterogeneous.

FRAGMENTATION AND HETEROGENEITY O.M.A. designs for the IBA and the design of Daniel Libeskind for the Jewish Museum give expression to a programme of modern contextualism which does not idealise a certain phase of the city's history, but accepts structures and elements from different epochs, transforms the fragments into an overall idea, uses spatial and programmatic extensions to remove their deficits and reinforces existing qualities. Neither is the status quo preserved nor is a past epoch reconstructed; instead what exists is developed further using contemporary means and enriched by the addition Libeskind developed this idea further on an urban scale in his competition entries for of new elements.

Alexanderplatz (1993, 2nd prize). In contrast to the design by Hans Kollhoff, which was awarded 1st prize, he proposed retaining the huge residential blocks built during GDR times and supplementing these with commercial and cultural functions. The new buildings make reference to the different urban structures in their surroundings. A multiple order The approach of the office of Léon + Wohlhage to serves to transform, develop and densify what is already there. the fragmented urban space of Berlin takes up the idea of ambivalent buildings which can be interpreted both as a soltaire and an integrated part of an urban texture, thereby giving expression to an ambivalence of autonomy and subordination. An example of this is, in addition to its designs for the World Trade Center Berlin (1991-93) and the Bürohaus am Halensee (Halensee Office Building) (1990-96), the Wohnhaus in der Schlesischen Straße 1992-94) (Residential Building Schlesische Straße). The building not only defines the corner of the block, it is also a free-standing element which permits a view of the surrounding fire protection walls and integrates the post-war development, which The design for the GSW-Hauptverwaltung in negated the historical ground-plan of the city, into a free order.

Kochstraße by Sauerbruch/Hutton (1991-99) is based on a analogous idea: The new building incorporates the existing high-rise of the GSW, which dates from the fifties, into the urban context of the baroque urban plan and, at the same time, creates references to the other high-rise buildings in the vicinity. The existing heterogeneity is accepted, integrated into a multiple order by means of interventions and structured spatially.

Berlin, Stadt des 20. Jahrhunderts

10/11/10 11:25 AM

rhythm and densified by means of a sequence of free-standing buildings which are aligned to the street, giving it a Another starting point which could be adopted was used by the Amsterdam landscape architects spatial definition.

B+B in its winning entry in the competition for the Hellersdorfer Graben (1994). The existing artificial topography was used to make possible the co-existence between a park which is used intensively and untouched natural space. The former drainage ditch, which today is used as an above-ground underground railway route, is to be deepened and allowed to develop into a self-regulating woodland biotope by means of initial plantings; this is to transverse the entire district like a green river and provide the link with the surrounding area. A number of topographical islands on the same level as the surrounding districts constitutes a park which allows many different forms of use and is linked with the urban districts by bridges.

MULTIPLICITY On the scale of the town as a whole the Berlin architect Christoph Langhof developed a concept in his project entitled 'Delta Stadt' (Delta City)( 1991) which makes use of the specific 'duplicity' of Berlin to develop a new quality: Instead of merging the east and west halves of Berlin in a process of 'reunification', he proposes establishing a third city to the south of Berlin, which makes use of the infrastructure already in place there (airport, ICE route, highway) and, at the same time, serves as a link between east and west. The parallelism of the three cities enhances the competition inside the metropolitan area, strengthens polycentrality and permits experimental and open urban development, which is to be helped by tax concessions and more efficient administrative processes.

TEMPORARINESS A further central Berlin theme is the temporary, spontaneous, often illegal use of waste urban land or empty buildings. Berlin has experienced the fall of four German states in this century. The times of radical change, the destruction of war, the weak economy and unresolved ownership questions often led to spontaneous appropriations and activities, which stood out on account of their lack of financial resources and high degree of creativity. Such activities are unstable and transitory, and have an extremely flexible reaction to any change in the general conditions. They have helped to shape the specific urbanity of the city. Typical of this are the squatting scene, the Polish markets and the club A legendary example of this is the and bar scene which has developed in Berlin-Mitte since the fall of the Wall.

WMF -Club, whose eventful history has been shaped by the temporary use of a number of places which are central to and, at the same time, very typical of Berlin's history. The club was founded in 1990/1991 when the premises of the former headquarters of the Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik in Leipziger Straße was occupied. After they were expelled by the owner, the initiators drained the flooded urinal of the former Wertheim department store at Potsdamer Platz without permission and ran the club there for nine months. This was followed by a legalised interim use in Burgstraße, the premises there were designed by Fred Rubin. The bowling bar which he had removed from the Palast der Republik and transformed was installed there in a new context. When the WMF recently moved into what had once been the guest house of the Council of Ministers of the German Democratic Republic in Johannisstraße the idea was developed further and the interior designed using objects from the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the former A further current example of the Central Committee of the SED such as the office of Erich Honecker in white leather. temporary use of a characteristic place is the Kunsthalle (art gallery) in Chausseestraße; here a former GDR As the examples described show, a number of projects supermarket has been turned into a place for exhibitions. have come about during the last few years outside the official discourse on architecture; these projects concern themselves with the authentic history of Berlin which is very particular to the city and seek to develop a contemporary form of architecture from this. The central themes of the city: emptiness, fragmentation, heterogeneity, multiplicity, temporariness, formlessness and subversion reveal a high degree of innovative potential. It remains to be hoped that, despite all trends toward restoration and economic exploitation, the city does not fully return to normal, but retains its particular identity and uses this to develop potential which points the way for the future.

Close Window Philipp Oswalt I would like to thank Stefan Rethfeld for his assistance in researching this article. published in : Berlin / Berlin, Katalog zur Berlin Biennale | Ed. Miriam Wiesel | Berlin | 1998 Location: http://www.oswalt.de/en/text/txt/berlin_p.html

MASS HOUSING ESTATES Unlike in the older parts of Berlin, the mass housing estates in the eastern part of the city are fundamentally characterised by functional monotony and spatiality which is poorly articulated. However, here, too, the sheer quantity of the pre-fabricated apartment blocks rules out the possibility of restructuring on the basis of supplementary buildings.

Hence, the study for Falkenberger Chaussee in Hohenschönhausen by Irene Keil and Jörg Pampe is based on the idea of modern contextualism, which accepts what is already there, while, at the same time, providing it with new qualities by means of transformation. The typical spatiality of urban design in the former GDR is überhöht compositionally, given http://www.oswalt.de/en/text/txt/berlin_p.html

42

Page 3 of 4

http://www.oswalt.de/en/text/txt/berlin_p.html

Page 4 of 4

43

4200 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

90 km2

/ 1200 km2

0.4 mil.

/ 1.8 mil.

TOOLS

ZÜRICH PLANNING THE METROPOLITAN AREA // GOVERNANCE / POLICY

REDENSIFICATION // HOUSING

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

36%

34%

26%

unemployment

128 bil.

3% green space

270 m2 / person

GDP

CREATING INFORMALITY // MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS

ZÜRICH LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

RAF

WIL

WAS

TOOLS

TOOL: PLANNING THE METROPOLITAN AREA

HÜN KAI

EGL GLA

WEA

ROR

STD

OWE

HOC

NEE NWE

BAC

REB

OEL

OPF

RED

WEI

GER SPR

UEN

EGW

BED

WID

FÄL

FEH GRE IF

BIR

EN

SEE

SE

KIB

ISL

OLU HED

BON STL

AFF

AEU

MAU MÖN

ERL THA

OTT

UST

ZUM

KÜS

RÜS

ADL

E

ARN

ZOL

WET

AES

OWL

JON

Main stakeholders: Planning Authorities on federal, cantonal and municipal levels, universities, planning

RUS

SER

UIT

RUD

ULU ROT

CITIES GROWING BEYOND THEIR ADMINISTRATIVE BORDERS

URD

VOL

DÜB

RE

ZUF HES

ILL

WAN

ZÜR SIE

BER

BRE

KYB

LIN

BAS

DIL WAL

OEN

DIT BEL

FIS

DÄL

NÜR

KLO

RÜM

HÜT

KIL REM

BRÜ

BUC

DÄN

WÜR

LUF

NHA

OTE

NEU

WIN

OGL

DID

BOP

EMB

NGL

STE

SEI

G

THEMATIC CLUSTER: GOVERNANCE / POLICY YEAR: 1900 -

SÖF

EHR

FRT

BÜL

HÖR

ORI

LAN

EGG

HER MEI

GOS GRÜ

OES UET

BUB

MÄN OBF HOG

offices

ZÜ

MET

RI

CH

HOM

STÄ SE

E

WÄD

KNO

RIC

The first railway line in Switzerland, the so called “Spanischbrötlibahn” was inaugurated in 1847 connecting Zurich with Baden. It meant the starting point of the rise of Zurich as the comercial capital of Switzerland. The strong industrialisation pushed by Alfred Escher as the founder of the machine factory “Escher-Wyss” pushed Zurich to grow quickly. In 1893 the city was extended over formerly independent municipalities. In 1934 another round of “Eingemeindungen” took place. The administrative borders of Zurich have not changed since, but nowadays the urban catchment area reaches out way beyond those borders. Another round of “Eingemeindungen” seemed at the time not only politically impossible, but also because wide parts of Switzerland appeared as one urban fabric. This required new ways of thinking of the country’s urban landscape as well as new forms of collaboration between the municipalities.

WOL Massstab 1 : 285 000 0

5

FRE FEU

10 km

Stadt Zürich (Kerngemeinde) Vorortsgürtel Erster Vorortsgürtel Zweiter Vorortsgürtel

(Volkszählung 1950) (Volkszählung 1960)

Dritter Vorortsgürtel

(Volkszählung 1970)

Vierter Vorortsgürtel

(Volkszählung 1980)

Fünfter Vorortsgürtel

(Volkszählung 1990)

Sechster Vorortsgürtel

(Volkszählung 2000)

Image 13: Areal Growth of the Agglomeration of Zurich according to the Definition of the term Agglomeration by the Bundesamt für Statistik

Only roughly fifty years ago, the task of planning the land was identified as a national issue in Switzerland. In 1969 the first national law on spatial planning was elaborated. It said that land has to be managed economically and that national, cantonal and municipal planning authorities have to synchronize their plans. However, nowadays it is not sufficient to synchronize planning activities on the vertical hierarchy of planning authorities; the need of a horizontal synchronization is undisputable.

These new forms of collaboration can materialize in associations between municipalities or cantons -that are not designated in the costitution- such as in the “Metropolitanraum Konferenz Zürich” that counts 236 municipalities within eight cantons or the Planungsgruppe Glattal.

But they can also be organized temporary as for example for the idea competition Limmattal.

The competition was organized by an association of the municipalities of the Limmattal, the cantons Zurich and Aargau, several federal offices (Bundesämter) and ETH Zurich.

Conceptual thinking on the urban landscape of Switzerland as the study of ETH Studio Basel on urban potentials or the proposal for the Glattal of the “Gruppe Krokodil” fostered public dialog on the future spatial development of the country.

Image 14: A conceptual approach: How “Architektengruppe Krokodil” sees the Glattal of the future. “Glatt! - eine Stadt im Werden”,2012

46

47

ZÜRICH LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: REDENSIFICATION THEMATIC CLUSTER: HOUSING YEAR: 1988 TRANSFORMING NEU-OERLIKON Main stakeholders: land owners (i.e. ABB etc.), planning authority of Zurich

Neu-Oerlikon is the first case in Zurich of an extensive conversion of former industrial sites into a living and working district. A great chance to approach the recently identified need for densification in already urbanized areas emerged due to the large size of the area that was about to be repurposed.

When in 1865 the railway line from Zurich to south germany opened, Oerlikon – by then belonging to the still independent municipality Schwamendingen – was the perfect location for the upcoming industry. Shortly after, the machine factory Oerlikon (MFO) was founded, which became the main catalyst for the growth of the village. In 1934 Oerlikon became part of Zurich. At that time a wide area of the district was occupied by factories and not accessible to public. Towards the end of the 1980s the now internationally operating companies decided to transfer their production to other countries and to abandon the sites in Oerlikon. In 1988 the planning process for the new neighbourhood started and within 15 years Neu Oerlikon was built. Nowadays the area is criticized for not being urban and dense enough.

Image 15: Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon, 1951

Redensification means the process of densifying an already urbanized area. This can either happen by converting an entire area, as in the case of Neu-Oerlikon, or by gradually increasing density in a district that aleady serves for housing.

Image 16: Gesamtplan Zentrum Zürich Nord

48

49

ZÜRICH LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: CREATING INFORMALITY THEMATIC CLUSTER: MICRO / TEMPORARY PROGRAMS YEAR: SINCE 2002 UPGRADING THE INFORMAL Main stakeholders: Architects: EM2N, builder-owner: foundation PWG, public foundation owned by the city of Zurich Already in the early days of the Letten Viaduct, small businesses installed themselves underneath its pillars. In 2003 when the Swiss Railway Company (SBB), as the owner of the lot, planned to renovate the viaduct, all the shacks had to be removed. Subsequent to the renovation, the SBB wanted to benefit from the new popularity of the neighbourhood, gained after clearing of the open drug scene in the ‘90s, and establish a new concept for the space underneath the train tracks. After protests of the adjacent residents who feared the new project could become a “Schickimicki-Meile” the administration of the city of zurich intervened and elaborated in a participatory procedure the concept of the “Viaduktbögen” as spaces for small local brands and a market hall to complete the insufficient grocery supply in the neighbourhood.

Nowadays the Viaduktbögen are filled with mostly well-established brands and a market hall that offers products in a price range of a gourmet food store.

Image 17: Tools (Leite Rosa, Marcos. Micro Planning. Urban Creative Practices. 2010. P 110 - 111)

Whereas in cities of the global south informality is connoted with under-supply of civil services, violence, and legal uncertainty it is predominantely positively seen in western european cities as Zurich. It offers an island of freedom, a space to experiment within an otherwise rigid framework of rules and regulations. Without the barriers of bureaucracy, ideas can be realized quickly and with little financial investments. Cities that offer many of these freespaces are considered attractive and lively and attract creatives from all over the world. Since Richard Florida’s publication “The Rise of the Creative Class” in 2002, it has become an acknowledged fact that the creative industries are a breeding ground for economic growth. Setting up a vivid creative community has since become marketing goal of every major city. But how can these free spaces, that constitute a creative environment, be enhanced? For obvious reasons, laisser faire can not be the policy of a government. Zurich attempts to foster a creative environment by different approaches, from legal facilitations for temporary uses or events in public space for young people under 25 years, over financing plans for smal, local businisses, to subsidised atelier spaces. However, sometimes the motivation to enable creativity overshoots the mark and prevents the development that was originally meant to be supported. This becomes apparent in the case of an artificial nail house (under the Hardbrücke), planned with an enormous sum of money, although there was an actual nail house just a few hundred meters away.

Image 18: The online advertisment for retail spaces at Europaallee in the visual language of small neighbourhood businesses

50

51

ZÜRICH LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Zurich Tool : Re-densification

1.

Conduct a brief research and find a comparable situation in another city in which dynamic urban transformation can be observed.

City:

The rapid urban development initiated by diverse actors can nowadays be easily perceived and documented. In the case of Zurich, the traffic infrastructure as well as office and housing (re)development projects, proposed and executed under the premise of different types of development cooperations, extensively transformed the cityscape in a very short period.

Below you can see images of such urban transformations that took place in Zurich-North during (only) the last 10 years.

2.

Following the shown Zurich Nord example, identify 3 different stages of urban development (Use the Google Earth function: “View > Historic Imagery”) by exporting corresponding images. Glue them into the frames on the right and name the status of the site development.

3.

Explain the background of your chosen situation:

a) Identify the stakeholders of the project (architects/planners, real estate developers, politicians). b)

Who is the user target group of the project and how are the existing residents involved?

c) How does it affect the pedestrian movement of the local residents, what is movement of the new users and their traffic flows like? d) Does it catalyze further construction activies as a chain reaction in the surrounding area? Be it planned or unpredicted, positive or negative developments. (As an example: gentrification, creation of a multi-functional neighbourhood, pedestrian or car orientedneighbourhood etc.)

2002

2008

2012

52

53

ZÜRICH LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

HOCHPARTERRE 4 / 2012

4 2/43 // PLANUNG

IN DIE ENGE GETRIEBEN Zürich soll dichter werden. Doch was geschieht dabei mit dem Freiraum zwischen den Gebäuden? Eine Kritik.

Text: Johannes Stoffler* Einigkeit herrscht: Zürich wird nachverdichtet, und es ist gut so. Für die einen ist es Teil eines Legislaturziels, für die anderen ein Mittel, die offene Landschaft zu erhalten, und für manche ein gutes Geschäft. Genossenschaften wittern Morgenluft, denn seit den Revisionen der Bau- und Zonenordnung der vergangenen Jahre locken Arealüberbauungen mit mehr als 6000 Quadratmetern mit grösseren Ausnutzungsziffern. Betroffen sind zahlreiche Siedlungen der 1940er- und 1950er-Jahre. Diese prägen die Quartiere aus der Ära des organischen Städtebaus von Stadtbaumeister Albert Heinrich Steiner, sie stehen am Fusse des Uetlibergs, in Schwamendingen oder Seebach.

Grosszügige Grünflächen fliessen durch die Zeilensiedlungen und verbinden sie über Grünzüge, in denen Freibäder und Schulen stehen, mit der offenen Landschaft. Wegen der geringen Ausnutzungsziffer scheinen die Gebäude wie in einen Park eingebettet. Wege und Mauern wurden so dezent wie möglich gesetzt, damit das landschaftliche Bild sich entfalte, die Grünflächen nicht stocken, sondern grosszügig die Gebäude umfliessen.

«Die Häuser scheinen in eine gepflegte Landschaft hineingestellt», fasste deshalb der deutsche Gartenarchitekt Otto Valentien «geradezu beglückt» zusammen, nachdem er seine Kollegen 1953 in Zürichs Vororte gebracht hatte, um da ein Vorbild für den deutschen Wiederaufbau zu besichtigen.

So viel Beglückung mag sich heute nicht mehr einstellen, denn inzwischen haben die eisernen Besen der Unterhaltsfirmen etliche gärtnerische Details weggefegt. Dennoch überraschen viele Siedlungen mit Weitläufigkeit — es sind Gartenlandschaften mit wertvollem Baumbestand. Sie sind Teile zusammenhängender und homogener Ortsbilder, die in diesem Umfang später nicht mehr verwirklicht werden konnten.

VOM RAUM ZUM SCHLAUCH Heute machen solche offenen Baustrukturen den Grossteil dessen aus, was laut der räumlichen Entwicklungsstrategie (RES) der Stadt Zürich von 2010 «weiterentwickelt», sprich verdichtet wird. Dabei soll der «Charakter der Gebiete, deren vorherrschende Siedlungsstruktur und die Qualität der Freiräume» erhalten werden. Wie dies umgesetzt wird, hat das Amt für Städtebau in seiner Dokumentation «Dichter. Eine Dokumentation der baulichen Veränderung in Zürich» unlängst mit dreissig Beispielen zusammengefasst. Je eine Doppelseite pro Beispiel gibt einen Überblick über die neuen Wohnanlagen. Abgerissene und neue Bauten werden mit Fotos, Plänen und Tabellen verglichen. Der Wunsch der RES, die «vorherrschende Siedlungsstruktur», in der Regel aus der Steiner-Ära, beizubehalten, spiegelt sich in fast allen präsentierten Siedlungen: Die aufgelockerte Struktur der Baukörper bleibt erhalten, Gebäudehöhe und überbaute Fläche nehmen zu.

Doch was geschieht dabei mit den Freiflächen? Folgt man der RES, so soll die «Qualität der Freiräume» auch in Zukunft der Idee der «fliessenden Grünflächen» genügen. Doch ob oder wie dies gelingt, davon ist in der Dokumentation keine Rede. Zwischen den Isometrien der Baukörper herrscht gähnende Leere, im Situationsplan ebenso. Die beteiligten Landschaftsarchitekten sind nicht einmal erwähnt. Dafür werden Wohlfühlwörter wie «Gartenstadtatmosphäre» bemüht, wo die Bilder der Bauten diese kaum hergeben. Weit verbreitet ist denn auch die Mär, man könne die «Gartenstadtatmosphäre» des organischen Städtebaus problemlos in die neuen Verdichtungssiedlungen hineintragen. Doch werden die Bauvolumen vergrössert, kippt das alte Bild, und die fliessende Landschaft gerät ins

54

Stocken. Infrastrukturen von Tiefgaragen bis Feuerwehrzufahrten, die der Aussenraum auch noch aufnehmen soll, demontieren die historische Gestaltungsidee. Das Modell «Steiner-XXL» stösst im Aussenraum schnell an Grenzen. Dennoch hängt man ihm nach, beispielsweise in der Else-Züblin-Siedlung in Albisrieden, in der statt den alten zwei- bis fünfstöckigen Zeilen nun sechs- und siebengeschossige Würfel stehen. Mit geschwungenen Wegen, Wiesen und Bäumen sind prägende Elemente der ehemaligen Aussenraumgestaltung der 1950er-Jahre neu aufgegriffen worden. Von «Fliessen» kann jedoch zwischen den viel breiteren Wegen, Rampen, Einfahrten in Tiefgaragen und massigen Baukörpern keine Rede sein. Je enger und höher die Baukörper stehen, desto mehr wird die Freifläche dazwischen vom Aufenthalts- zum Durchgangsort. Auch die Siedlung Wasserschöpfi am Friesenberg krankt an diesem Problem. Wer will in den Aussenraumschläuchen zwischen den hochskalierten Zeilen schon verweilen? Qualitätsvolle Plätze haben da keinen Platz, der Rest fällt wie so oft dem Rotstift des Generalunternehmers zum Opfer. Der Landschaftsarchitekt steht auf verlorenem Posten. Den Bewohnerinnen und Bewohnern bleiben Balkonien oder ein Ausflug auf den Uetliberg übrig.

POCKETPARK UND GARTENKABINETT Verdichtung in den Siedlungen des organischen Städtebaus ist, so lehrt uns die Dokumentation des Amtes für Städtebau, ein Kompromiss zwischen Verdichten und Bewahren. Doch das Bewahren der historischen Baustruktur verhindert oft, die Freiflächen sinnvoll zu organisieren. Dass es anders geht, zeigt die Siedlung Triemli in Zürich-Albisrieden. Statt die aufgelockerten Zeilen wieder aufzunehmen, entstand eine Grossform in der Art eines Blockrandes. Der weitläufige Innenhof setzt auf die Künstlichkeit der neuen Landschaft und ihrer Topografie. Entscheidend ist die Grösse dieses Pocketparks, der sich zu einem Mittelpunkt der Siedlung entwickeln wird. So wie das die Zürcher Innenhöfe der 1920er- und 1930er-Jahre konnten, etwa der Erismannoder der Bullingerhof. Auch wo Grossformen wie im Triemli städtebaulich keinen Sinn machen, gibt es sinnvolle Alternativen. Das gilt für die geplante Siedlung Toblerstrasse der Allgemeinen Baugenossenschaft Zürich.

Sie löst sich vom Bauschema der abgerissenen Siedlung und schafft eine neue Landschaft. Die vielfältigen Kammerungen des Aussenraums sind als unterschiedliche Gartenkabinette gestaltet. Wo es die Topografie zulässt, erhalten die Erdgeschosswohnungen einen direkten Ausgang zu einem privaten Gartensitzplatz. Statt Abstands- und Durchgangsgrün schenkt dieser Entwurf den Bewohnerinnen und Bewohnern unterschiedliche, gestalterisch klar gefasste Orte im Freien.

ORTSBILDINVENTAR FEHLT Die RES wird gelobt für die Balance zwischen Bewahren, Weiterentwickeln und Neuorientieren. In den Siedlungen, dort wo «weiterentwickelt» wird, führt diese Balance immer wieder zu Resultaten, die weder Fisch noch Vogel sind. Einerseits entstehen mit zu viel «Steiner im Kopf» keine guten verdichteten Wohnformen. Andererseits wird die Substanz des Erbes, werden die wertvollen Originale der SteinerÄra verspielt. Ein Beispiel dafür ist der abgerissene Mattenhof in ZürichSchwamendingen, der seinerzeit als Vorbild des Wiederaufbaus sogar in England nachgebaut worden ist. Viele Siedlungen dieser Epoche sind — weitherum anerkannt — erhaltenswürdig. Die Stadt Zürich hat zwar Inventare für Denkmalpflege, meist Einzelbauten, für Wohnsiedlungen, meist nur Teile von Siedlungen umfassend, und ein Gartendenkmalinventar. Aber

Die Siedlung Else-Züblin-Strasse heute: breite Wege, Rampen und sechs- und siebengeschossige Häuser — die Grünflächen aber fliessen nicht mehr. Foto: Heinz Unger

Else-Züblin-Strasse, Zürich-Albisrieden, um 1955: Die Grünflächen fliessen. Quelle: Baugeschichtliches Archiv Zürich

Zürich hat kein Inventar, das Siedlungszusammenhänge mit Freiflächen berücksichtigt. Ein solches Ortsbildinventar ist aber unverzichtbar, will man nicht an einzelnen Siedlungen, Gebäuden oder Gärten hängenbleiben, sondern die räumlichen Zusammenhänge und die Siedlungsverbünde verstehen. Doch der politische Wille, das Inventar zu erstellen, fehlt. Derweil wird weiter geplant und abgerissen. Dabei ist durch die FamilienheimGenossenschaft, eine am Fuss des Uetlibergs stark vertretene Wohnbauträgerin, ein ganzer Stadtteil in Bewegung geraten.

«Dass sich Landschaftsarchitekten zu Städtebauern erklären, beobachte ich skeptisch», bemerkt der Direktor des Amtes für Städtebau, Patrick Gmür, siehe HP 3 / 12. Doch bedeutet Stadt nicht ständige Wechselwirkung zwischen Baukörper und Freiraum? Die weissen Flächen des Schwarzplans sind keine amorphen Rahmungen für Architekturen. Sie stehen für Aufenthaltsorte, die nur dann sinnvoll gestaltet werden können, wenn Städtebau und Landschaftsarchitektur zusammengedacht werden. Das hiesse, dass die Strategie «Weiterentwickeln» der RES bei Nachkriegssiedlungen stärker als bisher «Neuorientieren» verlangt. Entschlossen und mutig das Neue bauen muss aber auch bedeuten entschlossen das wertvolle Erbe erhalten. Denn mit dem Kompromiss geht beides verloren, die ererbte und die künftige Baukultur. *Johannes Stoffler ist Landschaftsarchitekt BSLA in Zürich.

55

ZÜRICH LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

HOCHPARTERRE 4 / 2012

44/45 // PLANUNG 1_ERSATZNEUBAU SIEDLUNG ELSE-ZÜBLIN-STRASSE Zürich-Albisrieden > Bauherrschaft: Siedlungsgenossenschaft Sunnige Hof, Zürich > Architektur: Burkhalter Sumi Architekten, Zürich > Landschaftsarchitektur: Vogt Landschaftsarchitektur, Zürich > Baumanagement und Bauleitung: Generalunternehmung HRS Real Estate, Zürich

1_Else-Züblin-Strasse: dicker und höher.

2_ERSATZNEUBAU SIEDLUNG WASSERSCHÖPFI Zürich-Friesenberg > Bauherrschaft: Helvetia Versicherungen, Basel / St. Gallen > Architektur: Althammer Hochuli Architekten, Zürich > Landschaftsarchitektur: Vogt Landschaftsarchitektur, Zürich > Generalunternehmung und Baumanagement: Halter, Zürich

2_Wasserschöpfi: ähnliche Struktur, aber höher.

3_ERSATZNEUBAU SIEDLUNG TRIEMLI Zürich-Albisrieden > Bauherrschaft: Baugenossenschaft Sonnengarten, Zürich > Architektur: Von Ballmoos Krucker Architekten, Zürich > Landschaftsarchitektur: Vi-vo Architecture Landscape, Zürich N

3_Triemli: Hof statt Zeile.

4_Toblerstrasse: Kammerungen statt Abstandsgrün.

4_ERSATZNEUBAU SIEDLUNG TOBLERSTRASSE Zürich-Fluntern > Bauherrschaft: Allgemeine Baugenossenschaft, Zürich > Architektur: BS + EMI Architekten, Zürich > Landschaftsarchitektur: Lorenz Eugster Landschaftsarchitektur und Städtebau, Zürich

_

_alte Siedlungsstruktur _neue Siedlungsstruktur

56

57

4500 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

433 km2 / 777 km2 2 mil.

/ 3 mil.

TOOLS

CARACAS OIL AND THE AUTOMOBILE CITY // PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE/ MOBILITY

THE HYBRID CITY // INFORMAL / HYBRID CITY

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

24%

57%

18%

unemployment

69 bil.

7% green space

1 m2 / person

GDP

MULTIPLE HUBS // PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE/ MOBILITY

CARACAS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: OIL AND THE AUTOMOBILE CITY THEMATIC CLUSTER: PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE/ MOBILITY YEAR: 1948 EXPANSION PLANS Main stakeholders: Robert Moses, City Government

“Oil and the Automobile City” shows the urban expansion that marks the beginning of the social segregation and the transition from the colonial compact city to the modern outspread one; this phenomenon was directly influenced by the motor vehicle culture of the North American cities.

Image 19: Caracas, TEXACO Gas Station

Latin American cities have experienced rapid and drastic urban transformations in the last century. In this sense, Caracas’ fragmented urban and social fabric are the result of arbitrary forces or events like the oil-based economy, rural and foreign migration, and the modern architectural movement. These influences have transformed Caracas from the rigid Spanish grid to an organic, chaotic and spontaneous city.

The expansion to the east, encouraged by the American standard and the car culture, started to create new isolated houses, which were very different from those in the historic district characterized by proximity to basic services, and with access to the tram system as the main means of public transportation (1).

Along with the oil prosperity came serious traffic problems, as well as new expansion plans such as Robert Moses’ 1948 proposal for main arteries in the city. The agenda was to promote the automobile by creating more room in the city, resulting in the vehicle shaping Caracas’ landscape and living conditions in a very decisive way.

The priority given to the urbanism of highways means that until recent years other forms of transportation have been neglected; because of this, the best way to experience the urban landscape of Caracas remains the automobile (2).

(1) Santiago de Leon de Caracas 1967-2030. Exxon Mobil, Caracas 2004 (2) Colloqui - Cornell Journal of Planning and Urban Issues. 11th Edition, Spring 1996.

60

Image 20: Caracas, Main Highway

61

CARACAS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: THE HYBRID CITY THEMATIC CLUSTER: INFORMAL AND HYBRID CITY YEAR: 1940S BARRIOS Main stakeholders: Self-built initiatives

The inventive power of the urban laboratory that exists inside the Barrio in Caracas is an aspect that should be of interest to planners and designers. The role of the professionals is to explore and discover the extreme richness of these zones as a valid model for housing development, along with the self-regulatory systems that generate living spaces for millions.

The phenomenon of informal urbanization has become the single most pervasive element in the production of the city of Caracas. In this sense, the Barrios can be interpreted as a complex, adaptive system, which is permanently recreating itself.

Image 21: Caracas, Favelas, Informal Settlements

The mass of the Barrio structure follows the concept of the growing house. The growing house is typically made of a concrete frame, and filled with the cheapest local block or brick available. Antenna-like concrete supports rising out off the columns of the last floor are left as provision for a future that will bring materials for expansion. The Barrio houses maintain a microclimate that is far superior to comparable dense structures in the formal city. The pedestrian access and the dependence on the topographic situation, which are currently considered negative characteristics, could be easily reversed into assets. Existing forestation and vegetation can be used to support the microclimate, and additional forms of roof farming should be studied and promoted.

The Caracas case allows us to learn from the improvisation of a city formed by unpredictible agents and uncontested forces. Caracas offers us an insight on how cities in the future will develop. While the traditional city surrenders to formal modes of operation, the informal sector is gaining terrain. In many ways, it seems that the informal city is presenting us today with the stronger culture, which is also increasingly adopted by the formal part of Caracas.

Image 22: Caracas, “23 Enero” Social Housing Project surrounded by Favelas

62

63

CARACAS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: MULTIPLE HUBS THEMATIC CLUSTER: PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE/ MOBILITY YEAR: 2007 METRO CABLE FOR A BARRIO Main stakeholders: Urban-Think Tank

The Metro Cable in San Agustin, Caracas not only connects the barrio dwellers to the main transportation system, but also, and most importantly, creates hubs for social services and spaces for community interaction.

Metro Cable introduces formal infrastructure for the integration of the informal city. The phenomenon of informal urbanization has become the single most extensive element in the production of the city of Caracas. Because the last 30 years of urban development have received limited participation from local politicians, planners, and urbanists, these areas have engaged in bottom-up processes that fostered the integration of the barrios into the formal city through localized social initiatives in accessibility.

Image 23: U-TT Cable Car Caracas

The Metro Cable project was conceived as an initiative that presents an alternative proposal in opposition to the government’s one, which consisted of a road network through the barrio, displacing up to a third of inhabitants and disrupting their way of life.

Connected to the Metro Systems of Caracas, the public transit system provided in the “formal” city, the Metro Cable has five additional stations. Two are in the valley and connect directly to the existing public transport system; the other three stations are located along the mountain ridge on sites that meet the demands of community access, established pedestrian circulation routes, and suitability for construction with minimal demolition of existing housing.

Image 24: U-TT Cable Car Caracas

64

65

CARACAS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Caracas Tool : The Hybrid City

1.

The excerpt below - extracted from “The participation of states and citizens in global governance”, by the sociologist Saskia Sassen - deals with the term “informality” and “informal settlements”.

“I have a definition for both the informal economy and informal human settlement: housing built and inhabited outside the regulatory framework of a country. Crucial is the fact that it is in itself licit (building houses/shelters and inhabiting them is not in itself criminal) and could take place within the regulatory framework. (...) So part of the issue for me is that these informal settlements are a sort of frontier zone at the intersection of governmental regulatory framings of the complex issue of settlement, the market for real estate, and the objective need for housing by the poor and low income workers.”

[Saskia Sassen. “The participation of states and citizens in global governance”. in: Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Routledge. 2003. P 241-248] 1. Discuss, based on this text, the physical meaning of “informality” in cities.

What are the consequences for a city that is generated from this logics (concerning the urban morphology, new typologies, mobility, ownership, safety, governance, new developments etc.)?

2.

2. Often informal and formal structures overlap and influence each other, in a positive and/ or negative manner, creating a hybrid urban environment. Name and describe an example (except Caracas) where such phenomenon can be observed.

66

67

CARACAS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

68

69

CARACAS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

70

71

CARACAS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

72

73

CARACAS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

74

75

CARACAS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

76

77

CARACAS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

78

79

6000 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

1485 km2 / 5100 km2 9 mil.

/ 20 mil.

TOOLS

MEXICO CITY RECOVERING WATERSCPAES // ECOLOGY / LANDSCAPE

NETWORK OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE // PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE / MOBILITY

MACRO-SCALE HOUSING City Border Citty Ci y Administrative Adm dmiin nis stra ati tive ive ve B ord or der de 5 km km

Urb Ur Urba Urban ba an F Footprint ootp pri rin int

transportation means

17%

75%

5%

unemployment

411 bil.

6% green space

27 m2 / person

GDP

// HOUSING

MEXICO CITY LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: RECOVERING WATERSCAPES THEMATIC CLUSTER: ECOLOGY / LANDSCAPE YEAR: 2000S PROJECT CIUDAD FUTURA Main stakeholders: Innovative green infrastructure offices

The Basin of Mexico City has suffered from periodical transformations until today. From being a lake-side city barely one hundred years ago, today Mexico City is dying of thirst. An enormous visionary project is being planned. It consists of a new lake for Mexico City. This project aims at solving Mexico City’s water problems and returning part of the former lake back to the city.

When the Aztecs founded the city “Tenochtlitlan” in the center of the “Texcoco” lake, they optimized the resources of the lake system and learned to control the overflow with dams.

They managed to separate brackish from fresh water and to cultivate crops on artificial islands called “Chinampas”. Already in 1521 this city was an urban agglomeration of almost 1 million inhabitants. The Spanish did not understand the lake system and set out to dry up the basin by digging artificial exits, called the “Nochistongo Cutting”.

Image 25: Basin Today - Future. Gonzalez de Leon, Teodoro; et. al. Mexico Ciudad Futura. Editorial RM. 2010

Today, only small parts of the lake remained, since the metropolitan area of the Valley of Mexico, which houses more than 20 million inhabitants, has been built directly upon the ruins of its ancestors and spread over five dried-up lakes. Mexico City is suferring today from huge scarcity of water; 37% of the water distributed in the city is lost due to leakage and ageing pipes. Due to the irregular distribution and lack of universal connection to the water mains, 20% of the city’s population has no guaranteed access to water. 70% of the needed water is taken from the ground of the basin, and 30% is brought from outside. The over-exploitation of the underground has led the city center to subside by up to 7 meters.

The planned project, “Mexico Ciudad Futura”, proposes the rehydration of the ancient lake, fed by 5% of the city’s discarded water. It promises a sustainable solution for Mexico City’s water system and it is accompanied by new infrastructure projects, such as an airport, new urban housing and commercial developments, green public areas, educational and sport facilities.

Image 26: Future City Project. Gonzalez de Leon, Teodoro; et. al. Mexico Ciudad Futura. Editorial RM. 2010

82

(1) Gomez, Margarita. Lecture at ETH Zurich (12.05.2011) (2) DAZ. Citámbulos Mexico City: Journey to the Mexican Megalopolis. Jovis Verlag. 2008. P 242. Online in: http://www.citambulos.net/publicaciones.html (5.5.2011) (3) Gonzalez de Leon, Teodoro; et. al. Mexico Ciudad Futura. Editorial RM. 2010. Online in: http://www.mexicociudadfutura.com/proyectos/ciudad-futura/ciudadfutura.html (5.5.2011)

83

MEXICO CITY LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: NETWORKS OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE THEMATIC CLUSTER: PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE / MOBILITY YEAR: 2000S METROBUS - REORGANIZING PUBLIC TRANSPORT Main stakeholders: Traffic planning department of the city government

The public transport system in Mexico City involves two main actors. The transport system in the Federal District, which is operated by the government, and the transport system of the greater Metropolitan Area within Mexico State, which is covered by a privately organized plan. The recent increasing traffic congestion in Mexico City motivated the government to reorganize the public transport and find new innovative solutions to alleviate the problems.

Five million citizens spend between three and four hours each day commuting within the metropolitan area of Mexico City. The public transport system is operated by the government of the Mexican Federal District and by several public companies. The metro system, the light rail system, the trolleybus network and the bus network are public-driven transport systems, while the Metrobus is private-public partnership and the “peseros” (collective-buses) and taxis are managed by private companies or individuals.

Image 27: Mexico City, Traffic Jam

The “peseros” are used by 55% of the city’s passengers and cover all the routes that are still not covered by the public transport systems. In 2005, the new transport system “Metrobus” opened a new high-capacity rapid transit network. The “Metrobus” replaces two routes covered before by the “peseros”; first, the 20 km long north-south axis known as “Avenida de los Insurgentes”, and second, the east-west axis or “Eje 4 Sur”.

This system was influenced by the “TransMilenio” in Bogota and “Rede Integrada de Transporte” in Curitiba. It consists of several interconnected elevated stations, which in turn, are connected by an exclusive lane only for the express buses. The stations are simultaneously linked to other transport networks, such as the metro.

The “Metrobus” serves up to 400 000 passengers per day. The new lines have proven to reduce the traffic in the main roads and reduce the delays between the connecting networks.

Image 28: Mexico City, Metrobus

84

(1) Gomez, Margarita. Lecture at ETH Zurich (12.05.2011) (2) DAZ. Citámbulos Mexico City: Journey to the Mexican Megalopolis. Jovis Verlag. 2008. P 244-254.

(3) Urban Age. “Mexico City: Mobility and Transport”. Online in: http://www.urban-age.net/10_cities/05_mexicoCity/mexicoCity_M+T.html (5.5.2011)

85

MEXICO CITY LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: MACRO-SCALE SOCIAL HOUSING THEMATIC CLUSTER: HOUSING YEAR: 1940-2010 SOCIAL HOUSING BLOCKS, FAMILY HOUSING DEVELOPMENT Main stakeholders: Mexican national government

The fast urbanization process of Mexico City -with its 3 million inhabitants- in the 1950s, created an increasing demand of social housing, which gave rise to the production of informal settlements. The respons to this urgency was the creation of different social housing typologies, which emerged in different time periods with different finance approaches.

The first actions undertaken by the government were a slum clearance and an urban renewal initiative; the social housing block typology was implemented between the 1940s and 1970s. The vertical housing developments and large scale complexes marked the first direct governmental worker assistance. One example is the Multifamiliar Miguel Aleman, built by the Mexican modernist Mario Pani, following the principles of functionalism of Le Corbusier (large green areas, communal facilities and duplex apartments). Concurrently, some of the lowincome class started to appropriate the vacant and deteriorated houses in the historic center, referred as neighborhoods or “vecindades”. The earthquake of 1985 led to the limitation of vertical housing developments, promoting lower-height houses.

Image 29: Unidad Multifamiliar Miguel Aleman

In 2000, the Mexican president Vicente Fox introduced a privately-driven social housing development model and promised to build “two million low-income homes” throughout the country. The design, planning and construction of these single-family houses were delegated to private real estate developers, producing a new social housing model of vast rows of uniform and mass-produced homes. The houses are located at the periphery of Mexico City, without zoning, without commercial, educational and collective space, totally disconnected from public transport network, and no room for growth and transformation. Nevertheless, the inhabitants started to create solutions for their own necessities by organizing and adding basic services, such as markets, grocery stores, bakeries and others to these homogenous satellite cities.

(1) Urban Age. “Mexico City: Growth at the Limit?”. Online in: http://www.urban-age.net/03_conferences/conf_mexicoCity.html (5.3.2011) (2) Garcia Peralta, Beatriz. “Vivienda social en Mexico (1940 – 1999): actors publicos, economicos y sociales”. Online in: http://www.javeriana.edu.co/viviendayurbanismo/pdfs/2CVU-5.pdf (15.4.2011) (3) Juarez Neri, Victor Manuel. “Condiciones de la Vivienda en la Zona Metropolitana del Valle de Mexico en el ano 2000”. Online in: http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn/sn-146(040). htm (15.4.2011) (4) Villavicencio Blanco, Judith; Duran Contreras, Ana Maria. “Treinta Anos de Vivienda Social en la Ciudad de Mexico: Nuevas Necesidades y Demandas”. Online in: http:// www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn/sn-146(028).htm (15.4.2011) (5) Corona, Livia. “Two Million Homes for Mexico”. Online in: http://www.liviacorona.com/#S7,,Two_Million_Homes_for_Mexico (7.5.2011) (6) Urban Age. “Transport and Housing: Policy in Practice”. In: The Endless City. Phaidon Press. 2007. Page 182 – 185.

86

Image 30: Casas Geo in Ixtapaluca. by Livia Corona

87

MEXICO CITY LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Mexico City Tool : Networks of Green Infrastructure The transportation and mobility components of Mexico City’s Plan Verde (Green Plan) agenda, designed to lead the city towards a state of EcoMobility, was launched in 2007. The plan is based on a multi-component strategy to reduce traffic congestion and reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. The strategy has resulted in a set of programs to improve and expand public transportation systems, as well as offer more cycling and walking options. The Green Plan emphasizes local action, in particular, through initiatives such as the Hoy No Circula (Day Without Car) and Muevete en Bici (Move on Bikes) programs, Eco Bikes, Metrobus, and the expansion of the Metro system.

1. Find a similar initiative in other cities. Name the city and strategy. Discuss briefly the current problematic. Describe the main components of the chosen strategy and present your own critical reflection.

2. Glue a representative picture or draw a situation that depicts the intentions and strategies of your chosen development plan.

2.

1.

City name: Strategy name: Problematic:

Strategy description:

Your own critical reflection:

88

89

MEXICO CITY LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

MEXICO CITY GROWTH AT THE LIMIT?

BACK FROM THE BRINK

M

a worldwide series of conferences investigating the future of cities organised by the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International Forum of Deutsche Bank

exico is the city that was always spoken of as if it was one day going to be the biggest settlement on the planet. It was probably the first of the 20th century’s monster cities to make an impression on the wider world, portrayed as an unstoppable eruption of humanity swamping the landscape to reach the horizon in every direction. In the 1970s, predictions were made that it was well on the way to becoming a megalopolis of 30 million people or more. As it turned out, that has not happened. The population of the city centre is static, and some of its denser historic areas have been in decline, an issue addressed by the formation of a special public-private partnership to encourage investment and development. What growth there is now concentrates in the urban sprawl beyond city limits in the administrative control of the State of Mexico.

The lower-middle classes are moving out into areas where gated communities are not just for the privileged.

Certainly Mexico City grew fast from the 1940s when it began to loose its former incarnation as the Garden of Eden, blessed with a near perfect climate, reminiscent of the golden age of Los Angeles, but shaped physically by the remains of its Aztec and its Spanish past as represented by flower studded baroque courtyards, the presence of the surrounding mountains, and the famous lake. The photochemical smog that accompanied its discovery of the motorcar through the medium of the locally produced Volkswagens that once monopolised its streets made that growth look particularly threatening. That toxic haze was not helped by Mexico City’s extreme altitude, and its mountains, two elements that conspire to entrap the city’s pollution in the brown cloud that seems to thicken under the wings of descending aircraft.

Certainly Mexico City is huge, 18 million or so people now live in the sprawling metropolis. But that is a close match for Shanghai, New York and London – when their respective city regions are taken into account.

All three have their own disparities in wealth, even if Mexico’s seem more violent, and more entrenched, and do not have the pervasive impact of 50 years of Mao and Marx to damp down the sometimes chaotic lawlessness of the country in the way in which China has.

There are street children and kidnappings and water shortages in Mexico City and a sewage system at the limits of its original design life. But the metropolis never became the horror story that it sometimes threatened.

For a start, its growth has started to taper off, almost to the point that one might begin to consider the idea that growth might be self limiting. And second, its reputation might have something to do with its accessibility and its proximity to the United States, and so its visibility. For those with a taste for the dizzying sense of staring into the urban abyss, Mexico City is a lot more convenient to get to than Lagos, or Tehran, Dacca or Cairo.

But Mexico City has nothing to be complacent about. It could deal with its two greatest problems: photochemical smog, caused by its infatuation with the car coupled with extremely low petrol prices, and water shortages that are the product of its profligate use of its underground reservoirs. But it has failed to address these issues, and between them, they could still render the city all but uninhabitable.

Mexico City has had more than the explosive growth of the flight of the dispossessed from the countryside to contend with.

It has a fractured government system to deal with, divided between the Federal District – a territory that was tightly controlled by the federal government in the same way that Washington, D.C. and many other national capitals were until they began acquiring locally elected mayors – and the surrounding municipalities of the State of Mexico. Until very recently the two administrations have failed to come to a shared view of what the place needs to function properly. To complicate matters further, the whole country is having to deal with a gradual reawakening of a national democratic politics.

Mexico City has within it the elements of a global city and the visible impacts of a globalised economy, both negative and positive.

It has slick business parks and boutique hotels, and it is loosing industrial jobs to both the NAFTA-boosted factories on the US border and more recently to China. An overvalued peso is not helping either. But it is also a city where what could be seen as pre-modern conditions still prevail in certain aspects of civic life. It displays the chronic symptoms of uneven development in its lurch toward the global economy. Illegal land sales blight development in some areas, and the informal economy is far more than the all pervasive street traders and the 120 000 taxis on the city’s busy roads. The Federal District in particular has seen the impact of competing power centres.

The five year track record of the left leaning Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador says a lot about what happens when a democratic politician has to juggle constituencies with radically diverging ambitions for a city. Yet, recent agreeements between the current mayor, Alejandro Encinas, and Enrique Peña Nieto, governor of the State of Mexico – each from opposing parties -to collaborate across boundaries to solve the city’s structural problems does give rise to some optimism about Mexico City’s future.

Obrador, who has recently stepped down to run for president in the national elections to be held in the summer of 2006, was the second elected mayor since the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) relaxed its three generation grip on the country and its capital.

The presidential candidate of the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD), Obrador is now vying for the presidential palace with candidates from both the PRI and the National Action Party (PAN), the party of the current incumbent Vincente Fox. The PRD’s symbol is a highly charged Aztec sun, which might go some way to explain Obrador’s vigorous campaign as mayor against the national government’s imposition of daylight saving measures.

On the other hand, Mexico City is clearly also a part of the modern world. One of Obrador’s populist measures was to cancel Microsoft software licenses at city hall, and adopt Linux, a free operating systems instead.

As mayor, he kept a punishing personal schedule with a working day that started at 5.00 am and included 6.30 am press conferences. While there have been allegations against party members and city officials, Obrador stoutly defends his personal reputation for incorruptibility. His two most visible legacies to the city reflect the extremes of urban life in Mexico. On the one hand he has introduced dedicated bus lanes, modelled on the precedents of Curitiba and Bogotá, which

have transformed public transport in the and demonstrated that turning around a transport system does not have to entail c pling levels of expenditure. On the other, personal grand projet, the massive and quixotic plan to transform the Peripheral Ring into a double-decker urban highway asks more questions than it answers. It is enormously expensive but it appears to b fit only the relatively prosperous car own residents of the wealthy areas through wh it passes. Visually, the tangle of concrete c umn threaded on top of existing surface r is already a lurid scar on the landscape of city. Indeed it is a curious outcome for a p ect initiated by a left leaning mayor. But th this is already a city full of unintended ou comes. When the city tried to restrict car by introducing odd and even number pla only days, the response of the rich was of course to buy a second car. And all of this city in which commutes of three hours ar forced on the maids who work for the rich live in far distant settlements.

It seems that many of Mexico City’s i structure systems have failed to address th implications of rapid growth and change The city has a metro system that was its p and joy when Mexico hosted the Olympic 1968, an event that marked the country’s attempts to present itself as a modern stat The metro was state of the art when it wa built, but has failed to adapt to what has b going on around it and the city has outgr it. Mexico City has a historic centre that w loosing population to more salubrious su urbs even before the impact of the earthquake. It has an urban development patte that seems to recall that of Los Angeles: a downtown that at some point faced becom irrelevant, a deprived east, and a rich west The city has been growing chaotically for enough to have already revealed the limit modernisation.

Deyan Sudjic is Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Kingston Univers and co-chair of the Urban Age Advisory Bo

URBAN AGE CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 2006

90

91

MEXICO CITY LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

p g p q

THE COMPLEXITIES OF CHANGE

T

he Metropolitan Zone of Mexico City (zmcm) is the most valuable, monumental and complex work that the country has constructed in its entire history: in 2005, almost one third of the gross domestic product was concentrated in this area. Its urban sprawl covers approximately 2,000 km2, home to 19.5 million residents. The ZMCM is currently the second most populated city on the planet, although its economic scope is that of a secondary global metropolis, the function of which is to link up Mexico’s urban system with the main super-cities worldwide.

Mexico City has always been the economic centre of the country, although this predominance has been diminishing in recent years. Having increased its share of the gross domestic product (GDP) from 35-38% between 1960 and 1980, the crisis of the 1980s had a greater effect on the city than on other parts of the county, and its share of the GDP fell to 32% in 1988. After Mexico’s inclusion in the global economy, this index has been unstable, recovering slightly, reaching 33% in 1998, and then falling once more to 30% in 2003.

The share of the ZMCM in the industrial GDP is higher and its decline even more marked, totalling between 44 and 47% between 1960 and 1980, reaching its highest ever level (48%) in 1970. Thereafter, this super-concentration declined, reaching 22%

in 2003. Despite all this, like all large cities around the world, Mexico City has undergone indisputable de-industrialisation, although it produces over one fifth of national manufacturing.

At the same time, the relative significance of specialist services grew visibly. The ZMCM absorbed 39% of the GDP of the tertiary sector in 1960 (trade and services) and in 1970 this figure rose to its highest recorded level (47%). After that, it began its relative decline, falling to 35% in 2003. The capital concentrates 42% of producer services and 59% of the financial sector in Mexico. In 2003, its profile was as the only leading tertiary centre in the country.

The macroeconomic dynamics of the ZMCM explain its urban growth and the evolution of the labour market which, in the early 21st century, are facing one of the greatest challenges of their modern history. The intermittent crisis since the 1980s and economic opening-up have affected them significantly, dramatically reducing the real income of its population in the 1990s. In addition, the collapse of federal public investment in the city makes it impossible to modernise its infrastructural framework and it is therefore hard for the ZMCM to aspire to compete with European and Asiatic cities which are modernising themselves with the implementation of mega projects of worldwide importance.

In a comparative classification of levels of productivity and competitiveness of 66 met-

ropolitan regions from various countries according to the real GDP per capita, as the basic measure of productivity, the ZMCM comes 63rd. This situation is explained by the low levels of human capital, research, innovation and technology and by an insufficiently competitive market.

The urban sprawl of Mexico City is made up of a vibrant amalgam of 4.2 million homes (2000), a total of 529,000 commercial and services buildings and 53,000 industrial places of business (2003), all of which is joined together by a system of highways, facilities and infrastructure. All these elements constitute 1,926km2 of urban area, presenting an average density of 9,300 residents/km2 (2000). However, the magnitude and characteristics of its future urban growth will depend on the economic dynamics and the labour market of the ZMCM. The particularities of the labour structure are summarised below, to complement this vision of the city as a productive social force.

In 1960, the ZMCM contained 17% of the country’s economically active population (EAP), 22% of secondary sector workers and 34% of tertiary sector workers. Thereafter, its de-industrialisation meant that in 2003, secondary sector labour fell to 19% and tertiary sector labour to 25%. Within its labour structure, an increasing trend towards the tertiary sector can be seen; the proportion of the population working in services then rose from 58% in 1960 to 75% in 2003. In the last year, the EAP in the city totalled 7.7 million.

The major inequalities in the income from the various occupations are given concrete form in sharp socio-economic contrasts within the metropolitan area. According to the spatial disintegration of the ZMCM into more than three thousand Basic Geo-statistical Areas (BGA), 17% of the population are concentrated in the upper and upper-middle

socio-economic classes, 39% in the middle classes and 44% in the lower classes.

It is estimated that within the ZMCM, there were 33 million journeys/person/day in 2005, with an average journey time of 47 minutes; this totals 26 million travel hours per day. These totals represent the equivalent of 3.2 million eight-hour working days, or one day’s work by 42% of the active population in 2003. This data exemplifies the economic impact of the inadequacy of the urban services. Improving them is vital in order to have more efficient and productive cities.

In a scenario of moderate economic growth, it would be hoped that the ZMCM will increase its population by 4.2 million between 2000 and 2020. To cope with this expansion, 37,000 hectares of new developed space will be required. The political and economic future of the country will depend on Mexico City being able to have the public and private investment necessary to achieve this urban expansion with the appropriate infrastructure and facilities in order to join in, on a competitive basis, with cities worldwide because if it does not, its future will be very uncertain.

Gustavo Garza Villarreal is the academic coordinator of the Doctoral Programme in Urban and Environmental studies at El Colegio de México

URBAN AGE CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 2006

92

CONGESTION AT THE LIMITS?

B

ehind the serious transport problem in the Metropolitan Area of Mexico City (AMCM) lies the predominance of lowcapacity vehicles both in collective and in private transport.

Around 50,000 minibuses and microbuses handle the majority of journeys in the city. Added to these are over 103,000 taxis in the Federal District and probably over 160,000 throughout the city, along with approximately 450,000 vehicles carrying loads. These units use the highways intensively and their fragmented and “home-made”, corporate structure is highly inefficient with low productivity, both for the users and for the carriers and for the city in general.

Meanwhile, private transport handles only 19% of journeys but uses 95% of the vehicles, which exceeds the 4 million units in circulation and uses the highest proportion of road space in the city as a whole.

The result of the above is extreme congestion and journey stress, particularly serious along the main highway corridors and access roads of the city and during rush hour. One third of all journeys are made in the morning rush hour alone, and these journeys are taking longer and longer. In the second half of the 1990s, we saw the determining dominance of journeys made in Low-Capacity vehicles (cars, vans, taxis and minibuses) which handled over three quarters of metropolitan journeys. A decade before that, only one third of

journeys were done in Low-Capacity vehicles; this rapid and negative transformation of the composition of the urban transport service was the result of the application of erroneous government policies, which, for example, decided on the freezing and subsequent removal of the service of 4,000 buses in Mexico City, known as Ruta-100 and the promotion, to offset this, of vans, taxis and minibuses as alternatives for saving public resources, for self-employment and for collective transport. In other words, there was a dismantling of a collective transport system based on government-owned high-capacity resources, promoting in return deregulation, privatisation and fragmentation, further reducing the efficiency and productivity of high-capacity collective transport.

THE PROMOTION OF PRIVATE MOTORISATION

During the 1970s and 1980s, the city saw accelerated demographic growth which, above all, was translated into territorial expansion. This led to the reinforcement of the “horizontal extensive growth” of the AMCM, which incorporated increasingly outlying areas with less access to infrastructure and services. This was translated into longer, delayed and costly journeys to get to work, schools and services, which make metropolitan journeys and the rise in motorisation one of the most significant aspects of this problem in the city. The oil “boom” of the mid-1980s promoted the purchase of cars.

This trend deepened with the signature of the NAFTA, from the second half of the 1990s onwards, the growth in car assembly was explosive.

THE EXPLOSION OF THE CAR

The impressive dynamics of the car industry has been translated, for the AMCM, into an explosive growth of new vehicles which, at the end of the 1990s, was calculated at between 250,000 and 300,000 additional vehicles on average per year. Considering that during this period, the population growth index for the AMCM was reduced to just 1.5% per year on average, the growth rate of the total number of cars in the city is four times greater than the population rate. Under these conditions and after nearly fifteen years of non-construction of major roads, the current Federal District Government (GDF) decided to push forward a rapid road programme, given that the deficit calculated from the same totals 25%. This programme forms part of the sector’s Integral Programme and is complemented by various collective transport measures.

TRANSPORT AND HIGHWAY PROJECTS

As part of this Programme, the most impressive works are the road bridges located in the ravines on the west side, the “Two Tiers of the Ring Road”, the Eje Vial 5 Poniente, the San Antonio motorway exit, giving traffic alternatives in the strategic west zone of the city. We should also mention the progress of the other motorway exits of the Eje Troncal Metroplitano Oriente. Alongside, in collective transport, we have seen renovation of the infrastructure of significant stretches of underground, lines 2, 5 and 9, and nine trains have been introduced on line 2. In addition, the transport capacity of the public bus company Red de Transportes de Pasajeros (RTP) has increased by 50% and 19.4 km of

Metrobus have been introduced. Metrobus has 34 stations and runs 80 articulated buses running on low-emission engines along Insurgentes, one of the city’s main avenues. A Cycle Path Project has also been set up, to cover 90 km. In addition, a Suburban Train Project has been decided on, to the northwest, covering 25 km, using the existing railway line.

AND WHAT ABOUT MOBILITY?

Metrobus and the Cycle Paths are brand-new initiatives that lack additional investment in facilities, stations, signposts, dissemination and maintenance in order to allow for their more efficient and optimum use. Also, and in contrast with other major cities, there has been no cultivation of a culture of the added value of collective transport, even less of alternative transport: only 5% of the users of Metrobus and the underground also own cars. Also, with the exception of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, none of the city’s universities has infrastructure or programmes that promote alternative transport. This is particularly serious when the city is expanding territorially in a greater proportion than the population, favouring dispersion and disintegration. As a result, there are elements that are indicative of the fact that metropolitan mobility is being organised along urban corridors that limit the possibility of enjoyment of the city by the citizens. A new type of segregation and confinement is being promoted, even for those who have the privilege of mobility in transport.

Bernardo Navarro Benítez is a Professor at the Autonomus Metropolitan University

URBAN AGE CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 2006

93

MEXICO CITY LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

MORE HOUSING OR A BETTER CITY?

H

ow do we recover the loss of housing in central areas without increasing segregation in the city? How do we respond to the housing needs of the lowincome population? If building is forbidden in outlying neighbourhoods and a significant segment of the population cannot access housing in the centre, then where exactly do people live?

The answers are increasingly complex, largely due to the lack of any co-ordination between the Federal District (FD) and the State of Mexico, patently clear in the housing sector. In addition to working with different town-planning programmes and norms, in the FD, measures have been adopted to regulate housing production and promote a more balanced urban development, without considering that the FD forms part of the metropolitan area, that the actions have repercussions outside its limits and that, at the same time, these actions have an effect thereupon.

An example of these measures: the ban on the development of housing estates in the 1950s, and from the mid-sixties onwards, the delimitation of conservation areas, the definition of land-uses, densities and volumes in subsequent neighbourhood town-planning development programmes, and restrictions on building housing in special controlled development zones.

And lastly, in 2000, the FD Government

defined its urban policy around “Bando Dos”: an order aimed at “reversing the loss of population from the four central neighbourhoods, making good use of its exhisting infrastructure and facilities for the benefit of poor residents, and regulating disproportionate growth in the neighbourhoods to the south and east. In order to protect conservation land and prevent spread of the urban sprawl in aquifer recharge zones where a significant proportion of the city’s oxygen is produced”.

At the same time, for the working-class districts of the outlying neighbourhoods, it is implementing an improvement programme which, in addition to expansion and rehabilitation, includes two kinds of new housing: replacement of damaged housing or building on already inhabited family plots.

Since the 1950s, the urban area of the FD has exceeded the limits, accelerating the development of middle-class housing estates to the west, in districts bordering the State of Mexico. At the same time, the industrial zone to the north has been consolidated, and with this, the construction of public housing developments concentrated to the north and east of the city.

Whilst there is increasing deterioration and loss of housing in the working-class districts in the centre, where the capacity for more profitable uses of the land is growing, the low-income population is increasing significantly, a population that is turning to the unofficial market in order to meet its housing

needs. Thus, there has been a proliferation of clandestine estates and encroachment on neighbourhoods and districts to the east and south-east. Middle-class housing developments are located in the central band of the FD and the residential areas to the west and south; they make up the “city of the upper classes”, which extends to neighbouring districts.

It has been possible to generate new housing in areas where housing had been lost.

However, as DeMet indicates, production was concentrated in the four central neighbourhoods: in 2000, only 30% of the private supply was in this area; in the second quarter of 2005, the percentage rose to 66%, 72% if only new housing is included.

As the land prices are rising, the private supply of housing of social and working-class interest has fallen in relation to the middleclass supply, supply of the former being transferred to the adjacent districts. Thus, in five years, just over 60,000 new units in central neighbourhoods were built, whilst a property boom was recorded in the districts, involving around 150,000 housing units, according to data from the Urban Development Department of the State of Mexico. The lowincome population has only been able to obtain housing in the city centre, thanks to programmes of the Housing Institute (INVIDF), with its high subsidy levels.

To cope with rising land prices, private developers have increased density in housing developments of social and working-class interest, which according to DeMet, rose from 350 housing units/hectare in 2000 to over 650 housing units/hectare in 2005. They have also reduced living space from 57 to 51m2. The INVI-DF has used up its reserve of land in the area; it does not have the resources to buy land and depends on expropriation by the local government in order to continue working in

this part of the city.

With the new housing produced in the city centre between 2000 and 2005, just over 200,000 people stayed or returned; a positive balance for recycling of the area, which should be recorded with the results of the 2005 Housing Count.

The scenario today is very different: the supply of free land in the city centre has been reduced and has become more expensive; there is growing pressure on working-class housing due to its development potential for the construction of middle-class housing, and the FD does not have any reserves. According to Bando Dos, there will be no alternative for the development of working-class and social housing other than the metropolitan districts.

The solution put forward by developments in the districts raises new problems for the population: outlying locations that mean long, expensive travel and a lack of basic services and facilities. As for the city, it will continue losing its population, and the floating population will rise, along with the requirement for public transport on already saturated highways.

Bando Dos needs to be revised in light of its impacts both within and outside the limits of the FD, and on the living conditions of the average and low-income population. Tools need to be designed so that the FD can recover the added value that generates public investment in housing, in order to carry on producing it. Expanding, gradually, permission to build working-class and social housing in outlying neighbourhoods of theFD; in order to grow from within, densifying and exploiting the city’s services and facilitates, and reducing the crowding out of its population to dormitory zones of the city.

Noemí Stolarski Rosenthal is a private consultant specialising in housing issues URBAN AGE CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 2006

94

THE BREATHING SPACES OF THE CITY

P

ublic open spaces are democratic city spaces par excellence; one place belonging to and for everyone. Streets, boulevards, cultural facilities, public gardens, squares, parks and nature reserves constitute a vacuum, a negative space that gives its form, organises, structures and embellishes the city, allows it to breathe and live. Public spaces generate balance between what is built and what is private, the opening that society, by consent and by norm, has given itself in order to co-exist. In general terms, we can say that it does not matter how large, extensive or dense a city is, if in return, it allows its residents to access a variety of quality public spaces. In so far as we are able to stroll through its streets, gardens, squares and parks, we will have a more equitable and democratic and, in short, more human, city.

However, who is responsible for ensuring that the space that belongs to everyone is not violated, occupied, invaded, abandoned or ignored? How are marginal areas of the city affected by the absence or non-existence of public space and the lack of access to culture?

Do social and economic differences become even greater?

Chapultepec is the largest public space in Mexico City, bringing together history, culture, nature and leisure in an exceptional way.

There are few parks in the world with such a layering of historic and symbolic weight and

an intensity of cultural offerings and facilities in a single place of such ancestral natural beauty. It is also a central space, easy to access from the metropolitan area using mass lowcost transport: Chapultepec gets between 15 and 16 million visitors a year, 46% of whom come from the Federal District, 35% from the State of Mexico and just 19% from the rest of the country and overseas. Chapultepec holds a huge attraction for visitors, faced with an urban landscape that offers little, and suffers enormous disparity and inequality in the distribution of public open spaces and cultural and leisure facilities. These absences are particularly marked in the north and east, areas with the highest population growth and territorial expansion in the metropolitan area.

What is most impressive in the initiatives and actions that have been implemented to reverse the gradual decline in the ecology, services and maintenance of Chapultepec is the fact that these have been promoted and called for by civil society. The institutional model of intervention, with significant citizen participation. This model, although not perfected, has demonstrated a capacity for leadership, drive and follow-up within the enormous complexity and simultaneity of factors and problems. Fund-raising campaigns have been launched with a level of participation unheard of in our society. The masterplan for Chapultepec has made possible the co-ordination, promotion and scheduled implementation of multiple actions, which go far

beyond immediate or physical intervention.

A level of citizen commitment and involvement has been established that is rarely seen in urban programmes in our country. This is the lesson it has learnt. How can we move from this towards a metropolitan strategy for public spaces and cultural offerings? I would like to use this forum to propose a vision that I have called “1, 10 y 100 – Espacios Abiertos y Culturales en la Macropolis de la Ciudad de Mexico” (1, 10 and100 – Open and Cultural Spaces in the Macropolis of Mexico City).

ONE (1) SUPER-CITY SPACE

The great opportunity for the configuration of a major system of open spaces and supercity nature reserves is the former Vaso de Texcoco, as various architects, town-planners and engineers have pointed out. I have here a unique opportunity for the region, given the availability of federal public land in the centre, of which an enormous urban sprawl has already been created. It would be possible to create a vast network of parks, lakes, wetlands and conservation areas complemented by public service facilities for the most vulnerable population. However, Texcoco could turn into a huge problem; these areas have been invaded and populated at a rapid rate.

TEN (10) METROPOLITAN SPACES

The cycle track along the old Cuernavac railway is to be completed, turning it into a lineal metropolitan park (1) connecting up a chain of public spaces to the west. Starting at the lakes and wetlands in Tlahuac to the south (2) and passing via the important archaeological remains at El Cerro de la Estrella (3) and El Cerro Texcoxcingo (4), the lineal park will extend to metropolitan parks to the north, in El Olivar de los Padres (5) and La Cañada de Contreras (6), finishing up in El Cerro del Ajuzco (7). This vision of cultural and

archaeological metropolitan parks is complemented by the zone of the Pirámides de Teotihuacan (8), where an extensive masterplan is required, for heritage protection and for urban parks that service visitors and residents. Proposals have also been made for Tepozotlan (9), to the north, for the configuration of a system of parks, open spaces and heritage sites. The old Azcapotzalco refinery (10) also constitutes a major reserve for the creation of a large park with metropolitan cultural and leisure facilities in the centralnorthern region of the Federal District, representing a significant offering that balances out over-use and concentration in Chapultepec.

100 URBAN SPACES

However, an ordered system does exist within the context of all these problems, these inequalities and this chaos in Mexico City.

Heritage is an equaliser of quality of urban life because of its history, its precedent. Mexico City is a huge galaxy or universe of chaos and construction (not necessarily architecture) with multiples oases. I refer to the fact that no matter how poor or extensive or outlying a zone of the city may be, we will always find wonderful oases in a small square, the historic part of the district, a little glimmer of history.

That is to say, we live in a space that has already been inhabited, which we have transformed and combined in just one city, but which we will always come across and which is always here. This is not a conservationist or nostalgic vision, but a tool that initiates an ordered system of equality.

This is my proposal for 111 urban, civic, natural, historic, accessible and cultural spaces that could, significantly, create a habitable democratic super-city.

Mario Schjetnan is a founding partner of the Grupo de DiseñoUrbano

URBAN AGE CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 2006

95

MEXICO CITY LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

GOVERNING THE MEGA CITY

I

s it possible to govern the Mexican mega-metropolis? The initial response is yes, since it is obvious that this occurs on a daily basis. However, this process involves 79 executive bodies in 3 areas of government; they legislate for 63 legislative zones and at least 80 territorial plans and programmes exist, for “planning”. It is clear that fragmented and sectorised action prevails, and it is proving enormously difficult to define and execute a long-term metropolitan vision. And yet it is working! But how is it working? Does it offer reasonable conditions for competitive economic development, in order to improve quality of life and security in a community, so that its organisation and environment are sustainable? The answer is no, because it is offering fewer positive conditions and the feeling is growing that basic problems are increasing disproportionately.

One in five Mexicans live in the metropolis, and in 2005, the population reached 19.5 million: 56% live in the 59 suburban districts of the State of Mexico (EM) the remaining 44% in the 16 neighbourhoods of the Federal District (FD). Although the annual rates of growth are falling (4.37% 1970-1980, and 0.9% 2000-2005) and the FD is not growing, the districts in the EM are demonstrating a process of extensive expansion rising to 1.6% (higher than the national average). However,

in terms of super-cities (Central Region of Mexico or RCM), a circle of cities surrounds the Metropolitan Zone of the Valley of Mexico (ZMVM). These cities are growing at rates of around 1.9% per year and the RCM comprises a macro-regional space which has 26.1 million residents, 11 metropolitan zones, 6 Federatal entities and 158 districts. Even in the most enclosed area of the ZMVM, and notwithstanding the huge number of activities shared by the two main jurisdictions that govern it (EM and FD), there is a lack of effective co-ordination dealing with the needs of the metropolis. Hence, legislation, planning and urban taxation (tax on property), barely have any common ground, since neither body considers the other in its own institutional, governing and public policy decisions.

This metropolis also presents serious environmental problems. Can it keep consuming 62 m3 of water per second, drying out the Valley of Mexico and the river basins that export water to the city, without a plan for collecting water and for water processing and reuse? Can it keep adding to the number of cars at the rate of 280,000 per year until rush hours lasts five or ten hours, without a metropolitan public transport project that deals with the 4.5 million plus cars already on the road? Is it possible to continue producing nearly 23,000 tons of waste per day, when the sites where it is dumped are almost at the end

THE INFORMAL ECONOMY AS A WAY OF LIFE

T

o paraphrase Louis Wirth in his classic study of more than 60 years ago, we can affirm that the informal economy, in the context of Mexico City, has become a way of life. Mexico City is not the only city where this informal economy exists, nor the place where it is most exacerbated. However, it is perhaps where the density, scale and heterogeneity of the phenomenon most clearly show how this has altered the city both in its economic and social dynamics as well as in the production of urban space and everyday experience.

The term informal is elusive, ambiguous, temporary and problematic. Today, it has become a kind of conceptual umbrella that covers forms and practices of production, consumption and social relations that make up the city. What is informal offers proof of what exists outside what is legal, regulated, taxed, controlled or lawful.

Both the definitions of informal and the attitudes to this have been changing, over time, in Mexico City. Forty years ago, the housing units built by Mario Pani were considered “Proper Housing”, whilst the hundreds of thousands of houses built in outlying districts like Ciudad Neza were considered “informal settlements” or “parachutist settlements”. Today, official housing policies are more focused on supporting what used to be

considered marginal than on repeating what was, before,“normative”. Today, the judicious and negative stigma of the informal economy has diminished and it has been taken on more as a problem, as a fact.

The informal economy covers the whole spectrum of the urban economic cycle, from elemental forms of production, to recycling.

It includes goods and services such as housing, transport, the infrastructure, credit and occupation of space, extending as far as political negotiation. The whole informal activity features techniques, decisions and strategies that, although not very orthodox, entail a form of planning and organisation. They may be sophisticated and effective in the way in which they allocate resources, organise space and deal with both social and economic requirements.

The informal economy appears to be linked with official and regulated processes but even, more surprisingly, in some case, modifies these official processes and policies.

The leading mobile telephone company, whose owner is the richest man in South America, employs sales and distribution techniques specific to the informal economy such as street selling on corners. Similarly, the mechanisms for financing, in the case of micro-credit, replicate the mutually binding and guarantee networks that have existed for years in the world of informal credit.

Although some are rich and others poor,

of their useful life?

Do the capacities of existing governments contain the power to resolve these megaproblems, as they have already assured the citizens they can? Once again, the answer is no.

Many problems are irreversible, the limits have been reached. It is clear that a new paradigm is required, for raising questions not raised up until now, courses of action not attempted in the past. The citizens, some intuitively, others in a more structured fashion, are wondering what should be proposed in order to govern and run this metropolis? It would seem clear that it is only possible to take positive steps within a jointly responsible action by the government and democratic stakeholders. Which brings us to governance.

This means firstly defining what “metropolitan” is and what it is not, in terms of the existing policies and services required for the functioning of the metropolis. It is also obvious that inter-governmental metropolitan coordination needs to be made compulsory (both between authorities as well as between sectors of government). To this end, it is clear that we need a greater political will than exists now. There are three alternatives: (1) to govern and run the metropolis as has been done until now, but with improvements – this in reality is happening; (2) to explore new forms of co-operation and community involvement through non-profit organisations, particularly municipal, since this aspect of government has been lacking in metropolitan co-ordination decisions; (3) the best option, but one that involves exchanges of funds, is to turn towards a metropolitan government, via assemblies or parliaments that legislate strictly on metropolitan matters, and via executive and citizen Metropolitan Councils that take decisions concerning public policies of metro-

politan interest along with the authorities.

It would seem that the current multitude of public institutions and their reduced capacity to deal with the requirements of the metropolis have reached a historic limit and that we need to think about new structures, so that the stakeholders become jointly responsible with the state when it comes to decisions concerning the development of the metropolis. In order to do things differently and with better prospects of success, it is necessary to plan the metropolis from a long-term, integrated point of view perhaps with a Metropolitan Planning Institute. It would also be vital to “observe” the evolution of the phenomena, via, for example, a Metropolitan Supervisory Body.

In order to expand the overall economic space of the ZMVM, it would be necessary to focus investment policies and promote economic development using models such as economic development corporations. It is clear that it is also necessary to have appropriate resources for metropolitan projects and to institutionalise the existing Metropolitan Fund. Mexico City would benefit from the creation of public/mixed companies that guarantee the public interest and involve private actors. These structures would raise investment in services of metropolitan interests, in order to meet, on an integrated basis, requirements in terms of water, transport, solid waste, etc.

This is but a bare outline of the main themes that need to be tackled. All these problems have now gone beyond public action and require a new vision, structured within a strategy of urban reform for Mexico.

some pay taxes and others do not, the reality is that in Mexico City, we are all informal in that we benefit from it as much as we suffer.

The geography of the informal economy in Mexico City is both the historic centre and the outlying districts, both traditional public spaces – such as squares and parks – and transport interchanges. It occupies poor areas such as Iztapalapa or Chimalhuacán and privileged areas like Santa Fé. The corners of Mexico City have been turned into the preferred space for the informal economy where products are sold (from telephone cards, sweets, food to pets), entertainment (mimes, clowns, acrobats), exchange of information (surveys, distribution of political propaganda), and services (cleaning windscreens or whole cars).

It has been affirmed that the informal economy has its origins in the inability of the State and of the market to supply goods, services and employment to its citizens, acting as an escape valve; also mentioned is tolerance of disorder and crime, the lack of any simple regulation and the lack of economic policy reforms. Amongst its effects, people mention, exploitation and labour abuse, privatisation of public space, erosion of standards of coexistence and civility and the loss of economic competition. The question that should be asked is whether the informal economy and its effects are hindering or benefiting the urban economy as a whole.

The figures on the informal economy in Mexico City are elusive and statistically unspecified but to give an idea of the magnitude of the phenomenon, here are a few facts: – c. 60% of housing construction occurs informally; – over 60% of jobs are in the informal economy; – c. 25% of the 105,000 taxis are unofficial;

– c. 25,000 street vendors operate in the Historic Centre alone, this number has increased by 40% in the last 5 years and doubles each December; – it is estimated that 65% of music sold in Mexico is pirate music.

The mantra of democracy and liberalism as prerequisites of development has been eroded by the informal economy, replacing this with the principle of negotiation. In Mexico City, both the law and physical space are negotiated. It is not unusual to see that informal leaders, whether street selling or invading land, move on to party structures and elected positions. Social negotiation networks that are being woven in the informal economy are being transformed into clientele networks useful in politics.

It has been argued that the informal economy is neither good nor bad, it is simply a fact. Some see it as a problem, others as an opportunity. However, it is hard to avoid preconceptions and generate new perceptions of this urban phenomenon. Are we condemned to only making more or less intelligent, more or less marginal comments on the phenomenon? Is it possible only to work with the effects of the phenomenon, reducing its negative impacts and capitalising on its potential?

Is it possible to come up with a new taxonomy of the informal economy that better diagnoses the origin of urban policies and more effective responses? Perhaps it is possible to imagine that a new knowledge of the city might emerge from a better understanding of the informal economy as a driving and determining force in major cities.

8

4 8

9

José Manuel Castillo Olea is a Profesor at the Universidad Iberoamericana

2

6

8

5 1

Alfonso Xavier Iracheta Cenecorta is a Profesor at El Colegio Mexiquense

URBAN AGE CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 2006

96

CASE STUDIES: RECENT URBAN INTERVENTIONS IN MEXICO CITY

7

3

8

1 SANTA FE: FROM CITY DUMP TO GLOBAL NODE

The “corporate centre” of Lomas de Santa Fe, as locals know the area, is located in a hilly section of the sub-municipal district of Alvaro Obregón in the Federal District's western edge. A new metropolitan centrality located 30 km from the Benito Juárez international airport and 40 km from Toluca airport in the State of Mexico, the redeveloped Santa Fe now has a completely different shape from what it did two decades ago: the area had first contained various sand mines and it subsequently became home to huge city dumps. The steep hills below the development, however, are still largely occupied by precarious popular settlements and low-income neighbourhoods.

As part of the policies for the rehabilitation of Mexico City, Santa Fe was reconfigured from 1989 onwards. Via the Urban Development Master Plan (ZEDEC), Santa Fe was transformed into an urban mega-project which, multi-functional in nature, includes: various corporate towers where multinational corporations have set up their offices in Mexico City; large-scale commercial facilities; the campus of one of Mexico’s most prestigious private universities; and an up-market housing stock. Road infrastructure has been provided and Santa Fe has good connectivity with other metropolitan centralities, in fact

some see the node as an extension of the corporate corridor along the Reforma Boulevard and Chapultepec. Santa Fe may be seen as a symbol of a modernising Mexico City and of the city’s rising status in the global economy.

On the other hand, detractors may point to the highly exclusionary character of the area that is reflected in its introverted urban fabric of single-point blocks, big-box mall typologies and gated residential complexes. The reality is that Santa Fe is still growing and it may still be in order to question both the shape the area is taking and how this nodality interacts with the rest of the city.

2 REVITALISING THE HISTORIC CENTRE

In the last 20 years, the historic centre of Mexico City has suffered serious economic, social and urban decay, chiefly after the earthquakes in 1985. Between 1970 and 1995, the central city zone lost approximately 40% of its population. In 1990, the Historic Centre Trust was set up with the mission of revitalising this central urban quarter and restoring its valuable yet rapidly decaying architectural heritage. The Trust’s board is made up of representatives of federal and city government, of private actors and of civil society organisations – critics argue, however, that the revitalisation process is now dominated by business

elites and transnational real estate interests.

The restoration plan underway has various objectives: to attract private investment, reactivate its unutilised building stock, ensure the economic revitalisation of the zone and to generate formal employment. On the social dimension, the aims are to improve the liveability of the area, attract residents back and solve issues of insecurity and congestion caused by the overwhelmingly large presence of street vendors. Although the plan has already begun to show positive outcomes, and there is a visible movement of employers and residents returning to the centre, several questions remain unanswered. What will be the most desirable mix of industries and activities for the area? What type of employment will be created? How will the new economy solve issues of informality? Will a revitalised centre keep a percentage of social housing? Will the most important civic space in the city maintain its socially mixed character or will processes of gentrification and displacement take hold and purge its diversity and vibrancy?

3 REACHING FOR THE STARS: TWO-TIER MOTORWAYS

The Government of the City of Mexico has proposed the construction of two tiers over the Periférico (Ring Road) and the Viaducto (Miguel Alemán Viaduct) with the aim of

expanding and improving the capacity of the main controlled access roads, improving journeys, reducing travel time and reducing contamination indicators.

The project has been controversial and citizens were even consulted for their approval. The year 2002 saw the beginning of the work which, planned over four separate stages, overall, totalled 35 km of road. An approximate total investment of 2,000 million pesos will be required. The first phase of the work is complete and measures 13.8 km in length. The construction of this stage has already required 1,500 million pesos, the equivalent of a significant percentage of the 2002 budget for transport and road programmes. The second, third and fourth phases consist of the design and construction of a second tier, in both directions, over other sections of the Periférico, the Viaducto and other urban main roads.

4 THE SUBURBAN TRAIN

In the Metropolitan area of Mexico City, around 35 million journeys are made daily, and those who travel from the suburbs spend between five and six hours commuting each day. The Suburban Train Project, which will connect the Federal District to the State of Mexico, is the first step towards dealing with URBAN AGE CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 2006

97

MEXICO CITY LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

the need to improve a metropolitan transport infrastructure.

The project is being co-financed by three governments: the Federal government, the State of Mexico government and the Federal District government who are joining forces to start up the railway that will connect the old central railway station of Buenavista with suburbs in the State of Mexico. Its final destination will be Huehuetoca, covering 240 km.

Construction of the first 25 km, from Buenavista to Cuautitlán, has already begun.

The suburban train will carry 320,000 passengers a day, mostly workers and students who will save more than 2.5 hours daily on each round trip. The fare will be equivalent to what people are paying today on other means of transport. The train will also contribute to reducing the road problem and will have a positive impact on environmental conditions in the area.

5 METROBÚS: THE FUTURE OF COLLECTIVE TRANSPORT IN MEXICO CITY?

It is estimated that in the Federal District, there are already 3.2 million registered vehicles, which are responsible for 70% of the air contamination. With the central objective of reducing road congestion and contaminating emissions, the Federal District has promoted the construction of a dedicated-lane bus system since 2002. This initiative follows the success of the BRT systems (Bus Rapid Transit) in South American cities such as Curitiba, Bogotá, Sao Paulo and Quito. With the advantage that they use the existing road infrastructure, the BRT systems have constituted an option that is economically more viable than other collective transport systems such as the underground, which requires approximately 10 times more investment.

Inaugurated on 19 June 2005, Metrobus required an estimated investment of 48 million pesos in road works and approximately 212 million pesos in coaches. It has approximately 85 articulated buses that travel along the some 20 km of Avenida Insurgentes at an average speed of 21 km/h. It has 34 stops and 2 terminals (Dr. Gálvez and Indios Verdes).

On its busiest section, Metrobus carries around 5,500 passengers per hour.

6 URBAN PARKS

It seems almost unnecessary to mention the vital importance of parks, green and open spaces in dense urban areas. Urban parks beautify their surroundings and are fundamental as aquifer recharge zones, for producing oxygen and for reducing contaminants.

Green spaces in the Federal District cover only 12,828 hectares. The green space average is 15.1m2/resident if we take into consideration both private and public green spaces and this figure falls to only 5.2m2/resident if limited to public green spaces. The amount of green space in Mexico City therefore is not only much lower than that available in European cities but it also falls considerably below levels achieved in other high-density cities with comparably large populations such as Shanghai.

Because of these shortages, many green spaces have suffered serious damage due to overuse. A case in point is Chapultepec Park.

With 686 hectares of woods, the largest regional park in Latin America is visited by 15 million people a year and up to 17,000 visitors each Sunday. Because this space had been invaded by street vendors, waste and contamination, the Chapultepec Park Trust was set up for its restoration. The aim was to gather resources and draft a masterplan to restore every corner of this urban asset, which is also one of the few inclusive spaces in the city.

Other ambitious initiatives include the proposal to recreate the dried-up lake in the Vaso

de Texcoco zone; to produce a new ecological park on the eight hectares that used to be the Azcapotzalco Refinery and join it to other parks along a green linear corridor; and to distribute pocket parks throughout the city.

Mexico City seems to be rediscovering the importance of high-quality green open spaces and, in this respect, taking the same path shown in initiatives such as London’s Green Grid or the Mayor’s 100 Public Spaces, or the initiatives to revitalise the Los Angeles River and transform it into an armature that could rearticulate the disjointed urban landscape of Southern California.

7 THE FARO (LIGHTHOUSE) TO THE EAST OF THE CITY

In Mexico City, the supply of public space and cultural facilities has been concentrated in a narrow area bordering the centre and south-west of the city, where the most privileged social groups live. As a result, the eastern zone of the city suffers from both economic disadvantage and cultural neglect. With the intention of decentralising and democratising the access to culture, the city government decided to create a cultural centre in the east.

In 1998 a project was approved to create a cultural centre in an abandoned property that had been built years ago by the architect Alberto Kalach, who was also commissioned to refurbish the site for its new purpose. Since its opening in the year 2000, the F-ábrica de AR-tes y O-ficios de Oriente (Factory of Arts and Crafts of the East) offers workshops to around 1,700 children, youngsters and adults; a library and internet access; film screenings and other cultural activities – all free of charge. It also holds huge concerts and youthoriented events for nearly 10,000 people at a time. These events are known for their safety.

No major incidents have been reported, even though the facilities sit in a high-crime area with several opposing gangs active. Middleclass young people are beginning to attend these events regularly.

The FARO is located in the borough of Iztapalapa, one of the poorest and troubled areas of the Federal District, just a few blocks from the city’s largest dump, in a popular neighbourhood built over the dried-up Texcoco Lake. The FARO has been described as a socially inclusive and culturally alternative space, and although its ability to respond to the lack of cultural facilities in the east of the city is limited, this initiative, now being reproduced in other parts of the city, hints at the potential that social inclusion and cultural production offer to revitalise cities.

8 THE RE-DENSIFICATION OF THE URBAN CORE: BANDO DOS

In December 2000, the then Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued Bando Dos (Informative Decree 2), a policy initiative to promote the re-densification of the Federal District’s four core boroughs of Cuauhtémoc, Miguel Hidalgo, Benito Juárez and Venustiano Carranza and to curtail development in peripheral zones, particularly those with a high degree of environmental sensitivity. The initiative responds to three main concerns: population losses at the urban core that generate conditions of underutilised infrastructure; urban sprawl over land to be preserved as green fields; and decreasing levels of local water supply from within the metropolitan area. From the 1970s onwards, Mexico City experienced a gradual decline in the population living in central zones and a rapid expansion of peripheral neighbourhoods. Between 1970 and 2000, the four core boroughs lost over one million residents and their share of the city’s total population fell from 73% in 1950 to 20% in 2000. At the same time the city was progressively losing its capacity to retain rain water to replenish its

aquifers due to the multiplication of impervious surfaces, increasing quantities of potable water were being wasted because of leakages through the overextended pipe system.

Stricter growth controls in outer boroughs and a streamlined process to grant building permits at the core are the two concrete policies announced by the Bando Dos. In the five-year period since the initiative was first implemented, the four core boroughs have witnessed both a construction boom and steep hikes in housing prices that have also impacted on the rest of the metropolitan housing market. There has also been a proliferation of low-density subdivisions and gated communities at the edges of the metropolitan zone in the State of Mexico. Is the re-densification of the core an achievement of the Bando Dos or was it already underway before the initiative? Are the negative metropolitan dynamics unintended consequences of the policy? There is a wide range of opinions from both detractors and supporters of this controversial re-densification initiative. The case also illustrates wider debates on the relationship between urban densities and housing affordability, the need to consider the role of design in re-densification initiatives, and the limits of territorial policies in taming sprawl when they are not implemented within wide regional frameworks.

9 HOUSING IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMME (PROGRAMA DE MEJORAMIENTO DE VIVIENDA- PMV)

The PMV dates back to 1998. It was jointly designed by the city government and representatives from the various NGOs from the Habitat Coalition-Mexico to address the acute housing problems of popular settlements, which were originally informally developed and cover more than half of the metropolitan surface. The PMV grants loans to low-income families living in the Federal District (heads of household earning less than US$ 600 per month) and it provides technical assistance to programme participants concerning design issues and spatial arrangements within the housing unit. It was first co-financed by the city’s administration and NGOs and it has now been put under the entire supervision of the Federal District’s Housing Institute.

The PMV’s main objectives are to create better living conditions for socially disadvantaged families; to deal with problems of overcrowding; and to improve precarious, damaged or at-risk housing units. The interventions sponsored by the programme to reach these goals include: expansion; improvement; preventive, corrective or general maintenance; new progressive housing, designed for subsequent expansion; and new finished units. Since 2001, around 62,417 loans have been granted by this programme and it is envisaged that by the end of 2006, the programme will have organised almost 130,000 housing operations – while these figures fall far below existing needs, the PMV represents the largest public intervention to improve housing conditions in popular settlements to date. However, those who question the programme focus on the quality of its implementation rather than on the scale that it has achieved. The PMV has been critiqued for not following up with loan recipients on building details pertaining to their individual units and even less on the positive effects that the interventions could have on the physical shape of their neighbourhoods. Their bottom line is that the PMV has only accelerated self-help construction without really solving structural problems in the housing stock and conditions of overcrowding.

URBAN AGE CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 2006

98

99

7500 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

412 km2 / 3000 km2 3 mil.

/ 3.7 mil.

TOOLS

ATHENS DEVELOPER AS ARCHITECT // GOVERNANCE / POLICY

POST-OLYMPIC URBANISM // HOUSING

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

55%

32%

8%

unemployment

123 bil.

28% green space

1 m2 / person

GDP

USER-GENERATED URBANISM // MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: DEVELOPER AS ARCHITECT THEMATIC CLUSTER: GOVERNANCE / POLICY YEAR: 1930 BUILDING REGULATION Main stakeholders: Planning and construction regulators Image 31: Volume shape after the building law Athens General Regulations: 1919 - 1929 (left), 1985 - 2000 (right), Anastasia Paschou

The history of the architectural development of Athens can be traced through a multiple story housing structure called the “Polykatoikia,” literally meaning “multiple houses.” The successive changes in building code between the 1930s and early 21st century had a direct impact on the form of the polykatoikia and the city itself. The private developer was the primary person responsible for the formation of the city.

The Athenian polykatoikia was originally conceived in the 1930s as multistory apartment building for the Athenian bourgeoisie. The proliferation of this type was supported by the State in the form of a general building regulation and a property law, which directly produced the basic rationale behind the architecture of the polykatoikia. This law facilitated landowners to trade their buildable ground tax-free in exchange for built indoor space, effectively deregulating the construction industry. In essence, through the apparatus of the polykatoikia, the project of the city was advanced no longer through top-down master planning, but through the production of abstract legislative frameworks, which materialized in the bottomup practice of self-building.

The law permited a small construction company with low budget to build on a plot without paying for it, but offering in exchange part of the resulted space. A direct exchange of services between plot owner and contractor was established. The plot owner would receive in return for his temporary displacement 1 or 2 apartments to own, while the contractor collected profit from the sale of the remaining apartments. Architects were hardly involved in this procedure.

The most important building laws were published in 1929, 1955 and 1985. In between there have been alterations, but the main module of polykatoikia was defined in three decisive laws.

Image 32: View of a polykatoikia under construction. Photo: Manolis Baboussis

102

103

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: POST-OLYMPIC URBANISM THEMATIC CLUSTER: HOUSING YEAR: 2004 MEGA-EVENT AS GENERATOR Main stakeholders: Developers, Intenrational Olympic Committee, different governmental levels

According to one Olympic bidding manual, in hosting a summer Games a city needs to prepare: 31 to 38 competition venues and up to 90 training sites for the 28 summer Olympic sports, one or more Olympic Village(s) for housing approximate 15,000 athletes, broadcasting facilities and accommodation for more than 15,000 journalists, at least 40,000 hotel rooms and all kinds of other infrastructure – transport, logistics, telecommunications and entertainment facilities – to support the event. The Olympics represent both urban opportunities and urban liabilities: an example might be the satisfaction of Olympic requirements in a way that is to the long-term detriment of local development and local needs.

Image 33: Aerial view of the Athens Olympic Village, the largest housing development ever constructed in Greece. Photo: LEEAD Consulting

In Athens, major developments took place at the coastal zone, and in several sites around the edge of Athens. This led to a major decentralization of the Olympic sites, drawing attention to the suburban zones and away from the urban core. There were many concerns about the country’s ability to build and maintain such costly projects as the Olympic Village — fears that have proved well-founded. In 2008, the British newspaper The Daily Mail reported that 21 of 22 venues from the games were closed, most of them derelict and covered in graffiti. Athens has essentially become a manual on how not to stage the Olympics.

There are two major impacts of the Olympics on cities: firstly the Olympics have sufficient momentum to intervene in the host city’s short- and long-term development activities, placing unparalleled challenges and opportunities in the sphere of urbanization during the process of preparation; secondly the modern Games imply a certain standard of hosting milieu, such that cities need to rearrange their urban fabric and built environment to win the bid as well as to safeguard the success of Olympic events.

Image 34: Olympic infrastructure and new transportation networks (left), Athens Olympic sites (right)

104

105

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: USER-GENERATED URBANSIM THEMATIC CLUSTER: MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS YEAR: 2009 SMALL SCALE CHANGE Main stakeholders: Artists, activists

The citizens of Athens have not given up on their city. The young architects, artists, and activists have started to seek out and highlight the positive forces that currently are emerging from the crisis and to delineate a better future for Athens. The evolving traditions of the urban past, the fragmentation of public space, and the collapse of street life are issues recently being tackled by multiple grassroots initiatives in the form of small scale, user-generated, architectural solutions.

Image 35: “Self-Managed Park” in Exarcheia - a transformation of a former parking lot to a green space. Credit: Open Assembly

Recent attempts to design public space are influenced by self-managed parks, occupation/ squatting movements and alternative economy networks. The Self-Managed Park was created in March, 2009, when hundreds of residents from the Exarcheia area and other neighborhoods decided to take over a former parking lot, transforming it into a green area, a place for playing and encounters with others.

These new proposals, created by the users and local community, investigate new strategies for direct citizen participation; new programs for meetings and open assemblies, and new models of production, such as the formation of urban plantations, are just a few examples of the direct citiyen participation. The city has also, through its crisis, opened up opportunities for small scale intervention. The empty buildings and newly opened lots, due to the collapse of buildings in disrepair, have provided opportunities for reimagining space.

The Athens financial crisis hit the city hard, its center most of all. Phenomena indicating a disruption of the social web have become increasingly more severe and lead to urban decay, homelessness, drug problems etc.

However, these recent events are shaping a particular dynamic in the city. Conditions have been created in Athens at this time to redefine the priorities of architectural design. The current social and economic crisis brings to the forefront new ways of viewing the role of architecture, separated from professional opportunism and the standards of well-being of the previous decade.

Image 36: The street reimagined space for social potential and public utility. Credit: AREA Architecture Research Athens

106

107

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE Please answer the following:

City : Athens Tool : Building Law as Generator

1. What can you identify as the major reasons for applying such building laws in urban settings?

Consider all possible factors (light, ventilation, space, etc.)

The Athens housing model (Polykatoikia) was developed through the form of a general building regulation and property law, which directly produced the basic rationale behind the architecture. The volume articulation was mostly dictated by a complicated and strict law frame that in general terms favored only the contractor’s attitude to exploit the last possible square meter of a floor plan. As in New York, architects were able to interpret the city’s similar set of laws to create advantages for both the developer/contractor and the public.

2. What are the noticable differences between the first set of laws and the second set of laws in each city (as shown in the diagrams)?

3. Compare and contrast the two urban morphologies (as shown in the figure-ground plans) resulting from the building laws, in terms of factors of density, ratio between built and open space, implications of street width, etc.

Volume shape before New York City’s 1961 Zoning Resolution Plan review Volume shape after the building law Athens General Regulations: 1919 - 1929

Volume shape after New York City’s 1961 Zoning Resolution Plan review

Volume shape after the building law Athens General Regulations: 1985 - 2000

Typical block units in central Athens

Typical block units in Upper East Side, New York City

108

109

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

A Brief Historical Review of Olympic Urbanization Hanwen Liao and Adrian Pitts

Recent decades have seen an increased interest from the world’s major cities to bid for international sporting events and to use them as agents for urban transformation. In this paper the particular focus is that of urban development driven by the preparation for the Olympic Summer Games. Starting with Coubertin’s utopian concept for the creation of a ‘modern Olympia’, Olympic urbanization has been developing for over a century.

The result is that in various cities with often diverse urban patterns and cultures, the Games have left very different impacts on the local environment. This paper outlines the history and changes in urbanization within those cities that have acted as hosts during the modern Olympic period (1896–2012). It also discusses key factors in connection with the creation of a successful Olympic urban scheme. The evaluations of success are based on empirical investigations and analysis.

Introduction For many people, the modern Olympics Games are seen as a great contest of sportsmanship and chauvinism; for others, they are a media extravaganza. It should also be stressed, however, that the Olympics are also about venues and cities. Cities themselves provide the platforms and backdrops for the Games, characterize each event with a specific identity and context and, at the same time, are affected in a direct and dramatic fashion by the Games. There are two major impacts: firstly the Olympics have sufficient momentum to intervene in the host city’s short- and longterm development activities, placing unparalleled challenges and opportunities in the sphere of urbanization during the process of preparation; secondly the modern Games imply a certain standard of hosting milieu, such that cities need to rearrange their urban fabric and built environment to win the bid as well as to safeguard the success of Olympic events. According to one Olympic bidding manual, in hosting

Hanwen Liao, University of Greenwich, UK; Adrian Pitts, University of Sheffield, UK. Correspondence to: h.liao@gre.ac.uk; a.c.pitts@sheffield.ac.uk

110

The International Journal of the History of Sport

READINGS

The International Journal of the History of Sport Vol. 23, No. 7, November 2006, 1232 – 1252

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

1233

a summer Games a city needs to prepare 31 to 38 competition venues and up to 90 training sites for the 28 summer Olympic sports; one or more Olympic Village(s) for housing approximate 15,000 athletes and National Olympic committee (NOC) officials; broadcasting facilities and accommodation for more than 15,000 journalists; at least 40,000 hotel rooms and all kinds of other infrastructure – transport, logistics, telecommunications and entertainment facilities – to support the event. As Hiller points out, the Olympics represent both urban opportunities and urban liabilities: [1] an example might be the satisfaction of Olympic requirements in a way that is to the long-term detriment of local development and local need.

Over the last century, urban development in connection with the Olympic Summer Games has passed through a tortuous evolutionary course, from the monostadium model in the early years to an Olympic quarter model; from planning concentrated on competition facilities to a very broad scope of supportive construction. Olympic urbanization has clearly grown in terms of content, scale, form and complexity. The beginning of Olympic urban initiatives dates back to the fourth Games in London in 1908, with the construction of the White City Olympic Stadium. Yet even up to the post-Second World War period, the provision of sports venues and athlete Villages dominated Olympic preparation and the impact on the wider urban infrastructure was limited. It was not until 1960 that the dormant forces for large-scale development began to reveal themselves. From the Rome Olympics onwards, the Games began to have many far-reaching consequences on the local built environment – particularly in line with the needs of urban expansion in the 1960s and 1970s, of inner-city regeneration in the 1980s and 1990s and of sustainable urban form in the current decade. There is a constant intimacy between Olympic development and the evolution of host cities.

Recently, with sustainability issues having gained world attention, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) signalled the desire to promote the global campaign of building a positive environmental legacy for future generations by applying sustainable development concepts in the Olympic Movement. One of the challenges facing decision-making will therefore be to find ways of using Olympic planning as a vehicle for host cities to achieve more lasting and sustainable benefits. Although the Official Report of each Games is couched almost exclusively in the rhetoric of economic growth, social renaissance and environmental enhancement, its real effects can only be examined in a historical manner and the study of Olympic urbanization history can provide a useful starting point. It is important in this context to provide the historical timing of the introduction of the environmental element. This is because researchers often make the mistake of looking for environmental treatments in such Games as Atlanta and then produce a critique concerning the lack of initiative. This is a false critique, as ‘environment’ was not introduced as an element to be considered by the bid groups until the bid process related to the 2000 Games of the Olympiad.

This paper examines the different ways that Olympic facilities have been integrated into the host city’s urban fabric. The main focus is on the post-war period when

111

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

H. Liao and A. Pitts

Olympic planning to stimulate and justify large-scale urban improvements became commonplace. In reviewing the history of Olympic urbanization, there are several aims: . . . .

to provide a panoramic view of Olympic urban practices and changes over time; to identify the influential factors which determined the ever-changing course of Olympic urban planning, and also their significance as an aid in contemporary decision-making; to examine various Olympic urban policies which reference twentieth-century town planning concepts; to evaluate, with the benefit of hindsight, Olympic urban legacies against their stated original intentions, and then to posit lessons for the planning and design practice for future Olympic preparation.

A substantial part of the paper is presented in chronological order so that the reader may easily follow the sequence of the changing patterns in Olympic urban development.

Olympic Games and Cities The interdependency of the Olympic Games and the host city is reflected in the Olympic Charter, according to which the Games can only be awarded to a host city rather than a country. This is particularly central with regard to the Summer Games.

Although the Olympic Winter Games are also awarded to a host city and not a country, the IOC introduced an additional winter-specific stipulation into the Olympic Charter in 1991. Since that time, the stipulation has opened the door to the possibility that certain events could be held in a bordering country when, due to geographic or topographic limitations, it was not possible for these events to be organized within the country of the host city. [2] Although the IOC never sets rigid physical, economic or social criteria in selecting host cities, convention indicates that the Summer Games are accommodated by large cities with more than three million inhabitants. [3] The modern Olympics have grown to the point that their size suggests that they are on a different scale from any other major sporting event; the only sports extravaganza that might possibly challenge the Olympics influence is soccer’s World Cup, even though statistical evidence indicates that its scale is substantially less. Nowadays, each Olympic Summer Games might involve more than 15,000 athletes and officials, at least the same number of media representatives, and from 400,000 to a million out-ofcity visitors. This means the host city has a huge increase in temporary population, which places great demands on civic infrastructure and accommodation. Only the world’s largest cities have the required resources to cope with such challenges and sufficient population thresholds to sustain the viability of the facilities in the long term after the Games are over. Further, the increasing pre-investment costs for the bidding stage and overall cost of the Games mean that only the key cities of concentrated regional economic power can afford the financial commitment. Most Olympic hosts have come from among the most influential mega-cities in the world. [4]

112

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The International Journal of the History of Sport

READINGS

1234

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1235

These factors have created geographic inequalities by leaving out potential smaller city hosts (such as Lausanne’s candidature in 1948 and 1960; Baltimore’s in 1948; and Minneapolis’s in 1952 and 1956) and cities in the developing world. The increasing gigantism and polarization of the modern Olympics have raised concerns within the IOC; in 2002 the Olympic Games Study Commission was appointed to evaluate possible reduction in the number of events, participants, procedures and costs for future Games. It seems, however, that no matter the extent to which the Olympics may be moderated in the future, the Games will remain a high-profile event in promoting host cities on the world stage and attracting inward investment to these cities. As such, the Games will continue to be a focal point of competition among the world’s major cities, as witnessed by the numerous cities bidding for the 2012 event.

That Olympic host cities are some of the world’s largest and most cosmopolitan is an interesting point, because the evolution of these cities reflects the mainstream of urbanization processes in a modern, democratic and industrialized society. And this urbanization process, as will be mentioned later, can be used as an important reference to understand the ways that Olympic facilities are integrated into different urban contexts.

Olympic Urbanization History Since 1896, 25 out of 28 planned Summer Games have actually been staged in 21 different cities spread over 17 countries. In order to review more clearly the evolution of Olympic urbanization, it is useful to identify four historical phases within which host cities carried out relatively homogeneous urban approaches to prepare for the Games. The first phase includes the first decade of Olympic revival, which corresponds to the three earliest, modestly prepared, low-key events, with minimal urban intervention. The second phase covers the period from 1908 to 1928 when the event began to attract more world attention, to be prepared in a planned manner and to involve sport-specific venues. The Olympic Games entered its third phase in 1932, which spanned to 1956. This period witnessed substantial development of Olympic-related urban elements with some, perhaps, modest, renovation activities. In the fourth phase, since 1960, Olympic urbanization has extended far beyond the boundary of sports and associated facilities, to a more comprehensive urban scheme with many projects perhaps not having visible connections with the Games’ organization. In this phase, cities are no longer passive containers to serve the Olympic performances; rather, the Olympics become a pretext to trigger largescale urban improvement and shape planning policy.

The Origins of Olympic Urbanism (1896–1904) The origin of Olympic urbanism can be traced back to Pierre de Coubertin’s concept of creating a ‘modern Olympia’, which has set the tone of the modern Olympic built environment, and still nourishes today’s venue planning and design. Coubertin had

113

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

H. Liao and A. Pitts

perceived the long-term appeal of the ancient Olympic Games in the ancient Hellenic world as being deeply rooted in its unique festival form, a ‘cult of human essence’, as well as being located in a solid, physical setting, the holy city of Olympia. [5] He believed that if the modern Games were to extend beyond being a pure sports event and to be felt as a sense of culture and belief, then the definition of a unique urban context was paramount. In this pamphlet, which was published in 1906, Coubertin revealed his vision of future Olympic settings. He wanted it to be a ‘city’ that ‘harmoniously linked with athletics, literature and art’ and ‘closely collaborated of man and nature’. He also gave details of his concept: First the Olympic city must be visible to the visitor if not in its entirety, then at least as a grandiose and dignified ensemble. Second, it is desirable for this first view of the city to be related to its role. . . . Third, the shape of the city must clearly attempt to fit into the surrounding countryside, and to take advantage of it. Fourth, it would be a mistake to imitate the crowding of the ancient site. It would also be a mistake to take the opposite approach, spreading the site out too much. It seems to us that these are general principles regarding the setting of the city. [6]

Coubertin’s idea was to some extent a parallel development with other contemporary urban utopianism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the phalanste`re of Charles Fourier (in the 1840s) and the international city of Ernest Hebrand (in the 1910s), and inspired by various avant-garde design practices for urban spectacles such as world expositions at the time. [7] Many of the above principles are still meaningful in guiding today’s Olympic urban decision-making. The ‘Modern Olympia’ self-implies a site concentration approach, which has been favoured by the IOC for many decades. Pierre de Coubertin’s preference for a more pastoral setting inspires the creation of numerous scenic Olympic parks in crowded urban contexts.

Additionally, his insistence on the ‘Modern Olympia’ moving from one city to another instead of a permanent resort to spread the Olympic spirit makes it possible to capitalize Olympic preparation for various urban transformations.

However, during the first decade of Olympic revival, there were many more urgent tasks to be accomplished for the incipient movement; Coubertin’s plea could only remain as utopian. Furthermore, the Games did not attract the general public’s attention and were extremely financially constrained. Although Athens in 1896 did involve a limited provision of new facilities, including the restoration of the 2,000year-old Panathenaic Stadium and the refurbishment of the Zappeion building in its downtown area, the following two Games, at Paris and St Louis, had few meaningful settings and left few urban legacies. In Paris (1900) the Games were exclusively held in natural settings, where swimmers had to negotiate the muddied Seine and hammer-throwers were impeded by trees. [8] The Dominance of the Olympic Stadium (1908–28) Although tethered to the Franco-British Exhibition of the same year, the London Games of 1908 were a milestone in the Olympic urbanization journey, where the first

114

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The International Journal of the History of Sport

READINGS

1236

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1237

piece of Olympic architecture, the White City Stadium, was introduced. Aiming to showcase the technical achievements of the new century, the stadium was gigantic in size and was characterized by avant-garde industrial aesthetics, yet in function, it was found to be less than ideal due to the design attempting to reconcile too many – and often conflicting – functions for different sports through one architectural solution.

Nonetheless, it placed Olympic urbanization on a more secure footing.

In a rethinking of London’s approach, Stockholm 1912 developed a range of venues for separate sports at Djungarden in the northern suburb of the city. The centrepiece was the neo-classical athletic stadium, meticulously built in reddish stone to be in harmony with the context of Scandinavian cities. Stockholm’s approach can still be considered a mono-stadium model because the Olympic Stadium remained the backbone of the Games where most contests and ceremonies were concentrated, and it used most (87 per cent) of the budget. [9] Commended by Coubertin himself, Stockholm’s practice soon became a prototype for later cities to follow. Until the late 1920s, the pattern of Olympic urbanization can be summarized as: purpose built Olympic stadium (covering most of the competitions) þ small rented halls (for a few essential indoor events) þ improvised adapted water course (for aquatic sports).

From a town-planning perspective, Olympic urbanization in the 1910s to 1920s did not impinge greatly on host cities; yet purposefully created athletic stadiums effectively defined an Olympic node (if not a quarter) in urban fabric terms, stamping the location with new landmarks and identities. Further, there was in evidence a cultural diversity of the host society or the era through different architectural dialects, for instance, the industrial craftsmanship in London (1908) and Paris (1924), the gothic revival in Stockholm (1912), the beaux arts in Antwerp (1920) and the modernism of Amsterdam (1928). Aesthetic and symbolic expression subsequently became an important theme of later Olympic urban development.

The Rise of the Olympic Quarter (1932–56) The Los Angeles Games of 1932 turned out to be another breakthrough for Olympic urbanization, where the first genuine Olympic Village, comprising 550 prefabricated wooden cottages, was set up in a 101-hectare compound on Baldwin Hill at the edge of the city. This allowed the last indispensable component of Coubertin’s ‘Modern Olympia’ to come to life and extended the content of Olympic urbanization from sports premises to urban housing. William Garland, Los Angeles civic leader and the Games’ chief organizer, was perhaps the first to perceive the potential benefits that could be brought to host cities by Olympic intervention. [10] Under his leadership, Los Angeles prepared an inventory of new facilities, including the epic 105,000spectator-capacity Memorial Coliseum, a swimming arena and a fencing pavilion.

These were located in a 160-acre site that had once been Exposition Park, and which would later become the city’s after-hours amusement district. The Coliseum remained the largest Olympic arena built until the Sydney Games of 2000.

115

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

H. Liao and A. Pitts

The Berlin Games of 1936 consolidated the trend for the development of substantial facilities in forming an Olympic quarter, and resulted in a 130-hectare site at Grunewald in western Berlin (later named as Reich’s Sport Field) being developed as a sporting and cultural quarter. A further purpose of this effort was to showcase Hitler’s propaganda for National Socialism. The site included a new stadium with 100,000 seats, a swimming centre, an open-air amphitheatre, a sports forum and large assembly fields and service buildings, all built in rigid neo-classic forms and linked by monumental axes. A 16-kilometre ceremonial boulevard, the ‘Via Triumphalis’, was specially routed to articulate the Olympic site and the city centre through the Brandenburg Gate. A self-contained Village encompassing 194 bungalows was created in a verdant 55-hectare site 14.5 kilometres west of the Olympic complex, with full training and leisure facilities. The Berlin Games have been seen as a turning point for the Olympics, moving from modest sports celebrations to sumptuous, multidimensional spectacles. Although controversially coloured by the Nazi regime, the urban settings of these Games were superb and were not surpassed for many years to come.

Due to post-war economic austerity, the London Games of 1948 had to rely on existing facilities and left little impact on the city’s built environment. The following two Games in Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956), however, continued the tendency to produce more facilities for the expanding Games and to integrate the planning procedure into the local urban agenda. Helsinki made two significant contributions: the creation of the first pastoral Olympic park in which ‘buildings and landscape were perfectly harmonized in an expression of dignify and loftiness’; [11] and the combination of the Olympic Village development with the municipal housing scheme, which has become commonplace in later Games. Similarly, Melbourne concentrated most of its venues in a 20-hectare Olympic Park on the Yarra River two kilometres from the city centre and established a social-housingoriented Village in the northern suburb of Heidelberg. There was some criticism of Melbourne’s Olympic urbanization when several key venues were demolished or restructured after the Games, yet the Olympic Park remained the city’s main sports resort and memorable legacy.

Up to the 1950s, the breadth and depth of Olympic urbanization remained moderate by modern standards. This was partly due to the limits of transport (with typically low private vehicle usage), stable urban population growth and the amateurism promoted by the Olympic Movement which limited over-commercialism and political interference. Since 1960, however, Olympic urban planning has become more ambitious with wider impacts.

The Age of Urban Transformation (1960–2012) Due to rapid progress in the world economy, social mobility and communication techniques, the 1960s witnessed a wave of radical urban growth across all major world cities, creating great pressures on housing and civic infrastructures. Meanwhile,

116

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The International Journal of the History of Sport

READINGS

1238

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1239

Western planning ideas were heavily influenced by architectural modernism, leading to calls for urban transformation towards more rational and functional settlements.

Inevitably, 1960s and 1970s Olympic urbanization was impacted upon by these zeitgeists.

The Rome Games of 1960 provided the first paradigm of the Olympics as a catalyst for major urban change, where the delivery of Olympic venues as key elements in urbanistic intervention gave way to a wider urbanistic programme. The main sporting facilities for the Rome Games were clustered in three separate sites, two in the northern and one in the southern outskirts of the city, stretching the built area in two directions. The main sites were connected by a new thoroughfare called the Olympic Way. Besides Games-related facilities, the city also developed a new water supply system, new hotels, a new jetport and improved public transport, street lighting and urban landscaping. The largest project involved the road network connecting Olympic venues to the rest of the city, occupying 75 per cent of the land used for the event. [12] The lavish developments even led to calls for the cancellation of the next Games because of the increasing scale and complexity of Olympic urban commitment. [13] The role of the Olympics in triggering urban transformation was taken further in Tokyo for the 1964 Games. The Games provided a timely opportunity to remedy the city’s poor civic infrastructure and to fast-track the already proposed ten-year development plan. Tokyo spent nearly US$2.7 billion in 1964, or 3.2 per cent of GNP in 1965, on an ambitious urban renovation plan, which included extensive road improvements, harbour expansion and developments of urban amenities, housing, tourist accommodation and waste and sewage disposal systems. [14] But at the plan’s core was a carefully contrived, multi-hierarchy transport network that crisscrossed the whole city, embracing eight new expressways, 22 motor links of various kinds, 73 kilometres of subway, 13.2 kilometres of monorail and a 500-kilometre Shinkansen (‘Bullet train’) connecting Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. [15] Interestingly, among Tokyo’s vast Olympic expenditure only a tiny portion (less than three per cent) went to the construction of purely competition-related facilities; the majority was invested to meet the city’s short-term and long-term development needs. This sparked the IOC’s view that the cost was ‘the result of local interests, not Olympic interests at all’; [16] nevertheless, what had been planned and achieved in Tokyo did transform the city from congested, war-damaged chaos to a modern, prosperous metropolis.

Due to financial strictures and civic opposition, the Mexico City Games of 1968 could not afford developments on the scale of Tokyo; rather existing facilities were largely refurbished for Olympic use. The main investment included the giant Sports Palace, a swimming/gymnastics compound, some open-air stadiums and two self-sufficient Olympic Villages with combined capacity of 8,500 flat units.

Described as a ‘Games of long walks’, Mexico City extended the decentralized approach to its limit and placed new urban developments strategically in areas where growth was expected. With new and refurbished venues heavily scattered

117

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

H. Liao and A. Pitts

over its sprawling urbanscape, the city’s public transport was under great stress.

The Olympics stimulated the construction of the city’s metro but did not benefit from it – the first 12-kilometre line was inaugurated in 1969, one year after the Games. The most successful urban work that distinguished Mexico City from previous hosts was its ‘Olympic Identity Programme’, which introduced strong decorative elements and signposts to the whole city, particularly the Olympic routes, to create a carnival atmosphere. This strategy has been widely adopted by later Games organizers.

By comparison with the over-discrete Mexican scheme, the Munich Games of 1972 adopted a very centralized approach and located most Olympic venues and the Athletes’ Village on one concentrated 280-hectare site of derelict land at Oberwiesenfeld only four kilometres north of the city centre. Munich’s Olympic plan was characterized by land-use modification and urban renewal. Oberwiesenfeld had once been a pre-war airstrip and then a dumping ground for building debris. The 1963 city development plan had earmarked the site for the development of a sports and entertainment centre over a 15- to 20-year period yet, under the Olympic banner, the development speed increased. [17] In order to efface the arrogant impression of the Berlin 1936 Games, Munich Olympic Park was designed to embrace an enchanting style and humanistic taste and to avoid any metaphor of monumentality. The site was enriched by a green landscape of hills, hollows, waters and woods, in the midst of which lay a set of venues unified by a wave-form, net-structured roof, giving a sense of freedom and flux. The Olympic Village was constructed in the immediate vicinity of the site with diverse building types and vivid spatial layers to echo the theme. Yet the hostage taking of Israeli athletes by terrorists in the Olympic Village placed its open character and tortuous layout under criticism and highlighted security as a crucial point in Olympic urban design.

At Munich, other improvements also took place, from new shopping complexes to renewed public transport infrastructures. Studies of the price index for cost of living in recent host cities during and after the Games suggest that Munich is one of those (along with Barcelona) that have successfully converted to service-based economy associated with high consumption/high income during the Olympic cycle. While this conversion might be caused by various factors, nonetheless Olympic urbanization certainly contributed a significant part. [18] The pattern of centralized Olympic urban development continued with Montreal for the 1976 Games, where the local authority was keen to use grand projects to reshape the city, as had been the case with the 1967 Exposition. Yet due to the lack of federal financial support, the initial idea was to promote a ‘modest, self-financing’ Games. Existing facilities were widely used and Olympic construction was focused on the Olympic Stadium, the swimming arena, velodrome and the Athletes’ Village, forming Maisonneuve Olympic Park in the proximity of Montreal downtown.

Similar to Munich, the site had been earmarked for sports and recreational use by early urban plans and already contained some athletic facilities. The Olympic

118

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The International Journal of the History of Sport

READINGS

1240

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1241

development package also included a 20-kilometre extension of the metro lines, a new air terminal as well as some improvements of urban roads.

Although Montreal’s planning was as meaningful as previous cases, the implementation was, however, plagued with problems. Designed by Robert Tailibert, Montreal’s Olympic facilities have been noted as ‘among the most complex concrete structures ever attempted’ [19] – the most striking features of which were colossal self-stabilizing roof shells and an 18-floor leaning tower designed to house a retractable fabric canopy overhanging the main stadium. The ambitious structure, new techniques and materials, interwoven with perhaps lax project management, global inflation and local labour relations disputes, resulted in a debt of C$ 1.5 billion. [20] The Games were nearly cancelled before the Opening Ceremony.

The development of the Olympic Village was also problematic. The original proposal was to build five different residential compounds spreading over a radius of several kilometres from the Olympic park to be in line with the city’s housing scheme. It was, however, rejected by the IOC, who by then preferred a concentrated approach in the wake of the Munich tragedy. The result was to locate the Village in the vicinity of the sports facilities and compress 980 suites into two giant pyramidal towers; the consequent use of 34 hectares of urban green reservation caused a wave of local protests.

Ironically, despite all the efforts made, the Games seem to have had little benefit for local communities. Now 30 years after the Montreal Games, the sports complex is having difficulty in being sustained for its original functions and the stadium has been suggested for demolition. [21] Montreal’s Olympic urbanization shows the risk of creating ‘white elephant’ legacies and resulting in long-term debts.

The lessons from Montreal inevitably affected the planning of subsequent Games.

Both Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984) attempted to avoid the construction of over-extravagant projects. Nonetheless, Moscow’s Olympic inventory still embraced more than 90 construction sites across the conurbation. [22] The Soviet planning philosophy had long been influenced by rationalism and the satellite-city theory stemming from the early modern movement. Moscow’s master plan 1971–90 zoned the city into eight planning agglomerations with each centred on an economic, recreational and social-cultural core. Moscow’s Olympic scheme was largely devised in line with this vision. Olympic venues were established in six different zones as part of the city’s sub-centres identified in its tenth five-year development plan. The 107hectare Olympic Village, now the home of 15,000 Muscovites, was built in an urban extension south-west of the city that had been earmarked as a residential quarter much earlier. The Olympics also boosted the city’s underdeveloped hotel market and broadcasting and communication infrastructures.

The Los Angeles Games of 1984 represented a heterogeneous approach deviating from the mainstream of Olympic urban practice since the 1960s (where the whole concept was to create an ‘ephemeral Olympic scene’ rather than to bolster any substantial urban change). Due to local taxpayers’ opposition, the 1984 Games became an entirely privately sponsored event. In order to minimize expenditure on

119

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

H. Liao and A. Pitts

installation, the organizers mobilized existing facilities as far as possible and provided the rest with makeshift structures. In the whole plan no meaningful Olympic precinct had been truly defined and venues were dispersed throughout the city’s vast territory.

Being the only candidate city and a city already possessing 24 of 31 venues needed to stage the Games, Los Angeles had unique advantages to realize its strategy.

The old Memorial Coliseum was once again refurbished as the main venue and the student dormitories at three local universities were temporarily converted to Athletes’ Villages. The whole city was ablaze with colourful streamers, banners, balloons, signposts, light towers and all kinds of graphic design works. Yet behind these sparkling ‘urban confetti’ the Olympics brought little change to the urban fabric.

Nonetheless, with a profit of US $225 million, the 1984 Games is remembered as a great commercial success and a renaissance for the Olympic Movement.

The theme of utilizing the Olympics for local urbanization was revived with the Seoul Games of 1988 and the Barcelona Games of 1992. From the late 1980s there were increasing needs for Western industrialized cities to regenerate their run-down areas associated with suburbanization, urban displacement or the decline of manufacturing; the Olympics provide opportunities for such operations. In the case of Seoul, Chamsil on the south bank of the Han River was a slum and flood-risk area that had been occupied by various low-quality housing projects suffering from various environmental problems. Seoul’s Olympic organizers took over this site, designated 60 hectares for the development of Seoul Sports Complex and the remaining 63 hectares for an Athletes’ Village. A further 260-hectare tract of land in nearby Kangdong-gu was also chosen to develop Seoul Olympic Park, containing supplementary venues and media premises. These exploitations were consistent with the city’s long-term plan to extend the urban fabric towards the south of the Han River.

Other important themes of Seoul’s Olympic urbanization included the showcasing of Korean culture to the world and the improvement of the city’s general health and hygiene standards. Localism and Korean aesthetic identity were emphasized in the design of key Olympic architecture, and various cultural utilities, including museums, arts centres and historic monuments, were established in time for the Games. But the most visible change of the urbanscape was through the environmental beautification programme, which aimed to both improve the street scene and remove sources of physical pollution. Streets were decorated with flora, artworks and better paving. Many open spaces and parks were introduced throughout the city. Moreover, urban traffic was enhanced with the expansion of Seoul’s light-rail network and the establishment of bus lanes and one-way systems.

Following Spain’s joining the European Union in 1986, Barcelona took advantage of the 1992 Games to reform a local economy that had been in decline and to remedy infrastructural deficiencies left from the Franco period. Major developments were undertaken in four urban precincts: Montjuic Park, Vall d’Hebron, Diagonal and the seafront area of Poblenou. The Montjuic Stadium had been the site for the 1929 Exposition and the 1936 People’s Olympiad; it was remodelled as the centrepiece of

120

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The International Journal of the History of Sport

READINGS

1242

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1243

the 1992 Games and a symbol of local sporting heritage. Poblenou was an area consisting of derelict warehouses and railway facilities, cutting off the beach from the city and fragmenting the neighbourhood. Olympic development rehabilitated this area with stylish apartments, a new sewage system, a new costal ring road, a new marina (Olympic Harbour) and other amenities along the 5.2-kilometre barrier-free costal strip. Improvements in other supportive infrastructures, particularly the cultural aspects and telecommunications, were also carried out. The regeneration of Barcelona has been cited as one of the most successful Olympic urban initiatives, transforming the city from a decaying industrial port to a popular tourist terminal, and putting the city on the world urban map.

The Centennial Games of Atlanta in 1996, by contrast, represent a pause in Olympic urban transformation as it concentrated on the development of essential sporting facilities. Most venues were located within a three-kilometre circle of the Olympic Ring in the heart of the city; many others were constructed on a temporary basis at Stone Mountain Park site, 25 kilometres east of downtown Atlanta. The Olympic Stadium was designed as a combination of athletic ground and baseball diamond so that it could be converted into a ballpark after the Games. Many new and reused facilities were developed in cooperation with local colleges, including the Olympic Village that used the 130-hectare campus of Georgia Institute of Technology. To provide the Olympic concourse a commemorative legacy, the organizers set up an 8.5-hectare Centennial Olympic Park in the city centre with a rich collection of horticultural works.

Atlanta’s general urban infrastructure, however, was less touched by the Olympics.

The organizers self-consciously followed the Los Angeles model but did not appear to understand that the city lacked sufficient supportive facilities compared with those of Los Angeles, and neither was the Olympic Movement in the same situation as the late 1970s. The lack of substantial investment in the city’s infrastructure resulted in wide criticism of transportation, logistics and security matters. Also, the intention to revive Atlanta’s downtown through the development of centrally located venues does not appear to have been successful; recent studies suggest that the decline of many of the poorest communities in central Atlanta continues. [23] The Sydney Games of 2000 was widely labelled as a ‘green’ event. Inspired by the IOC’s new environmental policy, Sydney established a detailed set of sustainable development guidelines to govern the design, construction and maintenance of Olympic facilities. The main site for the Games at Homebush Bay, some 15 kilometres west of Sydney Harbour, was a neglected urban wasteland comprising unusable swamp, outdated industrial premises and noxious landfill sites, and had been earmarked for environmental rehabilitation. Homebush was also the demographic centre of the greater Sydney region, strategically linking two major central business districts (CBDs): Darwin Harbour in the east and Parramatta in the west. The Olympic development thus attempted to agglomerate Sydney’s amorphous tissue and consolidate the connections between regional centres.

Consisting of 14 grand venues, the Homebush bay site formed the largest venue cluster in Olympic history. This included the 115,000-seat Stadium Australia, the

121

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

H. Liao and A. Pitts

largest Olympic stadium ever created. It featured retractable stands to support versatility and demountable stands to enable the venue to resize after the Games.

Temporary overlays were widely used in Olympic facilities. Renewable energy sources, particularly solar panels, were demonstrated throughout the Olympic site and the Athletes’ Village. In order to restore the ecosystem of the region, a 420hectare site surrounding the Olympic venues was converted into Millennium Parklands with diverse landscaped topography. As with other host cities, the Olympics also brought forward improvements to Sydney’s general built environment, particularly in the area of hotel stock, motorways, rail links and public domain in the central city. Sydney’s tourism and convention sector were also boosted.

There were problems as well. Although Sydney was cited as a benchmark of ecosensitive design for future Games, its green credentials in decontamination and various sustainability goals have been questioned in view of such a hasty Olympic timetable. In addition, many venues at Homebush Bay have experienced low usage in recent years, suggesting the after-use issue is still a pressing subject to be explored.

The Games returned to their birthplace Athens in 2004. Given the special meaning of the Olympics to Greece, local communities held high aspirations to showcase successful organization and to reinvent Athens as a thriving postmodern city embracing the new century. Olympic projects were carried out in almost every part of the city, but principally accumulated in four precincts. The main site was Athens Olympic Sports Complex, located in the city’s north-eastern suburb nine kilometres from the Acropolis. The site already contained some quality venues and in preparing for the 2004 Games it was reshaped by the designer Santiago Calatrava incorporating his stunning – but also expensive – futuristic steel-trussed roofs. Other major developments took place at the Faliro coastal zone, Hellinikon, Goudi and Marathonas. The 530-hectare brownfield site at the obsolete Hellinikon airport was converted into Europe’s largest park for sports and recreational use. [24] The 2,300-unit Olympic Village was built on a 124-hectare site at the foot of Mountain Parnitha, 25 kilometres north-west of the city centre, aiming to attract more migrants to this under-populated area in the longer term.

Likewise, Athens built new metro and tram lines to link main Olympic sites with other urban territories, strengthening the city’s articulation along its north-east/ south-west axis perpendicular to the sea. There were also new air terminals, new plazas and new hotels. Many archaeological remains were restored and supported with museum facilities. Athens’s Olympic urbanization, however, was also overshadowed by worrisome delays in construction and cost overruns. The expenditure for Olympic installation nearly quintupled from the original budget. The environmentally-sensitive design concept, such a promising focus in Sydney, was less meaningfully incorporated in Athens; and the problem of post-Olympic use of venues has already been raised as an issue.

Olympic urbanization continues with the Beijing Games to be held in 2008, which is in hectic preparation, and the development plan for the London Games of 2012 is close to completion. Beijing aims to use the Olympics to raise its international profile

122

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The International Journal of the History of Sport

READINGS

1244

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1245

and remedy some severe environmental problems. Most venues are being constructed in a 405-hectare Olympic Park on the northern edge of the city’s central mass and adjacent to the old Asian Games Park. The idea is to make full use of the existing sports premises left from the 1990 Asian Games and to reinforce, in a symbolic sense, the city’s north-south axis, as a series of key Olympic buildings sit right on the northern end of this ritualistic axis lining up with the Tiananmen Gate at the city’s geographic centre.

For the benefit of the Games bid, Beijing’s Olympic urbanization does not follow the south-eastward strategy identified in the city’s earlier master-plan. [25] Criticisms therefore emerged that this would further aggravate the current development imbalance and social inequity. Nevertheless, this deficiency may be made up to some extent by Beijing’s ambitious ongoing initiative in expanding its metro and light rail network to the whole urban fabric, particularly the southern territory, over a 15-year period. Also, extensive infrastructural improvements and beautification endeavours are being made in the whole city beyond the Olympic precincts.

Comparatively, London’s Olympic plan for 2012 is more consistent with the city’s long-term efforts to regenerate its degraded eastern boroughs, which started with the redevelopment of Docklands in the 1980s and continues in the Mayor of London’s 2004 plan. [26] Most of the new venues and the Olympic Village will be constructed in a 200-hectare site in the Lower Lea valley, 13 kilometres east of the city centre. New transport facilities are being conceived to serve this area including a high-speed ‘Olympic Javelin’ shuttle train. At present, London’s Olympic preparation is still under detailed planning, but it can be foreseen that the impact will cover the entire ‘Thames Gateway’ area.

Planning in Olympic Host Cities: Successful Olympic Urbanization In order to aid understanding, Figure 1 shows schematic drawing of the Olympic site planning in some host cities. Looking at Olympic history, urbanization has taken place with diverse breadths and depths at different times in various places, and consequently has left very different and distinct footprints in host cities’ urban fabric.

On the other hand, it is also consistent, being carried out for the same objective, on an equal timescale, and endowed with the common Olympic identity. To judge the success or otherwise of an Olympic urban approach is difficult, because the comparisons need to face a great diversity of urban contexts, social evolutionary stages, resource availability and built environment deficiencies. All these would naturally lead to heterogeneous decision-making.

Nevertheless, consensus exists in evaluating the changes in host cities after respective Games based on the first-hand experiences of local communities. It is true to say that in cities such as Tokyo and Barcelona, the Olympics have triggered profound urban revival while in some others, such as Los Angeles and Atlanta, the Games were only a passing phase. In Munich and Sydney, Olympic parks have been preserved as urban landmarks but in Melbourne and Montreal some well-conceived

123

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

H. Liao and A. Pitts

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The International Journal of the History of Sport

READINGS

1246

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1247

Figure 2 Investment in Olympic construction, Tokyo 1964 to Beijing 2008.

Figure 1 Schematic drawing of the Olympic site planning in some host cities.

venues have failed to stand the test of time. Given such different outcomes, the question arises as to what makes a successful Olympic scheme in terms of urbanization. Several key aspects stand out as reference points for this investigation: the content and scale of Olympic intervention, the urban entity they define and the vision of urban integration they represent.

To some extent, the content and scale of Olympic urbanization can be examined by looking at the capital investment in Olympic construction at each Games.

The variations are shown in Figure 2 where all values have been converted into US

124

dollars for comparison. It shows that the highest investment, which was made by Tokyo in 1964, is approximately 24 times higher than that of Los Angeles in 1984.

There are also striking differences in the development of supportive infrastructures: in Seoul (1988) and Barcelona (1992), about two-thirds of the total expenditure was spent on this component, and in the case of Tokyo, the ratio is as high as 97 per cent.

By contrast, in Montreal (1976) only 13 per cent of the investment was made for indirect Olympic projects. In general, those Games with modest infrastructural investment or those over-concentrated on the development of competition-related facilities are unlikely to involve mass urban transformation and subsequent longerlasting benefits.

Of course, this is not a simple story of ‘spend more, get more’. As shown by the case of Helsinki and Munich, limited resources can still be well leveraged to improve urban amenities and create stylish spaces; or as shown by the case of Montreal, lavish investment does not guarantee wider urban improvement and sustainable legacies.

What should be included and excluded from the Olympic development package requires wisdom in decision-making, and comes from a thorough understanding of the city’s tradition, actuality, problems and needs; a sharp insight in predicting the local development trend; a holistic planning strategy with scientific analysis of pros and cons; a democratic consultation process to ensure the public interest; and sufficient economic capacity to enable the development to take place.

A successful Olympic urban scheme seems always to be associated with a suitable and linked long-term master-plan for the host city in terms of project determination, land usage, resource mobilization and development orientation. Emphasis on such may help to avoid over-ambitious initiatives triggered by infatuated enthusiasm, or any hasty decision-making because of the tight Olympic deadline. It also helps to

125

ATHENS COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

H. Liao and A. Pitts

rationalize the budgetary deployment so that Olympic projects do not overshadow the development of other essential facilities in the city.

A successful Olympic scheme also derives from a holistic planning concept that respects the distinct character of host cities in urbanization conditions, demographic change, socio-economic reality and environmental deficiencies. This is particularly reflected by the integration of major Olympic facilities into host cities’ urban fabric as fundamental to the overall planning intervention. Historically Olympic sites have been integrated with cities in six models, with each having different advantages and limitations, and should be used or adapted based on local externalities (see Figure 3).

In general, the decentralized model is suitable for a city having good civic infrastructures, with no obvious environmental deficiencies to be redressed in a planning manner, yet needing a partial adjustment of its urban fabric to balance the holistic development. Inner-city clustering models are suitable for a city suffering from inner city decline, suburbanization and hence sprawl. They can help to re-nucleate an evenly dispersed urban form and introduced large green and public spaces to the city’s central mass. The periphery clustering model is suitable for cities experiencing a considerable population growth, with outward development pressure and expansion needs. It can help to define the development orientation and convert an outspread urban form into a linear-shaped transit-oriented form. The satellite clustering model is suitable for large conurbations where internal development pressures need to be organically dispersed and multi-hierarchy settlements need to be reinforced in the whole region. The joint clustering model is suitable for the coordination of two closely located developing urban areas for a strategic development.

Conclusion The Olympic Games have now travelled around the world and left a rich spectrum of urban heritages which, taken together, are a unique and indispensable contribution to the success of the modern Olympic Movement. The ‘Modern Olympia’ is not a truly geographic concept and the ‘Olympic city’ is not a distinct urban genre; rather, they are open-ended phenomena constantly enriched by the practice of host cities and reinterpreted through the preparation for every new Olympics. Mass Olympic urban development has always been a double-edged sword for both the Games and local communities. On the one hand it may bring desirable social changes and a global reputation; on the other financial disaster and a tempest of criticism. Each Olympic urban scheme therefore has to balance between sports, ritual, social, economic, environmental and symbolic considerations, and appreciate the long-term realities. Nevertheless, Olympic urbanization has emerged as an essential part of the modern Olympic Movement, which bridges the worlds of sport and urban environment where daily life takes place and different cultures meet each other, and extends the Olympic

126

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The International Journal of the History of Sport

READINGS

1248

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1249

Figure 3 The six theoretical models of Olympic site integration to the host city (Cf. Fig. 1).

LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

127

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

128

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

H. Liao and A. Pitts

The International Journal of the History of Sport

READINGS

1250

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1251

facilities . . . Mexico City, Tokyo, Munich and also Montreal used the Games as an occasion to develop their cities. Sport is not guilty for this’. Cf. Newfield, Montreal–Innsbruck ’76, 11.

Chalkley and Essex, ‘Urban Development Through Hosting International Events’, 381.

Preuss, Economics of the Olympic Games, 66–8.

Malouf, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, vol. 2, 58.

Kidd, ‘The Culture Wars of the Montreal Olympics’, 156.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Big Woe (video archive).

Gordon, Olympic architecture, building for the Summer Olympic Games, 156.

Stone, ‘The Atlanta Experience Re-examined’, 20.

Plumb and McKay, Reaching Beyond the Gold, 9.

Beijing Municipality, General Plan of Beijing, 1991–2010.

Greater London Authority, Mayor of London, the London Plan, 39.

footprint well beyond the simple ‘16 days of glory’ over which the summer Games take place.

The Olympic Games can be seen as one extreme of a wide range of hallmark sports events. The implications of the Olympic Games for major world cities are amplified examples for other smaller cities with scaled-down sports spectacles, such as world championships and inter-continental Games. Parallel studies need to be introduced to non-Olympic contexts; such research would add to the understanding of sport-event-orientated urban development and enrich the findings of this study. The review of modern Olympic urbanization history, however, can provide a valuable starting point.

[17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26]

Notes

References

[1] Hiller, ‘Towards a Science of Olympic Outcomes’, 102. It is necessary, however, to assert that requirements for bid cities are not always uniform, nor do Olympic bid manuals remain the same across time. For example, in the 2008 version of the bid document the IOC provides estimates of required accomodation numbers. For the 2012 Games, by contrast, no numbers are specified.

[2] See International Olympic Committee, Olympic Charter 1991.

[3] Essex and Chalkey, ‘The Infrastructural Legacy’, 94.

[4] The Globalization and World Cities (GaWc) research group centred at Loughborough University produced a preliminary ranking of world mega-cities based on their size, population, scientific and cultural impacts, economic capacity and roles in the global service network. Most cities that have acted as the Olympic hosts are among those designated as ‘world class nexus’. Cf. Sassen, Global Networks, Linked Cities, 68.

[5] Coubertin, ‘Le Cadre, Une Olympie Moderne’, 153–6.

[6] Ibid., 155.

[7] A phalanste`re was a type of building cluster designed for a utopian community where people are working together for mutual benefits, which was conceived in the mid-1800s by French socialist Charles Fourier. The international city was proposed by French architect Ernest Hebrard after the Hague Peace Conference (1899) for creating a permanent Village where intellectuals could gather to solve ‘the world’s conflicts’. Cf. Greslery, La Ciutat Mundial, 164.

[8] Lucas, The Olympic Games, 1904, 19.

[9] Swedish Olympic Committee, Official Report, 46.

[10] International Olympic Committee, ‘William May Garland’, 12. It should be asserted here that an Olympic Village had been created for the 1924 Games in Paris and that the 1932 Olympic Village was only temporary, was only for the male competitors, and that the women were housed in hotel accommodation.

[11] Gordon, Olympic Architecture, Building for the Summer Olympic Games, 3.

[12] Munoz, ‘Historic Evolution and Urban Planning Typology’, 14.

[13] Chalkley and Essex, ‘Urban Development Through Hosting International Events’, 379.

[14] Tokyo Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games 1964, Official Report, vol. 1, 46.

[15] Gordon, Olympic Architecture, Building for the Summer Olympic Games, 94.

[16] In a speech at the University of Lausanne in 1928, Coubertin criticized many Olympic arenas that were ‘the result of local, and too often, commercial interests, not Olympic interests at all’ (Cf. Muller, Pierre de Coubertin: Olympism – Selected Writings, 184). And Lord Killanin (IOC president, 1972–80) commented on the Montreal Games: ‘Who force the cities to take on excessive cost? They use the Olympic Games to develop their city and to create new sports

Beijing Municipality. General Plan of Beijing, 19912010 (in Chinese). Beijing: Beijing Development and Reform Committee, 1991.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The Big Woe. CBC News Archives, 22 Jan. 1999. Toronto.

Available online at http://archives.cbc.ca, accessed 24 July 2006.

Chalkley, B. and S. Essex. ‘Urban Development Through Hosting International Events: A History of the Olympic Games’. Planning Perspectives 14 (1999): 369–94.

Coubertin, P. ‘Le Cadre, Une Olympie Moderne’ [‘The Setting, a Modern Olympia’]. Revue Olympique, October 1909: 153–6.

Essex, S. and B. Chalkey, B. ‘The Infrastructural Legacy of the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, a Comparative Analysis’. Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Legacy of the Olympic Games, 1984–2000. Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2003.

Gordon, B. Olympic Architecture, Building for the Summer Olympic Games. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1983.

Greater London Authority. Mayor of London, the London Plan: Spatial Development Strategy for Great London. London: Greater London Authority, 2004.

Greslery, G. ‘La Ciutat Mundial’. In Visions Urbanes, Europa 1870–1993. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Comtemporania de Barcelona, 1994.

Hiller, H. ‘Towards a Science of Olympic Outcomes: The Urban Legacy’. Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Legacy of the Olympic Games, 1984–2000. Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2003.

International Olympic Committee. Olympic Charter 1991. Lausanne: IOC, 1991.

———. ‘William May Garland’. Bulletin of the International Olympic Committee, November 1948.

Kidd, J. ‘The Culture Wars of the Montreal Olympics’. International Review for the Sociology of Sports 27 (1992): 156.

Lucas, C. The Olympic Games, 1904. St Louis, MO: Woodard & Tiernan, 1904.

Malouf, A. Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Cost of the 21st Olympiad. 4 vols. Montreal: Canadian Commission of Inquiry into the Cost of the 21st Olympiad, 1980.

Muller, N., ed. Pierre de Coubertin: Olympism – Selected writings. Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000.

Munoz, F. ‘Historic Evolution and Urban Planning Typology of Olympic Village’. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Olympic Villages. Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 1997.

Newfield, F., ed. Montreal–Innsbruck ’76: The Olympic Games. Montreal: ProSport Canada, 1976.

Plumb, C. and M. McKay. Reaching Beyond the Gold, the Impact of the Olympic Games on Real Estate Markets. Chicago: Jones Lang LaSalle, 2001.

129

ATHENS LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

1252

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

H. Liao and A. Pitts

Preuss, H. Economics of the Olympic Games, Hosting the Games 1972–2000. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000.

Sassen, S., ed. Global Networks, Linked Cities. London: Routledge, 2002.

Stone, C. ‘The Atlanta Experience Re-Examined: The Link Between Agenda and Regime Change’.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25 (2001): 20–4.

Swedish Olympic Committee. Official Report of the Games of the V Olympiad. Stockholm: Wahlstrom and Widstrand, 1912.

Tokyo Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games 1964. Official Report of the Games of the XVIII Olympiad, 2 vols. Tokyo: Tokyo Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, 1964.

130

131

4200 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

141 km2 / 1280 km2 0.4 mil.

/ 0.6 mil.

TOOLS

SARAJEVO IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION // INFORMAL AND HYBRID CITY

DE-URBANISATION // DESTRUCTION / RECONSTRUCTION

TURBO URBANISM City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

40%

25%

25%

unemployment

17 bil.

11% green space

11 m2 / person

GDP

// MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION THEMATIC CLUSTER: INFORMAL AND HYBRID CITY YEAR: 1990S DESIGNING NEW REALITIES Main stakeholders: New economies, new political structures

The extent of how political, economic and socio-cultural change is being reflected on urban design is a highly discussed topic. In the post-conflict chaos in Ex-Yugoslavia, a wide spectrum of different construction works had been introduced. New identities materialised in the urban space. New ideas of capitalism and the re-discovered value of religion created new identities.

Bosnia’s capital and other former Yugoslavian cities were subjected to a sudden change of urban identities, following the end of the communist regime and a war that resulted in the dissolution and destruction of the country. The annihilation of cities called “urbicide” resulted not only in physical destruction but also in the extinction of old identities.

Image 37: New religious identities result in new construction-New mosque inside 1980s Olympic village

This array of political and socio-cultural aspects manifested themselves extensively in the citymaking processes after the conflict. For example, new ethnic and religious identities materialised in the form of the new architectural and urban interventions. Suddenly, the existing monofunctional modernist urban fabric of a socialist society was faced with the need to introduce new functions. In the anarchy during the reconstruction and rebuilding processes, very diverse actors influenced the urban image.

“The process of national fragmentation has unleashed as well a new class of close-to-power, shady real-estate entrepreneurs, and their emergent populist architectural style-a bastard child of glitzy-corporate and folk-nationalist architecture called Turbo Architecture” (1).

Iconic, sacred buildings as representations of values of a post-communist society or investordriven developments in a capitalist economy became the rule in post-war urban interventions.

One of these is Sarajevo’s neighbourhood Alipasino Polje, a socialist residential area, with a dramatic level of occupation of its green areas by vivid construction of glass office units or gigantic sacred buildings.

(1) Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss: Almost Architecture. Akademie Solitude + kuda NAO. 2007

134

Image 38: New glass commercial buildings occypying the grey residential blocks from socialist times

135

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: DE-URBANISATION THEMATIC CLUSTER: DESTRUCTION / RECONSTRUCTION YEAR: 1990S RECOVERING THE CITY Main stakeholders: Community

Extreme circumstances in cities mirror themselves on the urban elements. In the time of the conflict in Sarajevo, the urban landscape was subject of immense destruction by heavy weapons but also by local people in search for survival. The open space was perceived as a highly dangerous place which people were afraid to enter. Nevertheless the improvisation of uses created a laboratory for various temporary but also complete new long-term functions.

People use and modify spaces in different ways. Urban space is in an ongoing change and reacts with different speeds. Sarajevo’s landscapes showed strong dynamics due to the creativity and self-organisation of the inhabitants, proving that even “ordinary” places can receive different and “unexpected” functions. In the traumatic experience of getting killed in the wide open space, exposed to snipers and bombs, issues like spontaneous graveyards in parks or fear of land mines changed the perception of people who were forced to cut hundreds of thousands trees for fuel. The city’s infrastructure broke down and the city turned into a version of a big village-phenomenon called ruralisation of the city or de-urbanisaiton.

It can be compared to de-industrilaised shrinking cities of the “US rust-belt” and Ruhrgebiet in Germany.

Image 39: Self-organisation in the landscape-Destruction of the own city as survival strategy

Still, the example of how modernist parks can be turned into agricultural fields or local streams into water sources changed the picture of people about the landcsape. The nature came back into the city and the citizens started being aware of the natural values of existing urban ecosystems and their potentials. The perception of the landscape seen as the medium for recreation or as a new potential building plot was radically changed. Such phenomena show the high adaptivity of urban areas and their multifunctionalities. But what can designers learn from such examples? Can those temporary uses be kept or should the spaces return to its initial function? The change in urban structure and the mindset of people can be used as inspiration for designers and planners to create flexible scenarios (not only final products) for urban spaces, having in mind the adaptive potential of city spaces.

Philipp Oswalt, Tim Rieniets (Eds.): Atlas of Shrinking Cities. Hatje Cantz Verlag. 2006.

136

Image 40: Ruralisation of socialist city residential blocks

137

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: TURBO URBANISM THEMATIC CLUSTER: MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS YEAR: 1990SURBAN INFORMALITIES IN POST-WAR ANARCHY Main Stakeholders: Self-built initiatives

The problem of informal settlements is generally considered to be an issue of countries in the ”Global South” and to architectural units that offer catastrophic life quality to its inhabitants.

The case of Sarajevo proves it wrong. Having the problem of hyper-urbanisation since the 1960s, informality became an alternative for the housing pressure. After the 1990s war, missing regulations, war refugees and the lack of qualitative material, contribute to the creation of a colorful post-war cityscape.

What happens to a post-urbicide European city with the majority of its housing units destroyed, tens of thousands of war-refugees squatting around the city and suddenly, de-facto no urban planning regulation?

Image 41: Map of illegal housing in Sajevo: Vesna Hercegovac-Pasic: Sarajevo Urban Structure and Urban Tendencies. 2010

Until 1992, Sarajevo was a typical socialist city with a highly autocratic and centralised planning regulations. Still, the problems of illegal settlements were ignored as unhygienical and shameful for the carefully organised socialist city but still tolerated as the housing shortage for all the rural migrants represented an chronical problem.

During in the post-conflict anarchy in the mid of the 1990s, the illegal housing areas increased significantly and the typologies and creativity of the citizens to improvise with new and existing structures.

Other than in socialist times, the planning authorities have less executive power and in lack of solutions, ignore the existence of informal settlements. The inhabitants realized the value and spectrum of own self-built interventions. They occupied even more space on unattractive locations and increase the creativity in architectural solutions.

On the other hand, according to many authors, the sudden freedom for individual solutions preferred over the socialist “corset” of uniform units creates a new democracy and promotes the retro-stylish vernacular forms, but also allow all citizens to express their own architectural language-without plans and induced rules.

Image 42: Diverse architectural informalities: Vesna Hercegovac-Pasic: Transformability of urban space. University of Sarajevo. 2009

138

139

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Sarajevo Tool : Identity Construction

Chosen situation:

Sarajevo’s several moments of change in identity, due to the political and historical turmoils - in a relatively short period of time - have challenged the city to constantly re-adapt. This has fostered the re-use of existing built structures and open spaces that would house new programs, fulfill new functions and represent new religious, ethnic, economic or political identities.

Which two areas in two different cities could one identify where diverse forms of identity change materialized in urban space?

1. Glue two images that illustrate these changes (choose technique on your own).

2. Describe the process of identity change (usage types, function/program; what aspects changed, which agents/mechanisms/stakeholders were responsible, is it a temporary or permanent change etc.).

Chosen situation:

Image 43: Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina | New identities materialize in urban space

140

141

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

142

143

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

144

145

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

146

147

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

148

149

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

150

151

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

152

153

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

154

155

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

156

157

SARAJEVO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

158

159

1500 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

400 km2 / 2450 km2 0.4 mil.

/ 3.7 mil.

TOOLS

CAPE TOWN MASTERPLANNING SEGREGATION // GOVERNANCE / POLICY

DEVELOPMENT THROUGH DISTRIBUTION // HOUSING

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

34%

26%

15%

unemployment

21 bil.

24% green space

290 m2 / person

GDP

COOPERATION AND DIALOGUE // MICRO / TEMPORARY PROGRAMS

CAPE TOWN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: MASTERPLANNING SEGREGATION THEMATIC CLUSTER: GOVERNANCE / POLICY YEAR: 1900S APARTHEID CITY Main stakeholders: Governmental Institutions, Political Parties

Cape Town offers one of the most radical examples of the regulated right to centrality. Through the design and management of space by distance and accessibility, Cape Town developed a fraught relationship with its periphery.

Racial distribution in Cape Town is fairly stable and reflects the apartheid legacy. From the beginning of the 20th century, different settlements for particular ethnic groups, with increasing distances from the centre, where founded over time.

Starting 1923, the “Native Urban Areas Act” required all local urban authorities to establish separate residences for ‘Black African’ and to exercise complete control over immigration into these areas. They also prohibited property rights to Black Africans on the grounds that they were not permanent urban residents.

Image 44: Apartheid City

“Slums Act” of 1934, gave the Department of Health sweeping powers to expropriate what they deemed to present health risk. Slum owners would be served notices to repair their property, reduce the number of residents or face having the occupants evacuated. (1935 - 45) In 1948 the Reunited National Party won the national elections and confirmed Daniel Malan as Prime Minister. Their succes was based on the platform of appeasing White South Africans, who felt threatened by the black political aspirations and were dissatisfied with domestic and economic problems after World War II. Nationalists pledged to implement a policy of strict racial segregation in all spheres of living - “apartheid” (“apartness” or “separation”).

Apartheid Planning set about projecting the ideals of apartheid over the political territory and became the official urban structural policy of South Africa Government 1948 - 1994. It took different forms, but relied principally on the segregation of space and access based on a hierarchical racial classification. This system was progressively refined to service the needs of the ruling elite and the national, international economy.

Vanessa Watson, Change and Continuity in Spatial Planning Metropolitan planning in Cape Town under political transition Integrating Poor Populations in South African Cities, Integrating Poor Populations in South African Cities, Fanny Hervé The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, Nigel Worden The Bo Kaap and District Six in Cape Town that were built between 1938 and 1944, Andre van Graan Urbanisation and Development in South Africa: Economic Imperatives, Spatial Distortions and Strategic Responses, IVAN TUROK Of REVELATION and REVOLUTION VOLUME TWO, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff New South African Keywords, Edited by Nick Shepherd and Steven L. Robins Consuming Architecture: On the Occupation, Appropriation, Daniel Maudlin, Marcel Vellinga POVERTY AND INEQUALITY AFTER APARTHEID, Jeremy Seekings Informal Settlements: A Perpetual Challenge?, Marie Huchzermeyer, Aly Karam 162 Institutional and Social Innovation for Sustainable Urban Development, Harald A. Mieg,Klaus Töpfer

Image 45: Map of racial distribution in Cape Town - 2011

163

CAPE TOWN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: DEVELOPMENT THROUGH DISTRIBUTION THEMATIC CLUSTER: HOUSING YEAR: 1994 OWNERSHIP AND HOUSING RIGHTS Main stakeholders: National Governmental Institutions, Local Authorities, Real Estate Developers

The second tool highlights the post-apartheid period in Cape Town’s city planning. After 1994, the government started to gradually dissolve its total control and make way for a more integrative approach, where people could have their right to the city.

The aim was to link economic growth with redistribution and reconciliation and address inequalities in: housing, health, tenure, education and service provisions (water, electricity).

This is first encapsulated in the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) and reinforced in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and the Housing Act. This was manifested in its urban form as free housing units with access to water and electricity.

Image 46: Neighborhood of RDP houses - View from above

The RDP promise was for 200’000 - 300’000 houses to be built a year with a minimum of one million low-cost houses to be constructed within five years and after 10 years meet the backlog. Beneficiaries needed to be married or have financial dependents, earn less than 3500 RND (about 300 $) and not have received any other housing benefits. The delivery method was predominantly done through private sector developers who identified land and implemented projects drawing from the capital subsidy.

The strategy had three key points: distribute private property to foster productive investment, create home ownership to encourage the establishment of a middle class and ensure a strong voter base.

Twenty years later, the promise takes on extreme proportions with 350’000 houses in the backlog in Cape Town alone. Surveys show that some beneficiaries sell them illegally and then use the cash to set up a business from the shack. This makes a lot more economic sense for them than living in the RDP house, where you are not allowed to trade.

The size of each house was too small and the quality poor due to profiteering. Developers were complaining that the amount of subsidy was insufficient. These results, together with monopoly and corruption in the construction process and lack of new territory are just some of the problems that occured with this ambitious housing program.

Image 47: RDP houses in the neighborhood of Kayalitsha

164

165

CAPE TOWN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

THEMATIC CLUSTER: MICRO / TEMPORARY PROGRAMS YEAR: 2004-

TOOLS

TOOL: COOPERATION AND DIALOGUE

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

prototype; a participatory spatial planning process, integrated built environment infrastructure and social livelihoods programming.

By creating an interface between community, leading professionals and the state, the project aims to develop a pilot scheme that responds to the social, ecological and market dynamics of the post BNG urban context.

BREAKING NEW GROUND Main stakeholders: National Department of Housing, Local NGOs, Academic Institutions (ETHZ)

In 2004 the National Department of Housing released a new policy document for the development of sustainable human settlements known as “Breaking New Ground” (BNG). This document comprised a major paradigm shift in how housing is delivered and subsidies are allocated. It required constructing all new housing projects to be located close to amenities and planned in a comprehensive manner that incorporates access to infrastructure services and social and economic facilities. In addition, it set out different options for tenure security and diverse housing typologies based on the demands of individual households.

The N2 Gateway is the most ambitious low-cost macro scale housing development in South Africa. This initiative is a fully-subsidised national government-led priority project offering a mix of high-density rental and credit linked bond houses in designated precints along the N2 highway and settlement areas. Despite the aims, the project has been steeped in controversy: planning, implementation, slow delivery, poor construction, protests, rent boycotts and evictions. It lead up to the World Cup city beautification project to keep Cape Town a “highly ‘aestheticised commodity’ for global investment and consumption”.

Image 48: Meeting of residents from Joe Slovo, Langa, near Phase 3 of the N2 Gateway housing development

With 2008, Government policy begins to focus on the upgrading of informal settlements as the key mechanism to address the housing backlog. It does this by initiating the first informal settlement upgrading project through its new National Upgrading Support Programme (NUSP). This is formally acknowledged through the informal settlement upgrading subsidy included in the revised Housing Code. A strong drive is undertaken to provide all households with access to basic infrastructure services.

The focus shifted towards working in-situ rather than relocating people, new measures for acquisition and rehabilitation of well located land, flexibility in layout planning, participation in decision making and planning and new measures for service provision.

One of the bottom-up pilot initiatives on the micro scale is ‘Empower Shack’ - an interdisciplinary development project directed by the Urban Think Tank from ETH Zurich and Ikhayalami Development Services, in collaboration with the BT-Section (Site C) community of Khayelitsha and associated local and international partners. Through design and organisational models the project aims to upgrade the BT-Section informal settlement through the development, implementation, and evaluation of four core components: a light weight, two-story housing

166

Image 49: Building the first Empower Shack prototyp, Kayalitsha

167

CAPE TOWN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Cape Town Tool : Cooperation and Dialogue

1. Choose a location in another city where you can identify a situation arised in similar sociopolitical context (legal response to housing demand, governmental subsidy issues and policies, evictinon/relocation issues, upgrading existing settlements, etc.).

In 2004 the National Department of Housing released a new policy document for the development of sustainable human settlements in Cape Town. This document comprised a major paradigm shift in how housing is delivered and subsidies are allocated. Initially Provinces and Municipalities had difficulty in interpreting how to implement the policy. Despite aims, projects like ‘N2 Gateway’ have been steeped in contreversy: planning, implementation, slow delivery, poor construction, protests, rent boycotts and evictions. Overtime there was a recognition of the need to develop ‘in situ’ rather than eradicate the settlements and so did the first informal settlement upgrading programms commence. Projects like ‘BT Section Sites’ in Khayelitsha allowed local communities and residents to participate and manage their rights in the city. The goal of this exercise is to critically analyse projects developed in such circumstances and identify the key measures that determine their outcome and consequences.

2. Explain graphically the process and who is involved (e.g. scheme, plan, infographic etc.) using a free chosen visualisation technique (e.g. sketch, collage, etc.).

3. Provide a short textual description of the chosen situation and a detailed explanation of the processes and actors who are participating.

4. Point out the similarities and differences between your chosen location and the situation in Cape Town by providing corresponding and relevant explanations.

3.

1. Chosen city and location: 2.

4.

168

169

CAPE TOWN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

By

velopment plan for South Africa. Both required the use of forecasting and scenario building, with an eye on sequencing inter-related policy reforms over a 20-year horizon. During the past year, I have been enrolled in working on a long-term (2030) urban development policy framework.

The developmentalist rationales at play in this applied research stand at a sharp angle with the theoretical preoccupations of postcolonial academic debates on emergent urbanisms. They do offer, however, a novel way of thinking about the scope and dynamics of contemporary scholarship and practice on the African city 4.

SLUM LAB

AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT PATHWAYS SUGGEST AN INTERMINABLE FUTURE FOR SLUM URBANISM. HOW SHOULD WE THINK ABOUT THE IMPERATIVES OF SCHOLARLY WORK ON THE AFRICAN CITY? Edgar Pieterse

African Futures

…the point is to pursue the dogged work of trying to understand the implications of what people do, particularly as it is clear that residents, even in the desperate ways they may talk about their lives, usually think about them as more than survival alone. Yes, survival is the overwhelming preoccupation of many. But the pursuit of survival involves actions, relations, sentiments, and opportunities that are more than survival alone. It is these thousands of small excesses that also act on the city, remaking it ever so slightly into something different than it was before.

These changes are not measured by any easily discernable standard that would allow one to say that the city is becoming more just, equal, cutthroat, revolutionary, messianic, or hellish. And thus the important work is perhaps simply to document these efforts on the part of the poor to give rise to a new moral universe, a sense of value, of potential, and of the unexpected to which people’s attention, no matter how poor, is also paid2.

These two quotes are compelling as they foreground a profound tension between the need to pronounce on the how of achieving urban change and well-being versus a determined patience to simply elucidate ordinary practices in the now.

This tension connects my two primary research tracks over the past few years. On one hand, I have thrown myself headlong into an emerging field of future studies with a focus on the governance imperatives of sustainable urban transitions. On the other, I have been trying to assemble various epistemic communities with an interest in the arts and urbanism to train their attention on the emergent socialities of African cities in order to open up fresh discourses and visual registers on contemporary urbanisms3.

The former track is firmly within the domain of developmentalism and holds to the belief intentional action can improve life and aspiration for urban majorities despite profound structural and cultural barriers. The latter category lives within the postcolonial critique of modernity and developmentalism, but without any desire to declare a post-development era. It seeks to insinuate intimacy, microscopic social textures, psychic dispositions, aesthetic adventures and agency amidst constraints into the research frame. In order to hold on to my own sanity, I have kept these tracks rather separate, for each requires its own processes of immersion, learning and maturation.

From 2009 – 2013, I have worked on various public policy processes conducting long-term strategic planning with a focus on reimagining trajectories for urban areas in South Africa. One strand of work focused on the Western Cape region with Cape Town at its epicenter. The other fed into the policy development work of the National Planning Commission (NPC), tasked with producing a long-term de-

According to the African Futures 2050 study, 'over the entire half-century [19602010], Eastern Africa gained only about $150 per capita and Western Africa about $130 per capita, while GDP per capita in Central Africa has remained almost unchanged since 1960'5. This is an astonishing accomplishment of economic, political and social failure. Looking ahead to 2052, an even larger and more dramatic process of systemic exclusion will potentially eclipse this inventory of failure across most African countries. UN-HABITAT points out that almost 62 percent of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa live in slum conditions, coinciding with World Bank estimates that roughly 280 million urban dwellers can be regarded as income poor 6. The forecast data and speculation seem to suggest Africa will double its population by 2052, moving from 1.1 billion in 2011 to 2.3 billion; and an urban share of 40 percent in 2011 to one approaching 60 percent by 2052. Will the majority of the urban population continue to be slum dwellers? And what could the possible implications be of the cumulative impacts of slum urbanism over the course of almost a century?

Africa is the only world region that will maintain robust population growth momentum by mid-century. In particular, East and West Africa will more than double their populations from 250 million to almost 700 million respectively. Over that period of time, Africa’s share of the global population would have grown from 15 percent in 2010 to 23 percent in 2052.

However, despite this dramatic increase in its share of the global population of nine billion, it will remain largely peripheral in economic terms. In 2010, Africa accounted for 3.5 percent of global exports and slightly less of foreign direct investment (FDI). This grows only to 5.8 percent of exports and 5.3 percent of FDI by 20507.

SOUTH AFRICA

heir [deliberative planners] emphasis, instead, falls on motivating visions, scenarios, and diagrams of possibility placed under democratic scrutiny. The strategic role of the planner is not to draw up a plan for implementation, but to offer a vision, to map alternatives. I wonder, however, if something has been lost of the knowing tradition in this otherwise laudable attentiveness to urban complexity and multiplicity; a certain programmatic clarity over the overall aims and priorities of urban living, made all the more necessary in a context of radical uncertainty […] Has the attentiveness of deliberative planners to procedures of decision-making compromised the necessity to know about substantive matters of urban change and wellbeing?1

T

89

170

171

CAPE TOWN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

An aerial view of downtown Johannesburg from the Carlton Center

The break on economic performance is attributable to numerous factors, but the most critical are severe infrastructure deficits, governmental inefficiencies, dramatic market failures and the inability to forge effective regional trading blocs across the continent. The perpetuation of slums can be attributed to a lack of infrastructure and maintenance investments to ensure affordable access to reliable and safe energy, drinking water and sanitation. This is a direct function of relatively small formal economies, concomitant limitations on the tax base available for large-scale public investments, pervasive administrative inefficiencies overlaid by malfeasance and corruption – the lifeblood of many patronage systems propelling dominant political parties and elite systems across Africa8.

SLUM LAB

Recent private sector think tank reports suggest we can anticipate a significant shift in this picture on the back of sustained economic growth over the past decade or so. Much of this growth is related to the increasingly important role of cities in Africa’s economic trajectory. Monitor Group asserts: …the economic future of [sub-Saharan Africa] is more connected to the success of its cities, and the competitive clusters based there, than to its nation states. Cities today generate most of the wealth, with many thriving despite ob-

vious challenges. Rapid urbanization turbo charges economic growth and diversification, enhances productivity, increases employment opportunities, and improves standards of living 9.

The critical prerequisite for cities to play this role, however, is adequate infrastructural capacity coupled to just and consistent regulation.

During the past five years or so, much more attention has been devoted to understanding the scale and cost of the infrastructural deficit in Africa. This question goes to the heart of Africa’s prospects by mid-century, because if this challenge is not adequately addressed, large-scale poverty rooted in structural economic exclusion and economic under-performance will persist. The World Bank has pegged the overall infrastructure deficit at $93 billion per annum. This is the level of annual investment required to address current backlogs and cope with future growth. According to the same report, the level of annual investment peaks around $45 billion per annum, suggesting a massive shortfall, which of course means the scale of future investment costs continue to climb well above the $93 billion estimate 10.

Market pressures dictate that amidst infrastructural finance scarcity, particular kinds of investments get prioritized. For

90

172

instance, connective economic infrastructure such as roads, ports, and airports to ensure various primary commodities get to destination markets faster. There are also intimate connections between the infrastructure financiers from China, India and the United States, and the pathways these extractive commodities need to travel. In addition, it is clear essential network infrastructures to reticulate power, water, waste, data and the like are not thought of in terms of universal coverage, but follow a strange patchy geography along the contours of where the middle-classes and formal firms are embedded in the territory 11.

The net effect is an uneven geography reproducing splintered urban territories of connections and disconnections; a material metaphor of deep and enduring urban inequalities12. To be sure, fault lines follow social lines of distinction, discrimination and oppression, predictably encoded by ethnic, racial and class bases of power.

At the core of this unequal and unviable spatial patterning is the question of cost recovery, or more crassly, money 13.

In summary, if we articulate the doubling of the urban population by 2050, with very modest increases in GDP per capita, severe income inequality and systemic political dysfunction, we can anticipate that slum urbanism will remain an interminable feature of African cities. This trend data amplifies the profound differences

One-quarter of the labor force is unemployed and actively looking for work.

But this statistic masks the extent that a very high proportion of South African adults do not participate in the labor market. Only about 41 percent of the adult population (ages 18 to 60) work, either in the formal or informal sector, employed or self-employed. This rate is about two-thirds in countries such as Brazil or Malaysia, and about 70 percent in the US and UK 14.

Most disconcerting is that the cohort aged 15 – 24 experiences unemployment rates above 50 percent! If we combine this with the research finding that unemployed youth who have never entered the labor force by 24 are unlikely to ever hold a job in their lives, we begin to get a sense of the social and economic crises these statistics represent. Large-scale, endemic unemployment is undoubtedly one of the key drivers of the social development crises – low educational and health attainments relative to per capita spending and extraordinarily high levels of social violence – in South Africa.

The NPC underscores that the crisis of unemployment must be understood with an appreciation that the economy’s performance is at best mediocre, and vulnerable to stagnation and decline due to a variety of further structural problems. Most urgent are: a low savings and investment rate; a poor performing and expensive logistics system undermining competitiveness and productivity; the ageing and sometimes

What has emerged from the cross-fertilization of the four diagnostic reports of the NPC is that our settlement system is key to both the reproduction and potential dismantling of the contemporary dysfunctional development ‘model’. There are actually very few matured ideas, however, about how – within the conjunctural constraints of the political economy of statecraft and uninterrupted accumulation – to find a different path. Of course, the easy answer is to call for an overthrow of the dominant political and economic systems, but this is simply wishful thinking in a context where the South African economy is firmly attached to numerous global circuits, but responsible for less than 1 percent of global output. South Africa is too small to go it alone, and too large to be left alone to its own devices, especially when its role as a springboard economy into Africa is brought into the frame. The question remains, how to reimagine and rethink the patently unviable and unjust settlement dynamics of the South African economy, society and ecology?

Implications For The Immediate Future With the recent NPC analysis and larger African challenges in mind, a few trends are worth highlighting: ➀ Global capitalism will become increasingly unstable, prone to crisis as fundamental resource constraints catch-up with outdated regulatory systems that persist due to the vacuum in effective globalized regulatory standards and systems. ➁ The impacts of this systemic volatility, crises, loss in assets and economic value will be most severely felt by already excluded regions and groups – only to be worsened by the uneven impacts of intensifying climate change dynamics.

➂ Those wealthy classes and groups who are more buffered will first opt to insulate themselves, manifested in ever more fantastical spatial expressions of splintering urbanism, some coated in ‘green design’ foliage, and others simply opting out for more extreme forms of garish gatedness and insularity, which will increasingly manifest in both vertical and horizontal expressions17. ➃ The related effects will be even less resources to invest in substantive infrastructural solutions for slums and other parts of urban peripheries because spatial isolationism will continue to be underwritten by public network infrastructure investments in order to protect the sanctity of local tax bases. ➄ Amidst these transitional convulsions, governance arrangements will become even more stylized, performative and ineffectual in shifting the patterns of resource allocation, reinforcing radicalizing discourses and practices within civil society, but crowding out grounded interventions that can simultaneously improve the quality of life of people and hold states and elites accountable through surgical monitoring, advocacy and co-production.

With this admittedly bleak diagnosis in mind, how do we think about the imperatives of scholarly work on the South African/African city? I want to work my way through this question by instigating a more contested discussion through a series of propositions. What follows is premised on my reading of deeply held assumptions that anchor much of our contemporary scholarship.

Making Our Peace With A Few Unruly Things Proposition➀ As critical scholars and practitioners, we have to make our peace with the logics of markets. There is something important about engaging with the intense poetics of market dynamics, which involve compelling allocable and distributive systems – simultaneously holding the power to bring forth incredible fantastical innovation of both the episodic and mundane kind – whilst on the other hand instilling a measure of capriciousness that is clearly unjust and often cruel. Yet in our post-Marxist moment, important thinking must be done to subvert this and repurpose pervasive systems, cultures and desires for a different world. To simply insist that such

SOUTH AFRICA

SOUTH AFRICA

This is not the occasion to go into detail on the findings of the NPC, though a few stylized points are important to foreground.

Firstly, the commission has placed the fundamental manifestation of structural economic exclusion at the center of any discussion about the now and the future.

Specifically, the economic diagnostic report points out:

unreliable basic infrastructures that ensure power, water and waste treatment 15; high levels of economic concentration and tendencies towards uncompetitive behavior; and insufficient investment in research and development coupled to shallow innovation systems. The first two factors are clearly linked to the territorial basis of development and are of direct interest for urbanists. The NPC effectively invites the South African urban scholarly community to proffer their findings and insights, as these problems are directly related to: 'weak alignment between human settlements, economic opportunities, social services and transport'16.

SLUM LAB

between urban development challenges in most sub-Saharan cities and counterparts in South Africa. Indeed, South Africa operates from a different base in terms of the size of the economy, resources at the disposal of the state, and the degree of access to basic services and opportunity, but it does not diminish the fact that amidst relative abundance, more than half the population struggles to make ends meet, and experiences profoundly dislocated familial settings and extremely high levels of domestic social violence. In some ways, the depth and scale of South African development pressures can be read as an indictment of our collective inability to effectively unravel and recast colonial-apartheid inheritances.

91

173

CAPE TOWN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

SLUM LAB

I am not suggesting that organized interests of the urban poor are not a fundamental prerequisite for more egalitarian and interesting futures. Simply, that we need to stop projecting our own desires for virtuous heroes in order to make sense of how people survive amidst torrential oppression and continue to fail to rise up and seize their fair shares. Given the complex wiring of our psychic interiors, we must come to terms with identities in the making: they are invariably conflicted, contradictory, contingent and equally prone to altruism and selfishness, compassion and violence, and always hovering somewhere in-between in a state of constitutive uncertainty. If we then layer over this the routinized violence and damage a life without access to the basics implies, we can only surprise ourselves if we somehow continue to search for virtuous citizens that, in the absence of love, care, encouragement and spiritual sustenance, rise above their inevitable traumas. We need a much more provisional, psychologically attuned and culturally inflected discourse on identity, everyday life and social becoming within settings of almost permanent states of structural violence and violation19.

THE QUESTION REMAINS, HOW TO REIMAGINE AND RETHINK THE PATENTLY UNVIABLE AND UNJUST SETTLEMENT DYNAMICS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN ECONOMY, SOCIETY AND ECOLOGY? Y to consider that the demographic transition runs in lockstep with an uncertain but profound techno-social transition, as African and Asian youth become the digitally astute axis mundi of the world. These two transitions will intersect profoundly with the dramatic resource constraints already causing global markets to wobble 21.

Let us briefly consider the youth-digital interface. Can we really begin to fathom the implications of the fact normality for the majority of (poor) urbanites in Africa is now partially mediated by the digital device presently slumbering in all our pockets?

In 1995, a total of 600,000 mobile phones were in use in sub-Saharan Aff rica, of which 90 percent were in South Africa. By 2009, the number surpassed the mark of 300 million units, a growth of 51,300 percent. […] South Africa was the first to reach mobile market saturation and Nigeria grew to become the biggest market on the continent, with 75 million phones in use by 2009 22.

How far have we travelled to remodel our social and economic categories to take this ontological shift into account? The mobile phone is merely the surface re-

92

174

minder, however, of much more powerful currents of technological remodeling that will produce new categories of reality, life, materiality, communication, experience, interpretation, and most importantly, imagination.

This is not a yearning for adopting sci-fi sensibilities – although that is probably not a bad idea – but rather a provocation to come to terms with the technologically mediated nature of almost every aspect of routine reproduction of households, firms, neighborhoods and cities themselves, especially in our deeply inter-penetrated and multiple distanciated worlds 23.

There is a confluence between the youthful demographic of our continent, and the shifting tectonic plates regulating flows of data, resources, signals and symbols (and therefore desires and aspirations). If urban studies is anything, it is surely the apprehension and analysis of contemporary desire lines, explicating them in all their spatial and temporal fullness. Disruptive technological change is the only keyhole available to us to both imagine and instantiate more just, resilient and inclusive futures. These potential worlds are not the product of technological innovation in an instrumentalist sense, but rather rendered viable, and therefore obtainable, through artful struggle for technologically informed claims that paradoxically argue for distributed, low-tech and labor-intensive options.

Proposition➃ We need to make our peace with the fact the full swathe of modern institutions – the state, multinational firm and university, amongst others – are for all intents and purposes obsolete. As these institutions continue to perpetuate their denials about our postcolonial, post-foundational, post-carbon emergent moment, they are essentially going down fighting. They have much life and fight left in their sinews, but it is essentially a matter of time. This tendency is brought into sharp relief by the Asian economies that are, with incredible historical speed, eclipsing the dominance of the G8 – a pendulum swing that will perpetuate Africa’s marginalization, whilst fundamentally recasting Africa’s insertion into all kinds of material and value chains – inciting new bases of power, new ideological projects, and new frames of aspiration and dependence. How much of our work in city studies is consciously looking for these signs of the times? How far can we go to delineate a new prophesy for our era premised on truly post-postmodern articulations of institutional and regulatory times to come?

My argument here is not that regulatory and transmission institutions will disappear, but rather we will see the birth of new

institutional forms with novel regimes of governmentality to provide a sense of ordering, interaction and futurity. And these institutions will have to mould themselves to the dual and inter-dependent imperatives of decentralized production and consumption, embedded in a transnational culture of selective globalism and aspiration. Put simply, we cannot hope to solve the problems of structural unemployment, over-consumption, inequality and violence by scaling up the norms and machines of globalized consumer cultures. We need to understand the material and cultural imperatives of localism, selfsufficiency and autonomy, but profoundly sutured by multiple larger sensibilities of affiliation that will flow between religious, intellectual, lifestyle, technological, gender, sexuality, and financial imperatives.

Can we really critically reflect on, and project out of, the contemporary problems of the city without some explicit engagement with the futures rising up around us?

Proposition➄ If these ideas hold any water, then the final missive is simply a logical extension. We need to make our peace with the necessity and urgency of ‘partnerships’ in thinking about and transforming the city. In my reading of much of the contemporary literature on cities in the global South (and north), there is a deep and seemingly unshakable piety when it comes to documenting and analyzing the practices of the local state. Everything, whether it be service delivery efforts, tariff policies, safety nets, renewal efforts, public space interventions, public art competitions, and so on are read through the lens of neoliberal governmentality. We continuously discover local state actors who say one thing and do another – pithily captured by Bond in his 'talk left, walk right' tag 24. Of course, most of the time this is exactly what is going down. Yet this seems to be a profoundly fated conceptual positioning. Surely, we can critique and also explore other ways of thinking and doing – roll up our sleeves and work with various actors in the contested drama and really unpick ways of seeing, imagining, doing, and most importantly, reflecting. Here, the protean literature on social learning is most apt.

In their concise and suggestive book, Johnson and Wilson remind us that all aspects of the development process, whether symbolic political contestation of resource prioritization or the organizational execution of specific actions, invariably involve a multiplicity of actors across state institutions and society, needing some form of named coherence 25. This multiplicity simply intensifies as societal understanding deepens around the imperatives of integrated and multi-scalar responses to a

variety of development problematics. The result is always a complex entanglement of organizations, interests, agendas, power and resources, and in the absence of coproduced tools for conflict management, mediation and orderly contestation (that will of course always have an irresolvable excess), effective action and learning is simply impossible26. I am hard pressed to think of any contemporary urban issue in Africa exempt from these imperatives. Yet, when one encounters contemporary texts there is frequently a caricature of the ‘bad guys’ – the witting or unwitting agents of neoliberal governmentality, and the victims of this intentionality. Both sides are typically enfolded by larger market dynamics speeding inexorably towards ever more intense commercialization and commodification of life itself, let alone the supporting infrastructures for dwelling, working and moving about.

3

4

5

6

7 8 9

10

11

12

Surely, this cannot be adequate? Certainly, we can find more dynamic and relational analytical categories to capture the hybrid and inter-dependent formations gravitating around various points of action and intervention, and which in turn constitute a variety of relational networks and impulses continuously working to destabilize and recalibrate dominant understandings of how best to make sense of the city, how best to act on its unruly dynamics, and how best to reflect on and arrive at judgments about what is actually going on (or not, for that matter).

In concluding, I want to circle back to the opening quotes by Amin and Simone.

They ask of me: what is the scope for laying down some firmer knowledge claims for how our cities could be better understood, remade and engaged? Can such an ambition work with the injunction that in the multitudinous acts of survival, there lie precious pearls of insight into how the city presently works amidst its dysfunctionality? Insights that could even instigate propositions towards the larger knowledge project to build aspirational architectures for cities that are resource efficient, dynamically inclusive, surprising, impervious to crass social engineering, and fundamentally adaptive? My unsettled thoughts on this are a story for another time.

13

14 15

16 17

18

19

20 21

22 23 24 1

2

Ash Amin, ‘Urban Planning in an Uncertain World’ in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds), The New Blackwell Companion to the City (2011), 6377 8.

AbdouMaliq Simone, City Life From Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (2010) 38-39.

25 26

An initial product of this exploration is: Edgar Pieterse and AbdouMaliq Simone (eds), Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities (2013).

An earlier version of this paper was presented as a keynote at the South African City Studies Conference at the University of Cape Town in September 2011. I have retained the tone of a spoken paper and done some refinements.

Jakkie Cilliers, Barry Hughes and Jonathan Moyers, African Futures 2050: The next Forty Years, ISS Monograph 175 (2011) 30.

See UN-HABITAT, State of the World’s Cities / : Bridging the Urban Divide (2010); 2010/2011 Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen and Prem Sangraula, New Evidence on the Urbanization of Global Povertyy (2007).

Cilliers et al (2011) 60.

Patrick Chabal, Africa: The Politics of Suffering ff and Smiling (2009).

Monitor Group, Africa From the Bottom Up: Cities, Economic Growth, and Prosperity in Sub-Saharan Africa (2009) 6.

Vivien Foster and Cecilia Briceño-Garmendia (eds), Africa’s Infrastructure: A Time for Transformation (2010).

Stephen Graham, ‘When Infrastructures Fail’ in Stephen Graham (ed), Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Faill (2010).

These challenges are more carefully explicated in: Edgar Pieterse and Katherine Hyman (in press), “Disjunctures Between Urban Infrastructure, Finance and Affordability’ in Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield (eds), The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South.

See Sudeshna Banerjee, Quentin Wodon, Amadou Diallo, Taras Pushak, Helal Uddin, Clarence Tsimpo, and Vivien Foster, Access, Affordability, ff and Alternatives: Modern Infrastructure Services in Africa (Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic Background Paper 2, 2009) 4-5.

National Planning Commission of South Africa, Economy Diagnostic (2010) 3.

The NPC’s Material Conditions Diagnostic report points that: “between 1976 and 2002, annual public sector infrastructure investment fell from 8.1. percent of GDP to 2.6 percent of GDP, leaving a legacy of old, outdated and unreliable infrastructure […] The accepted norm for infrastructure investment, as a ratio of gross fixed capital formation to GDP, is 25 percent, with recent infrastructure investments shifting the South African ratio from 16 percent in 2006 to 19.3 percent in 2010” (21-22).

Ibid 12.

Vanessa Watson, ‘African Urban Fantasies: Dreams or Nightmares?’ (2013) 26 Environment and Urbanization 1.

See the perceptive rethinking on these issues in: Kees Biekart and Alan Fowler, ‘A Civic Agency Perspective on Change’ (2012) 55 Development 181.

I explore these themes more fully, yet inconclusively, in a few recent articles: Edgar Pieterse, ‘Grasping the Unknowable: Coming to Grips with African Urbanisms’ (2011) 38 Social Dynamics 5; Edgar Pieterse, ‘Cityness and African Urban Development’ (2010) 21 Urban Forum 205; Edgar Pieterse, ‘Hip Hop Cultures and Political Agency in Brazil and South Africa’ (2010) 36 Social Dynamics 428.

Laurence Smith, The New North: The World in 2050 (2011) 10.

UNEP, Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication (2011).

Jasper Grosskurth, Futures of Technology in Africa (2010) 40.

Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002).

Patrick Bond boasts an expansive oeuvre that is best explored through the following website: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za Hazel Johnson and Gordon Wilson, Learning for Developmentt (2009).

Michael Carley and Ian Christie, ‘Organizational Ecology and Innovative Management’ in Managing Sustainable Developmentt (2000).

SOUTH AFRICA

Proposition➁ We need to make our peace with the uncivil or unruly core of much of civil society. Most civil society organizations, whether in poor neighborhoods or not, are complex, contested and prone to conservatism, especially in the domains of biopolitics and gender relations 18. Yes, some embrace and espouse radical values and objectives, but typically there is a rather large gulf between ideological identity and lived practices. Moreover, it is often the somewhat less democratic, altruistic, and inclusive members who rise to the top to take on leadership positions and imprint their idiosyncratic proclivities on the identity of their organizations. This is not to suggest there is malign intent at work, but rather that we need to make peace with the sociological dynamics and power logics at play when people with few resources, limited political reach, and relative power over other interests within their domains of control are endowed with the political and moral responsibility to be the harbingers of all that is good and true in our futures.

Proposition➂ At some point we need to pause and take stock of the fact we are living through an incredible period of transition, shot through with all manner of technological shifts that will bring into view material-social-cultural articulations that remain, at best, obscure in our urban discourses. Let’s stand back with Smith and allow the following observation about the length of time in human history it has taken us to add a billion people to sink in: '11,800 years… 130 years… 30 years…

15 years… 12 years'20. The mind-blowing nature of this observation that we are now down to adding a billion people to our stock every decade-and-a-half or so – an estimated three billion over the next 40 years – is simply incomprehensible in terms of its implications. If this trajectory is not confronting enough, we also need

SLUM LAB

SOUTH AFRICA

READINGS

reimagining is only available in a postmarket ideological moment is to forego large swathes of innovation that can make a profound difference to the quality and prospects of urban life. What are the questions and theoretical touchstones we can weave into our diverse interests to begin to reimagine market logics beyond the narrow imperatives of unbridled proff it and accumulation?

93

175

720 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

790 km2 / 34500 km2 8.4 mil.

/ 23 mil.

TOOLS

NEW YORK HORIZONTAL - VERTICAL GRID // CITY EXTENSION

REVITALIZING INDUSTRY-MIXED-USE // INFORMAL / HYBRID CITY

REPURPOSING INFRASTRUCTURE // MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS

transportation means

25%

54%

10%

unemployment

1210 bil.

10% green space

30 m2 / person

GDP

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: HORIZONTAL - VERTICAL GRID THEMATIC CLUSTER: CITY EXTENSION YEAR: 1811 / 1916 A SUPERIMPOSED GRID FOR MANHATTAN Main stakeholders: City of New York / Mies van der Rohe Image 50: Commissioners Plan, 1811

In the late 19th century, citizens of Manhattan demanded better conditions of living as an alternative to the existing shanty towns. The chosen grid created building typologies, volumetries and open spaces, which, over the last century, generated the conditions for high density and the urban culture that define New York’s authenticity.

In 1865, the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizen’s Association of New York reported on the sanitary conditions of the city, highlighting the need to prioritize health. The grid has been a radical response to the bad sanitary conditions, an ambitious plan that aimed at becoming a model for other American cities.(1) The production of the urban space in Manhattan is a synthesis of the horizontal grid (1811’s Commissioners Plan) and the vertical component. New York’s 1916 Zoning plan defined the base frame for the building typologies developed in coming years - it regulated height and setback and designated land uses.(2) The Seagram Building (1957, Mies van der Rohe/ Phillip Johnson) is a reference for the typology of the skyscraper with plaza, a natural outcome of applying the 1916 zoning plan; this kind of materializations lead to the revision from 1961, based on the successful ‘private plaza’ strategy.

Continuous verticalization has lead to a space of high population density. The creation of the Central Park has provided a recreational free space from which to contemplate the overdense urbanscape. This breach in the urban structure highlights, by contrast, the city’s density and the grid, defining New York’s unique urban culture.

Image 51: Central Park (1) The Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizen’s Association of New York. 1865.

(2) www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/subcats/zoning.shtml 178

179

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: REVITALIZING INDUSTRY MIXED-USE THEMATIC CLUSTER: INFORMAL / HYBRID CITY YEAR: 2000S POST-INDUSTRIAL TRANSFORMATIONS AS ACTIVATORS Main stakeholders: Urban creative industries

New York, like many other cities, encountered in the last decades a decline in the output of manufactured goods, as well as of employment in the manufacturing sector, causing downturns and decline in urban areas.

Nevertheless, a shift from manufacturing to service sectors offers an opportunity for alternative strategies for revitalizing cities, by implanting new functions and refurbishing the existing industrial facilities.

One example of analyzing such potentials is the Vertical Urban Factory research project that looked at multi-storied factories, and their relationship with the urban environment. This research project analyzed industrial building typologies located in cities, integrating also the aspect of verticality as a potential. In addition, the impact of global economies on the physical space of industries was used to stimulate ideas for reintegrating the vertical factory and places of production into the urban fabric - both programmatically and economically.

Image 52: Long Island, Abandoned Industry

The project demonstrates how architectural and urban design issues addressing manufacturing in cities present an exciting design challenge for integrated systems and programs. The same problems demand solutions that could gather environmental benefits and create job opportunities. While some products will always be produced more cheaply overseas in industrial manufacturing areas due to low wages and tax free zones, others - such as those that relate to local markets, including food processing, elevator repair companies, high-tech, fashion, and furniture - survive and thrive within cities. These stacked industries could, in fact, revive both communities and their factory infrastructure. If industrialists and urban planners were to reconsider the potential of building vertically in cities, this, in turn, would revive the cycles of making, consuming, and recycling as part of a natural feedback loop in a new sustainable urban spatial paradigm.

Image 53: Vertical Urban Factory, Workshop Space

180

181

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: REPURPOSING INFRASTRUCTURE THEMATIC CLUSTER: MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS YEAR: 1990S NEW IDEAS FOR ABANDONED INFRASTRUCTURES Main stakeholders: Local communities, Landscape Architects

In the early 20th-century steam railroads emerged in places that were not connected by waterways, and the new trains soon reached the North-Eastern port cities in the USA; they became a tool of rivalry among cities like New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston. New York with its New York Central Railroad proved its superiority, ensuring the city’s continued dominance over the international trade from within the United States.

However, in the 1950s and 60s, trucking became a more financially viable way of transporting goods and New York began to de-industrialize as jobs went to other parts of the region or country.

Image 54: Reclaiing the Highline in 2006

In the mid-1980s, a group of property owners with land under the line lobbied for the demolition of the entire New York Central Railroad structure.

However residents in the area prevented this from happening by challenging the demolition threats in court. In the 1990s, as the line lay unused and in disrepair – although the riveted steel elevated structure was still strong –, it became known for the tough, drought-tolerant wild grasses, shrubs, and rugged trees that grew on top of the structure.

In 1999, a group of community members formed a non-profit organization and began applying for permits to redevelop the structure into a park. They also convinced the government to fund the project with extra backing from private investors.

This illustrates how some of the infrastructure that has lost its functionality is being transformed into linear infrastructures of public spaces and leisure facilities, which became the High Line.

The High Line today is a 1.6 km long elevated linear park, redesigned and planted as an aerial greenway. The highline shows that, even if big-picture planning is still important, such specific small-scale interventions can produce a high impact on the larger scale and influence urban processes.

(1) Jacobs, Jane. The death and life of great american cities. New York. 1961.

(2) PPS: Projects for public spaces. In: www. pps.org/new-york-city-streets-renaissance (3) DOT Streets Manual. In: www.nyc.gov 182 (4) Gehl Architects. In: www.gehlarchitects.com

Image 55: The highline park has become a tourist magnet (2009)

183

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE Please identify the following:

City : New York Tool : Horizontal-vertical and opening of the grid

Characteristics of each urban form (Urban Structure, Morphology, Street Hierarchy, Building Typology, Freedom in verticality vs. Freedom in Horizontality, open/green spaces etc.)

Reading and understanding different urban morphologies, including all advantages and disadvantages is crucial for understanding how a city functions and develops. New York’s specific urban form and its vertical and horizontal properties show the typical grid structure - together with its all positive and negative aspects. In the following case, analyse a very different urban form, the one of Paris around the “Place Charles de Gaulle” and make a comparison with Midtown Manhattan.

1.

Advantages and Disadvantages of each urban form.

Name a city with a similiar urban morphology from another continent.

1.

2.

2.

3.

184

3.

185

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

186

187

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

188

189

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

190

191

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

192

193

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

194

195

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

196

197

NEW YORK LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

198

199

10400 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

530 km2 / 1700 km2 10.2 mil. / 17.8 mil.

TOOLS

CAIRO COINCIDENTAL MASTER PLANS // CITY EXTENSION

DESERT CITIES // CITY EXTENSION

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

13%

48%

33%

unemployment

145 bil.

8% green space

2 m2 / person

GDP

REBELLIOUS INFORMALITY // INFORMAL/HYBRID CITY

CAIRO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

TOOLS

TOOL: COINCIDENTAL MASTER PLANS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

recommended the creation of industrial sub-centers to absorb population and limit the growth of the city (Helwan, Shubra, Al-Khima, Imbaba and Giza). It included Nasr City. Nasr City, build in 1960, is a city planned by the government, for the government- in terms of functions, it is a government center with a few ministries, and it marks the start of the Desert Cities planning policy.

THEMATIC CLUSTER: CITY EXTENSION YEAR: 1860 - 1960 RETROSPECTIVE OF PAST URBAN VISIONS Main stakeholders: Colonial Authorities, local Urban Planners,

From 1860 to 1960, Cairo has been expanding through the consecutive implementation of Master plans, and the establishment of institutional and regulatory mechanisms for building the city. The greater changes to the ancient Islamic city are undertaken under Khedive Ismael, and mark the state’s engagement in construction characteristic to Egypt- from Khedive Ismail’s grandfather Muhammad Ali to President Gamal Nasser.

In 1867, Ismael Pasha travels to Paris before the World Fair (the Exposition Universelle) -where Egypt is represented- and is impressed by Baron Hausmann’s program of Grand Travaux. This is the first vision of ‘Paris on the Nile’. The first Qasr al-Nils bridge was built in 1871, by a French firm, linking Tahrir Square and downtown Cairo, to the island of Gezirah, and the Zamalek district.

In 1882, Egypt becomes a British colony- a “veiled protectorate”. Mostly new elite areas flourished along the Nile, such as Garden City. The British rule marks mostly the disengagement of the state in the making of the city- left to private forces. Indeed, apart from the districts of Qasr al-dubara & Zamalek built by the State, private firms or individuals erected all new areas and districts of Cairo since 1911. The oasis city of Heliopolis was established around 1905, with a masterplan started in 1894 by the Belgian orientalist Empain. Helwan is created ex nihilo around 1876, as a thermal city, with a Masterplan designed by the German doctor Reil. In the 1920s, after the construction of the bridges across the Nile, Cairo developed on the west bank in Giza, (along the 8 kilometers Pyramids Avenue and the area of Dokki) again following speculative plans and designs by private firms. Another private agent, the Egyptian Land and Investment Company in 1929, for instance, develops the area of Maadi.

Image 56: Cairo map from 1911

After the 1952 Coup d’Etat when Nasser seizes power, socialist pan-Arabism is introduced.

Strict rent control laws were implemented, and private investment stopped for housing. In terms of urban growth, there are few major public housing programs like the large-scale area of Mohandesseen designed in 1948 by the Egyptian planner Ryâd that shows a grand design approach to town planning with axial compositions, perspectives and large parkways.

In 1956, the first comprehensive Master plan for the whole city of Cairo is drafted. The 1956 Masterplan envisioned a city with 5.5 million inhabitants in 2000- a number it has surpassed in 1965. A succession of other plans, and amendments, to correct this error were made. It

Image 57: Cairo Mohandessin

Volait, Mercedes. Architectes Et Architectures De L’egypte Moderne (1830-1950) : Genèse Et Essor D’une Expertise Locale. Paris, France: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2005.

Arnaud, Jean-Luc. Le Caire : Mise En Place D’une Ville Moderne, 1867-1907 : Des Intèréts Du Prince Aux Sociètès Privèes. Arles: Sindbad, 1998.

202

203

CAIRO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: DESERT CITIES THEMATIC CLUSTER: CITY EXTENSION YEAR: 1956 INTRODUCING SATELITE TOWNS Main stakeholders: Governmental Institutions, Local and International Urban Planners

‘Desert Cities’ is a planning idea born out of the Masterplan of 1956. Desert Cities, New Cities, or Satellite Towns are settlements created ex nihilo on desert land, government-owned.

Image 58: Map of Cairo’s new satellite cities

Until 1966, very few housing, public nor private, was built, which resulted in overcrowdingand deterioration of existing housing stock in the city. The 1970 revised master plan aimed at restraining growth and attempted to divert it to new towns built on desert land, so as to preserve agricultural land. Six new cities and satellite towns were established (10 Ramadan, El-Sadat, Badr, 6 October, 15 May, and El-Obour), and in addition ten new settlements along the ring road were to be created.

The objective of the 1983 master plan, developed with French planners, which revised the earlier plan of 1970 intend to further protect farmland by establishing new settlements on desert land and by encouraging urban development to the east and west of the city. It also incorporates the Ring Road to constrict growth. 10th of Ramadan with a masterplan from 1976, aimed at a self-sufficient city with 500 000 inhabitants by 2000, today there are 250 000 inhabitants officially.

10th of Ramadan, like other new cities, required a heavy investment from the State, and therefore often the lands were offered for bargain prices to developers. The cost for this new city was 1,5 billion british pounds, a third of the cost needed for a functioning sewage system for greater Cairo. Sixth of October is considered the most successful new city in Egypt- the goal was to host 550 000 inhabitants by 2000. Also, New Cairo City was created - a new settlement on Desert land, east and west of the capital-on a 2000 presidential decree, with a master plan designed by a Boston firm.

This resulted on the speculation-motivated construction of large and expensive housing in the form of upscale gated communities, unaffordable to most. In fact, many of Cairo’s desert cities are establishing themselves as gated communities-for upper socio-economic classes, who obviously do not comprise the majority of the Egyptian people.

New cities have been implemented with the professed goal of hosting all Egyptians. In reality, they strain public expenditures, diverting funds from the center and the informal areas into speculative schemes that often benefit speculators and serve upper classes.

Image 59: Desert Cities - Building New Cairo’s business district

Sims, David. Understanding Cairo : The Logic of a City out of Control. Cairo; New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2010.

Sims, David E. Egypt’s Desert Dreams : Development or Disaster?, 2014.

204

205

CAIRO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: REBELLIOUS INFORMALITY THEMATIC CLUSTER: INFORMAL/HYBRID CITY YEAR: 1960SURBANISM OF INFORMAL GROWTH Main stakeholders: Informal Developers, Local Comunity

Informal development happens all over Egypt and around Cairo in particular. While some say, there were virtually no informal settlements in 1960 in Cairo, informal and illegal expansion of the built-up area on peripheral agrarian land and desert is now a major problem of the authorities. In fact between the 1970s and the 1990s approximately 80% of the new housing units in Greater Cairo have been built informally. This informal urbanization does not mean land occupation or squatting on public land, but is the product of a non-official land market with private land owners.

Image 60: Manshiyat Naser - slum settlement in Cairo

One consequence of informal expansion is a precarious imbalance between urban growth and agricultural land that is becoming even more unbalanced as the city continues to grow.

This growth is highlighting how neither formal private and public housing policies are not responsive to the needs of low-income populations, which guarantees a steady demand for affordable informal housing.

The relative tolerance of the authorities towards illegal constructions facilitates forms of growth further. Concerning the farming population and the impact of the loss of agrarian land among peri-urban populations, it appears that the actors involved in food production in these areas do not have the means to resist against the ongoing pressure of urban expansion.

The urbanism generated by the informal growth can be problematic, with lack of services (schools, water, electricity), but all in all, they palliate the lack of convenient and affordable housing. Finally, in Egypt’s 2011 uprising, political and economic grievances were closely linked to attempts to address complex problems of corruption and injustice that related to urban questions. Free market and the impact of globalization as steering poverty have also been considered as factors of unrest because of the development of publicly funded and encouraged areas like desert cities, were public funds are being used, while informal areas lack basic services.

In 2011, of the 12 million Egyptians that live in these areas, many went to turn Tahrir Square into an insurgent space for eighteen days. One of the slogans shouted during the revolution was ‘bread, freedom, social justice’; this people that felt left out of the formal system went down to Tahrir Square in January 2011, marking their presence in the heart of the historical city, demanding their right to social justice.

El Kadi, Galila. “L’articulation Des Deux Circuits De La Gestion Fonciére En Egypte: Le Cas Du Caire.” In Housing Africa’s Urban Poor, edited by Philip Amis, Peter Cutt Lloyd and Institute International African, 103-17. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press for the International African Institute, 1990.

El Kadi, Galila. L’urbanisation Spontanée Au Caire. Vol. 18 Urbanisation Du Monde Arabe, Edited by Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur l’Urbanisation du Monde Arabe.

206 Tours: URBAMA [etc.], 1987.

Shehayeb, Dina. Cairo’s Informal Areas between Urban Challenges and Hidden Potentials. Cairo: GTZ 2009.

Image 61: Map showing the infromal settlements in Greater Cairo region

207

CAIRO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Cairo Tool : Rebellious Informality Official planning documentations, such as maps, plans, schemes are inevitable instruments in contemporary urban design. They contain crucial information regarding population and human densities, land uses, traffic loads etc.

2.

Cairo has one of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world (2.5 times denser than Zurich). Consider Zurich as a case study. In order to understand the issues and impacts of densification, verticalisation and land use, please take a look at http://maps.zh.ch/ and the Map “Bevölkerung”>”Räumliche Statistik zu Bevölkerung und Betrieben”. On this map you can find info about population density and business density (you can chose between those two from the menu bar).

1. Please identify several low and several high density areas/clusters on the maps, draw them onto the empty map on the right.

2. Explain the relation of population density to business density on the examples of the identified areas/clusters. How does it relate to different land use patterns, verticalisation (building heights) and traffic infrastructure?

1.

Map of Zurich showing population per 0.01km2

208

209

CAIRO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

Volume 37.5 September 2013 1584–610

The praetorian politics of land management in Cairo International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01202.x

ARTICLES Exclusion and Informality: The Praetorian Politics of Land Management in Cairo, Egypt W.J. DORMAN

Abstract Since the late 1970s, Western aid agencies, including the US Agency for International Development (AID) and the World Bank, sought to assist the Egyptian government in planning its capital, Cairo. The aim was to foster an administratively competent Egyptian state able to respond, for example, to informal urbanization of the city’s agricultural periphery by channelling the city’s growth into planned and serviced desert sites. However, these initiatives were almost entirely unsuccessful. Egyptian officials rejected engagement with the informal urbanization process. The projects became enmeshed in bureaucratic struggles over control of valuable state desert land. This article examines these failed planning exercises, first, in order to assess what they indicate about Egypt’s authoritarian dispensation of power, in place since 1952 but challenged in the February 2011 overthrow of President Husni Mubarak. It concludes that project failure is diagnostic of the regime’s exclusionary nature and the presence of autonomous centres of power such as the Egyptian military. Secondly, the article looks at how this political order shaped Cairo’s largely uncontrolled growth by constraining the Egyptian state’s capacity to manage it. Thus, urban planning in Cairo reveals how authoritarian power relations have been inscribed upon Egyptian social space.

Introduction The upheavals of the Arab Spring have played out in different ways. In Egypt, the February 2011 overthrow of President Husni Mubarak initially led the Egyptian military to reassert its dominant political role in the post-1952 dispensation of power. Observers of the post-Mubarak transition now commonly acknowledge that the armed forces have sought to constrain the emergence of a more democratic political order, necessarily Over a decade ago Sara Dorman told me to publish these urban-planning case studies, and I appreciate her patience in the intervening years. I am also very grateful to the IJURR referees, whose comments significantly strengthened the article’s argument, clarity and contextualization. Discussions with Toby Kelly and Safa Ashoub about Cairo in the post-Mubarak era provided unexpected inspiration and facilitated the revision process. The University of London Central Research Fund and the American Philosophical Society (Franklin Research Grant Program) provided essential financial support for the research upon which the article is based. The usual caveats apply.

READINGS

bs_bs_banner

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

1585

including civilian control of the armed forces, so as to protect their economic interests (Abul-Magd, 2011; Springborg and Henry, 2011; Azzam, 2012; Khalil, 2012). The military and its investment portfolio remain the most secretive elements in a state apparatus characterized by its opacity to outsiders (Hashim, 2011).

However, the study of international donors and urban planning in the Cairo metropolitan area since the 1970s offers an indirect window on the workings of the state and authoritarian political order, particularly the role of the military. President Anwar Sadat’s rapprochement with the West in the 1970s entailed the resumption of aid from the United States and other donors. In the urban sector, the Sadat and Mubarak governments sought Western funding for the ‘new desert cities’, ostensibly intended to attract growth away from their capital, which was rapidly becoming a 10-million-plus megacity. Most of this growth consisted of informal homesteading on nominally protected agricultural land. Donors such as the US Agency for International Development (AID) and the World Bank viewed the new cities as uneconomic and instead attempted a series of initiatives, from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, to channel informal urbanization towards the state-owned desert periphery. But because they challenged the elite monopoly on formal urbanism and its construction-driven approach to urban development, these donor initiatives for semi-formal homesteading were largely rejected by government authorities. Moreover, the desert periphery was actually controlled by the Egyptian military and other state agencies, which further blocked donor-backed planning efforts. Some of the proposed desert sites were subsequently developed as upper-income ‘gated’ communities, which proliferated on the Cairo periphery as part of the post-1991 Gulf War property boom.

Such project failures are salient to scholarly understandings of Cairo, Egypt and developing-world urbanism in several respects. Egypt watchers all too often interpret the latter years of the Mubarak government within the framework of neoliberalism, which they argue Egypt embraced in the 1990s at the behest of international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank (Mitchell, 2002; Beinin, 2009; El Mahdi and Marfleet, 2009; also see Rutherford 2008). The desert land boom, for example, is commonly seen as exemplifying the combination of globalized capital flows and domestic structural adjustment, particularly the privatization of public resources such as land. However, the focus on donor-backed projects examines the origins of this expansion in the period prior to 1991. It reveals a largely hidden politics of land speculation in which the armed forces and other state agencies competed to control the Cairo metropolitan frontier — and successfully excluded donor interlopers such as the World Bank — at least a full decade before the apparent turn to neoliberalism.

So while the land boom did depend on external funding and was framed in the language of neoliberal modernity, it is probably better understood in terms of the reproduction of a durable authoritarian political order. Since 1952, Cairo’s rulers have failed to engage with the actual existing city and neglected the provision of shelter and services for ordinary Egyptians, promoting instead an exclusionary urbanism largely for the benefit of the state-linked elite. The Egyptian military’s appropriation of the desert periphery was part of its ‘enclavization’, with the Mubarak government allowing the officer corps to construct an ‘autonomous military world’, probably in part to contain any broader political ambitions (Springborg, 1989: 105; Springborg, 1998). Thus, the study of urban planning in Cairo illuminates the workings of an authoritarian and patrimonial dispensation, in place since the 1950s, previously hidden to outside observers. It demonstrates how elite privilege has been inscribed on the metropolitan built environment and explicates, in considerable detail, what the military is seeking to protect in the post-Mubarak era.

Finally, the failed urban-planning cases illustrate that Cairo’s apparent ungovernability — neither ‘mastered nor planned’ — is closely connected to the post-1952 dispensation of power (Sutton and Fahmi, 2001: 135). While Cairo’s burgeoning informality may be characteristic of developing-world megacities (Liotta and Miskel, 2009), it nonetheless specifically reflects the exclusionary character of Egypt’s International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

© 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

210

211

CAIRO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

W.J. Dorman

post-1952 order. Such ‘self-help’ urbanization has been undertaken by ordinary Egyptians who have been priced out of elite-dominated formal markets and are without means to demand public redress. While state authorities have historically tolerated informal Cairo as the proverbial path of least resistance, achieving a de facto measure of political integration through clientelistic means, in some accounts informal urbanization has produced subaltern ‘spheres of dissidence’ antagonistic to the external state (Ismail, 2000: 364). By contrast, the donor urban-planning initiatives would have given Cairo’s rulers practical options for achieving their proclaimed aspiration of controlling the capital’s growth and dealing with its (putatively threatening) informal settlements. Their failure to pursue the semi-formal option meant that there was little alternative to bottom-up urbanization and the metropolitan area’s continuing expansion into the countryside. The Cairo planning cases thus illustrate how authoritarian power relations have weakened the state’s capacity to govern its capital.

State and elite Cairo’s governance remains embedded in the authoritarian dispensation of power inaugurated by Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officer colleagues following their seizure of power in July 1952. The Nasser government sought to eliminate not only its political rivals, but all potential alternative centres of social power (Beattie, 1994). In the post-1952 dispensation, formal politics have been largely monopolized by a succession of ‘presidential monarchs’: Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak (Lesch, 2004; see also Kassem, 2004). Indeed, after 1999, Egyptian politics seemed incipiently dynastic, as Mubarak appeared to be grooming his son Gamal to succeed him (Shehata, 2008). But changes in presidential power requirements and the international environment have resulted in the political order not remaining entirely static. Sadat, for example, distanced himself from Nasser’s populism and pseudo-Leninist vanguardism — as well as the material support from the Soviet Union — in favour of limited economic and political liberalization and a rapprochement with the West. But there have also been substantial continuities in terms of the (informal) means through which power has been exercised. Devolved patronage has long been an important tool, not only of top-down control, but also for demarcating the boundaries of elite privilege vis-à-vis the broader Egyptian society (Springborg, 1975; Waterbury, 1976).

In this autocratic setting, state-led development — including the nationalization of most of the private sector by the early 1960s — led to the growth of a bureaucratic leviathan state demobilizing and clientelizing Egyptian society (Vatikiotis, 1968; see also Waterbury, 1983; Ayubi, 1995). But however impervious to domestic challenges, the Egyptian state has had limited ‘reach’ into Egyptian society. Egypt’s rulers since 1952 have been unable to tax directly, mobilize Egyptian society in the service of their developmental goals or even to regulate it at the grassroots level (Adams, 1986; Sadowski, 1991; Barnett, 1992). The state has lacked the ‘infrastructural power’ — grounded in state–society bargaining and a measure of bottom-up consent (Crone, 1988; Mann, 1988). Moreover, autocracy has had a corrosive effect on internal state capacity.

The use of state agencies as employers of last resort, as well as vehicles for elite aggrandizement and control, has resulted in bureaucratic fragmentation, ‘erratic’ policymaking, inefficiency and immobilism (Springborg, 1979: 53; Henry and Springborg, 2001).

So while hegemonic in its pretensions, the Egyptian state is often a ‘lame leviathan’ (Munro, 1998; see also Callaghy, 1987). Its formal institutions have functioned as channels for elite networking, rent seeking and accessing the externally generated income streams — including ‘strategic rents’ in the form of foreign aid from the United States and other donors — which have long supported the Egyptian political economy (Springborg, 1975; Richards, 1991: 1721; Soliman, 2011). In respect of Egyptian society, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

212

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The praetorian politics of land management in Cairo

READINGS

1586

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1587

the Egyptian state since 1952 can best be grasped as a ‘gate-keeper’ (Cooper, 2002). In direct control only of the ‘main axes’ of the country (Roussillon, 1998: 390), it can merely ‘[annex]’ the rest of society ‘from the outside’ (Ayubi, 1995: 447). Egyptian governments have frequently ruled otherwise ‘self-managing communities’ through local notables and other allies on the ground (Roussillon, 1998: 390).

The post-1952 proclivity for ‘edifice projects’ is illustrative of such shortcomings. The Nasserist state-building project had developmentalist aspirations — what James Scott has called ‘authoritarian high modernism’: that states can achieve rapid socioeconomic change through a combination of technology, planning and administrative fiat (Scott, 1998: 87–102). These were most visible in such 1960s ‘edifice projects’ as the Aswan High Dam and the Tahrir Province land reclamation scheme, but also include the new desert-cities initiative. Intended to capture the public imagination and act as legitimating symbols for the government of the day, these projects provided a means of distributing patronage (Springborg, 1979; Moore, 1994). Economic and spatial development in Egypt has hence been largely construction led, with projects often substituting for policies (Deboulet, 2010). However, such projects are also very expensive, and frequently wasteful (Beblawi, 2008), thus helping to explain the bureaucratic administrative state’s long-term dependence on external income and its cyclical financial crises. Perhaps most importantly, ‘edifice projects’ can be understood as attempts by the rulers of a gate-keeper state to transform Egyptian society without actually engaging it.

Such interventions bypass existing communities in favour of bespoke social spaces; the latter could be created unilaterally without the need for state–society negotiation (Waterbury, 1983).

In Cairo, the leviathan state has been visible in the elaborate security apparatus created to guard the capital against its inhabitants (Dorman, 2009a). More subtly, close to half the city’s (formal-sector) labour force are state employees (Sims, 2011). But the ‘weight’ of the Egyptian state in Cairo is also indicative of its ‘lameness’. Cairo’s governance has been fragmented by the fact that over a dozen public bodies have a stake in it. These include the housing ministry, long notorious for underperformance and bureaucratic instability, which in the 1970s and 1980s was repeatedly joined with and split from the ministries of planning, reconstruction, new communities and utilities (Meikle, 1988; Moore, 1994; Hamza, 1998; see also Harik, 1997). The metropolitan region’s territorial administration has been historically divided into three administratively autonomous governorates — the Cairo governorate on the east bank of the Nile, the Giza governorate on the west bank and the Qalyubiyya governorate, which includes some of the northern areas of the east bank agglomeration — thus greatly complicating city planning (El Kadi, 1992).1 Finally, the arrival of international aid donors in the 1970s led to agencies — such as the housing ministry’s General Organization for Physical Planning (GOPP) — which functioned mainly as donor clients and had very little bureaucratic or on-the-ground influence (Dorman, 2007). The governorates, while often responsible for implementing land-development and planning decisions, have had few funds to undertake such projects; three quarters of their funds are spent on staff salaries (Sims, 2011).

While Cairo-based governments have been unable to penetrate Egyptian society at large, the weight of the state has nonetheless had a significant effect on it. The systematic use of devolved patronage has helped create an elite of regime insiders with preferential access to state spoils and opportunities for political participation, resulting in the concomitant exclusion of the sha’b or ‘popular classes’ (Singerman, 1995; Roussillon, 1998; Sonbol, 2000). Historically, the elite has functioned as a coalition of dependent interests around the presidency, including the military, senior bureaucrats and public-sector managers (the so-called ‘bureaucratic’ or ‘state bourgeoisie’), ruling-party 1

In 2008, the metropolitan area was further subdivided, creating two additional governorates (Sims, 2011). These new governorates were subsequently abolished in April 2011 (Ahramonline, 2011).

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

213

CAIRO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

W.J. Dorman

officials, corporatized sectors such as labour and a ‘crony capitalist’ private sector — including land developers and construction contractors — dependent on state-created rents and opportunities (Waterbury, 1989; Adly, 2012). Some observers have seen this last group as politically ascendant, especially since 2004, but the Mubarak overthrow demonstrates that ultimate power remains with the armed forces. Ironically, Mubarak’s efforts to depoliticize the officer corps in the 1980s allowed it to develop a parallel economy and set of social-welfare institutions dedicated to its own corporate aggrandizement (Springborg, 1998). The military’s visibility in Egyptian public life had markedly diminished by the 1990s, especially following Mubarak’s removal of his irrepressible defence minister — and likely rival — Abdel Halim Abu Ghazala in 1989.

However, it is likely to have retained substantial ‘behind-the-scenes’ influence and now had substantial assets in land, labour and capital — presently representing at least a quarter of GDP — none of which has been subject to public scrutiny, let alone accountability (Springborg, 1998; Cook, 2003; El Mahdi, 2012; Sayigh, 2012).

In respect of the study of Cairo, the term ‘elite’ encompasses multiple categories of influence and privilege. It includes senior officials in the housing ministry and its various agencies, as well as the public- and private-sector contractors who depended on their contracts. In the 1970s, they expected that the World Bank and other donor interventions would fund their activities — probably hoping to be direct beneficiaries too — and were thus appalled at the donors’ preference for semi-formal development, which they believed to encourage informality and undermine the authority of the state (Sakr, 1990). More generally, the elite includes those with state-mediated access to land, housing, credit and infrastructure. Such access can take various forms, including control over public-sector flats, bespoke military and police housing estates and subsidized housing cooperatives (Singerman, 1995; El Kadi, 1987; Harik, 1997; Sims, 2011).

Particularly salient here is military housing and control of land. The former dates back to the Nasser era and was backed by Sadat ‘as a measure to secure the armed forces’ political support’ (Zohny, 1988: 202). By the early 1980s, the officer corps had seen their official entitlements badly eroded by the inflation of the previous decade and in comparison to the nascent private sector.2 As part of a broader attempt to reverse this decline, Abu Ghazala expanded the military housing programme so that all serving and retired professional soldiers would have their own flats by 1986 (Springborg, 1989).

From 1985 to 1986, 5% of all housing constructed in Egypt was by and for the military.

Crucial to this agenda were defence ministry holdings in the western and eastern deserts around the city, which had originated in the policy of dispersing bases and facilities during the wars with Israel through 1973 (Sims, 2011). Following the cessation of hostilities, the domestic focus shifted to postwar reconstruction, with military-controlled areas becoming a valuable ‘land bank’ that the armed forces developed via organizations such as Armed Forces Land Projects, and which they defended from other state agencies and even sought to expand by acquiring valuable properties through force majeure (Springborg, 1989; Arandel and El Batran, 1997; Abul-Magd, 2011; Sims, 2011) Such land represents a kind of multi-purpose capital: enabling ‘joint ventures with public sector and private developers’ and thus ‘forging linkages with strategic elites’ (Springborg 1998: 6). Military-linked contractors are also said to have privileged access to the tenders for developing such sites (Sayigh, 2012).

But real-estate speculation was not confined to the military and has been a basic form of elite aggrandizement since the 1970s. In some cases, state officials turned a blind eye to the appropriation of land, both public and private, and its development (El Kadi, 1987; 1988). In other cases, state agencies and parastatals did the converting, for example, in the name of ‘land reclamation’ (Springborg, 1989). A final way of thinking about the

214

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The praetorian politics of land management in Cairo

READINGS

1588

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1589

Cairene elite is to include those with sufficient wealth — whether earned overseas or with state mediation — to buy real estate in the formal market and own a private automobile. While representing no more than 10% of the overall housing market, they have been the primary non-state beneficiaries of government attempts to encourage private-sector housing production since the 1970s (El Kadi, 1987; Harik, 1997; Sims, 2011). Similarly, car ownership is limited to roughly 11% of households in the metropolitan area (Sims, 2011).

State planning and informal Cairo Informal urbanization in Cairo reflects the Egyptian state’s inability to manage Cairo’s rapid growth from a population of roughly 3 million in 1947 to over 17 million currently (Sims, 2011). The Nasser and Sadat governments found it difficult to fund the housing and infrastructure necessary to expand the formal city, especially after the start of cyclical economic crises in 1965 and the protracted confrontation with Israel (1967–74) (Serageldin, 1991; Sims, 2011). Indeed, the Nasser government initially sought in the 1950s to curtail housing investment in a deliberate — albeit ineffective — effort to redirect resources into industry (Wahba, 1994; Harik, 1997).

Yet Egypt’s rulers were not entirely oblivious to the demographic pressures on the capital. Consistent with authoritarian high modernism, state planners have sought to contain Cairo’s growth and redirect it top-down elsewhere. The planning ethos has been about imposing schematic order, what Deboulet calls the ‘dictatorship of the straight line’ (2009: 211–14). It emphasizes geometrical grids and symmetric forms, and is largely oblivious to the local environment and financial constraints. Yet these latter factors have historically constrained any imposition of the modernist vision, its implementation also having been shaped by the exigencies of authoritarian reproduction.

The result has been an ineffectual construction-led approach to controlling Cairo’s growth, which has mainly benefited elite Cairenes and ironically supported informal urbanization.

Initial planning efforts

2 Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, Egypt: the roots, values, and attitudes of the officer corps (March 1982), August 2010. CIA-RDP83B00232R000100060006-1, CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

The first attempt, the 1956 master plan, closely ‘followed the traditions of British town planning’, introducing ‘notions of ideal size, containment, development standards for new growth and long-range (20-year) planning to guide and control development’ (Serageldin, 1985: 123). Such traditions were embodied in the recommendation that Cairo’s population be limited to 3.5 million, excess growth being diverted into satellite communities, preferably located in the desert (Joint Housing and Community Upgrading Team, 1977; El Kadi, 1992). Like all static plans, it was immediately vulnerable to the city’s rapid growth: by 1960, the population was well in excess of 4 million (Abu-Lughod, 1971).

Indeed, the plan was never elaborated in any detail, officially accepted or implemented (ibid.). One political problem was the Nasser government’s fear that the construction of the satellite cities would diminish its political control over a labour force ‘susceptible to communist blandishments’ (El Kadi, 1990: 191). Hence it preferred to locate industrial development closer to the existing agglomeration, usually on arable land, ironically putting in place the infrastructure and employment opportunities that would later support the growth of informal settlements. Perhaps most importantly, the 1956 plan served as a rationale for the construction of the show-piece neighbourhoods Muhandisin and Nasr City for important regime constituencies (AbuLughod, 1971; El Kadi, 1992). The latter was intended to be an ‘administrative city and centre of power near the major army installations in Heliopolis’ (El Kadi, 1990: 191– 92), reflecting the explicitly praetorian character of politics at the time. Its rapid growth in the late 1970s and early 1980s was largely the result of ‘construction for the military’ (Springborg 1989: 105).

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

215

CAIRO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

W.J. Dorman

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The praetorian politics of land management in Cairo

1591

A second master-planning attempt, undertaken in the mid- to late 1960s, concluded that Cairo’s growth had exceeded the city’s carrying capacity (GCPC, 1970). Similar to the 1956 effort, it recommended the ‘containment’ of Cairo in terms of its ‘ideal size’ and emphasized ‘large-scale projects requiring heavy investments and high levels of subsidy’ (Serageldin, 1985: 123). The plan concluded that Cairo could not be expanded cost-effectively, and advised that the city’s growth be capped at 9.5 million. Expected excess population, estimated at around 5 million by 1990, would most efficiently go to four satellite cities to be built in the desert.

A casualty of the war years, the plan did not receive formal approval until 1974 and was, again, overtaken by Cairo’s actual population growth, which had reached close to 8 million by 1976 (SUBE, 1994; Sims, 2011). What little urban development did take place in the early 1970s consisted largely of discrete construction projects undertaken by political insiders such as Ahmad Muharram and Osman Ahmad Osman, whose Arab Contractors construction firm exemplified the crony capitalism of the Sadat era (Moore, 1994).

land-use regulations and as ugly, dirty and backward. Official rejection of informal Cairo also reflected concerns (yet to be substantiated empirically) that such urbanization would eventually consume Egypt’s scarce supply of arable land, the 2% of the country where spatial development has historically taken place (Dames and Moore, 1981; Mayo, 1982; Sims, 2011).3 It further embodied deep-seated elite fears of rural-urban migration in which uncivilized peasants from upper Egypt purportedly threatened to overrun the national capital (Miller, 2006; Sims, 2011).

But while Cairo’s rulers refused to recognize informal Cairo as legitimate urbanism, they could do little to stop it without extending the elite privilege of formality into the city’s subaltern neighbourhoods. Even after the security campaigns against Islamist militants in a number of informal Cairo neighbourhoods in the early 1990s, state authorities failed to sustain a promised policy of demolishing or upgrading existing communities and preventing the creation of new ones. Rather, the de facto policy continued to be a mixture of toleration and tacit acceptance, with only a pretence of sanctions or state investment (Dorman, 2009a; Sims, 2011).

Informal urbanization

The new desert cities

Despite its packaging in the language of ‘rational, efficient and scientific management’, such planning was little more than a combination of wishful thinking and elite aggrandizement (El Shakry, 2006: 85). It did little to contain or direct the demographic pressures on the capital, and these were consequently channelled into the informal sector.

From the mid-1960s, the lack of new subdivisions accessible to ordinary Egyptians resulted in the steady inflation of land and housing costs (Wheaton, 1979; Mayo, 1982).

Increasingly priced out of formal housing, and with no means of demanding intervention from an otherwise financially exhausted state, ordinary Egyptians sought a less confrontational self-help solution. They began to purchase farmland on the city periphery — which was substantially cheaper, as it lacked planning permission and services — for subdivision and development (Mayo, 1982). The process resembles Asef Bayat’s notion of a ‘social nonmovement’ (Bayat, 2010). Young families and others looking to improve their housing stock acted in parallel without explicit coordination or ideology. They left the capital’s overcrowded and decaying historic districts to settle in homesteads in sprawling suburban belts surrounding the formal agglomeration (Bayat and Denis, 2000). At the outset, such settlements often ‘piggy-backed’ on infrastructure installed for public housing or industry (Mayo, 1982).

While strictly speaking it was not collective action, the sheer scale of this subaltern homesteading transformed Cairo from below. Informal housing now shelters close to two-thirds of the city’s population outside the state’s administrative umbrella (Sims, 2011). Egyptian governments have sometimes forbidden the servicing of such ‘illegal’ neighbourhoods, but these did gradually acquire better access to public infrastructure, often because of Western aid projects (Mayo, 1982; Dorman, 2007). Yet the Egyptian state’s regulatory and service-provision role remains so limited that one Western student of the city declared that ‘basically Cairo manages itself’ (Tutton, 2011; see also Sims, 2011). In effect, informality represents the rationing of public services such that almost all domestically funded investment is spent on ‘formal’ neighbourhoods housing a progressively smaller proportion of Cairenes (Sims, 2011). Hence, informal urbanization reflects not merely the disengagement of a gate-keeper state but also the exclusionary character of the political order in which formality, and its attendant benefits, has become the preserve of the elite (Deboulet, 2009).

Public reactions to informal Cairo thus embody the tension between the state’s hegemonic pretensions to impose straight lines and the political utility of such neighbourhoods as cheap subaltern housing. The Cairo authorities largely ignored informal urbanization at least through the mid-1970s (Sims, 2011). When periodically obliged to take notice of such communities, they denounced them for violating numerous

In April 1974, Sadat inaugurated what was to become Egypt’s main urban development policy: the construction of new desert cities (see Figure 1). Some were free-standing new towns such as 10th of Ramadan, between Cairo and Ismailia, and Sadat City, located halfway between Cairo and Alexandria (El-Shakhs, 1994). Others were satellites of the existing Cairo agglomeration, roughly corresponding to those recommended in the 1969 plan: El-Obour between the Bilbeis and Ismailia roads northeast of Cairo, 15th of May outside Helwan in south Cairo, and 6th of October in southwest Giza. Together with 10th of Ramadan, they were originally intended to house some one million Egyptians by 2000 (El Kadi, 1992).

Although neither a town plan nor exclusively Cairo-focused, these new desert cities became the principal Egyptian approach to coping with the capital’s growth and informal urbanization. They were to be ‘relief poles’ that would attract population and industry away from Cairo (Sims, 2000: 17–18). Such a redirection of people and capital was predicated on freezing investment in the capital and decentralizing state institutions. In practice, the new towns have served mainly as a panacea (Sims, 2011). They gave Egyptian officials a pretext for ignoring Cairo’s actual growth and sidestepping the complexities of the existing (increasingly informal) city in favour of an alternative urbanism to be enacted unilaterally.

Indeed, desert development is best understood as an edifice project and exercise in elite urbanism, rather than a practical solution to the problems it was nominally intended to address. The new towns have proven extremely expensive for the state — especially as the Egyptian government sought to attract business and residential immigration with large subsidies — representing 20% of its annual capital spending by 1991 (Zaghloul, 1994; Stewart, 1996). While some now house an economically important manufacturing sector, they were initially nicknamed ‘ghost towns’ in the Egyptian press (Feiler, 1992).

Most failed to acquire a significant residential population; their total combined

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

216

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

READINGS

1590

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

3 While such fears are intuitively plausible and supported by limited research, the issue of land loss is under-studied and affected by problems of data quality (Abdel-Salam et al., 2005; Denis and Séjourné, 2002; El-Hefnawi, 2005). A more systematic assessment of the effects of urbanization on the agrarian sector would need to consider the role of other environmental factors on land loss, the contribution of land reclamation to replenishing the stock of arable land and, finally, more general factors affecting the productivity of Egypt’s agrarian sector (Ireton, 1998). Such factors include the negative consequences of state intervention since the 1950s, which have contributed to the predominance of non-agricultural economic activities in nominally rural areas (Adams, 1986; Sadowski, 1991; Adams, 2003; Sims, 2011).

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

217

CAIRO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

W.J. Dorman

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

The praetorian politics of land management in Cairo

READINGS

1592

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

1593

Planning Cairo’s future

Figure 1 Cairo in regional context, 1980s (sources: Abdel-Kader and Ettouney, 1989: 44, Figure 1 and PADCO, Inc. et al., 1982a: 77, Figure III-1; reproduced by permission of Practical Action Publishing; map first appeared in Zetter and White, 2002)

population in 2006 did not exceed 900,000 (Sims, 2011). None of them have ‘made the slightest dent in Cairo’s growth’ (Sims, 1990: 5; see also Sims, 2011). Lower-income housing in the new towns was often substandard, initially far from job opportunities and lacking in basic amenities such as shops (Denis, 2008). The modernist developmental ethos further precluded large-scale construction of semi-formal owner-built neighbourhoods that would have been genuinely accessible to ordinary Egyptians (Kardash, 1993). Instead, the new desert cities largely attracted speculative property investments from upper-income Egyptians — land in 10th of Ramadan was allocated to businessmen with connections to the ruling party — and became associated with luxurious gated communities in the 1990s, as will be discussed below (Denis, 1997; Osman, 2010).

Nor did the Mubarak government make much progress in either freezing investment in Cairo — which has also had privileged access to services — or decentralizing the bureaucracy (Ibrahim, 1996). During the latter years of the Sadat government, various civil ministries, for example, those responsible for housing and planning, had agreed to relocate to Sadat city. However, after a series of ministerial and portfolio reshuffles in the 1980s, the reconfigured state agencies rejected transfer (El-Shakhs, 1994). These included the ministry now responsible for the new-towns programme, whose staff threatened industrial action (Sims, 2011). But even if the government relocations had gone ahead and the new towns had grown more rapidly, it is unlikely that the desertcities initiative would have led to a broader process of spatial reconfiguration (El Kadi, 1992).

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

218

While high modernist attempts to plan Cairo’s growth failed to check informal urbanization, Egypt’s rulers since the 1970s have not faced Cairo alone. From the late 1970s, the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development (AID) undertook a series of urban-development projects related to housing, infrastructure and improved public services in the capital. Such efforts were part of a broader effort to support the Sadat government’s rapprochement and reflected Washington’s fear that his government was vulnerable to urban crisis and unrest in the rapidly expanding city.4 While the need to work with official agencies meant that donors inevitably credited the Egyptian state with too much capacity, they were hardly oblivious to Cairo’s governance shortcomings. Rather, they sought to reform an urban administration that was hegemonic in its pretensions but ‘lame’ in practice by moderating its aspirations, strengthening its institutions and increasing its practical capabilities. In short, they sought to foster an administratively competent Egyptian state better able to govern its capital.

Such initiatives included upgrading existing informal communities and constructing low-cost housing, using the aided self-help approach to facilitate cost recovery from beneficiaries in order to make upgrading a self-replicating process. Ideally, if somewhat ironically, such an approach was intended to diminish the Egyptian state’s dependence on external resources for its infrastructure spending. However, these initiatives were poorly prepared and encountered official Egyptian resistance. Urban-sector bureaucrats rejected aided self-help as a violation of the — implicitly exclusionary — modernist ethos (Sakr, 1990). Cost recovery would have necessitated state–society bargaining— for example, over revenue mobilization and property rights — contradicting the established mode of rule, whereby an unaccountable state distributed goods and services top-down (Dorman, 2009b). Egyptian officials were mainly interested in urban development as a means of funding (conventional) construction projects, most notably the new desert cities.5 Western donors hence eschewed further upgrading of informal communities in situ.

Through the early 1990s, they experimented with a more proactive approach instead, working with Egyptian state agencies such as the General Organization for Physical Planning (GOPP) to reorientate Cairo’s growth away from arable land. Western planners, noting the Egyptian failure to curb informal urbanization, sought to harness its ‘dynamism’ and recommended that the Egyptian government attract homesteaders towards planned and serviced desert sites (Dames and Moore, 1981; Zaghloul, 1994).

Under Egyptian law, desert land is state-owned, which ostensibly simplifies land acquisition (Tayler and Green, n.d.) The ‘sites and services’ approach has since fallen out of favour with donors — in part because of the difficulties of acquiring land — but the projects reflected a consensus amongst Western students of Cairo’s expansion (Tayler and Green, n.d.). Managing the city’s growth — whether to protect arable land or facilitate service provision — required a break with existing policies of principled prohibition and practical indifference. Regardless of the precise method, Cairo’s authorities would need to engage with the informal urbanization process and create 4 For detailed Cairo studies, see Central Intelligence Agency, National Foreign Assessment Center: Cairo’s housing shortage: prospects and political implications (November 1981), August 2010, CIA-RDP06T00412R0002000530001-0; and CIA, Directorate of Intelligence: Public services in Cairo: potential for unrest? (April 1983), August 2010, CIA-RDP84S00556R00010011002-2, both CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD. 5 This preoccupation is clear from the National Urban Policy Study (NUPS) case and was also discussed by Delwin Roy, Senior Consultant with USAID/Near East, in personal communications with the author, February 2000. See also Donald S. Brown, Director, USAID Mission to Egypt, Memorandum 6 July 1977, ‘Discussion with engineer Hasaballah el Kafrawi’; SOC 4–5, Housing 1977, Research; Central Subject Files, 1974–84, Entry P257, Box 9; Records of the United States Agency for International Development Record Group 286; National Archives Building, College Park, MD. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

219

CAIRO LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

W.J. Dorman

alternative (desert) sites for homesteading, guiding rather than proscribing the city’s expansion. Had any of these ‘sites and services’ projects been successful, they would have given the Egyptian state an alternative to indifference and toleration in dealing with Cairo’s informal urbanization.

But such planning initiatives collided with the exclusionary character of Egyptian urbanism and authoritarian power relations more generally. This section examines four such attempts.

The praetorian politics of land management in Cairo

1595

NUPS continues to be routinely cited in Egyptian planning publications, and its component studies can still be found in government libraries and offices.

The El-Obour new town

Conflicting donor and Egyptian approaches to city planning were manifest in the AID-funded National Urban Policy Study (NUPS), completed in 1982 under the auspices of the reconstruction ministry and nominally intended to integrate Egypt’s sectoral and spatial planning in the service of national development goals (PADCO, Inc. et al., 1982a). Unofficially intended by AID to justify its refusal to fund the new desert cities, NUPS paid considerable attention to Cairo.6 It asserted that — whatever planning strategy the government adopted — the city’s population levels were likely to reach 15–16 million by 2000. A variety of implicit and explicit state policies were thought to intensify both its growth and the consumption of arable land (PADCO, Inc. et al., 1980; 1981a; 1982a). The real issue for Egyptian policymakers, therefore, was not how to stop Cairo’s expansion, but rather how to manage it.

NUPS criticized the Egyptian strategy of deconcentration based on the argument that the new desert cities were uneconomic and argued that free-standing new towns were unlikely to absorb significant populations in the near to medium term (PADCO, Inc. et al., 1982a). Instead, the report suggested that Cairo’s problems — overcrowding and the consumption of arable land — could be best addressed through a strategy of ‘intra-regional deconcentration’, whereby the new-cities programme would focus on peri-urban satellite towns — such as 6th of October and El-Obour — which were distinct from the existing agglomeration but nonetheless integrated with its economies of scale (PADCO, Inc. et al., 1981a: 130). In particular, it suggested: (1) directing Cairo’s future growth along an ‘east-west orientation’, which would avoid agricultural areas in favour of the desert periphery; (2) engaging with the informal housing sector and mobilizing private savings ‘through provision of adequately serviced sites in appropriate locations on non-arable land’; (3) undertaking institutional reforms to overcome the ‘functional fragmentation’ of local government and create a metropolitan planning authority; and (4) promoting cost recovery in public spending, which would ‘enhance the resource base for maintenance and service delivery’ (PADCO, Inc. et al., 1981a: 132; 1982a: 85, 86, 448).

Presciently, NUPS identified potential obstacles to this strategy, observing that ‘land associations and cooperatives as well as private individuals are vigorously acquiring land’ for speculative purposes along most of the city’s entrance ways (PADCO, Inc. et al., 1981a: 145). It also noted the adverse effects of military land appropriation on planning and developing East Cairo (ibid.). But the immediate problem for NUPS was opposition from Egyptian officials, who insisted that Cairo’s growth needed to be reduced and wanted NUPS to provide a justification for channelling resources into the free-standing desert-cities programme (PADCO, Inc. et al., 1982b).7 Upon submission, the study was rejected by Hasaballah El-Kafrawi, the reconstruction minister under whose auspices it had been undertaken, but who was also the principal advocate of the new-towns approach (Gardner and van Huyck, 1990). Kafrawi banned its distribution within the Egyptian government, but elements of NUPS were eventually incorporated into government policy and substantial parts reused in the subsequent French attempt to re-plan Cairo, which is discussed below (DIESA, 1990; Harris, 1992; Sims, 2011).

Kafrawi’s fixation on free-standing new towns may be partially explained by exactly the problems of land access that his ministry’s GOPP faced in attempting peri-urban development in Cairo.8 In 1978, GOPP had enlisted the German development agency Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) to assist in planning the El-Obour new town in northeast Cairo. While GTZ’s immediate role was to provide technical assistance, it had reportedly offered substantial funding for housing construction in the city. The World Bank had similarly intended to underwrite half of El-Obour’s basic infrastructure (Al-Sharqawi, 1986). However, GOPP and GTZ were unable to gain control of the land from the Egyptian military. Subsequent efforts by Kafrawi’s ministry to develop a nearby site were similarly frustrated by a ‘private’ land-development cooperative whose members were senior army officers. The project thus indicates the difficulties of reorientating Cairo’s population growth and reforming the state’s land-management policies.

Located near existing industrial areas and road networks, El-Obour was within a development zone considered by NUPS in 1981 to ‘have the most potential of the desert areas for development in both the short, medium and long term’ (PADCO, Inc. et al., 1981a: v). The study recommended it as the most promising site upon which to begin the development of satellite communities, and noted that it was crucial to the reorientation and deconcentration of Cairo’s northern areas as well as the future growth of 10th of Ramadan (PADCO, Inc. et al., 1981a; 1981b). For their part, the GTZ planners saw the site as having a strong internal economic rationale. Adjacent to the airport and the planned Cairo ring road, it was linked to the international air-freight and agricultural-commodities sectors. Their proposal also included a ‘sites and services’ element to attract homesteaders away from the informal sector (Sims, 2011).

However, GOPP and GTZ were not the only interested parties. Indeed, their 1980 ‘master plan study’ noted the activities of a number of groups and that they were not ‘guided and controlled by any development plan for the entire Project Site Area’ (Egyptian/German El-Obour Master Plan Study Group, 1980: B/1). These included the Arab Contractors and the military-dominated Ahmad Urabi cooperative (Sims, 2011).

Both were engaged in land-reclamation projects, the latter also allowing its members to build ‘country [houses]’ (Egyptian/German El-Obour Master Plan Study Group, 1980: G/10–G/11). Most importantly, the Egyptian military had a substantial presence in the area. During the 1973 war, it housed surface-to-air missile batteries defending the capital. Despite peace with Israel, the military continued to hold the land for camps, factories and housing (ibid.). Interestingly, the 1980 study’s transmittal letter from the head of GOPP to Kafrawi notes the ‘necessity to monitor and coordinate development forces at the sub-regional level’, suggesting that GOPP was well aware of the competition it faced in attempting to develop El-Obour (ibid.: 2–3).

Such fears were well founded. In June 1982, GOPP approved the GTZ-produced urbanization plan and in December 1982 a prime-ministerial decree designated a 4,200-hectare site for El-Obour (Al-Sharqawi, 1986). But while the defence ministry had reportedly given its permission for the project in October 1981, GTZ and GOPP were unable to begin implementation in 1982–83, because it would not give final approval.

Repeated efforts to negotiate with it — the services of a retired senior officer had been retained to facilitate these contacts — and secure from it an estimate of what it would

6 Interview with NUPS project officer, Washington, DC, 6 December 2000.

7 See also interview with NUPS project officer, Washington, DC, 6 December 2000.

8 Interview with deputy project leader, GTZ El-Obour Project and EMS project leader for the Cairo element, London, 13 April 2000.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5 © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

National Urban Policy Study (NUPS)

220

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

1594

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

221

430 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

370 km2 / 3500 km2 0.8 mil.

/ 3.7 mil.

TOOLS

DETROIT GENERATING SUBURBIA // SUBURBIA

SHRINKING CITY // DESTRUCTION/RECONSTRUCTION

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

71%

9%

3%

unemployment

203 bil.

14% green space

30 m2 / person

GDP

ACTIVE INFILL // MICRO / TEMPORARY PROGRAMS

DETROIT LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: GENERATING SUBURBIA THEMATIC CLUSTER: SUBURBIA YEAR: 1940S NETWOKS OF DECENTRALIZATION Main stakeholders: Real Estate Developers, Architects, Contractors

Suburbanization generated a new mode of urbanism that pushed the growth of the city to the edges, to the periphery – dramatically redefining Detroit and the American Landscape.

The production of new technologies, typologies, available modes of transportation, communication, and distribution together began to form what Robert Fishman would call new “Networks of Decentralization.” (1)

Image 62: Detroit, Suburban Housing

Suburbanization through these “Networks of Decentralization” will be understood here as a fundamental shift from the old lines and nodes of communication into these new systems; into a new, often autonomous fabric made possible at the urban edge. It has also contributed to the condition of stagnation in the urban core of Detroit.

As Suburbanization (a concept already well-understood as far back as the eighteenth century) gained momentum in the United States in the early and mid-twentieth century, the parallel desires for open space and cheap land took on an extreme quality. This separation, or exodus, from the city center to the outskirts created a massive regional shift, radically restructuring the relationship between the periphery and the core.(2) This phenomenon was described succinctly by Lewis Mumford as “urbanization at any point in a region.”(3) Suburbanization in Detroit was not an inevitable development along a singular and linear urban evolution; it was the result of parallel developments occurring simultaneously (automobile, new transportation networks, desire and availability of open space, new typologies of living and manufacturing). As these reached critical points in their own progress, they could be combined to promote growth away from the core (ironically, the same processes and developments that had previously built Detroit also produced the process of urban decline).

As a result of these contemporary tools of decentralization, Detroit had lost its density and resources.

Image 63: Detroit, Suburban Shopping Mall (1) Fishman, Robert. Suburbanization: USA. In: Oswald, Philipp (ed.). Shrinking cities. Volume 1. International Research. Hatje Cantz. Ostfildern-Ruit 2005. pp. 66-73.

(2) Ibid., p. 43.

(3) Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of cities. New York 1938, p. 43.

224

225

DETROIT LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: SHRINKING CITY THEMATIC CLUSTER: DESTRUCTION/RECONSTRUCTION YEAR: 1970S DECAYING INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE DE-INDUSTRIALIZED BELT Main stakeholders: Traditional large Scale Industries

Detroit operated in what was once known as the American Manufacturing Belt, a large region that contained several cities as transportation and production hubs (1). Many of these cities were built up around industry, most notably the automobile industry, along and near the Great Lakes and in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States.

Image 66: Detroit, Peak of industrial development

Now, after the region has endured industrial decline during the 1970s, this area is simply referred to as the Rust Belt, adopting its new name from the rusty shells that remain of the abandoned factories.(2) The massive infrastructure built during the previous decades, combined with a sharp decline in and decentralization of manufacturing, meant that now entire regions would have to address these abandoned infrastructures and constructions. The Midwest was confronted with a situation of extreme loss, but also, paradoxically, an absurd overabundance.

Image 67: Detroit, Industrial decay

“Whether in the USA, Britain, or Belgium, Finland, Italy, Russia, Kazakhstan, or China: everywhere, cities are shrinking. (...) Shrunken cities contradict the image, familiar since the Industrial Revolution, of the ‘boomtown’, a big city characterized by constant economic and demographic growth.” (3) The shrinking city defines the phenomena of population decrease and emptying of city areas.

After the war, the “American Dream” and life in the suburbs became a larger reality. The dream of open space and cheap land for a single-family home was a reality for many. But if we step out of the periphery and back to the core, we see a systematic erasure of the city, its services, and urban quality.

Detroit is the only city in the United States that has reached a population of 1,000,000 only to fall back below that milestone number. As a shrinking city, Detroit is defined as much by its erasure, decay, or loss - along with inherent new potentials - as it is by its growth.(4) Shrinking cities spur a reconsideration not only of traditional ideas of the European city, but also of the future development of urban worlds.(5)

226

(1) Ferry, W. Hawkins. The buildings of Detroit. A history. Detroit 1980.

(2) John M. Hagedorn, “Rustbelt,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed. George Ritzer (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007).

(3) www.shrinkingcities.com (4) Oswald, Philipp (ed.). Shrinking cities. Volume 1. International Research. Hatje Cantz. Ostfildern-Ruit 2005.

(5) Oswald, Phillip/ Rieniets, Tim (Ed.). Atlas of shrinking cities. Hatje Cantz. Ostfildern 2006.

Image 64: Detroit, Ground Floor Plan, Timelapse

Image 65: Detroit, Last standing houses

227

DETROIT LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: ACTIVE INFILL THEMATIC CLUSTER: MICRO / TEMPORARY PROGRAMS YEAR: 2000SDIY SOCIAL ACTIVISM AND PARTICIPATION Main stakeholders: Activitsts, Creatives, City Government (Detroit Strategic Framework Plan)

Detroit’s decadent situation reveals opportunities for innovative thinking and design, introducing one possible way of reading the contemporary city. Social activism and participation - translated into DIY (do-it-yourself) initiatives - have, over the last several decades, created a network of uncoordinated ‘bottom- up’ practices that represent a huge platform of research being performed on the ground.(1) By accepting the real city and organizing projects based on creativity, these practices(2) are tracking potential in new fields defined by systems of production.

Image 68: Detroit, “Urban” gardens

As we started to see in the restructuring of the core and periphery, the pendulum is beginning to swing back to the city, as the suburbs are now facing similar pressures as the former core, and the core offers new opportunities. There is a retraction of the city from the edge. This has been addressed with less successful top-down approaches, interesting yet effectively invisible bottom-up initiatives, and finally what could be an interesting combination of these two disparate forces - where a new city plan has co-opted community-based strategies for growth.

Shrinking cities have a lot to offer. Abundance of space and cheap rents attract a young generation of creative individuals that can live and develop their projects with little money.

Recognizing this as an opportunity for growth, the city developed a program that would subsidize nearly 50% of films produced in Detroit. As the automotive industry waned, a new form of creative production took its place.

Detroit had become trendy, with a strong transformational potential, but also a dangerous risk of gentrification. Based on this, residents began to address the city in a bottom-up way, which demonstrates how to modify it, based on individual commitment - attitudes that were then eventually co-opted into the city’s most recent plan: “Detroit Strategic Framework Plan”.

It is a comprehensive improvement plan, developed under mayor Dave Bing, that will establish programs for land use development, economic recovery, public services, transportation and neighborhood stabilization.

(1) Archplus 173. Shrinking cities. Reinventing urbanism. Aachen 2005.

(2) See: Haeg, Fritz. Edible estates. Atack on the front lawn. New York 2010.

Herscher, Andrew. Detroit unreal estate agency. In: Volume 18. After zero. 2008. pp. 94-97. http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/mayor-dave-bing-announces-the-detroit-strategic-framework-plan 228

Image 69: Detroit, “Urban” gardens

229

DETROIT LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Detroit Tool : Suburbanization & Shrinking City The two images below illustrate different results, in which the automobile culture strongly influences the shape of the city. That has often lead to sprawl and suburbia (including both housing & industry that moved to the outskirts), a typical phenomenon of the American City.

Moreover in the city of Detroit, the strong focus on the car industry in the city itself, followed by its downfall, resulted also in an immense shrinkage and population loss in the downtown area.

230

1. Describe in both depicted situations, the changes in the city caused by mass motorized mobility and industrialization. Name a few different aspects.

2. In the case of Detroit, ironically, the influence of the car (besides other factors) led to a shrinking downtown area. Describe this process with all causing elements.

3. Explain the relation of suburbanisation to shrinking city, how are they interconnected and what similarities and differences you can identify?

Extract from the huge and still expanding Detroit suburban zones.

Extract from the shrinking Detroit downtown area with both empty residential and industry & commercial lots.

1.

1.

2.

2.

3.

3.

231

DETROIT LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

232

233

DETROIT LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

234

235

DETROIT LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

236

237

2000 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

3840 km2 / 7430km2 12.9 mil. / 15 mil.

TOOLS

GUANGZHOU PRAGMATIC MULTICULTURALISM // GOVERNANCE / POLICY

URBAN VILLAGES // INFORMAL/HYBRID CITY

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

25%

60%

7%

unemployment

248 bil.

2% green space

166 m2 / person

GDP

GATED COMMUNITIES // COMMUNITY PROJECTS

GUANGZHOU LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: PRAGMATIC MULTICULTURALISM THEMATIC CLUSTER: GOVERNANCE / POLICY YEAR: 1990S INTERCONTINENTAL MIGRANTS’ MICRO ECONOMIES Main stakeholders: Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Local Investors

Guangzhou is a time capsule for non-western ways of thinking. Despite the myriad ‘bootleg’ recreations of global cultures that resembles ‘segregation’ these different cultural groups create spheres that make Guangzhou tolerable for themselves - an entirely new model of multiculturalism that fits the future.

In that sense Guangzhou, as a city, is a microcosm of the entire world. It also encompasses the global divisions. Nowhere can you more clearly see, in a single frame, accomodating the haves and the have-nots.

Image 70: Charlie Koolhaas - African Community in Guangzhou

One of the cities goals is to develop an image of being a cosmopolitan and global city. As a part of these ambitions, certain “desired” groups of migrants, particularly the so-called foreign talents that are mostly from developed nations, are particularly encouraged to migrate to China, while the inflow of “undesired” groups of migrants is being further regulated and restricted.

The recent manufacturing boom is behind the flood of Africans coming to Guangzhou since the 1990’s. The first wave arrived in the late 1990s, shuttling shipments between Guangzhou and African hubs like Lagos, Abidjan and Accra. They formed the backbone of the kind of informal trade that has helped make China Africa’s biggest trading partner.

But, today Africans in China are rapidly turning away from buying and selling the small batches of cheap, low-margin products like clothes and plastic household goods that have made up much of their business. In 2008, it was reported that the number of African residents was increasing by 30% to 40% annually, making Guangzhou the city with the largest African community in Asia. Often they arrive in Guangzhou with a one-way-ticket and have to start a business to earn money in order to return home.

Increasingly African merchants are partnering with Chinese businesses to run factories, warehouses and export operations. Therefore Guangzhou is a long-term home to them, and they are some of the most culturally integrated ex-pats in the city.

Image 71: The Little Africa neighborhood in Guangzhou is dominated by African immigrants who run the shops

240

241

GUANGZHOU LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: URBAN VILLAGES THEMATIC CLUSTER: INFORMAL/HYBRID CITY YEAR: 1990SSYSTEMS OF TENURESHIP Main stakeholders: Local Authorities, Local Community Associations, Inland Immigrant Workers

The huge urban-rural gap drives waves after waves of huge labour flows, consisting mainly of former peasants, attracted to the coastal cities where opportunities are concentrated.

Hukou is the prevailing system of household registration in China. This system was designed to ground individuals to the locales where they were presumed to belong, thus making it difficult for individuals to migrate to other parts of the country at will.

Not having a hukou from a particular place complicates the access to services and benefits in that locale (i.e. health, education, welfare). The hundreds of millions of migrant workers from China’s vast rural hinterlands today constitute a significant part of the urban labour force.

Image 72: Shipai Urban Village

The great majority of the migrants are denied the local hukou and are excluded from urban citizenship treatment in their adopted city of domicile. Finding a place to live in the city is particularly difficult. For many, the densely packed, substandard housing built by local peasants in urban villages on the former suburban fringes of the city is their only choice.

Urban villages are former rural villages, termed ‘chengzhongcun’ or villages-in-the-city, or more simply urban villages. They are enclosed by urban developments and represent parts of the city so dense that the buildings touch each other, giving them their names ‘woshoulou’ (handshake building) or ‘qingzuilou’ (kissing building).

Though situated in the midst of the urban area, the villages become de facto independent kingdoms, outside of urban planning, infrastructure construction, and other forms of administrative regulations and public policy. Village landowners became rich landlords and built much larger buildings in the villages, making any urban renewal planning impossible due to the huge corresponding compensation that would have to be paid.

Shípái is the largest urban village in Guangzhou. It is situated in the middle of Tianhe District in Guangzhou, with dense multi-story dwelling houses building in and lands for collective use. The village is supported by 170 narrow alleys yet surrounded by tall buildings and busy commercial streets. There are many shopping and entertaining centers as well as several institutions of higher education such as Jinan University nearby. With an area of only one square kilometer, there are over 50,000 people who come from the rural areas staying at Shipai Village, making this one of the most dense areas in the world.

242

Image 73: Charlie Koolhaas - Immigrants in Guangzhou

243

GUANGZHOU LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

TOOLS

TOOL: GATED COMMUNITIES

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

accomplishment, status and belonging among the new homeowners, in a sense of belonging to the new global capitalist society.

THEMATIC CLUSTER: COMMUNITY PROJECTS YEAR: 2000SCAPSULAR URBANISM AS A SOCIAL STATUS Main stakeholders: Real Estate Developers, Gated Community Neighbourhood Associations

The transition from a socialist central-planned economy to a socialist market economy has produced neighborhoods and housing types characterized by distinct socio-occupational mixes. In the colonial era, quarters with their imposing Western-style mansions and relatively well-planned street layouts dominated the cityscape. Located side by side were the traditional walled cities and largely unregulated settlements, characterized by immense densities and crowdedness, extremely poor hygiene, and chaotic, yet bustling street life.

Under communism, compounds where created in which the workplace was intimately tied with the residence. In cities, these were called Danweis. Then, there came thirty years of market-oriented economic reforms and the accompanying urban land and housing reforms.

Commodity housing estates emerged in redeveloped inner-city neighborhoods as well as newly developed suburban districts.

Image 74: Dolce Vita - gated community project, Guangzhou

Large housing estates or ‘xiaoqu’ where built primarily for the “nouveau riches” and the new middle class of professional and managerial workers. The great majority of such housing estates, especially the more recently completed ones, are gated and heavily guarded, and are provided with various kinds of amenities.

In general, the western gated communities are seen as a negative phenomenon, because they are said to increase segregation and lead to a breakdown of society in cities. It has been argued that in this kind of social attachment to a place stops being about community but rather about the feeling of security and homeliness. It excludes rather than includes.

In general though, criticism of gated communities is based on the idea that it erodes the public sphere as we share physical spaces less and less, such as parks or coffee houses, where political ideas can be discussed and expressed. Existence of such a public sphere is seen as a precondition for any democracy and this is said to be threatened by splintering urbanism.

For millennia, urban neighbourhoods in China have been arranged in a gated way. Walls and gates characterized old courtyard housing. In the old neighborhoods and danwei compounds, gating is used as a tool to facilitate the delivery of public services and help exert political control. In the new commodity housing estates, gates and boundaries not only ensure security but also help to differentiate the insiders from the outsiders and cultivate a sense of

244

Image 75: Guangzhou, Gated Communities

245

GUANGZHOU LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Guangzhou Tool : -

4. Describe in a short essay the difference between a european multicultural environment and the situation created in Guangzhou. Take into account matters of spatial/physical organisation, segregation/inclusion and perception of space, occupations of migrants, legal issues of migrant workers, cultural establishment of expat citizens, etc.

1. Select one tool presented in the previous lecture about Guangzhou.

2. Gather images from the city of Zurich where you can find the tool characteristics.

3. Glue the images on the field below. What are the similarities with the presented tool? Mark these on the image and provide corresponding explanations.

246

247

GUANGZHOU LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

248

249

GUANGZHOU LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

250

251

4200 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

730 km2 / 990 km2 2.1 mil.

/ 2.2 mil.

TOOLS

HAVANA PERIODISATION // CITY EXTENSION

MAPPING AS A RESEARCH TOOL // GOVERNANCE / POLICY

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

7%

22%

61%

unemployment

40 bil.

2% green space

12 m2 / person

GDP

MAPPING AS AN ANALYTICAL TOOL // DESTRUCTION / RECONSTRUCTION

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: PERIODISATION THEMATIC CLUSTER: CITY EXTENSION YEAR: 1519 - 2000S CITY AS AN OPEN-AIR MUSEUM Main stakeholders: Local Planning Authorities, Urban Researchers

Havana represents a case of special interest for urban research; the development and expansion of the city virtually came to a halt after the Cuban revolution in 1959. Therefore, the urban structures of the past have been conserved to a large extent. “Havana maintains largely an excellent spatial quality and represents a piece of urban heritage worth preserving.”

Image 76: Image of Havana in the XVIII century

Christian Schmid compares Havana to Pompeii in the sense of the city’s conservation. The city shows a compilation of original references from another time. Periodisation is a tool used to read those references based on historical moments and knowledge. The contemporary city and its past references are positioned side by side in an agglomeration that creates an open air museum.

He uses periodisation to highlight some of these moments, which are still readable in the city: Spanish Colonialism (1519), City extension (1830-1898) and the ‘classic city’, Modernization (1899-1939) and the ‘American city’, the Metropolitan phase (1940-1958) with its ‘Las Vegas of the Caribbean’, the Revolutionary phase (1959- 1970), the ‘Sowjet’ phase (1971-1889) and the Periodo especial (1990-2010).

Periodisation, as a tool, induces the reading of the city as a collage of different patchworks that come together as a whole - the contemporary city. It allows one to read the existing heritage and intends to step further into creating maps and a working method that intends to make those patterns visible, revealing the city’s complexity.

Making other districts visible also means promoting attention and improvement to other areas, other than the UNESCO World Heritage site Habana Vieja and the Vedado along the coast line, which are already extensively studied and promoted.

Image 77: Urban Footprint of Havana since 1960s

254

255

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: MAPPING AS A RESEARCH TOOL THEMATIC CLUSTER: GOVENANCE / POLICY YEAR: 2000S CITY ON THE THRESHOLD OF TRANSFORMATION Main stakeholders: Government, City Planning Authorities

Almost half a century after the 1959 revolution, city planning offices had almost no information available about the disparity of the city. In this moment, through an opening to foreign research institutes, mapping was proposed as a tool and an exercise to understand and reveal the contemporary city.

At present Havana is a city on the threshold of transformation, a prospective change that puts pressure on the urban structure and challenges its own planning instruments.

A 1985 zoning plan, which included land prices, has been the starting point for that task. On that basis, an estimation of today’s situation was created, analyzing how urban quality of housing and urban spaces in different areas are improving or getting worse. Another map would show, for instance, the difference in income in each of these areas.

Image 78: Mapping Havana - Research on Quality of Life

Those maps have been used as a starting point for generating others that aimed to produce a comprehensive overview of the living standards and social conditions of living in each one of the neighborhoods.

As a result of that effort, a sequence of maps have set the basis for a further step to be taken, allowing urban planners to rely on updated data to work with analyses of the current situation.

Image 79: Havana - 1985 Zoning Map rating urban facilities

256

257

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: MAPPING AS AN ANALYTICAL TOOL THEMATIC CLUSTER: DESTRUCTION / RECONSTRUCTION YEAR: 2000SIDENTIFYING NEW URBAN PATTERNS Main stakeholders: Local Planning Authorities, Urban Analysts

Following a moment of production of basic maps containing general data on the conditions of living in Havana, a series of analytical maps have been produced. Their intention is to create layers of interpretation overlayed on those basic maps that allow a more critical reading of the city and indicate ways of being active in changing its urban legibility.

The official city plan shows 3 zones (central, peripheral and the in-between). This representation has been revised. A map shows the different street grid and patterns. It depicts the city as a museum of architecture pieces and urbanism. In Havana one can easily find samples of urbanism that, in other cities in the world, have already been destroyed and replaced. Based on that phenomenon of conservation, one identifies seven different urban patterns, which lead to seven different urban configurations - Havana lessons.

Image 80: Mapping Havana - Identified urban patterns

‘Franja Azul’ is the famous touristic blue strip, the area along the coast. Within this area, La Habana Vieja (old city) is currently under a regeneration plan as part of a UN program. ‘Vedado’ shelters late 19th century villages and the first skyscrapers in the city from the 1950s. ‘Miramar’ has a fashionable residential area housing most of the country’s embassies. ‘Habana Profunda’ is the geographical center of the city, a very mixed area where all of the patterns coincide.

‘Malecon’, ‘Habana Entre’, ‘Ciudades Industriales’ and ‘Habana Nacional’ complete the parts of this patchwork scheme that makes history legible.

Havana becomes a complex agglomeration of patterns from its main neighborhoods with heritage areas, in which use and density recreate lifestyles and give specific character. The way people move and use the city also indicates a plan of hubs and sub-centers that give the city some structure, along with its cultural background. Mapping is therefore used here as an analytical tool that employs the basic maps so as to extract information that can lead to possible urban planning proposals based on its own heritage and reference.

Image 81: Image of the area Havana “Entre”

258

259

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Havanna Tool : Periodisation Havanna represents a case of special interest for urban research; the development and expansion of the city virtually came to a halt after the Cuban revolution in 1959. Therefore, the urban structures of the past have been conserved to a large extent. The compact urban fabric of Havanna conserves low rise buildings, colonial facades, wide plazas and narrow streets.

1. Sketch a section of Havanna, marked by the red line.* 2. In contrast to Havanna, New York is characterized by rapid growth and different types of urban densities and it also includes high rise buildings, block structures and a strict grid. Draw also a section of New York City.* *Consider the following elements: scale, density, topography, building types, infrastructure, open space, elevations, etc. Both pictures have the same scale.

Midtown | New York City | U.S.A. Plaza Vieja | Havana | Cuba

1.

260

2.

261

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

Cities, Vol. 23, No. 2, p. 85–98, 2006 Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

0264-2751/$ - see front matter

www.elsevier.com/locate/cities

Mapping and designing Havana: Republican, socialist and global spaces K. Edge

*

School of Architecture and Design, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA

J. Scarpaci Department of Geography in the College of Natural Resources, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA

H. Woofter School of Architecture at Washington Univesity in St Louis, St Louis, MO 63130, USA Available online 21 February 2006

Buildings, public spaces and other urban elements are employed to characterize three periods of Havana’s history as it moves to global status as a consequence of the tourist industry. As globalization provokes antagonism between the regional and the global, the paper shows that the challenge for Cuban architects, planners, and urbanists will be to find a middle ground in planning and design that accommodates this global status without forsaking distinctive attributes of Havana’s built environment. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Globalization, socialism, urban design, Cuba

Introduction

alike), without forsaking distinctive attributes of Havana’s multi-layered built environment.

This essay will draw on selected buildings, public spaces and other urban elements to characterize three periods of Havana’s history. These places, etched by unique historical forces and signature buildings, serve as reference points in a city that is slowly making its way to global status (Hall, 1988).

The issue of globalization and its attending pressure on public spaces – and on the architecture that delineates those spaces – has provoked the classic antagonism between the regional and the global in Havana. The overlap of socialist public space and commodified, ‘‘for-profit’’ space is now fully evident.

We show how the challenge for Cuban architects, planners, and urbanists will be to find a middle ground in planning and design that accommodates this global status (for inhabitants and foreign visitors

Regionalism, globalism, tourism Globalization is coming to Cuba once again by way of tourism, which in recent years has become more profitable than sugar production (Peters, 2003; Scarpaci, 2005a). Since most real estate investment, urban planning and building activity in Havana now is related to the industry, it is appropriate to consider a brief history of tourism there. The latter requires the marketing of an image, and urban design and architecture are a means to marketing such impressions (Klingmann, 1998; Blais, 1997; Scarpaci, 2005a). We begin by considering the idea of regionalism in architecture and human geography, which we believe, is helpful in assessing the role of architecture in contemporary planning and design.

Since Kenneth Frampton’s 1983 article, ‘‘Prospects for a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 540 231 1212; e-mail: kedge@ vt.edu.

85

262

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

doi:10.1016/j.cities.2005.12.008

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

Architecture of Resistance’’, regionalism in architecture and urban design has been considered an opposing force to the homogenizing trends of globalism. In that essay, and the subsequent article, ‘‘Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: a Provisional Polemic’’, Frampton argues for a critical regionalism (Frampton, 1983, 1987). By this, he means a consideration of the particularities of place, such as quality of light, traditional building technique, and local materials and practices. Efforts like these reject nostalgic reconstructions of vernacular architecture (Wagner, 1988). Frampton sought a middle ground in urban design, between returning to traditions that no longer have meaning, and giving in to relentless, frenzied modernization and the resulting banality therein.

Globalism and regionalism are symbiotic in many ways; the forces of globalization simultaneously fragment and unify the world (Dicken, 2003; Berman, 1982). That is why Dirlik (2000) argues that the binary dichotomy of regionalism/globalism may not be a useful conceptualization. Tourism is a form of globalism that has been present for many years. It clearly presents this curious condition of interdependence – of containing and actually depending upon regionalism and cultural identity within the larger context of globalism (Graham et al., 2000). Tourism, in turn, is dependent upon image-making and the marketing of this cultural identity. Some analysts call imagemaking a necessity for competitiveness and profitability in the current economic and cultural climate.

Place images and travel are largely responsible for the time-space compression that characterizes globalization (Castells, 1994; Lash and Urry, 1994) (see Figure 1).

Recent post-colonial studies highlight the difficulties faced by architects and urban designers as they question the idea of regionalism and this marketing of an image and culture that may, on closer examination, turn out to be falsely constructed. For architectural theorist and historian Alan Colquhoun, regional architecture is more a product of wishful thinking. The authenticity pursued by those who would make regional architecture can only be re-conceptualized and re-presented if this ‘‘authentic thing’’ ever existed in the first place. He says: ‘‘the use of local materials, sensitivity to context, scale and so on would all be so many ways of representing ‘the idea’ of an authentic, regional architecture. The search for absolute authenticity that the doctrine of regionalism implies is likely to create an oversimplified picture of a complex cultural situation’’ (Colquhoun, 19XX). He argues that while regionalism is supposed to preserve differences, it is no longer possible to ‘‘correlate cultural codes with geographical regions’’ (Nalbantoglu and Wong, 1997, p. 8). Geographers, too, have long grappled with the complexities of deciding which landscapes of the past should be included in heritage tourism (Lowenthal, 1996; Graham et al., 2000).

Historian Rosalie Schwartz’s description of the marketing of cubanidad (e.g., all things Cuban) to tourists as early as the 1920s justifies Colquhoun’s suspicion and eventual rejection of regionalism. Schwartz says: ‘‘contrived entertainment? Blatantly and unapologetically so. . .[Cuban] promotional materials portrayed an exotic, erotic, yet familiar island: Spanish food, quaint natives, Afro-Cuban music and dance, romantic moonlight, sensuous women, golf, tennis, country clubs, and racetracks. Cubans modified traditional culture, altered customary behavior, and when necessary, invented new experiences, such as sun worship ceremonies. Cubans stitched together a marketable cultural identity from bits and pieces of island life’’ (Schwartz, 1997, p. 75).

Interpreting these cultural landscapes and built environments are often elusive tasks.

Buildings and spaces of the republican era At the beginning of the 20th century, Americans became curious about newfound possessions and war booty taken from the Spanish–American–Cuban War of 1898. Photographs, especially those by the Detroit Publishing Company (available at the Library of Congress) and the US Official photographer assigned to the Chief Engineer, Division of Cuba, Havana, during the US military occupation of the island (1889–1902), stirred the imaginations of Americans. It led to what Bretos (1996) called the ‘‘imaging of Cuba under the American flag’’. These photographs became powerful allures in the minds of an American middle class that was gradually enjoying the benefits and privilege of affordable leisure travel.

Havana and Cuba were billed as the ‘‘Pearl of the Antilles’’ as early as 1923 (Schwartz, 1997, p. 71).

Figure 1 Cover of Cuban magazine, Bohemia, c. 1920s.

86

263

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

Beginning with first impressions gleaned from the railings of steamers entering Havana Bay, the Ministry of Public Works ensured that the first impression of Habana Vieja was a pleasant one. New projects in the 1920s and 1930s replaced older colonial buildings and remnants along the waterfront. While not yet evoking a landscape of power expressed by multinational capital or imposing public buildings (Zukin, 1991), Havana’s skyline displayed European sophistication and charm (see Figure 3).

The US Army Corps of Engineers, to construct the Maleco´n seaside promenade, provided the appropriate ‘wrapping’ of Habana Vieja and Centro Habana in a four-lane highway where a mere footpath had existed before. In view by 1930 was the Hotel Nacional resting atop on old limestone quarry at a point where the Maleco´n ended. Both the Hotel Biltmore and the Hotel Nacional had respected the beige colored stucco quality of the older parts of the city on their exteriors, but offered modern conveniences within for the expectant tourist.

Tourists arriving in Havana have always been struck by the fac¸ade along the Maleco´n, a seaside promenade initially built and expanded by the US Army and later extended by various Cuban governments. Sixty years ago, at the end of the Republican period and when tourism was at its height before the socialist period, these facades were considered cru-

READINGS

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

cial. They were generally kept in good repair, in order to greet the visitor arriving by steamship and entering Havana Bay where the Maleco´n begins (Figures 2 and 3).

As US visitors to the island shifted from long-term wintering for the very well off, to a mass tourism industry delivered first by steamships and then by airplanes, lodging preferences shifted from rented rooms in homes and apartments to hotels. In the Hotel Nacional (Figure 4), built in 1930, we see a structure that was monumental and the first of its size.

Located in the Vedado section of Havana (Figure 5), the footprint is quite extensive. If marketing Cuban culture was blatantly contrived for the foreign visitor, then the grand hotels of the 1930s proved to be compromises between classic Spanish architecture and spacious modern settings to accommodate the North American tourist.

Melding regionalism with international design models did not end with Cuba’s relationship with the motherland. Architectural avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century appeared as Art Nouveau and Art Deco. A variety of influences came from the US and Europe. Havana’s rich collection of these buildings existed mainly as private residences, offices and factories, rather than as tourist complexes. The 1905 Paris Exhibition, a strong wave of Catalan migration to Cuba and technical knowledge about

Figure 4 Hotel Nacional (1930) in the heart of the Vedado district, overlooking the Maleco´n and the Florida straits. It is perched at the edge of an old coralized limestone quarry.

Figure 2 Maleco´n, c. 1935, Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Figure 5 Location map of key buildings, streets, and public spaces noted in article.

how to construct new facades all greatly eased the introduction of Art Nouveau in Cuba. A strong sugar economy until 1920 allowed for palatial buildings to grace the streets of Havana, especially in the western suburbs of Vedado and Miramar. Art Deco structures peppered the old quarters for Habana Vieja, including the Bacardı´ Building in 1930 (Figure 6)

Figure 3 Maleco´n, c. 1910, Courtesy of Library of Congress.

87

264

and the Fausto Theater (Figure 7), and in Centro Habana too (Figure 8, the Streamline Moderne Solimar Building: Ca´rdenas, 1991). Although these ‘modern’ buildings were not tourist facilities, they lent the city a sophistication that Eduardo Luis Rodrı´guez (1996) contends forged Havana’s ‘modern regionalism’ in key ways.

88

265

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

Figure 9 The outline of Cuba’s former Minister Eduardo (Che´) Guevara on the side of the Interior Ministry’s building (left) which flanks the northeastern corner eastern of the Plaza de la Revolucio´n (right).

Figure 8 Solimar Building, Centro Havana, 1942. Residential building in Centro Habana built during the peak of Cuba’s modern movement.

Figure 6 Bacardı´ Building, Habana Vieja, 1930. Perhaps the finest example of Art Deco in the Caribbean basin.

John Loomis notes three architectural directions in Cuba that were evident by the end of the republican period: the large-scale public buildings erected

by the Batista government, a number of commercial and residential real-estate speculations, and smaller scale projects that seemed to be about exploring cubanidad (Loomis, 1999, p. 7). Perhaps the largest public complex erected by the Batista government (1952–58) was the Plaza Cı´vica, or Civic Square.

Since the famous air reconnaissance made by the French landscape architect Jean Nicola´s Forestier in 1925, this site (originally called Lomas de los Catalanes, or Catalan Hills) had been sited as a new holding for modern government buildings that

could move beyond the narrow confines of Habana Vieja (Forestier, 1928). The Frenchman was sensitive to open spaces as they helped to frame the city’s monuments but also allowed the casual stroller a stage on which to appreciate Havana’s tropical landscape (Labatut, 1957; Benjamin, 1962). Like much of Latin America, Cuba was looking to Europe for high culture and influence (Segre, 1989), and was keen on presenting Havana as a ‘‘tropical Nice [France]’’.

The Great Depression and political turmoil delayed the implementation of Forestier’s plan to re-map and re-design Havana. Thus, it was President Fulgencio Batista (an avid supporter of road and building construction) who embarked on an ambitious campaign to construct a national auditorium, national library, and a half-dozen public buildings to house national ministries in the Plaza Cı´vica. When the revolution arrived in 1959, Civic Square became Revolution Square (Plaza de la Revolucio´n). While the many images of massive gatherings in the socialist era (including the famous May Day parades) lead many outsiders erroneously to believe this square’s design embraces ‘new socialist realism’ (Figure 9), its execution is attributable to the right-wing Batista.

Buildings and spaces of the socialist era

Figure 7 Cine-Teatro Fausto, Prado, Habana Vieja, 1936. On Prado and Colon streets, designed by Saturnino Parajon, a good example of streamline Art Deco.

89

266

To characterize the urbanism of socialist Havana is to acknowledge what began as the revolution’s anti-urban stance, which shares similarities with other socialist projects of the late 20th century, such as the USSR and Vietnam. Chauncey Harris’ study of the USSR in 1962 highlights Soviet efforts to limit the growth of large cities (>100,000) and encourage the development of small (<50,000) and medium sized centers (50,000–100,000: Harris, 1970). This ‘anti-metropoli-

tan syndrome’ reflected a spatial vision of Marxist– Leninist ideals, that rejected the spatial concentration and regional inequality engendered by capitalism (Jensen, 1984), or what others might label ‘urban primacy.’ Elsewhere in the socialist realm, Vietnamese planners struggle to keep Ho Chi Minh City from becoming another Bangkok: ‘‘urban planning controls are limited and far from effectively enforced’’, and underreporting of return migrants may be as high as 25% of the official urban census count (DrakakisSmith and Dixon, 1997, p. 36). All this suggests that the void between urban and regional theory on the one hand, and regional planning on the other, is especially wide in socialist cities. Cuba, too, embraced an anti-urban position, choosing to develop rural centers and provincial capitals rather than invest excessively in the national capital of Havana (Eckstein, 1981; Scarpaci et al., 2002).

Four decades of Cuban socialist order have transformed the way Havanans use public spaces and accommodate international visitors. The elimination of most private enterprises in the early years of the Cuban Revolution (post-1959) created new public spaces that could serve as ideological arenas, in which the collective identifies of socialism could be forged in a vision outlined by the leadership. In rather obvious ways, the cityscape changed. Private automobile usage tapered off over the following decades as fuels were rationed, the US trade embargo against Cuba deepened, and public transportation became the main mode of travel. Different orders of space appeared in the Cuban capital: public monuments, Eastern European-like housing blocks, health care facilities, and small signs posted by mass organizations (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, Federation of Cuban Women) etched their way into the Havana landscape. Curi-

90

267

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

ously, these elements of the socialist built environment – places of public ceremony and work – coexisted next to elements of a bygone era, such as international tourist facilities from the early 20th century.1 The search for cubanidad that began in the early part of the 20th century continued in the socialist era, with projects like the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte (National Art Schools). In keeping with socialist anti-urbanism, it is situated on a site removed from Havana’s urban center, a republicanera golf course seized by revolutionaries. The Art Schools, built from 1961 to 1965, were meant to – in the words of John Loomis – ‘‘express the revolutionary passion and utopian optimism’’ of the Cuban Revolution. (Loomis, 1999, p. xxxii) The schools, by Cuban architect Ricardo Porro and Italian architects Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti, also address the debate between regionalism and globalism outlined above. But quite separate from this made-up culture meant for tourists was an honest and intense search by intellectuals and artists for cubanidad. Cuban architects were part of this search and the younger ones were enthusiastic about modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. There seemed to be a genuine intent to carve out a place for an architecture of regional culture, an architectural cubanidad in answer to the International Style (Loomis, 1999, p. 6). As Porro pointed out in a polemic published in 1957, the socially committed architect must produce work that has social merit and that reflects Cuban tradition (Loomis, 1999, p. 11). The Art Schools employed the Catalan vault, local materials and craft, and a certain brand of feminine sensuality and even open sexuality that Porro associated with Afro-Cuban culture (Figure 10).

Eventually, the local craft and particularity repre-

1

Unpacking the meaning of uses of public spaces in socialist cities offers insight into competing geographic structures of urban space. A burgeoning literature has addressed the meaning of ‘‘socialist cities’’, highlighting the features that set them apart from their capitalist counterparts (Andrusz et al., 1996; Bater, 1986; Forbes and Thrift, 1987). Szelenyi (1996) notes three sets of attributes about the socialist city that are useful in understanding Havana’s present urban condition. First, many socialist cities are ‘‘under-urbanized’’. That means they are often smaller and display lower population densities than capitalist centers. This derives from a great reduction or near elimination of private property, as well as strict controls over rural-urban migration.

Second, socialist cities display fewer aspects of ‘‘urbanism’’.

Competition over scarce resources forces planners and politicians to ‘‘urbanize on the cheap’’. To their benefit, however, many socialist cities experience fewer ‘‘social problems’’ (crime, prostitution, poverty and homelessness) than their counterparts in market economies (Scarpaci, 2000). As well, socialist cities serve largely as administrative centers that appear spartan in character.

Pre-1989 Warsaw (Regulska, 2000) and contemporary Havana illustrate these features particularly well. According to most Western cities in market economies, open space in the socialist city is used more ‘‘wastefully’’ in the construction of massive public squares and monumental sites.

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

sented in the schools was overruled by Soviet-style standardization (Scarpaci, 2003).

Public spaces for gathering are important ceremonial settings such as the Plaza de la Revolucio´n described above. Even though some amount of spatial inequality is observable in Havana – especially with new tourist enclaves – the differences include the absence of a high-rent/high-rise Central Business District and the proliferation of exclusive singlefamily and low-density residential suburbs. Although the stage was set for urban sprawl because of the spread of ‘‘bedroom communities’’ in the 1940s and 1950s, today, sprawl is not a problem in Havana.

The city’s skyline displays a low-lying uniform set of buildings (Figure 11) in contrast to the spatial polarization that is happening on the periphery of Moscow and the urban sprawl occurring in parts of east Germany. Havana’s low level of private automobile ownership, fractured public transportation network, and very limited real-estate market for foreigners have served to prevent sprawl in the Cuban capital.

Socialist Havana: accommodating the new global market While rich research questions assess how globalization homogenizes cities in the new millennium, relatively less investigation has addressed the transformation of socialist cities. Crowley and Reid (2002) argue that a unitary and universal definition of socialist space is impractical because of the cityspecific setting in which such spaces have evolved.

Nonetheless, bourgeois and fascist configurations of urban spaces are markedly different than the socialist spaces carved out in Europe, Asia, and Cuba.

Figure 10 Cuba’s Art Schools.

‘‘[M]assive investment was made in the production of grand monuments and new public spaces to symbolize the new order. Parade grounds, public artworks and ‘people palaces’ formed a ubiquitous environment throughout the [Eastern] Bloc. Official discourse about these and other spaces reproduced the shared ideological priorities and tactical operations of the socialist regimes. Marxist–Leninist ideals of progress and principles of social justice, based on an equitable redistribution of all resources throughout the agency of the State, were claimed to be the basis of a new spatial economy. Measured against these ideals, such ‘socialist spaces’ will no doubt be found wanting’’ (Crowley and Reid, 2002, p. 4).

Like the impacts of socialism’s antithetical cousin – industrial capitalism – the experiences of socialist cities around the world share certain experiences.

Socialist projects unfold over long periods of time as they aim to ameliorate uneven development imposed by market forces. Chilcote and Edelstein 91

268

READINGS

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

Figure 11 Havana’s skyline looking west from the edge of Habana Vieja. Three prominent buildings from the 1930s and 1950s in the Vedado section rise over the city’s uniform skyline.

(1986, p. 121) claim ‘‘[t]he progression from the consolidation of a socialist regime to the achievement of advanced socialism is a project whose

length is measured in generations’’. Urbanists search for changes in the built environment that appear in shorter periods; Havana offers such an

92

269

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

opportunity. In fact, the lines between ‘‘post-socialist’’ and ‘‘socialist’’ city are easily blurred as noted

by Manuel Castells (1977, p. 94): ‘‘. . . designating a society as capitalist, then specifying the precise conjuncture and the stage of capitalism that is revealed in it, enables me to organise my analysis theoretically. But the reverse is not true: to designate a social formation as ‘socialist’ does not elucidate its relation to space, and, very often it tends to divert research, which takes refuge in a series of ideological dichotomies tending to present the obverse side of the capitalist logic, instead of showing the real processes that are developing in the new social forms.’’

These conceptual problems are even more salient in the new millennium – nearly three decades after Castells’ observations – well after the dissolution of the USSR and the Soviet bloc. The forces of perestroika, glasnost and the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev unleashed a domino-effect crash of the Council of Mutual and Economic Exchange. In many corners of the world public welfare services were increasingly dismantled (Scarpaci, 1998) and the commodification of public spaces (long an aspect of the capitalist city) began appearing in places like Poland (Regulska, 2000), China (Smith, 2000), Vietnam (Smith and Scarpaci, 2000), and Cuba.

Szelenyi (1996, 288) concluded that during and after transition, the socialist cities of Eastern Europe witnessed changes in these three sets of characteristics noted above: under-urbanization, fewer resources spent on urbanization and fewer urban characteristics in the largely administrative centers.

In particular, ‘‘. . .many features of socialist urban development are now decaying rapidly, and those that still survive are increasingly in contradiction with the emergent socio-economic reality of the region’’. When collective agriculture disappeared, for example, the countryside suffered. Greater out-migration ensued and caused a slight rise in urbanization. The quality of urban life also changed significantly with the (re)-introduction of capitalism (Sheppard, 2000). Today, many downtown centers bustle with petty-commerce vendors, traders, and immigrants. A casual stroll through Warsaw, Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh City, or Havana verifies that trend.

Western-style urban social problems are also on the rise. To contend with these new market-created problems, some wealthier groups are suburbanizing and the massive apartment complexes of the city core are being abandoned. US retail franchises and shiny shopping malls are springing up in the richer suburbs of China and Eastern Europe. At the same time, however, inner city decay continues. Longtime city dwellers become trapped by poverty and are left behind in the least desirable areas. Unfortunately, parts of downtown Ho Chi Minh City and Havana portray this under-investment (Freeman, 1996; Scarpaci, 2000).

Ivan Szelenyi’s (1982) pioneering and comparative review of socialist cities identified several reasons as to why these inequalities persist. One explanation is that socialist governments cannot remedy centuries of uneven capitalist development in short order. Another factor is that transitions to socialism often used some private capital to recompense the state’s inability to create certain goods and services. Private markets linked to hard currency transactions serve as conduits to external capital, and international tourism in Havana serves just that purpose. Finally, the historical periods in which Szelenyi addressed public spaces in socialist cities included 20th century Eastern Europe and the former-USSR; because neither Lenin nor Marx had an empirically grounded nation-state in mind to forge the transition to a socialist state, wellthought criticisms of 19th century industrial capitalism established instead the foundation for a socialist project.

In this first decade of the new millennium, many analysts claim that the 20th century was a victory for industrial capitalism. When Soviet communism collapsed, the outlook for capitalism seemed bright, and double-digit GNP growth in many nations was common in the mid-1990s. By the decade’s end, though, the weaknesses of some market economies emerged. Variously dubbed the ‘tequila effect’ (Mexico in 1994), the ‘samba effect’ (Brazil in 1998), or the ‘dragon effect’ (Japan and Southeast Asia in 1998), it became unclear whether contagion could be prevented elsewhere. Dunford and Smith (2000) argue that the European Union will create both convergence and divergence in the continent’s reunification; ‘‘market reforms and market integration will [not] automatically result in greater ‘‘cohesion’’ between the various territories of Europe’’ (Dunford and Smith, 2000, p. 172). In 2004, Cuba adopted the Euro as its hard currency of choice, and now charges a ten percent commission on dollar conversions on the island. The move underscores the drop in numbers of US academic and cultural tourists who have been greatly restricted from traveling to the island since mid-2004. It also reflects Cuba’s great reliance on European tourists. These trends suggest that Cuban capital may once again (as it did during the 1920s) turn towards Europe, adopting and blending elements of urban design and planning.

Such tenacity in the Cuban revolution and Havana suggests that the nature of the socialist city is more indelible than many anticipated.

the Eurodollar has its architectural equivalent, it is surely these generic hotels and multi-purpose venues that mean to entertain. These buildings have become the neutral, interchangeable units that facilitate global exchange (Sennett, 2000). Guy Debord’s assertion that ‘‘tourism is the chance to go and see what has been made banal’’, is borne out (Debord, 1994, p. 95), as hotels demonstrate the architectural intersection of tourism and banality (Kracauer, 1997).

Havana’s Caribbean location poses special challenges in urban design. Sea-salt and storms weaken the lovely facades that range from Art Deco, Art Nouveau and brutalism to eclectic. With the recent increase in tourist travel and the allowable growth of this industry, Havana’s Maleco´n promenade is again the subject of reconstruction (see Figure 12).

Arguably, the restoration of these structures activates a different kind of program along the street for the inhabitants – a public living room as many gather along the water edge for the evening (Scarpaci et al., 2002, p. 277). Yet, this type of restoration raises several questions regarding facadism in the infrastructure of the city and the enclosures of the hotels themselves. Because of the 1959 revolution, the city of Havana was saved from a ‘Cancunization’ of its coastlines.2 Yet recently constructed hotels and tourist facilities indicate the pressure to accommodate international clientele. At the same time, the city has languished as investment has kept pace with infrastructural enhancements in water, light, and sewage (Dı´az-Briquets and Pe´rez-Lo´, 2000).

Assuming these structures continue due to the growth in tourism, there would be the natural extension to promote additional functions within the hotels because of their increased isolation and numbers of guests. This emphasis on the making of a fac¸ade in both restoration and new hotel enclosures raises several key issues. First, the role of restoration – how may the tourist industry create a relationship with the businesses and residences along the Maleco´n? Second, how does one enclose multi-function and large spaces within the public realm where isolation is not necessarily created as a default? Third, with respect to the growing tendency to emphasize the fac¸ade in tourist destinations, how might constructions and materials reassert themselves? Developers designing for the tourist industry attempt to mimic the look of historical buildings while employing less expensive, flexible, and arguably empty systems at the interior. In this way, the enclosure and

2

Old meets new Although tourism around the globe still depends upon the marketing of difference and the selling of a ‘‘place-myth’’, the place where tourists are housed, the hotel, shows that other trend of globalization: homogenization (Lash and Urry, 1994, p 165). If 93

270

READINGS

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

This is a reference to high-rise buildings lining the coast of Cancun in Mexico. Artificial Mayan temples and artificial ecosystems disguise the large and varied spaces in the interior of the hotels. Practically, the hotels need to contain multiple functions (restaurant, theater, sports center, lodging, etc.) in order to keep clients on the premises for the duration of their stay.

These tourist enclosures deny both the scale and reality of the place.

Figure 12 Havana’s seaside promenade, the Maleco´n.

Photograph courtesy of Andrea Brizzi.

interior are separated. No attempt to mimic the look of traditional buildings may be found in Galerı´a del Paseo and Melia´ Cohiba Hotel, (discussed below) which were built in the 1990s in the mode of banal enclosures, indicative of transplanted generic international hotels. In both cases, modern facades are denied meaning because there is little evidence of the place and time of the work. In a way, they both fall victim to economic pressures. Architecture critic Anne Kingman contrasts an architecture of constructive rigor with one founded on the principles of marketing an identifiable building that speaks a story to the consumer and realign itself with current trends.

How then might some of the ideas alluded to here apply to Havana in the ‘Special Period of a Time of Peace’?

To consider these matters, we turn to a brief review of three projects: two are hotels and one entails a business complex. All were erected in the 1990s (and the latter continues to evolve) and are direct manifestations of Cuba’s rather rapid insertion into the world economy in the post-Soviet era (Scarpaci, 2005b).

Hotel Parque Central After standing abandoned for several years, the Ministry of Tourism, in consultation with the City Historian’s Office, solicited bids for building a new hotel. The site is exceptional because it anchors one end of Parque Central and fronts one of the finest pedestrian malls in the Americas: Paseo Martı´ or Paseo del Prado, with its ficus-tree lined perimeter (Figure 13). The renovated Parque Central project opened in 1995 as a joint-venture project between a Dutch company and the Cuban government (Figure 14). It has been criticized for its exaggerated portico gallery which stand in almost brutalist fashion against one of the city’s streetscape hallmarks, which Alejo Carpentier (1970) called ‘‘the city of columns’’. Just across from the Parque Central on the plaza of the same name is the Centro Asturiano.

The post-modern panoply of various motifs on the Parque Central contrasts with the more sober turnof-the century buildings such as the Centro Asturiano (Figure 14) (built in 1938, now an art museum).

Although the Hotel Parque Central contains a roof-

94

271

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

Figure 13 Paseo del Prado (aka, Prado), c. 1928.

top pool and the traditional patio courtyard with a glass dome that is not visible from the street, its overall features cannot be disguised. While it provides 5-star hotel comfort to international visitors who want access to remarkable cityscapes, it does violate the urban fabric within the UNESCO World Heritage Site where it is located.

The intersection of Paseo and Malec on One of the first signs of new architecture in the postSoviet tourist economy of the Special Period surfaces at the intersection of Paseo Street with the seaside promenade, the Maleco´n. There, a Spanish-managed hotel, the Melia´ Cohiba, was introduced in 1994. The Melia´ company manages a number of hotels around the world, including Spain and elsewhere in Latin America (Scarpaci, 1998).

Today, it is the largest builder of new hotels in Cuba and offers a variety of turnkey complex styles and options. When the proposal to develop a hotel in the Vedado was floated in the early 1990s, the economic condition of the country could not have been

more dire. With hindsight, economic pressure was the only factor that could have justified a modern, 21-floor design with more than 400 rooms (Figure 15). The building is a predictable architectural structure that looms over the lower skyline. From the back of the hotel at the swimming pool, sunbathers gaze up at a housing complex and the back of the Hotel Riviera (Figure 16). Unfortunately, local design and review panels such as the Grupo para el Desarrollo Integral were not consulted in the project review. If a model of the structure had been placed in the Grupo’s 1:1000 scaled-model of the city, it would have demonstrated the disproportionate dimension of a hotel that protrudes in a mediumdensity neighborhood of the Republican era. As Mario Coyula (2005) points out, these inappropriate, ill-fitting buildings are threatening to destroy what brings tourists to Cuba in the first place. It could be an office complex, a condominium or a hotel, set anywhere in the world (see Figure 16).

Figure 16 Hotel Melia´ Cohiba.

Before the Melia´ Cohiba was built, the primary commercial building in this part of Vedado was the Hotel Riviera. Originally designed by a design team that included the late Philip Johnson (but who was later replaced by a Cuban architect), the Hotel Riviera embraces the modern style of Las Vegas-like 1950s buildings that still grace the Nevadan city as well as older parts of North Miami Beach in Florida (see Figure 17). The Hotel Riviera was financed by the notorious crime figure, Meyer Lansky, and was one of the largest casinos and hotels in Havana of the 1950s. Gambling profits lined the pockets of many politicians in that decade and provided grist for revolutionary fervor (Schwartz, 1997). The views from the front and back of the building are also wanting. From the front, one sees a glass-wrapped shopping arcade called the Galerı´a del Paseo (Figure 18). Architects and planners remark that the two

Figure 17 View from the back of the Melia´ Cohiba of a public housing project (left) and Hotel Riviera (right).

Figure 15 Centro Asturiano, now the International Art Museum.

Figure 18 Galerı´a del Paseo.

Figure 14 Hotel Parque Central.

95

272

READINGS

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

96

273

HAVANA LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

prominent support columns rising above the fac¸ade appear like the ears on a mask, and have dubbed the building the ‘‘bat mall’’. It contains a mix of non-peso retailing establishments (jazz bar, pet store, hardware store) whose high prices make them inaccessible to most households (Peters and Scarpaci, 1998; Scarpaci, 2005b). The town square between it and two other hotels is filled in the evenings with taxis, tour buses, and young Cubans (some of whom are sex workers) seeking entrance to the hotel’s nightclubs through the favor of foreign tourists. What may be a Felliniesque depiction of Havana led satirist and literary critic Andre Codrescu’s (1999, p. 113) hyperbole that Havana at times appears as a ‘‘thoroughly eroticized proletariat’’. In short, this intersection at Paseo and the Maleco´n, like other corners of transitional Havana, introduces a distinctive blend of tourist facilities oriented to the global market with an unusual milieu of design and public space. It has created an unusual melding of Republican and socialist spaces.

Conclusions Globalization’s impact on Havana’s architecture – before 1958 and after 1989 – has led to anticipated results. The disruption of urban spaces and buildings, and the insertion of design elements that are inappropriate, stem from these global forces. We began our study of mapping and designing Havana by summarizing Frampton’s call for a middle ground: where local materials and traditional building techniques temper a relentless, frenzied modernization and banality. Accommodating these changes is never easy, and Havana is certainly not alone in blending external forces with local needs. It is unrealistic to expect a small island of just 11 million inhabitants to resist the powerful pulls that accompany international tourism. In that spirit, the assessment of 22 cities from around the world by Anthony Tung, former President of New York City’s Landmark Commission, is instructive: While the speed of modern urban change has led to rapid transformation and destruction, it can also lead to rapid reconfiguration of that which we have already built. Having fractured our cities, with time, can we un-fracture them? If we understand that current intrusive structures will eventually become obsolete and subject to replacement, and that vanished historic buildings might be reinstated, an unprescribed palette of urban possibilities is presented, making it possible to change the spirit and form of the city at many locations (Tung, 2001, p. 430).

We hope that subsequent mappings and designs of Havana’s built fabric will, in the context of Tung’s forecast, become ‘un-fractured.’ Political and economic decisions by the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Foreign Investment will always outweigh informed design review and assessments

by planners, architects and urban geographers. In this sense, Cuba is not unique, since government interests at the national level often over-rule decentralized decision making. Those involved in design decisions must find a middle ground, between returning to traditions that no longer have meaning or may never have existed in the first place, and giving in to a relentless and frenzied modernization.

Havana has a rich design history that can help deter impending homogeneity and predictable landscapes (Segre, 1970, 1990).

A good building, like good urban design, employs the materials and methods of its time; location, along with construction, are crucial in consideration of the art form (Ford, 1994). Good master plans must be sensitive to this dictum and, in order to create contemporary architecture, a discussion of fac¸ade and cladding material should be considered. Uniqueness of place, materials, program, and even enclosure in opportune tourist insertions may serve in lessening the separation between tourists and local spaces. Cuban architects have historically fought trends of European and North American ‘iconographical agendas’ through artists who sought national imagery and identity when it was unfashionable to do so (Segre, 2000).

The spirit of their efforts was inspired by the need for identity to promote the value and legacy of Cuban society and the individual. Havana embraces the elements of Frampton’s regionalism despite its uneven architectural evolution and responses to different global economies. It is ironic that the development of the tourism industry is marked with unrelated building skins and interiors that are rooted in the demands of consumerism.

The challenge facing Havana’s urban designers and decision makers is described by Paul Riceour in History and Truth: ‘‘how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization’’.

Will Cuban developers, in reconsidering the value of uniqueness in the marketing of their environment, allow this ‘Pearl of the Caribbean’ to regain its Antillean lustre?

References Andrusz, G, Harloe, M and Szelenyi, I (1996) Cities After Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in PostSocialist Societies. Blackwell, Oxford.

Bater, J H (1986) Some recent perspectives on the Soviet City.

Urban Geography 7, 93–102.

Benjamin, W (1962) Saggi e frammenti: Angelus Novus. Einaudi, Turin.

Berman, M (1982) All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Simon and Schuster, New York.

Blais, M (1997) Cladding and Representation: Between Scenography and Tectonics in Constructions of Tectonics for the Postindustrial World. 1996 ACSA European Conference. ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) Press, New York.

Bretos, M (1996) Imaging Cuba under the American flag: Charles Edward Doty in Havana,1899–1902. Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 22, 82–103.

97

274

READINGS

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

Mapping and designing Havana: K Edge et al.

Ca´rdenas, E (1991) En Busqueda de una Arquitectura Nacional Editorial. Letras Cubanas, Havana.

Carpentier, A (1970) La ciudad de las columnas. Editorial Lumen, Barcelona.

Castells, M (1994) Technopoles of The World: The Making of Twenty-First-Century Industrial Complexes. Routledge, London and New York.

Castells, M (1977) The Urban Question. Edward Arnoldl, London.

Chilcote, R and Edelstein, J (1986) The transition to socialism. In Latin America: Capitalist and Socialist Perspectives of Development and Underdevelopment, (eds.) R Chilcote and Edelstein. pp. 93–132. Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Codrescu, A (1999) Ay, Cuba!: A Socio-erotic Journey. St. Martin’s Press, New York.

Coyula M (2005) City, tourism and preservation the old Havana way. <http://WWW.fas.harvard. edu/~drclas/publications/revista/Tourism/coyula> (accessed 06.03.2005).

Crowley, D and Reid, S (2002) Sites of everyday life in the Eastern Bloc. In Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in Eastern Bloc, (eds.) S Crowley and S Reid. pp. 1–22. Berg, London.

Debord, G (1994) Society of the Spectacle. Zone Books, New York, p. 95.

Dı´az-Briquets, S and Pe´rez-Lo´pez, J (2000) Conquering Nature: The Environmental Legacy of Socialist. Cuba University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh.

Dicken (2003) Global Shift: Reshaping the Global and Economic Map in the 21st Century. Guilford, London and New York.

Dirlik A (2000) Globalization as the end and the beginning of history: the contradictory implications of a new paradigm.

Available from: <www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~global/workpapers/dirlik.pdf>.

Drakakis-Smith, D and Dixon, C (1997) Sustainable urbanization in Vietnam. Geoforum 28, 21–38.

Dunford, M and Smith, A (2000) Catching up or falling behind Economic performance and regional trajectories in the ‘‘New Europe’’. Economic Geography 76, 169–195.

Eckstein, S (1981) The debourgeoisement of Cuban cities. In Cuban Communism, (ed.) I L Horowitz. pp. 119–140. Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ. Forbes, D and Thrift, N (eds.) (1987) The Socialist Third World: Urban Development and Territorial Planning. Blackwell, Oxford.

Ford, L (1994) Cities and Buildings: Skyscrapers, Skid Rows, and Suburbs. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London.

Forestier, J C N (1928) Gardens: A Note-book of Plans and Sketches. Charles Scribner and Sons, New York.

Frampton, K (1983) Prospects for a critical regionalism: six points for an architecture of resistance. Perspecta 20, 147–162.

Frampton, K (1987) Ten points on an architecture of regionalism: a provisional polemic. Center: A Journal for Architecture in America 3, 20–27.

Freeman, D B (1996) Doi moi policy and small-enterprise boom in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Geographical Review 86, 178–197.

Graham, B, Ashworth, G J and Turnbridge, J E (2000) A Geography of Heritage: Power Culture and Economy. Arnold, London.

Hall, P (1988) Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning in the Twentieth Century. Blackwell, Cambridge, MA. Harris, C D (1970) Cities of the Soviet Union. Rand McNally, Chicago.

Jensen, R G (1984) The anti-metropolitan syndrome in Soviet urban policy. In Geographical Studies of the Soviet Union: Essays in Honor of Chauncey Harris, 211. pp. 71–91. Department of Geography, University of Chicago.

Klingmann, A (1998) Architecture as product. Daidalos’ 69(98/ 99), 69–70, December–January.

Kracauer, S (1997) Mass ornament: The hotel lobby. In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, (ed.) N Leach. pp.

53–58. Routledge, London and New York.

Labatut, J (1957) Experiencias en la pra´ctica y la ensen˜anza de la planificacio´n urbana. Arquitectura 290, 25–446.

Lash, S and Urry, J (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Loomis, Joh (1999) Revolution of Forms Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools. Princeton Architectural Press, New York.

Lowenthal, D (1996) The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Nalbantoglu, G B and Wong, C T (eds.) (1997) Postcolonial Space(s). Princeton Architectural Press, New York.

Peters, P (2003) Cutting Losses: Cuba Downsizes its Sugar Industry.

Lexington Institute, Arlington, VA. Peters, P and Scarpaci, J (1998) Cuban Entrepreneurs: Five Years of Small-scale Capitalism. Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, Arlington, VA. Regulska, J (2000) The emergence of political and civil societies in Warsaw: post-1989 dilemmas. Urban Geography 21(8), 701– 723.

Rodrı´guez, E L (1996) The architectural avant-garde: from art deco to modern regionalism. Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 22, 254–277.

Scarpaci, J L (2003) Architecture, design, and planning: Recent scholarship on modernity and public spaces in Latin America.

Latin American Research Review 38, 236–250.

Scarpaci, J L (1998) Tourism planning during Cuba’s ‘special period’. In Regional Planning and Development Practices and Policies, (eds.) F Costa, R Kent, A Dutt and A Noble. pp. 225– 244. Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, UK. Scarpaci, J L (2000) Reshaping Habana Vieja: revitalization, historic preservation, and restructuring in the socialist city.

Urban Geography 21, 724–744.

Scarpaci, J L (2005a) Plazas and Barrios: Heritage Tourism and Globalization in the Latin American Centro Histo´rico. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Scarpaci, J L (2005b) Globalization and work: economy, remittances, and joint ventures in post-Soviet Cuba. Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems 14, 101–117.

Scarpaci, J L, Segre, R and Coyula, M (2002) Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London.

Schwartz, R (1997) Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London.

Segre, R (1970) Diez an˜os de arquitectura en Cuba revolucionaria.

Cuadernos de la Revista Unio´n, Havana.

Segre, R (1989) Arquitectura y Urbanismo de la Revolucio´n Cubana.

Editorial Pueblo y Educacio´n, Havana.

Segre, R (1990) Ensayo: Lectura Crı´tica del Entorno Cubano.

Editorial Letras Cubanas, Havana.

Segre, R (2000) 40 an˜os, 90 millas y una cubanı´a (40 years, 90 miles but one sole cubanhood). Introduction to the special number of AAA: Archivos de Arquitectura Antillana (Santo Domingo) 5(10), 11–13.

Sennett R (2000) Yale University Seminar, October, 2000.

Sheppard, E (2000) Socialist cities? Urban Geography 21, 758– 763.

Smith, C (2000) The transformative impact of capital and labor mobility on the Chinese city. Urban Geography 21(8), 670– 700.

Smith, D W and Scarpaci, J L (2000) Urbanization and transnational societies: an overview of Vietnam and Hanoi. Urban Geography 21(8), 745–757.

Szelenyi, I (1996) Cities under socialism – and after. In Cities After Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies, (ed.) G Andrusz et al. pp. 286–317.

Blackwell, Oxford.

Szelenyi, I (1982) Urban Inequities, State Socialism. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Tung, A (2001) Preserving the World’s Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis. Potter/Random House, New York.

Wagner, O (1988) Modern Architecture. The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica.

Zukin, S (1991) Landscapes of Power. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

98

275

5390 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

605 km2 / 5335 km2 3.1 mil.

/ 6.4 mil.

TOOLS

MADRID INVENTING A CAPITAL // GOVERNANCE / POLICY

REVISITING COMPLEXITY // CITY EXTENSION

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

45%

40%

10%

unemployment

189 bil.

18% green space

12 m2 / person

GDP

SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF PUBLIC SPACE // MICRO/ TEMPORARY PROGRAMS

MADRID LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: INVENTING A CAPITAL THEMATIC CLUSTER: GOVERNANCE / POLICY YEAR: 1561 CONTINUOS VISIONS OF A GLOBAL CITY Main stakeholders: The Royal Court, Politicians, Economists

Since ancient times, humans chose to settle near the sea or navigable rivers. In absence of motorways, railways and airports, water provided the means of faster, cheaper and safer transportation. In 1561 Felipe II decided to establish a new capital of the Spanish Empire in Madrid, even though he could have chosen Barcelona or Sevilla, as gateways to the Mediteranean region or the New World.

His idea was to build a new centrality of power, so that information from all the corners of the Iberic Peninsula would take equal amount of time to reach the capital. In a time when transport by water was vital for commerce and flow of goods and ideas, this new capital would isolate itself within its context until nowadays.

Image 82: Centrality of Madrid vs. the “Natural Gateways” (Barcelona, Sevilla)

This new capital was chosen not only far from navigable water routes, but also on highlands, making it today the second highest situated capital in Europe. The magnitude of this small worldview decision would affect the evolution of a country and a city, since the only reason to visit Madrid was to approach the court and its power.

This was a significant event in the history of Spain, which has permanently marked the worldview (Weltanschauung), culture, the economy and Spanish society. The geographical aberration of Madrid is one of the determinants of the historical anomaly of Spain, that is, of their incorporation to modernity.

Luis Garicano pointed out that the only ways to be rich in Spain was to be the son of a rich person or be close to the king. The heat around the court developed in Spain a pure-blooded capitalism, so-called financial capitalism, based on the capture of income and proximity to power, which is typically seen in Madrid and remains today the dominant form of capitalism in the country.

In the past twenty years, development under the umbrella of political favour seemed to be an urban planning mechanism that lead Spain to an economical boom based on real estate development. The current crisis of construction in the periphery of cities has become a matter of global concern. This crisis results from the construction in and around cities under the speculative economic forces of the banking and real estate complex that feeds on the dream of home ownership.

Image 83: Plan of Teixeira 1656

http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2012/03/02/actualidad/1330712282_179577.html

278

279

MADRID LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: REVISITING COMPLEXITY THEMATIC CLUSTER: CITY EXTENSION YEAR: 2000S ICONIC URBANISM FOR A MODERN METROPOLIS Main stakeholders: Architects, Urban Planners (Arturo Soria), Real-estate Developers

The years of economic boom in Spain are closely related to the construction industry. Savage urbanization, lacking in detail, far from building the city in the broadest sense, was pumping up a predatory real estate bubble.

Despite being a great opportunity to rethink the models of urbanity for citizen, many of the master plans and architectures conducted, eliminated any interest in the potential of the streets and open spaces, as a platform not just for mobility, but for social and cultural interactions.

Image 84: Madrid Rio Park Project

The urban complexity lost in most urban developments made during the years of economic prosperity, raise the need for a retrospective reflection on certain issues/questions present in the history of the city over time. In particular the notion of how to shape the relationship between city and nature deserves a special attention.

The Madrid Río Park project retrieves for pedestrians the shore of the Manzanares river, by burying the hegemony of the car under a tunnel of more than 6km in length. At the same time it reconnects the two sections of the city divided by the highway, through an extensive ‘landscape as urbanism’ intervention. Such approaches have been inspired by the late nineteenth century revolutionary urban planning ideas of the Spanish urbanist Arturo Soria who developed the idea of the ‘Linear City’, the precursor of the Garden City of Ebenezer Howard. In the case of Madrid the tram was envisioned as the backbone of a permeable urban strip embeded within nature.

Moreover, intensive developments to create a Spanish ‘Metropolis’ for the era of booming cities like Berlin, New York or London of the 1910s and 1920s, an event street like the Gran Via was cut into the urban fabric following Haussmann’s tools, with the intention of recreating a ‘Broadway-like’ atmosphere.

Lately, the phenomenon of the global city can be observed in Madrid - with architecture and urbanism that mainly serves for representation of economic and political power. Therefore, a vision in form of a strong skyline, a ‘Business City’ was implemented and materialized through an iconic urbanism of the ‘Four Towers’ project during the pre-crisis real estate boom of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Image 85: Arturo Soria y Mata - Linear City

Arturo Soria, Tratados de Urbanismo y Sociedad, CLAN, 2005 Francisco Burgos, Ginés Garrido, Fernando Porras-Ysla, Landscapes in the City: Madrid Río: Geography, Infrastructure and Public Space, Tapa Blanda, 2014 280

281

MADRID LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

TOOLS

TOOL: SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF PUBLIC SPACE

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

In this sense, the citizen collectives like ‘Zuloark’ or ‘Campo de Cebada’ that include thinkers, self-producers and enterpreneurs managed to gather not just the cultural and architectural scene but also the wider public in these innovative revitalization processes for the City of Madrid.

THEMATIC CLUSTER: MICRO / TEMPORARY PROGRAMS YEAR: 2000SACTIVIST ARCHITECTURE FOR REACTIVATING THE CITY IN CRISIS Main stakeholders: Young Architects (e.g. Zuloark), Activists, Thinkers, Self-producers, Entrepreneurs

In 2009, the government of the city of Madrid decided to demolish a public swimming pool in one of the liveliest districts of the city. The intention was to build a modern sports complex, under a competition held during the boom years. But later, with a disastrous economic situation in the country and no budget for its realization the result became a huge void of 5500 square meters.

Shortly before the 15-M Movement 2011, which called for a more participatory democracy, the initiative of the neighbors of La Latina and groups of young architects proposed to reclaim the public space lost by political inaction.

Starting with assemblies and a website to arrange and propose activities and organization models, a year later, in February 2012 the El Campo de Cebada (Field of Barley) became a reality, where summer movie theater, concerts, workshops and sport events were organized.

Image 86: Zuloark - El Campo de la Cebada - Illustration

Unlike many other public spaces, which start from a formal basis, meant to establish physical frameworks for certain functions, in this case use preceded form.

This open contemporary square, not only opens up to all kinds of activities and social relations, but is also an experiment that demonstrates to the administration and experts the viability of a public management of the square, reformulating the relationship between citizens and the city.

This example shows also the transformation of the profession of architecture and urban design under specific socio-economic and political conditions. In the case of late 2000s Madrid, this meant self-organization of young architects in order to collaborate and try to reactivate a city suffering of a heavy crisis.

In this context of a moribund city and a desintegrating urban landscape, young architects become activists in order to reactivate the urban potential. Rather than relying on top-down approaches and the real estate industry, political decision-making that is limited by local government mandates, bottom-up initiatives became survival reactions.

Image 87: Zuloark - El Campo de la Cebada - Participation http://elcampodecebada.org/ https://es-es.facebook.com/pages/El-campo-de-Cebada/180735625274126 http://www.publicspace.org/en/works/g362-el-campo-de-cebada 282

283

MADRID LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Madrid Tool : -

The two pictures below show the situation in Madrid in two different contexts: in an urban and a suburban setting. What different typologies can you identify? Mark the identified zones on the map with different colours and provide a brief explanation of your choice reflecting on the catalysts and agents that, according to your idea, created the existing situation.

The development of Madrid is characterized by very diverse urban mechanisms. Different typologies emerge from a wide variety of building and planning activities. Natural catastrophies, strong influences of the tradition, loose construction legislation as well as boom and crisis economic periods created a specific urban morphology - an interwoven mix of different forms.

Central Madrid

284

Suburban Madrid

285

MADRID LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

Volume 34.4 December 2010 967–80

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.01015.x

The Breakdown of the Spanish Urban Growth Model: Social and Territorial Effects of the Global Crisis MARISOL GARCÍA

Abstract

ijur_1015

967..980

The present global crisis has manifested itself in Spain with special force, but what is happening today has its roots in the recent economic and urban growth model. Whereas much has been written on the economic weakness of a model heavily based on the construction industry, little attention has been given to the internal regulations, policies, social and cultural factors in which the Spanish urban growth model was embedded. The question insufficiently addressed by current debates is therefore: to what extent is Spain’s current crisis the result of its urban economic and social growth model? In this essay I argue that the crisis in the Spanish urban growth model reveals a particular interaction of globalizing forces with national and local processes, characterized both by specific structures of economic incentives and path-dependent cultural traits. The combination of these factors goes some way towards an explanation of the housing bubble. This specific combination of factors, however, makes the outlook for the aftermath of the housing bubble in Spain different from that experienced in the United States.

READINGS

968

Debate

David Harvey (1989: 4) was the first to stress that ‘the power to organize space derives from a whole complex of forces mobilized by diverse social agents’. This applies to the issue addressed here: How was the massive expansion of the housing market engineered in Spain through the combined actions of international and national regulators, real estate brokers, financial sectors and local administrations as well as citizens and residents? In order to answer this question I propose to look at the articulation between: (1) the financing of the real estate market in combination with a structure of incentives, which has had serious consequences for housing ownership and the current housing crisis; and (2) path-dependent cultural practices, consumption patterns and demographic transformations as part of the explanation. A second question is: who are the loss bearers in this crisis? This question links the real estate crisis with its effects on unemployment in Spain.

In this essay I argue that the crisis in the Spanish urban growth model reveals a particular interaction of globalizing forces with national and local processes, characterized by specific structures of economic incentives and path-dependent cultural traits. The combination of these factors goes some way towards an explanation of the housing bubble. This specific combination of factors, however, makes the outlook for the aftermath of the housing bubble in Spain different from that experienced in the United States. The major differences that exist between countries are partly the result of their histories, but are also due to different policy choices made by governments and institutional regulators. In Spain, the Central Bank’s regulations prevented the banking system from developing ‘subprime mortgages’,1 but not from contributing through abundant credit to an overcapacity in the housing sector (close to a million units for sale in 2009).2 The bursting of the housing bubble contributed directly and indirectly to nearly 2.3 million job losses and a large private debt. However, since Spain is de facto a federal country, it is possible to observe some city (and regional) variations in the creation of, and reactions to, the crisis. Some examples will serve to illustrate this. The essay first provides an introduction to the previous growth model with special emphasis on the housing market, then focuses on the actors involved in the housing bubble, and goes on to consider the sociological implications of the crisis and governmental policies in the aftermath.

Globalization factors in Spanish urban growth: the Europeanization factor Although the current global economic crisis has revealed flaws in the capitalist system, some countries have to grapple in addition with problems of their own making: ‘Spain had allowed a massive housing bubble to develop and is now suffering from near-total collapse of its real estate market. In contrast to the United States, however, Spain’s banking regulations have allowed its banks to withstand a much bigger trauma with better results — though, not surprisingly, its overall economy has been hit far worse’ (Stiglitz, 2010: 21–2). This statement gives a summary diagnosis of Spain’s situation in the spring of 2010. But was there a specific design that gave rise to Spain’s problems?

Whereas much has been written on the economic weakness of a model heavily based on the construction industry, little attention has been given to the internal regulations, policies, social and cultural factors in which the Spanish urban growth model was embedded. The question insufficiently addressed by current debates is therefore: To what extent is Spain’s current crisis the result of its urban economic and social growth model?

I wish to thank the IJURR reviewers for their constructive comments on a previous version and Cristina Lopez for her help in compiling Figure 1.

For almost a quarter of a century till 2007, Spanish growth was closely linked to Europeanization, and latterly also to globalization. The start of EU (EEC) membership in January 1986 saw the Spanish economy begin a process of convergence with other European economies; the country entered the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1994, with full membership of the European Union (EU) translating into financial support from that organization’s structural and cohesive funds.3 Entering the European Union (the ‘European Economic Community’ at the time) was indubitably positive for the Spanish economy. GDP per capita increased from 72.5% to 90% in the period 1985–20044 compared to the other EU15 members. Tourism and commercial 1

Law 19/1992 of 7 July, which regulates the securitization of mortgage loans and the new Law 41/2007 of 7 December, regulating the mortgage market. Further, unlike what happens in the USA, the Spanish mortgage market is client-based and not transaction-based.

2 An internal document from the Ministry of Housing specified a total of 997,562 housing units for sale, including those to be finished during the year (cited in Doncel, 2009).

3 These represented only a total of 1% of Spanish GDP (1.5% between 1994 and 1999).

4 In 2004 the number of EU member states grew to 25 with the incorporation of 10 new countries; the statistical effect of this increased the percentage for Spanish GDP in relation to the EU. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

© 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

286

287

MADRID COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

969

benefits are good indicators of the positive implications of Europeanization: 87% of tourists, 74 % of exports and 66% of imports are of EU origin (Royo, 2006).

Europeanization and globalization contributed to an average yearly growth of 3.5% between 1994 and 2007. Globalization became highly visible in Spain from 2002 onwards, as large numbers of immigrants entered the county — 5.6 million between 1998 and 2009 (De la Dehesa, 2009: 443–4). Foreign migrants concentrated in the areas where the job market was expanding: basically, the capital region (Madrid), the Mediterranean coast and the islands.5 But financial capital had preceded human capital.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century the massive inward flow of direct foreign investment was well underway. With the introduction of the Euro, Spain gained international investors’ confidence as an investment site and obtained a triple-A credit rating. As a result, in 2008 Spain ranked next to the United States in the league of countries with the largest net import of capital (IMF–World Economic Outlook, 2009).

This private foreign investment fuelled the economy, especially the real estate sector.6 As the construction industry, and then the tourist industry, gained a larger share of the market (11–12%7 and 11% respectively), economic growth and urban growth became practically synonymous.

Globalizing factors, such as the combination of large numbers of foreigners and foreign investment, permeated not only the two largest cities — Madrid and Barcelona — but also the Mediterranean coast. As the economy grew, cities flourished; Madrid was the city that benefited most from Spain’s full membership of the EU, as governmental and commercial organizations chose to locate their offices in the capital (Leal and Dominguez, 2008), thereby bringing or encouraging direct foreign investment.

Barcelona did not attract equivalent investments, but being an outstanding example of urban regeneration, attracted large numbers of tourists and visitors to economic fairs (Marshall, 2004; Degen and García, 2008). Bilbao followed a similar strategy with the ‘Guggenheim effect’ and with the advantage of already having a background of solid local innovative industries (Plaza, 2006). In addition, the contribution of EU funds enabled the modernization of large infrastructures all over Spain — including high-speed trains — which helped to reduce the historical development gap between rich and poor regions. In the Mediterranean, with the economic boom (1994–2007), cities like Valencia and Malaga gained prominence (Prytherch, 2006).

As Figure 1 shows, housing growth surpassed population growth in Spain, but mainly in some Mediterranean cities.

Investment in transport infrastructures helped the real estate market to take off by supporting suburbanization and an increase in interurban mobility through boosting car culture at the same time. Urban sprawl consolidated around large cities with the construction of large housing blocks and housing complexes called ‘urbanizaciones’ (estates of semi-detached houses). This model also started to characterize medium-size cities along the Mediterranean coast, fuelled by tourism. Some urban centres (Malaga, Murcia and Alicante) experienced a remarkable urban expansion, partly because they attracted foreign residents.8

5 In 2005, at the peak of the boom period, 80% of all foreigners resident in Spain lived in Madrid (21%), Catalonia (22%), the Valencian Community (15.5%) and Andalusia (11.3%) and the Canary and Balearic islands (10%) (see López de Lera, 2006: 245).

6 For example direct foreign investment in real estate demand increased 102% between 1998 and 2006 (Banco de España, 2007: 49) 7 Variations exist between different statistical sources.

8 Between 2001 and 2008, Alicante increased its population by 401,212 inhabitants; Malaga by 261,021 and Murcia by 235,731 (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2010). In the same period the number of housing units increased by 265,081 in Alicante; 298,376 in Malaga and 183,496 in Murcia (see Ministerio de Vivienda, www.vivienda.es).

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

288

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

970

READINGS

Debates and Developments

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

Debate

6.00

Rate of annual growth of population and housing (%)

LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

5.00

4.00

3.00

Population Housing

2.00

1.00

0.00 Vizcaya

Barcelona

Zaragoza

Valencia

Madrid

ESPAÑA

Alicante

Murcia

Málaga

Figure 1 Annual growth rate in population and housing, 2001–08 (sources: own elaboration based on Instituto Nacional de Estadística (2008) ‘Padrón continuo de habitantes 2001–2008’ and Ministerio de la Vivienda ‘Estadísticas del Parque de Viviendas’, www.vivienda.es)

Ten years of economic growth lead to private debt growth The long economic cycle of the Spanish economy between 1997 and 2007 was accompanied by ever lower interest rates, with an average of 4.65% Tasa Annual Equivalente (Annual Equivalent Rate), less than two points above inflation. The decrease in nominal interest rates contributed to a large internal household demand for credit to invest in housing and consumer durables.9 Although housing prices increased rapidly — the strongest growth (16%) took place between 2002 and 2005 — the good performance of the economy and employment encouraged further demand for housing. But the housing boom led to a huge increase in debt. For one thing, the number of instalments on mortgage payments increased, prolonging the period during which households were in debt. Moreover, the average annual increase of credit to the housing buyer was 20%, which explains the current household debt (home debt amounts to 74% of total household debt).10 Also, the expansion of financial credit to real estate developers grew from 5% to 17%, i.e. 12% in 10 years (1997–2007). Lastly, in order to meet demand from housing owners, construction industries and real estate developers, financial institutions (mainly banks and saving banks) borrowed from European and Asian financial markets.

The exceptional availability of financial credit caused a huge internal demand during the period, which fuelled the housing bubble with the above-mentioned yearly rise in house prices.11 As is often the case with housing bubbles, there was a general perception of wealth increase felt by homeowners and real estate agents (Rodriguez López and Fellinger Jusué, 2007; Stiglitz, 2010). Homeowners overestimated the value of their home, especially the middle- and low-income groups, while acknowledging that the 9 The short- and long-term nominal interest rates fell from 13.3% and 11.7% to 3% and 4.7% respectively. This contributed to companies’ investment in hiring workers and equipment costs.

10 Consumer debt was 11% and other loans 15%. Spanish household debt had risen to over 84% of the annual GDP in December 2009 according to the European Central Bank (see European Parliament, Directorate General for Internal Policies, 2010: 3–4).

11 The Banco de España has estimated that the overvaluation in housing prices is between 24% and 35% (García-Montalvo, 2006: 7).

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

289

MADRID LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

971

price implied an overvaluation.12 However, optimism combined with fear of future price increases encouraged housing acquisition (García-Montalvo, 2006).

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

972

For over a decade the construction sector contributed to making Spain’s economic growth 1 to 1.5 points higher than the European average (Gurria, 2009). Between 1998 and 2007, the housing stock increased by around 5.7 million units (29.6%) (Banco de España, 2007: 42). On the supply side, the housing construction industry was first boosted by the increasing availability of land on urban peripheries after 1990.13 In 2007 the introduction of a new Land Act provided new criteria limiting the expansion of urbanized land, but only when the existing urban sprawl around large, medium and even small cities was already consolidated.14 Irrespective of whether the cities were governed by conservatives, social democrats or even leftwing politicians, the dynamics of housing growth proved to be consistent and similar everywhere. What varied were the proportions of housing growth, checks on corrupt practices and the accompanying measures taken by some regional governments (Autonomous Communities) to regenerate existing neighbourhoods.

Most of the housing production was intended for sale, as homeownership features strongly in the Spanish urban growth model. Spain’s homeownership (over 80%) is one of the highest in the world, behind Hungary and some regions of Poland. This contrasts with 70% in the UK, 55% in France and 43% in Germany. Differences exist in Spain between regions. For the 2001 census data the comparisons hold: the Basque Country (89%), the Valencia region (86.3%), Madrid (81.9%) and Catalonia (79.0%) (OECD, 2007). Homeownership is, however, a path-dependent practice in Spain. Already in 1981, long before the recent homeownership boom, as many as 73.1% of housing units were owner-occupied. The economic explanation for this factor is rooted in the 1970s, when inflation was very high and mortgage interests were fixed, encouraging families to locate their savings in housing ownership. Homeownership was accessible across all social classes, helped by the construction of large housing blocks on the peripheries of the largest cities, sold to workers at low prices. Moreover, from that time onwards middleclass families started also to invest in second residences in the countryside around larger cities and on the Mediterranean coast.

When the economic boom started in 1994, real estate agents and developers seized the opportunity to enlarge the housing market, helped by financial and government officials, who created a system of incentives. In this context the majority of the population in Spain was happy to take advantage of the opportunity for homeownership with relatively easy and low-interest loans. Governments (both conservative and socialist) introduced fiscal incentives for the purchase of homes (first residences). There is, however, a more complex socio-institutional explanation.

In Spain, as in the other Southern European countries, people have traditionally relied on family provision for welfare (Andreotti et al., 2001). Housing provision is often a family concern, with parents helping in the purchase of homes by newly formed couples

290

Debate

Table 1 Proportion of buyers with financial support from their families Cities

The housing boom and homeownership: a structure of economic incentives and sociological factors

READINGS

Debates and Developments

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

%

Year of Acquisition

%

Socio-economic Group

%

Barcelona

23.2

2000

14.7

High

23.5

Madrid

23.9

2001

23.6

Medium-high

21.5

Murcia

19.1

2002

18.0

Medium

19.6

Coruña

19.8

2003

22.5

Medium-low

9.5

Valencia

13.0

2004

16.0

Total

19.9

2005

25.0

Source: García-Montalvo (2006: 36)

within the family unit (Allen et al., 2004; Arbaci, 2007). Thus, family solidarity has become part of a cultural practice across all social classes. Table 1 provides indications of the extent to which family financial support is important in housing purchase. The data is based on a survey15 conducted in 2005 in five Spanish cities.

The above table shows that about 20% of respondents received financial support from the family for housing acquisition. It also shows that the higher the income, the more generous the support. In Madrid and Barcelona, more generous support coincided with higher housing prices.16 What is significant, however, is the relatively low support the medium-low income groups can count on from family members, making them more likely to become indebted and thus exposed when the housing bubble eventually burst.

To sum up: incentives towards ownership were very strong for Spanish citizens and residents, not only because financial institutions were lending money easily and at a low rate, but also because fiscal policies made housing ownership tax-deductible and therefore advantageous. This structure of investments was reinforced by family solidarity across society, albeit less so in the medium-low income groups.

Who were the buyers?

Newly built houses were to be owned and occupied by newly formed couples, products of the baby boom of the 1970s, by new single parents — as the number of divorcees increased — and by the growing number of childless singles and couples (these two groups often opted for central neighbourhoods rather than the suburbs). The changing composition of households — with increasing numbers of singles and single parents — stimulated housing demand.17 Demographic factors were altered by the notable impact of immigration. High numbers of migrants from developing countries contributed to the exhaustion of the small rental market, putting more pressure on the housing market as a whole, thus leading to an increase in the construction of housing units in areas with a larger immigrant population (Leal and Dominguez, 2008: 706). In support of this argument, it must be borne in mind that immigration to Spain reached 12% of the population by 2009 (from 1.6% in 1998) (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2009). Apart

12 In a survey study conducted in five cities — Coruña, Madrid, Barcelona, Murcia and Valencia — 94.5% replied that housing was overvalued (García-Montalvo, 2006: 33).

13 The Land Act of 1990, under a Socialist government, gave local and regional administrations the ability to promote and benefit from the urbanization process through real estate transactions and the capacity to buy land and to change rural into urban land. Further, the Land Act of 1998, under a Conservative government, simplified land regulations, effectively liberalizing land for development.

14 For a comprehensive analysis of the Land Act, see issue XXIX of Ciudad y Territorio (2007), double issue with introduction by L. Parejo.

15 The sampling is based on 1,509 interviews in five cities (361 in Barcelona; 360 in Madrid; 296 in Valencia; 246 in Murcia and 246 in Coruña) (García-Montalvo, 2006: 16).

16 Housing prices have systematically been higher in Barcelona and Madrid (Sociedad de Tasación, 2009: 7).

17 The number of single-person and single-parent households rose from 366,000 in 1998 (24.6% of the total) to over 540,000 (36.3% of the total) in 2005. In Encuesta Continua de Presupuestos Familiares (Spanish Household Expenditure Survey), the latest available results for which are for 2005.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

291

MADRID LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

973

from immigrant workers and their families, other groups of foreigners found their niche in Spain, from Northern European pensioners (particularly British and German, but also other Europeans) to a more heterogeneous group of residents working or studying in cities, and last but not least, seasonal tourists who acquired or rented flats, also mainly along the Mediterranean coast (including the Balearic Islands).

The category that completes the picture of buyers is that of investors and speculators, who expected a good return on their investment in buying a flat as housing prices increased yearly. In a study already cited, it was found that 37.2% of the respondents acknowledge that either they themselves or a family member or a friend has bought or sold a house as a commercial transaction (García-Montalvo, 2006: 39). Thus, the dream of improving one’s capital or savings spread like a virus. No doubt also ‘the black economy explains something about the propensity to invest in housing . . . as a form of savings available for investing black money’ (Allen et al., 2004: 98). As owners opted for selling rather than renting to make quick profits, this generated a vicious circle, shrinking the rental housing stock. This is one of the explanations for the fact that even immigrants and young couples were induced to buy, the first group at high risk, the second with the financial support of parents.

Finally, a market developed for second homes, amounting to 16% of total housing.

Second homes are mainly concentrated along the Mediterranean coast (41.4% of the total), but a considerable proportion of owners live in the larger cities. As many as 40.2% of households located in the provinces of the six larger cities in Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza, Bilbao and Seville), owned 50% of the secondary residences in Spain, whether these were in their vicinity or on the coast (Leal, 2006: 468).

To sum up: the purchase of housing increased considerably in the boom period due to demographic factors (for first residences) and to consumption of and investment in housing (for secondary and other-use residences). In order to give an idea of the relevance of this last factor: the percentage of households with other properties in addition to their first residence went from 30.1% to 34.5% in just the few years between 2002 and 2005 (De la Dehesa, 2009: 449).

A segmented housing market

The economic boom correlated with homeownership expansion, but in a housing market that reflected and generated strong social inequalities, as can be seen in the clear differences in accessibility for the population. Several deviations are worth mentioning.

Firstly, housing accessibility has been restricted for the young by the increase in housing prices. In combination with low-paid and temporary jobs, this has postponed the age at which they leave the parental nest (the highest in Europe, along with Italy). Fault lines appeared between young couples whose parents’ savings provided the entrance payment for purchase and those couples who could not count on family support. Secondly, high housing prices have forced immigrants to share residences (even to share the purchase of flats), resulting in households with more than one family or with several adults. Although spatial segregation has been relatively moderate in recent years of immigration, one may refer to social segregation in terms of quality of life or lack of it — to the point of social exclusion — in overcrowded flats in cities (Terrones, 2007). This factor has been exacerbated by the very small amount of protected and public housing, which went down proportionally during the 1990s and in the 2000s. Thirdly, there is also a territorial imbalance, as the areas most affected by the current urban growth model have been the larger cities and the Mediterranean coast (Leal and Dominguez, 2008).

Before the current crisis there was evidence of a paradoxical housing structure in which accessibility restrictions and under-use of housing space (as much as 14.8% was empty according to the 2001 census) created a social and a spatial disequilibrium. Some open manifestations emerged in the form of urban protest in the larger cities. As pointed out above, young people have suffered, particularly, from restrictions in housing International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

292

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

974

READINGS

Debates and Developments

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

Debate

accessibility due to increasing housing prices. In 2006 expenditure on non-subsidized housing for young households amounted to 39% of their income in Spain, but as much as 60% in Madrid, 50% in Catalonia and 56.8% in the Basque Country (Observatorio Joven de Vivienda en España, 2006, cited in Camargo, 2009). This was one of the main reasons for a cycle of urban protests organized by young people during 2006 and 2007 in Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao. Although regional governments have responded in various ways to these mobilizations this has hardly improved the position of the young in the housing market.18

The role of local and regional administrations All this housing construction and this method of urbanization did not happen in an institutional vacuum. On the contrary, local and regional governments were actively involved in the process. What made the more progressive municipalities emulate the same practice of freeing up land for development? Historically, municipalities in Spain — including the largest cities — have suffered from a shortage of financial resources, even after the decentralization to the regions (Autonomous Communities). As a result local administrations have found in urban development and city sprawl a way to increase their resources through land management and new housing taxes (Impuesto de Bienes Inmuebles — IBI). They are thus better equipped to face citizens’ demands and expectations for the improvement of services. The transaction fees linked to urbanization and liberalization of land, coupled with local fiscal competences over housing construction, have provided local administrations (municipal and regional) with the resources needed to modernize cities.

However, the limits of what modernization means have sometimes been blurred, to the extent that in some cases the housing boom became irrational and dysfunctional, such as in the south and southeast of Spain where urban developments and golf courses overburden limited water reserves. In most cases, protests mounted by civic organizations and ecological groups have been ignored. Part of the problem was the lack of spatial planning in urban development, as specific plans were either absent or unheeded (Leal and Dominguez, 2008).

Coping with the housing crisis: Who is most affected?

What has been done?

The global financial crisis accelerated a downturn in Spanish real estate that was already apparent in 2007. During that year residential investment underwent a slowdown, posting a rate of increase of just 3.1%, compared with 6.4% the previous year (Banco de España, 2007: 27). It was clear by then that the excessive weight of the real estate sector in the economy (productive resources and household wealth) could not be maintained.

The added problem for the Spanish economy was the high levels of debt acquired by families and businesses (especially by real estate and construction companies, and the fact that the Spanish banks and savings banks were financed by foreign savings. When the savings of German and French banks (among others) started to be redirected towards their own mortgage assets as a result of the global crisis of confidence, the Spanish banks 18 The provision of subsidized housing is the responsibility of the city and regional administrations in Spain. In her thesis Camargo (2009) shows a tolerant and indifferent response by the Barcelona administration, a repressive response by the Madrid administration and a tolerant negotiating response by the Bilbao administration.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

293

MADRID LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

975

became exposed. The Spanish Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB)19 was created in June 2009 to readjust mainly regional savings banks that had proliferated with the boom and were to a considerable extent financing the housing boom (De la Dehesa, 2009: 454). Since then a process of savings banks mergers has been underway with the financial support of FROB and under the supervision of the Bank of Spain.

Without entering into a discussion of macro-economic indicators, it should be mentioned that the overexpansion and subsequent downturn of the real estate industry have both involved double negative consequences: (1) the mismatch between supply and demand in housing units, leaving an oversupply for sale — this has caused a large absorption of bank credit that is not going to be paid back easily as thousands of housing assets remain for sale, but has dried up credit for other companies and families; (2) their direct and indirect contribution to the dramatic rise in unemployment.

Housing oversupply

There is at present an oversupply of almost 1 million housing units for sale on the market, 613,000 of them newly constructed with 50% located on the Mediterranean coast.20 As in other countries, the current housing crisis in Spain has had several effects. One is the shift of housing ownership to financial institutions, which are absorbing the assets from construction industries that are defaulting.21 The management of entire housing stocks from construction companies and developers has contributed to a lowering of housing prices and therefore a devaluation22 of the real estate business and families’ wealth. Once again, there are variations among cities. In the larger cities and for the period 2007–09 housing prices went down: 12% in Barcelona, 10.2% in Madrid, 17.1% in Valencia and 2.8% in Bilbao (Idealista.com, 2009).

As the housing market shrinks, especially along the Mediterranean coast, financial institutions have created parallel internal branches that act as real estate agents (there are 63 web portals set up by financial institutions selling homes). Although this strategy is portrayed as temporary and only geared towards selling the housing stock accumulated mainly as a consequence of the closure of construction companies, the question remains as to how long banks will keep this up. Some voices have been raised among real estate brokers complaining of unfair competition, with banks lowering housing prices23 in part of their housing stock by as much as 30% or even 50% compared to 2007. These special bank promotions contrast with the overall decline in housing prices.

How are households affected? Given the scale of the potential social problem of foreclosures — and subsequent evictions — that could occur, interesting innovative measures have been introduced by savings banks, such as the renegotiation of mortgages in accordance with the current income of the mortgage holder. This measure was engineered particularly for unemployed homeowners with a contracted mortgage.

Another measure involves the option of an affordable rent charged by the bank in 19 Created by the Real Decreto Ley (Royal Decree law) 9/2009, on credit institution restructuring processes and enhancement of their equity (see http://www.frob.es/general/gobierno_en.html).

20 Ministerio de Vivienda Press Office, June 2010 (www.vivienda.es). Overcapacity is uneven in Spanish regions. Some regional variations are: in Murcia 9% and in Andalusia 6% of total housing stock is for sale; while the corresponding figure is 5.5% in Cataluña; 4.5% in Madrid and 2% in the Basque Country (BBVA, 2010: 25).

21 Between 2009 and June 2010 three of the largest real estate companies went bankrupt as banks refused to renegotiate credits.

22 In 2008 the share value of the ten largest companies was reduced by 85% in relation to their peak evaluation in 2006 (Pellicer, 2009).

23 An interesting variant is the agreement signed by Spain’s largest financial institution, Banco Santander, with the Association of Spanish Construction Promoters, covering 2,000 real estate intermediaries and allowing them to sell their housing stock without an initial payment and at a 20% price reduction (Blazque, 2009).

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

294

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

976

READINGS

Debates and Developments

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

Debate

anticipation of a better economic situation and with the option for the lessee to buy or to recuperate ownership (for those who resume the mortgage contract).

These institutional innovations introduced by some financial institutions have had an impact on the banking sector. The Asociación Hipotecaría Española24 (Spanish Mortgage Association), which represents a large part of the banking sector, has been lobbying to influence policy choices concerning housing tenure practices, e.g. to promote better rental contracts for housing owners to encourage them to rent instead of sell. Although there are no quantitative data available for both measures (renegotiation and modifying tenure for a period), it can be argued that the innovative practices introduced are not only preventing foreclosures, but also homelessness and social unrest.

Finally, a collateral consequence of decreasing housing prices has been that these lower asset prices have affected credit and consumption. This is particularly damaging to small and medium-size companies that relied on their assets to obtain credit, but also to families whose housing wealth represented up to 80% of their total wealth, prompting the fall in household consumption.

Unemployment

Job losses amount to approaching 2.3 million, affecting over 700,000 women and 1.5 million men.25 The most affected have been workers in construction (30%) and industry (20%). As a result of the shrinking housing market, growth in employment in the construction industries has receded since 2008. This has affected workers, many with temporary contracts (55% of the total employed in the sector), and many being foreigners (43.9%).26 Unemployment more than doubled from 2007 to April 2010, when construction workers constituted 8.6% of the active labour force. Although more than a third of the unemployed seem to move to jobs in another economic sector, the rest find employment in the informal economy or live on fixed-term unemployment benefits. Along with immigrants, young people are the group most affected by unemployment: 48.1% for the 16–24 age groups.

High unemployment levels have been recurrent in Spain. In the 1970s and early 1980s the country also registered high levels and in 1995 the rate reached 24.5% of the active labour force. The social groups who have contributed to employment growth for over a decade are mainly immigrants and young people, many of them working with temporary renewable contracts.27 Also, growth in the tourism, commercial and services sectors have absorbed women, whose participation in the labour market reached 63% in 2008 (17.8 points more than in 1994) (Massarelli and Romans, 2008; Rojo, 2008). These three large groups constitute the so-called labour market ‘outsiders’ because, in comparison with full-time protected workers — male breadwinners — with permanent contracts and accumulated rights, these groups28 find it difficult to stay in the labour market over a long period of time (García and Karakatzanis, 2006; Polavieja, 2006). While the economy was expanding, these groups entered and exited the labour market (and even public administrations) almost without interruption, allowing them to acquire goods, travel and 24 An organization made up of banks, savings banks, cooperatives and financial credit institutions which have a major presence on the mortgage market. The members of the Association hold approximately 80% of the mortgage loan market (see http://www.ahe.es/bocms/sites/ingles/ pages/Home.jsp?mID=61 [accessed 19 September 2010]).

25 Women are better qualified and more represented in services. However, in October 2010 total unemployment stood at 19.9% for men and 20.1% for women.

26 Between 1996 and 2007 the number of workers in the construction industries rose by 1.55 million, of whom 43.9% were foreigners (Banco de España, 2007: 48).

27 Up to 90% of immigrants’ labour contracts were temporary, with only 9% having permanent contracts in 2003 (Porthé et al., 2007: 36).

28 Temporary contracts constitute 30% of the Spanish labour market, but these groups are overrepresented.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

295

MADRID LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

977

even purchase flats, thereby generating part of the housing demand. At present, they are seriously affected by the economic crisis.

As stated at the start of this essay, there are still important geographical differences in the way the economic crisis is evolving in Spain. The four regions where the concentration of immigrants is most pronounced (Madrid, Andalusia, Catalonia and the Valencian Community), and where housing construction has developed to the greatest extent, are also losing the most employment. A marked contrast exists between unemployment in Andalusia, at 27.21%, and that in the Basque Country, where unemployment is 10.91% (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2010).

Some government policies

What has been done by the government? For many months after the start of the global financial crisis, the Spanish Prime Minister insisted that things were not as bad as they appeared. By spring 2010 the Spanish government was compelled to change its tune and to introduce hard measures. The first wave of measures were of a Keynesian nature. In November 2008 the government announced the Fondo Estatal de Inversión Local29 (State Fund for Local Investment) with a budget of 8,000 million euros, aimed at financing local public works managed by city councils for over a year, with the priority of creating jobs to be offered to unemployed workers (up to 400,000 direct jobs were expected to be created). However, this measure could only create temporary jobs. This programme complements the Strategic Plan for Infrastructures (2005–2020) that promises more sustainable and productive works and employment and involved as much as 1.6% of GDP in 2008. Other measures involving fiscal reductions and moratoria on mortgage repayments have been introduced to help families. Finally, in order to boost credit to small and medium businesses, a New Credit Line was opened with 10,000 million euros (50% to be provided by banks and 50% by the ICO, the Official Credit Institute) (El Pais, 26 April, 2009: 6).

The Keynesian policies introduced in Spain (as in many other countries) were followed by a dramatic increase in public debt and a loss of confidence in the strength of the Spanish economy on the part of international financial market investors. In spring 2010 the government introduced severe cuts in public wages and social welfare, and more are in the pipeline. As one of the main problems is to regain confidence and profits for companies in order to generate employment, parliamentary debate in summer 2010 will concentrate on further reforms of the labour market after the recent measures already announced.30 More flexibilization of the labour market is going to be introduced, along with the loss of workers’ acquired rights.

Final notes This essay started with a reference to the housing bubble in the United Stated as a counterpoint with the Spanish case. Analysis of the Spanish case shows the combination of factors leading to the bubble, the specific characteristics of a large homeownership sector and the problems of household debt and unemployment. As in the United States, the real estate sector, the financial sector and households embarked on a dream of wealth increase. However, in Spain the strong role played by the family as an institution and by family solidarity partly explains not only the high level of homeownership but also the relatively cushioned landing during the crisis.

In his discussion on the vulnerability of lower-middle-class homeowners with the crisis in the United States, Stiglitz (2010) stresses the distance of the banking sector from the communities as a factor explaining high levels of foreclosures. In Spain local savings 29 Real Decreto-Ley 9/2008 [Royal Decree Law 9/2008] of 28 November.

30 The Spanish government issued a Royal Decree introducing urgent measures for the reform of the labour market in June 2010.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

296

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

978

READINGS

Debates and Developments

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

Debate

banks were deeply involved in granting business loans to constructors and mortgages to consumers as owners of the mortgage assets. This is why they needed to engineer innovative practices for the renegotiation of mortgage contracts to homeowners.

However, they have to deal with thousands of housing assets from bankrupt constructors.

This factor is causing considerable pressure on these banks and has led to a restructuring of the sector under the supervision of the Bank of Spain and international supervisors.

An important characteristic of the Spanish urban growth model has been regional differences. There are clear differences between the overcapacity of housing on the Mediterranean coast (Cataluña, Valencia Community, Murcia and Andalusia), Madrid and the Basque Country. Whereas in the latter the crisis is less painful thanks to a more balanced growth model in Madrid and on the Mediterranean coast the negative consequences of the neoliberal growth model is clearly shown in overcapacity of housing and high levels of unemployment.

Finally, unemployment is once again the scourge of Spain, reinforcing family solidarity. Unemployment is affecting the working population in general. However, it is especially the vulnerable groups — young cohorts and immigrants — those with temporary contracts and those working in the construction sector (a good deal of overlap here), who are the losers. The young continue to be supported by their families; immigrants also rely on the family institution. Thus, the current crisis is reinforcing the path-dependent cultural feature of familism in Spain. This will be compounded by further cuts in welfare over the coming years.

Marisol García (marisolgarcia@ub.edu), Department of Sociological Theory, Faculty of Economy and Business, University of Barcelona, Avda/Diagonal 690, 08034 Barcelona, Spain.

References Allen, J., B. James, J. Leal, T. Maloutas and L. Padovani (eds) (2004) Housing and welfare in Southern Europe. Blackwell, Oxford.

Andreotti, A., M. Garcia, A. Gomez, Y. Kazepov, E. Mingione and P. Hespanha (2001) Does a Southern European model exist? Journal of European Area Studies 9.1, 43–62.

Arbaci, S. (2007) Ethnic segregation, housing systems and welfare regimes in Europe.

European Journal of Housing Policy 7.4, 401–33.

BBVA (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria) (2010) Perspectivas para las economías española y madrileña [Prospects for the Spanish economy and the economy of Madrid]. BBVA Servicio de Estudios, Bilbao.

Banco de España, (2007) Informe Anual [Annual report] [WWW document]. URL http://www.bde.es/webbde/es/secciones/ informes/Publicaciones_an/Informe_anual/ 2007/ (accessed 19 September 2010).

Blazque, S. (2009) Las entidades financieras venden ladrillos [Financial companies sell bricks]. El Pais-Extra 26 April, 16.

Camargo, S. (2009) La crítica al modelo de ciudad competitiva: movimientos urbanos por la vivienda [Critique of the model of the competitive city: urban movements for housing]. Master’s thesis, Department of Sociological Theory, University of Barcelona.

Degen, M. and M. García (2008) La metaciudad: Barcelona. Transformacion de una metrópolis [The metacity: Barcelona. Transformation of a metropolis]. Editorial Anthropos, Barcelona.

De la Dehesa, G. (2009) La primera gran crisis financiera del siglo XXI: orígenes, detonante, efectos, respuestas y remedios [The first great financial crisis of the 21st century: origins, trigger, effects, implications and remedies]. Alianza Editorial, Madrid.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

297

MADRID LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

Doncel, L. (2009) Los promotores construyen 385.000 pisos que agravaran el exceso de la oferta [Developers build 385,000 units, which will worsen the oversupply]. El Pais 11 June [WWW document]. URL http://www.elpais.com/articulo/economia/ promotores/construyen/385000/pisos/ agravaran/exceso/oferta/elpepieco/ 20090601elpepieco_2/Tes?print=1 (accessed 19 September 2010).

European Parliament, Directorate General for Internal Policies (2010) Financial, economic and social crisis. Household indebtedness in the EU. Policy Department A, European Parliament, Brussels.

García, M. and N. Karakatzanis (2006) Social policy, democracy and citizenship in Southern Europe. In R. Gunther, N. Diamandouros and D. Sotiropoulos (eds.), Democracy and the state in the new Southern Europe. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

García-Montalvo, J. (2006) Deconstruyendo la burbuja inmobiliaria: expectativas de revalorización y precio de la vivienda en España [Deconstructing the housing bubble: revaluation of expectations and housing prices in Spain]. Papeles de Economía Española 109, 44–75.

Gurria, A. (2009) OECD. El Pais 20 March [WWW document]. URL http://www. elpais.com/articulo/economia/Espana/ saldra/recesion/ano/despues/resto/Europa/ elpepueco/20090320elpepueco_7/Tes (accessed 6 October 2010).

Harvey, D. (1989) From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation of urban governance in late capitalism.

Geografiska Annaler 71(B), 3–17.

Idealista.com (2009) Informe anual de precios [Annual report on prices] [WWW document]. URL http://www.idealista.com/ informacion/anio_2009.pdf (accessed 19 September 2010).

Instituto Nacional de Estadística (2008) Encuesta continua de presupuestos familiares [Permanent survey of family budgets] [WWW document]. URL http://www.ine.es/daco/daco42/daco4213/ resmeto06.pdf (accessed 19 September 2010).

Instituto Nacional de Estadística (2009) Población [Population] [WWW document].

URL http://www.ine.es/inebmenu/ mnu_cifraspob.htm (accessed 19 September 2010).

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

979 Instituto Nacional de Estadística (2010) Encuesta de población activa [Inquiry into the working population) Press Release 30 April [WWW doument].

URL http://www.ine.es/daco/daco42/ daco4211/epa0110.pdf (19 September 2010).

International Monetary Fund (2009) World economic outlook. International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC. Leal, J. (2006) Distribución del espacio residencial y localización de la población española [Distribution of residential space and localization of the Spanish population]. In J. Fernandez Cordon, and J. Leal (eds.), Análisis territorial de la demografía española [Territorial analysis of Spanish demography]. Fundación Fernando Abril Martorell, Madrid.

Leal, J. and M. Dominguez (2008) Transformaciones económicas y segregación social en Madrid [Economic transformations and social segregation in Madrid]. Ciudad y Territorio. Estudios Territoriales XL 158, 703–25.

López de Lera, D. (2006) El impacto de la inmigración extranjera en las regiones españolas [The impact of foreign immigration in the Spanish regions]. In J. Fernandez Cordon and J. Leal (eds.), Análisis territorial de la demografía española [Territorial analysis of Spanish demography], Fundación Fernando Abril Martorell, Madrid, 233–72.

Marshall, T. (2004) (ed.) Transforming Barcelona. Routledge, London.

Massarelli, N. and F. Romans (2008) Population and social conditions.

Eurostat: data in Focus 40, 1–8.

OECD (2007) Regions at a glance. OECD, Paris.

Pellicer, L. (2009) Desplome sin paracaídas [A plunge without parachutes]. El Pais-Negocios 8 March, 12.

Plaza, B. (2006) The return on investment of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.2, 452–67.

Polavieja, J.G. (2006) The incidence of temporary employment in advanced economies: why is Spain different?

European Sociological Review 22.1, 61–78.

Porthé, V., M. Amable and J. Benacha (2007) La precariedad laboral y la salud de los inmigrantes en España: ¿qué sabemos y qué deberíamos saber? [Job

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

298

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

980 insecurity and the safety of immigrants in Spain: what do we know and what ought we to know?]. Arch Prev Riesgos Labor 10.1, 34–9.

Prytherch, D. (2006) Narrating the landscapes of entrepreneurial regionalism: rescaling, ‘new’ regionalism and the planned remaking of Valencia, Spain. Space and Polity 10.3, 203–27.

Rodriguez López, J. and E. Fellinger Jusué (2007) El mercado de la vivienda en España. Previsiones 2007–2009 [The housing market in Spain. Forecasts 2007–2009]. Ministerio de Vivienda, Madrid, mimeo.

Rojo, M. (2008) Mujer y Mercado de trabajo [Woman and the labour market].

Secretaria Nacional de Empleo, Ministerio de Trabajo e Inmigración, Madrid.

Royo, S. (2006) The European Union and economic reforms: the case of Spain.

READINGS

Debates and Developments

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

Debate Working Paper 8/2006, Real Instituto Elcano, Madrid.

Sociedad de Tasación (2009) Síntesis del estudio de mercado de vivienda nueva en 2009 [Summary of a study of the market in new housing in 2009] [WWW document]. URL http://web.st-tasacion.es/ html/menu6_2.php (accessed 19 September 2010).

Stiglitz, J.E. (2010) Freefall. America, free markets, and the sinking of the world economy. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.

Terrones, A. (2007) La influencia de los sistemas de vivienda en las condiciones residenciales de la población inmigrante.

Los casos de Barcelona y Amsterdam [The influence of housing systems on the living conditions of the immigrant population.

The cases of Barcelona and Amsterdam.

PAPERS Revista de Sociología 85, 207–211.

Résumé La crise mondiale actuelle a fortement affecté l’Espagne, mais ce qui se passe aujourd’hui tient au récent modèle de croissance économique et urbaine. Alors qu’on a beaucoup écrit sur la faiblesse économique d’un modèle fondé largement sur le secteur du bâtiment, on ne s’est guère intéressé aux réglementations internes, politiques publiques ou facteurs socio-culturels dans lesquels s’inscrit le modèle de croissance urbaine espagnole. La question que les débats actuels n’abordent que trop peu est donc : dans quelle mesure la crise que connaît l’Espagne résulte-t-elle de son modèle de croissance socio-économique urbaine? Il est affirmé ici que la crise de ce modèle révèle une interaction particulière des forces mondialisatrices avec les processus nationaux et locaux, caractérisés les uns comme les autres par des structures spécifiques d’incitations économiques et par des traits culturels tributaires de chemins de dépendance. La combinaison de ces facteurs participe à une explication de la bulle du logement.

Concernant ce phénomène, l’association spécifique des facteurs étudiés permet d’envisager des répercussions différentes pour l’Espagne comparée aux États-Unis.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34.4 © 2010 The Author. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

299

1020 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

1300 km2 / 12500 km2 3.9 mil.

/ 13.1 mil.

TOOLS

LOS ANGELES TOP-DOWN INFRASTRUCTURE // ECOLOGY / LANDSCAPE

FRAGMENTED SUB-URBAN // SUBURBIA

City Administrative Border 5 km

Urban Footprint

transportation means

56%

30%

8%

unemployment

765 bil.

7% green space

3 m2 / person

GDP

PLACES FOR EXPERIMENTATION // MICRO / TEMPORARY PROGRAMS

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: TOP-DOWN INFRASTRUCTURE THEMATIC CLUSTER: ECOLOGY/ LANDSCAPE YEAR: 1940SLOS ANGELES RIVER Main stakehodlers: Innovative Green Infrastructure Planners

Los Angeles sits on an inhostile landscape – its terrain is comprised of swampland, flood plain, desert, mountain, and coast. There are simply not enough natural resources to support a city of its size and population. With an ecological footprint greater than the state of California, Los Angeles only exists because of the infrastructure that supports it. Infrastructure is the lifeline that has allowed this unlivable territory to be transform into the 2nd largest metropolis in the United States. Los Angeles depends on the resources delivered to it through its infrastructure in order to survive. (1) Image 88: The City Project, Aerial image Los Angeles State

Once a traditional river that flowed through the landscape, Los Angeles had a detrimental impact on the developing city due to constant flooding. So in order for the city to continue growing the river needed to be controlled. The natural Los Angeles river was transformed into the urban drainage system pictured on the left.

The LA River controls the landscape through a super efficient infrastructure that allowed for development of the rapidly expanding city up to the edge of this new river front, with no threat of flooding. With this newly engineered river, new real estate opportunities developed.

This new river was now able to organize easements, right-of-ways, and the placement of utility infrastructure. (2) Notice the development in the image to the left - highways, factories, and homes have been developed up to the edge of the river - this would have never been possible with the natural river’s treat of flooding.

(1) Varnelis, Kazys. The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. Edited by Kazys Varnelis. Actar, 2008.

(2) ibid.

302

Image 89: Los-Angeles River

303

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: FRAGMENTED SUB-URBAN THEMATIC CLUSTER: SUBURBIA YEAR: 1950STHE URBANIZATION OF SUBURBIA Main stakeholders: Developers

This tool looks at the urbanization of the suburban territory and the fragmented urban conditions that have resulted from the city’s rapid urbanization. Los Angeles is a fragmented city. An amalgamation of urbanized suburbia, the city has no true center. Instead it is a multi nodal city.

By 1960 the scale of LA was staggering and unprecedented. Los Angeles was not a simple hub and spoke industrial city with boulevards and rail lines radiating outward from a central downtown core. It was, in the words of one scholar of the period, a “fragmented metropolis”-a multi-headed beast with no one true center. Its system of urban organization was something that Easterners and Europeans couldn’t fathom(1). Los Angeles is a city that developed with a sense of urgent density.

Image 90: Suburbia. Iwan Baan, 2011, No More Play

As a fragmented metropolis, LA is the way it is today due to its non-traditional development.

The physical, social, infrastructural, cultural, political conditions surrounding its growth allowed for an extremely diverse landscape to flourish. Los Angeles’s physical form was shaped by a rapid urbanization that occurred simultaneously with the introduction of public transportation, the automobile, and as a response to the dense urbanization of other US cities.

Today, LA has become a dense urban field, no longer with the option to sprawl horizontally, the city has begun to fill back into itself. There are many LA. It is so saturated, so dense, that the city must be broken down into small nodes of activity and commerce. It is because of this, that the region is a fractured and has a subjective sense of place. And now, as it infills, this smaller scale emphasizes the role of the individual and individuality.

Image 91: ibid.

(1) Fulton, William. The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

304

305

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

TOOLS

TOOL: PLACES FOR EXPERIMENTATION

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

evolved around architects such as Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss, and the establishment of The Southern California School of Architecture (SCI-Arc) as a as a counterweight to the established East Coast School. They developed new ideas and ways of displaying architecture by a deconstruction of the process and the ideas themselves. The result was as delusional and many layered as the city itself.

THEMATIC CLUSTER: MICRO / TEMPORARY PROGRAMS YEAR: 1960S TYPOLOGIES OF CALIFORNIAN (POST)MODERNISM Main stakeholders: Avantgardistic Architects, Artists, Academic Insititutions (SCI-Arc)

As Los Angeles was an experimental field from the beginning, the idea of experimentation is deeply embedded into the city’s culture. It is still today a place where new ideas find the soil to grow. This experimental field has created a complex structure in the citys’ fabric, where different grids and organising principles collide and overlap. Like the Bonaparte Hotel, with its overlapping spaces and layers summarises the postmodern condition, the overlapping layers of the urban field are signs of the postmodern city.

This condition with its infrastructural backbone has affected the city’s growth patterns, but also strongly influenced the architectural experimentation. The ideas of the postmodern city, the infrastructure, layering and delusion have been adapted by LA-based architects for over a decade, in a smaller scale, proving Leon Battista Alberti’s quote: “The city is like a great house, and the house in its turn a small city.”

Image 93: Charles and Ray Eames - Eames House

In the third tool, we present how the ideas of Los Angeles, as an experimental field, fluctuate between scales.

Modern architects believed that new conditions of lifestyles and technology should be given a fresh interpretation, rather than being forced into the forms of previous eras. Among the iconic buildings of LA, one could mention “The Millard House” (Frank Lloyd Wright), “Schindler House” and “Lovell Beach House” (Schindler) and the “Kauffman House” (Neutra).

The Case Study House Program was an experimental residential house development aiming to make efficient modern homes for the housing boom caused by the end of World War II. Important houses such as “The Eames House” (Ray and Charles Eames), “The Stahl House” and “The Walter Bailey House” (Pierre Koenig), contributed to the development of Californian Modernism.

The complexity of the interchanging ideas between city and house, might be best expressed in some of John Lautner’s buildings, such as “The Sheats Goldstein Residence”, “The Elrod House” and “The Chemosphere”.

The Californian modernists laid ground for a new generation of experimental architects that further explored this interchange of ideas in the postmodern city. A progressive environment

306

Image 92: John Lautner - Malin Residence (Chemosphere)

307

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Los Angeles Tool : Fragmented Sub-Urban The fast development, growth and merging of communities and whole cities is one of the most heavily discussed topics in the field of urban design. The attempts to describe this urbanization phenomenon of why and how cities grow, spread, sprawl and what terminology to use: metropolitanization, conurbation, poly-centralization, suburbanization etc. is very present and visible in numerous publications. As some authors see it as an inevitable and irreversible direction of urban development and socities, others favorize the argument of a contant change in cycles - also pointing ut the negative implications and possible scenarios.

Below you see can read the theories of two very renowned scholars: Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes and some of their visions and ideas:

“What matter to us, who look at it for the moment in this detached way from very far above, or even really to the actual citizens themselves to-day, those old boundaries of the countries, which were once traced so painfully and are still so strictly maintained, from use and wont or for purposes other than practical ones? What really matter nowadays the divisions between innumerable consistuent villages and minor boroughs whose historic names are swallowed up, apparently for ever, like those microscopic plants, those tiny plants and animals, which a big spreading amoeba so easily includes, so restlessly devours? Here for most practical purposes is obviously a vas new unity, long ago well described as a ‘province covered with houses’ “.

Geddes, Patrick (1915): ‘Cities in Evolution’. Williams&Norgate. London. p. 26-27.

“The persistence of such overgrown containers would indicate that they are concrete manifestations of the dominant forces in our present civilization; and the fact that the same signs of overgrowth and overconcentration exist (..) show that these forces are universal ones, operating almost without respect to the prevailing ideologies or ideal goals. While one must recognize such facts, it would be premature to believe that these processes are final and irreversible: we have already surveyed a vast amount of data that demonstrates that, even in cultures far less committed to quantitative growth than our own, there comes a point when the tumorous organ will destroy the organism at whose expense it has reached such swollen dimensions. Meanwhile normal birth, growth, and renewal may elsewhere shift the balance.”

Mumford, Lewis (1961): ‘The city in history-its origins, its transformations, and its prospects’. Harcourt, Brace&World. New York. p. 526527.

Explain briefly the authors’ points of view, supported by the knowledge extracted from the Los Angeles lecture but also other case studies.

How is the development of Los Angeles metropolitan region similar to/different from the development of Zurich metropolitan region? What are your future urban visions for those two regions supported with arguments concerning the economic, social and ecologic aspects of urban development? Look also at the maps below (equal scale). Use the rear page for your explenations.

308

309

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

310

311

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

312

313

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

314

315

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

316

317

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

318

319

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

320

321

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

322

323

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

324

325

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

326

327

LOS ANGELES LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

328

329

5300 people / km2

size & population urban

/ metropolitan

1990 km2 / 2050 km2 10.6 mil. / 10.6 mil.

TOOLS

SHENZHEN TOP-DOWN URBAN PLANNING // PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE/ MOBILITY

MEGASCALE NEIGHBORHOOD // COMMUNITY PROJECTS

City City Administrative Administrative Border Border 55 km km

Urban Urban Footprint Footprint

transportation means

31%

65%

5%

unemployment

225 bil.

2% green space

16 m2 / person

GDP

HANDSHAKE URBANISM // INFORMAL / HYBRID CITY

SHENZHEN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: TOP-DOWN URBAN PLANNING THEMATIC CLUSTER: PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE/ MOBILITY YEAR: 2000S CREATING A MEGACITY Main stakeholders: Local Government, Development Companies, Industiral Companies

Shenzhen is an internationally relevant border city between Mainland China and Hong Kong. It is one of China’s trading gates to the world. What was once a fishing village is now a metropolis of more than 10 million people. Shenzhen grew at an extraordinary pace, making it one of the world’s fastest developing urban areas over the past 30 years.

Over this period of time the whole Pearl River Delta transformed from a productive hinterland into a metropolitan region of 40 million inhabitants. This growth, in both scale and speed, is unprecedented making the future development of the city and region difficult to predict.

Image 94: Shenzhen, Timelapse, 1988-2009

The creation of Shenzhen as a global city was based on economic growth and important political decisions. Such areas could be seen as economic experiments for the future development of China. Special Economic Zones (SEZ) function in a quasi-autonomous way, having special administrative rules. The pace of growth could not have been foreseen from the beginning, but in 30 years Shenzhen went from a fishing village to a 10 million people urban agglomeration, the 4th biggest city in China.

Cheap labour was the force that made the development of Shenzhen and Hong Kong possible.

Deng Xiaoping drew the borderlines of the SEZ of Shenzhen, then divided them into big parcels of land for development.

The land remained in government possession, but was rented to the development companies.

Speculative building emerged as a strategy based on continuous economic growth that matches the rapid urbanisation process. Decisions are based on the belief that, sooner or later, everything that developers build will eventually be used or occupied, the developing area will quickly become functional and even new local identities will be created.

Image 95: Shenzhen, Pearl River Delta Global Schindler Award 2015 Shenzhen Projects | ETH Zurich | K. Christiaanse

332

333

SHENZHEN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: MEGASCALE NEIGHBORHOODS THEMATIC CLUSTER: COMMUNITY PROJECTS YEAR: 2000S URBAN MEGAPROJECTS Main stakeholders: Real Estate Developers, Industrial and Comercial Investors

Urban megaprojects (UMPs) have become the norm in the big cities of Southeast Asia and China. In response to the demand for living, working, and consumption spaces, they take many forms: from central business districts to new towns, from redeveloped waterfronts to gated communities.

Their most powerful incarnations are found in projects that we can term “global”: new highdensity central areas with supra-local attractiveness, their images of skyscraper clusters, punctuated by pieces of iconic architecture, that became familiar representations of cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, Guangzhou, Kuala Lumpur and Taipei.

Image 96: Shenzhen, Central Business District

More than just pragmatic reactions to rapid urbanization, such key projects aim to embrace modernity and elevate the position of their respective city in the global hierarchy. Many urban scholars have identified large-scale projects of such ambition as artifacts of economic globalization as well as of neoliberal urban policy, initially in Europe and North America, and increasingly in Asia and the rest of the world.

As cities strive to attract footloose investment capital and a sophisticated labor force, the development of new spaces for urban economies and quality infrastructure becomes a key factor.

New high-density central districts are a type of urban megaproject particulary instrumental in establishing urban identities and mobilizing economic development in the context of global inter-city competition. At the same time, “floating people” (migrant production workers) and “floating administrators” (constantly changing administration and political staff) make urban identity on an everyday basis in the consciousness of the population difficult.

Hitherto, the aim of urban planning has been mainly economic improvement: extending technical infrastructure to guarantee industrial estates (streets, harbours and airports), new construction of commercial centres and increasingly also building of representative cultural institutions. An additional planning task was to ensure housing supply with extreme building concentrations, corresponding to the growing need.

Image 97: Shenzhen, Civic Centre Urban Design Models for Urban Megaprojects in a Global World - Eirini Kasioumi “THE GENESIS OF URBAN LANDSCAPE” Kassel University Press, 2005 334

335

SHENZHEN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

TOOLS

TOOL: HANDSHAKE URBANISM THEMATIC CLUSTER: INFORMAL / HYBRID CITY YEAR: 2000SVILLAGE IN THE CITY (VIC) Main stakeholders: Local Communities

Shenzhen’s Urban Villages are the spatial outcome of a loophole in Chinese development policies, associated with the mind-blowing growth of the region. This type of urban development is characterised as ‘handshake urbanism’ because of the narrow streets and the facades that almost touch each other.

Image 98: Shenzhen, Existing situation of Shipai Urban Village, Axonometry

In Urban Villages land ownership is collective and managed by the community itself: it is thus extremely difficult for the state to absorb them within a regulated framework of development, the same development that produces large-scale gated compounds in the rest of the city.

As a result, urban villages retain certain urban qualities of traditional villages: streets are crowded with pedestrians, micro businesses occupy the ground floors entirely, functions change seamlessly over time and the buildings are upgraded in a constant process of adaptation.

After years of fighting their status, the state has eventually recognized the potential of the Urban Villages to overcome the need of affordable housing for working migrants, and it is opening the way for a new understanding of them as self-sustaining, hyper-dense resilient communities.

In the city center, the extremely high floating population density of a Village in the City (VIC) is an impetus for financial growth. Simultaneously, however, it produced in those villages a high Floor Area Ratio, which restricts the VIC’s further improvement.

Because of restrictions on the current collective land system, owners of property within VICs are not allowed to mortgage, transfer or use their land on the market. This restricts the potential for land exploitation and reduces the value of this asset. This, in turn, leads to inefficient utilization of the land. In city centers, often the most valuable land area of the city, some VICs are used mainly as inferior residential zones.

Image 99: Shenzhen, Map of Urban Vilages ETH Zürich l DARCH l Profs. Brillembourg & Klumpner l Pearl River Delta Seminar Week Booklet l Spring 2015 Village in the City - Unknown Urbanity in China | RRO 1-07.05 | Berlage Institute Research Report 336

337

SHENZHEN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

EXERCISES

EXERCISE City : Tool : -

Urban Stories Sum Up Summarizing all the tools from the Urban Stories lecture series, it can be seen that urban design and urban development, by changing the various contexts, shows significant differences of how urban and architectural practice shape cities. At the same time, very different cities show also some common urban phenomena (see below, left).

MASTERPLANNING

Relate the relevant tools (see list below, right) to each of the three categories and explain in key points their common characteristics.

Caracas Oil and the Automobile City

Berlin Megascale Planning

Cape Town Masterplanning Segregation

Caracas Informal Toolbox

Berlin Critical (Re)Construction

Cape Town Development through Distribution

Caracas Multiple Hubs

Berlin Temporary Urbanism

Cape Town Dialogue and the Peoples Process

New York City Horizontal - Vertical Grid

Detroit Generating Suburbia

Sarajevo Identity Construction

New York City Revitalizing Industry

Detroit Shrinking City

Sarajevo De-Urbanization

New York City Repurposing Infrastructure

Detroit Active Infill

Sarajevo Turbo-Urbanism

Madrid Inventing a Capital

Mexico City Recovering Waterscapes

Athens Developer as an Architect

Madrid Revisiting Complexity

Mexico City Networks of Green Infrastructure

Athens Post-Olympic Urbanism

Madrid Social Production of Public Space

Mexico City Macro-Scale Social Housing

Athens User-Generated Urbanism

Los Angeles Control

Zurich Planning the Metropolitan Area

Los Angeles Fragmented Sub-Urban

Zurich Redensification

Shenzhen Top-Down Infrastructure Shenzhen Megascale Neighborhoods

Los Angeles Places for Experimentation

Zurich Creating Informality

Shenzhen Handshake Urbanism

MOBILITY

SUBURBIA - SPRAWL

338

339

SHENZHEN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

340

341

SHENZHEN LECTURE: “URBAN STORIES” I/II

FALL 2014/ SPRING 2015

COORDINATOR: HARIS PIPLAS

ETH ZÜRICH DARCH INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN PROF. ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG PROF. HUBERT KLUMPNER

READINGS

342

343