New Towns on the Cold War Frontier - Part 3 by International New Town Institute

Rour Toul kela Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue

New Towns

on the

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Cold War Frontier

Part 3

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*Part 3

Vernacular Spectacular

Critique from the Inside-Out on the Diagrams of the New Towns

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Rour Toul kela Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue

In the 1960s New Town planning became the blueprint model of modernist-based moderations through the introduction of local elements with attention to the social context. Connection to existing social customs and traditions was encouraged, and designers fought against the exclusion of individual populations, and introduced a culture of participation. In the design of these cities, the tension between modernity and local identity became visible. This new phase in the theoretical basis of New Towns became visible first in Western Europe and later in the construction of New Towns by Western-trained architects in developing countries.

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739 Rour Toul kela Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue

The Double Life of an Indian New Town

Ali Saad

ROURKELA, INDIA

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue The New Town's informal township with Rourkela steel plant in the background, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

While today the concept of the Modernist New Town is widely regarded as a failure in Europe, and its built examples often fall victim to demolition, some representatives of this universal typology, that were exported to developing countries after World War II, have experienced a reinterpretation.1 One of them is the steel town Rourkela. Co-financed by the German government and planned by the German Krupp Enterprise in the 1950s, this New Town was Germany’s biggest and one of the most ambitious foreign development projects after World War II 2: the transformation of one of the most underdeveloped parts of India into “one of the most modern cities in Asia” in the period of only four years.3 Today, after 60 years, Rourkela is proof of how the Modernist City needed to be understood differently than intended in order to turn from an abstract urban model into a “real”, multi-layered and locally valuable city.

1. This text is the revised and comprehensively extended version of an article published in German. See: Ali Saad, “Rourkela - Das Doppelleben einer indischen New Town”, archplus 185 (2007): 30-33. It is based on a study and fieldwork carried out by the author between November 2005 and May 2006 at the Chair for Architecture and Urban Design, Prof. Dr. Wouter Vanstiphout, TU Berlin.

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2. Jan Bodo Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts. Wissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Außenund Entwicklungspolitik. (Bonn: Eichholz,1963), 5. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” Der Spiegel, March 30, 1960, 30. 3. Konrad Steiler, “Rourkela – eine indische Großstadt in Essen entworfen”, Bulletin der indischen Botschaft, Band V, no. 7 (Juli 1955): 13.

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IN THE MIDDLE OF “NOWHERE”: KRUPP’S GLOBALIZATION Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach must have been very confident on August 15th 1953, when he signed the first agreement between the Indian government, his world-leading steel company Friedrich Krupp AG and the German engine constructor Demag AG.4 The memorandum comprised the planning and construction consultancy for the first of three projected state-of-the-art steel plants, each with a production capacity of half a million tons of raw steel per year that due to growing demand was soon raised to 1 million.5 In December 1953 a second agreement extended this commission6 to include all infrastructure necessary to make the plant self-sufficient: accommodation for 20.000 workers and service population, general facilities, power plants, water supply and transportation routes – in short, a complete city for 100.000 inhabitants.7

Alfried Krupp on cover of Time magazine, August 19, 1957

For Krupp, Hitler’s former arms supplier and some years later the richest man in Europe, the deal meant a major step towards the transformation of his enterprise from one producing steel for the weapons industry to one producing for civil purposes. After his release from prison in 1951 and the decomposition of his company by the Allies through the so-called Mehlem Treaty in 1953, Krupp was forced to strike new paths to rebuild his business. He found possibilities in the exploration of new global markets. The commission for the Indian steel plant was a mayor project acquisition stemming from this approach and therefor very important in building up the new reputation that Krupp needed for his enterprise.8 After the first memorandum was signed the Indian government founded the national Hindustan Steel Limited (HSL) to execute the project. The Germans merged into the consortium Indiengemeinschaft Krupp-Demag. Some months later, after having

4. Klaus Röh, Rourkela als Testfall für die Errichtung von Industrieprojekten in Entwicklungsländern, Veröffentlichungen des Hamburger Weltwirtschafts-Archivs (Hamburg: Verlag Weltarchiv, 1967) 82, 102f. 5. Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 83. 6. Hermann Stümpel, Das Hüttenwerk Rourkela – Ein westdeutscher Beitrag zur wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung Indiens, PhD Dissertation (Marburg: Marburg University, 1966), 175. 7. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 3. In detail the calculation was based on 15.000 workers and their 60.000 family members plus 5.000 persons of service population and their 20.000 family members. See: Alfred Schinz, “Rourkela – die moderne indische Industriestadt,” Geographische Rundschau, Jg.19, no. 7 (1967): 241. 8. Corinna Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien – Eine internationale Geschichte 1947-1980, (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015) 183. On Krupp’s internationalisation after his release from prison see: Lothar Gall (Ed.), Krupp im 20. Jahrhundert - Die Geschichte des Unternehmens vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Gründung der Stiftung (Berlin: Siedler, 2002), 526ff. Also see: Jonathan S. Wiesen, West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past: 1945 – 1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), Chapter 7 (quoted from Unger 2015, 183). Also see: See: “Business abroad: The House that Krupp Rebuilt,“ Time magazine, 19 August 1957. [online] Available at: http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,809772,00.html (accessed: February 12 2020).

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Rourkela has a direct train connection with the harbour of Kolkata and is located close to rich mineral resources like coal and iron ore (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

examined various places in northeastern India, the experts of Krupp and Demag found the location they needed: Rourkela, a village in the State of Odisha, located in one of the poorest parts of India, circa 400 kilometers to the west of Kolkata. In the middle of “nowhere”9 Rourkela was situated in a vast, savanna-like landscape surrounded by hills, fields, jungle, the rivers Sankh, Koel and Brahmani, as well as some other smaller villages. When the Germans arrived, the village mainly consisted of primitive wooden huts housing the local Adivasi, the umbrella term for India’s native tribes.10

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9. Srirupa Roy describes the deliberate placing of Indian steel towns in underdeveloped “elsewheres” away from the existing urban centres as a way to establish a new narrative of Indian national identity after India’s independence. As “abstract spaces” these places “were upheld as the national exemplary spaces of the new India”. Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief – India and the Politics of Post-Colonial Nationalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 134-135. 10. Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 124-126.

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Despite its remoteness, the location offered perfect conditions for the supply of the future steel plant and township. It had a train station on the South-Eastern-RailwayLine with a direct connection to both Kolkata and Mumbai. It was in proximity to ample sources of raw materials essential to the production of steel, such as iron ore, coal, limestone and dolomite. In addition, it was close to the Hirakud Dam in Sambalpur, which was crucial in providing the New Town with water and electricity.11

Arrival of Krupp's engineers on their first field trip to Rourkela, 1954 (photo: Claus Coupette)

11. Sperling, Rourkela – Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 11f.

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Site of the future township with view on Durgapur Hills, 1954 (photo: Claus Coupette)

Brahmani River with the site of the township in the background, 1954 (photo: Claus Coupette)

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Hamirpur Church

Temple

Rourkela before construction of the New Town, around 1950 (source: Ali Saad) Durgapur Hills

Panposh Market Rourkela Station

Panposh Station

Rourkela

Temple

Villages Brick buildings Water and creeks Flooding area Unpaved road Path Rail tracks

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Ferry crossing Brahmani River, around 1958 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

Brick buildings around Rourkela station, 1954 (photo: Claus Coupette)

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Adivasi village, around 1950 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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COLD WAR INTERESTS Although India was striving for autonomy after its independence from British rule in 1947, foreign help and skills were initially needed to build up the new state.12 Given its potentially huge market and relatively cheap supply of resources, western as well as Communist countries were very interested in dragging India into their respective spheres of influence in the hope of selling their products and services.13 Like in other developing contexts, large-scale projects and New Town planning were important tools within this strategy.14 The Indian government was very aware of the Cold War situation and was taking advantage of both systems by following a strict non-alignment policy.15 Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s political doctrine of a “democratically planned collectivism” kept major industries and infrastructure in public hands, but allowed private ownership16, and thus, represented a mix between the centrally planned economy of the Soviets and the market economy of the West. 17 The foundation of the Non-Alignment Movement in 1961 by India, Yugoslavia, Egypt and Ghana further consolidated India’s will to detach itself from the influence of former colonial powers.

Location map of Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur (source: Der Spiegel, no. 14, 1960, p. 30)

The non-alignment approach also dominated the commissioning strategy for the new steel plants. The commissions should not go to firms from only one power sphere. Instead negotiations were held with various countries including the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and West Germany. Finally, three projects were commissioned. Besides the Germans, the Soviets were also contracted in 1955 to

12. Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 97. 13. Corinna Unger, “Rourkela, ein ‘Stahlwerk im Dschungel’ – Industrialisierung, Modernisierung und Entwicklungshilfe im Kontext von Dekolonisation und Kaltem Krieg (1950-1970)”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 48 (2008): 370. 14. Michelle Provoost, “New Towns an den Fronten des Kalten Krieges - Moderne Stadtplanung als Instrument im Kampf um die Dritte Welt,” archplus 183, Situativer Urbanismus (2007): 63-67. 15. Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien, 156. 16. Unger, “Rourkela, ein ‘Stahlwerk im Dschungel’”, 370. 17. The ambition of a mixed, public and private economy was already formulated in the „Industrial Policy Resolutions“ of 1948 and 1956. See: Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 49; Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien, 154. On the importance of the mixed economy for India’s nation building see: Roy, Beyond Belief, 142.

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plan a steel plant with a capacity of 1 million tons of raw steel per year including an adjoining worker’s town for 100.000 inhabitants in Bhilai. In 1956 another steel plant and township for Durgapur with equal capacities were commissioned to the British.18

German chancellor Konrad Adenauer (left) and Indian prime minister Nehru (right), 1956 (source: Deutsche Bank AG, Kultur und Gesellschaft Historisches Institut, Frankfurt am Main)

Prime Minister Nehru (left) and Alfried Krupp, around 1958 (source: Jozef Maria Hunck, India Tomorrow: Pattern of Indo-German Future, Verlag Handelsblatt, 1963)

After initial negotiations with Japan had failed, the Indian government approached the German embassy in New Delhi in 1953 and proposed that German engineers realize the Rourkela project.19 As the first and biggest West German foreign commission after World War II,20 the project was strategically very important for the West German Government as there was a good chance it would give West German expertise access to the Indian market.21 At the same time it played an important role in curbing the spread of communism in general, and in West Germany's stand against the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) specifically. In the context of the so-called Hallstein doctrine West Germany was claiming an exclusive mandate (Alleinvertretungsanspruch) to represent Germany internationally 22 and was therefor very interested in maintaining close relations to India as a strategic country.23 The doctrine was implemented by the West German government under the chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1955 and sanctioned countries that had relations with the GDR until it was abolished under chancellor Willy Brandt in the late 1960s.

18. Friedrich Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte – Eine wirtschafts- und siedlungsgeographische Untersuchung zur Industrialisierung und Verstädterung eines Entwicklungslandes (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1970) 45. 19. Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien, 182. Japan did not want to leave the direction of the project to the Indians and India feared that Japan was more interested in accessing Indian iron ore for their domestic market than in the plant. See: Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 80-81; Stang, Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 45. 20. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 5. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” In: Der Spiegel, no. 14, March 30, 1960, 22. 21. Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien, 167 and 183. 22. Unger, “Rourkela, ein ‘Stahlwerk im Dschungel’”, 373.

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23. In a statement from 1965 West German foreign minister Gerhard Schröder summarizes the strategic arguments for West Germany’s interest in India since the 1950s: “a) To save the Indian subcontinent from drifting into the communist sphere of power, b) to secure West Germany’s exclusive mandate [against the GDR] and c) to participate in the economic development and accessibility of India”. Quoted from: Amit Das Gupta, Handel, Hilfe, Hallstein-Doktrin – Die bundesdeutsche Südasienpolitik unter Adenauer und Erhard 1949 bis 1966 (Husum: Matthiesen, 2004), 16.

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“TEMPLES OF MODERN INDIA”: STEEL PLANTS AS TOOLS FOR PROGRESS AND EMANCIPATION Large-scale New Town planning was adopted in India shortly after independence and the split from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Between 1947 and 1981 India built 118 New Towns, which according to Robert Hume was the largest New Town programme of its time.24 In 1948 the German architect Otto Koenigsberger drew up a plan for Bhubaneswar in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, which was to be the new state capital replacing Cuttack, a city that was devastated by floods regularly. In Punjab the split from Pakistan made a new regional capital necessary, leading to Le Corbusier’s plan for Chandigarh in 1951. In the 1970s Gandhinagar was planned by former employees of Le Corbusier to give the newly emerged state of Gujarat a capital city.25 Besides new state capitals many New Towns for refugees coming from Pakistan and Bangladesh were constructed, such as Faridabad near Delhi, Nilokheri in Punjab and Asokenagar in West Bengal.26 And with the First Five-Year-Plan (1951-1955), which aimed at India’s self-sufficiency by strengthening agricultural production and the primary sector, many townships were built in relation to new dam, irrigation, fertilizer and power projects.27 The construction of steel plants and their accompanying townships was part of the second and the third Five-Year-Plan (1956-1961 and 1961-1966): a huge, national reform programme under prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to industrialise postcolonial India in order to raise income levels, create new jobs and improve the quality of life of the Indian population.28 After Independence an economic upturn had generated a rapidly growing need for steel which could not be satisfied by the existing steel plants in Jamshedpur, Burnpur and Bhadravati, which at that time all together produced circa 1.4 million tons of steel each year.29 Steel plants and their New Towns also played an important role in disseminating the idealism and progressivism of India’s young democratic government. They acted as 24. Robert K. Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Towns (London: E & FN Spon, 1997), 248. Quoted from Wiliam J. Glover, “The Troubled Passage from ‘Village Communities’ to Planned New Town Developments in Mid-Twentieth-Century South Asia,” in Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability, eds. Anne Rademacher, K. Sivaramakrishnan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 93. 25. On the new Indian state capitals Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh and Ghandinagar see the works of Ravi Kalia: Ravi Kalia, Bhubaneswar: From Temple Town to Capital city (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994). Ravi Kalia, Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). Ravi Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004). 26. K. C. Sivaramakrishnan, “Durgapur: Case Study of an Indian New Town,” in Urban Planning Practice in Developing Countries, eds. John L.Taylor, David G. Williams (Oxford: Pergamon, 1982), 144. 27. Ved Prakash, "New Towns in India", Monograph no. 8 (Durham: Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia, 1969), 1. 28. Government of India / Planning Commission, Second Five Year Plan (Delhi: Planning Commission, 1956), Accessed March 1, 2020, https://niti.gov.in/planningcommission.gov.in/docs/plans/planrel/fiveyr/ index5.html. 29. Friedrich Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 45.

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Prime Minister Nehru looking at a model of Rourkela's blast furnace, 1958 (source: Jozef Maria Hunck, India's Silent Revolution, Verlag Handelsblatt, 1958)

model towns for showcasing the modernity and “newness” of the country.30 For Nehru the new infrastructural modernisation projects - such as factories, power plants or irrigation dams - promised and symbolized a better life for the people of Post-colonial India and thus were regarded as the “Temples of Modern India”31. A new way of life that was subordinated to the strict working processes of industrial production should raise the living standard of every Indian, generate a greater equality in income and wealth, and thus contribute to what is referred to as a “Socialist Pattern of Society”: “A social and economic order based upon the values of freedom and democracy, without

30. Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief – India and the Politics of Post-Colonial Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 141-142.

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31. According to Daniel Immerwahr it is unclear, if this famous phrase – especially the word “modern” – was literally uttered by Nehru or if it was attributed to him in order to let him appear as a “high modernist”. Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 208-209. However, at the inauguration of the BhakraNangal canal system in 1954, during a speech with the title The Temples of New India in his selected works, he is quoted to have said: “[…] for me, the temples, the gurdwaras, the churches, the mosques of today are these places where human beings labour for the benefit of other human beings, of humanity as a whole. They are the temples of today. I feel more, if I may use the word, religious-minded when I see these great works than when I see any temple or any place of pure worship. These are the places of worship because here we worship something; we build up Indians; we build up the millions of India and so this is a sacred task. […]”, See: Jawaharlal Nehru, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru: 1 June 1954-30 September 1954, Second Series, Volume 26, eds. Ravinder Kumar and Sharada Prasad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 143.

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caste, class and privilege, in which there will be a substantial rise in employment and production and the largest measure of social justice attainable.”32 The emancipation of the heterogeneous and mostly rural Indian society33 from religious, ethnic and casterelated values should contribute to overcoming established social disparities and to the construction of a new, unifying national identity.34 This rhetoric makes quite clear, that the young state not only had economic ambitions with its steel plant programme but also firmly believed in its social engineering capacities.35 Nevertheless, the main reason for India’s steel plant programme was much more pragmatic. Following the theory of “import substitution industrialisation”, a trade and economic policy which advocates replacing foreign imports with domestic production, the Second Five-Year-Plan was geared to restructure the national steel production in order to keep prices low, avoid expensive imports and foreign credits, and ultimately achieve India’s economic and political independence from foreign countries.36 Time was an important factor. To avoid slowing the upturn and risking further losses, as a first step, the Second Five-Year-Plan aimed to satisfy the growing demand within only five years.37 As the Indian Government had already decided to build two new steel plants in 1949, the Second-Five-Year Plan cleared the way for their realisation and added one more: a total of three new steel plants were to be built, each with an updated production capacity of 1 million tons of raw steel per year.38 Besides the impact that the steel plants would have on India’s national economy, the Second Five-Year-Plan also aimed at strengthening local urban development. In line with “democratically planned collectivism”, centrally planned steel plants and their supporting townships should stimulate private businesses and develop into regional centres of growth. To achieve a balanced urban development they were deliberately placed in the poorest and most underdeveloped regions of India.39 The Germans initially also acknowledged the importance of local development. In a report of 1956 published by the German Federal Ministry of Economy, German experts state that before

32. Government of India / Planning Commission, Second Five Year Plan (Delhi: Planning Commission, 1956), Accessed March 1, 2020, https://niti.gov.in/planningcommission.gov.in/docs/plans/planrel/fiveyr/ index5.html. 33. According to Alfred Schinz 80% of the Indian population was making a living from a mostly self-sufficient agriculture in 1967. Alfred Schinz, “Rourkela – die moderne indische Industriestadt,” 241. 34. Roy, Beyond Belief, 133. Christian Strümpell, “Precarious Labor and Precarious Livelihoods in an Indian Company Town”, in Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism – Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject, eds. Chris Hann and Jonathan Parry (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, 2018), 135. 35. Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien, 153. 36. Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien, 155-156. 37. Unger, “Rourkela, ein ‘Stahlwerk im Dschungel’”, 370, 373. 38. Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 45. Later, in 1978, the fourth public steel plant was built in Bokaro. Initially it should have been commissioned to the USA, but a controversial debate inside the US Congress, that started in 1959 and lasted for several years, on whether the USA should support a country that was sympathising with socialism and was openly criticising the USA triggered tensions between India and the USA. Finally, the Indian Government took back its request and commissioned the USSR to build the plant. See: Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien, 157. 39. Prakash, New Towns in India, 8-9.

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embarking on a large-scale industrialization process, the so far mostly agrarian India would need to modernize its vast array of small-scale industries first in order to create the kind of skills and work force needed to build up middle and large-scale businesses and industries.40 However, while the importance of the steel plant programme for the Indian economy was undeniable, the issue of local urban and economic development was not seriously followed up by the Indian government or by West Germany.41 Apart from an unreliable evaluation of the location in terms of its suitability for steel production42, no social, socio-political or economic analyses of the region were made before planning the plant and its New Town.43 While the production process of the steel plant was planned in detail, the other parts of the commission were described very rudimentary.44 The question of how the urban plan could precisely stimulate regional development and integrate the local, mostly uneducated and rural society remained unanswered. The site was in fact regarded as “empty” and the local population, namely the Adivasi, were deliberately ignored.45 For the construction of the whole New Town 32 Adivasi villages and their surrounding rice fields were demolished and circa 13.000 inhabitants – of the circa 15.000 that were living in this area in 195146 – were displaced and resettled in the northern and southern periphery of Rourkela.47 The Adivasi – who as indigenous or socalled scheduled tribes have a low status in India’s caste system – were initially employed as unskilled day labourers when plant and township were constructed. However, they had no chance to be hired as steel workers later because better educated candidates from all over India were given priority.48 Although their so-called “resettlement colonies” featured adequate infrastructure49 – such as paved streets, community houses, clean water supply and canalisation – the former basis of their livelihood, the rice fields, was destroyed, forcing the Adivasi to pursue minor service work such as rickshaw

40. Unger, “Rourkela, ein ‘Stahlwerk im Dschungel’”, 372. 41. Unger, “Rourkela, ein ‘Stahlwerk im Dschungel’”, 373. 42. This refers to the so-called “Mohanty-Report” that Jan Bodo Sperling and Klaus Röh describe as a “propaganda report” with many wrong facts and exaggerations (Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 47f.; Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 124). 43. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 47ff.. 44. Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 175. 45. Roy, Beyond Belief, 139-140. 46. Rajkishor Meher, Stealing the Environment: Social and Ecological Effects of Industrialization in Rourkela (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 103. 47. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 17.

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48. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 13-14 and 22ff. 49. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 19f.

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driving, shop keeping, gardening or house cleaning.50 Clearly, the need to build the plant in order to raise India’s steel productivity on the Indian side, and the desire to quickly access the Indian market on the German side, were given much higher status 51 than urban planning and the question of local development.

THE PLANNERS: KLEINWOHNUNGSBAU KRUPP Alfried Krupp himself must also have been much more interested in the construction of the steel plant than in urban planning. The township was actually regarded as a necessary condition to acquire the promising commission. As the plant and township had to be realized within the term of the Second Five-Year-Plan there was not much time for planning and design. Krupp had to improvise and draw on skills that were quickly available. In 1954, immediately after signing the second agreement, he therefor appointed Konrad Steiler – head of Krupp’s company-owned housing construction company Kleinwohnungsbau Krupp gGmbH and later mayor of Krupp’s home town Essen – as planner of the New Town. The German word Kleinwohnungsbau52 literally means small house building and the term was used to indicate small and affordable worker's flats with healthy living conditions. It is quite appropriate for the scope and scale of projects that this firm had realised so far: some “smaller” Werkssiedlungen with small houses for Krupp’s steel plants in West Germany’s major industrial and mining region Ruhrgebiet. Founded at the end of the nineteenth century a famous example includes Krupp’s worker’s settlement Margarethenhöhe in Essen (built between 1909 and 1938 for circa 5.250 inhabitants), commissioned by Steiler’s predecessor Robert Schmohl to the architect Georg Metzendorf.53 Built on the outskirts, these mono-functional housing settlements were designed as an antidote to the unhealthy living conditions that the dense structure of the Mietskasernen had created in German cities. Planned according to the principles of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept, their green and village-like character with low densities compensated for the harsh production environments of the factories. Although Kleinwohnungsbau Krupp had designed and executed these Garden City

50. Friedrich Stang, “Rourkela – eine Company Town,” In: Indien. Friedrich Stang (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), 141. 51. Unger, “Rourkela, ein ‘Stahlwerk im Dschungel’”, 373. 52. The term "Kleinwohnungsbau" was frequently used in the early 20th century by representatives of the German reform movement to stress the importance of providing small and affordable worker's flats with healthy living conditions during industrialisation. See: Fritz Schumacher, Die Kleinwohnung, (Leipzig: Verlag Quelle & Meyer, 1917). 53. Other examples include the worker’s settlements Altenhof I and II in Essen and Margarethenhof in Duisburg-Rheinhausen. See: Hermann Hecker, Der Krupp’sche Kleinwohnungsbau (Wiesbaden: Gesellschaft für Heimkultur e. V., 1917), 5th edition; On the work of Georg Metzendorf see: Rainer Metzendorf, Georg Metzendorf 1874-1934 - Siedlungen und Bauten (Darmstadt / Marburg: Selbstverlag der Hessischen Historischen Kommission Darmstadt und der Historischen Kommission für Hessen, 1994).

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Krupp's Garden City Margarethenhöhe in Essen by Georg Metzendorf, 1919 (source: Georg Metzendorf, Kleinwohnungsbauten und Siedlungen, Alexander Koch, 1920)

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settlements, the planning of an entire New Town with all its facilities for 100.000 inhabitants by far exceeded the firm’s as well as Steiler’s experience.54 Post-war West Germany at that time was in the middle of the so-called Wirtschaftswunder and was growing demographically and economically at a rapid pace. The growth resulted in a huge amount of reconstruction projects as well as housing developments and hence, in an enormous lack of qualified personnel. As a consequence, Steiler – who himself was not a designer but a civil engineer – could not draw on experienced architects and planners but had to hire young graduates for the design of Rourkela.55

54. Claus Coupette, interview with the author, Essen, December 7, 2005. 55. Werner Baecker, interview with the author, Cologne, December 8, 2005.

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For the Rourkela commission Krupp Kleinwohnungsbau’s task was to deliver a general plan for the whole New Town including technical diagrams for its water and electricity supply, a more detailed masterplan for the housing areas, illustrative designs for the city centre and exemplary neighbourhoods, as well as schematic plans for the main building types. The Rourkela team consisted of several quite unexperienced people: Claus Coupette, a freshly graduated civil engineer, became the project manager and was the only team member who had visited Rourkela in 1954 and later once again in 1956; Heinz Teschner and Hanns Feldhüsen, two architecture graduates, were responsible for the detailed design of the various neighbourhoods; and an illustrator was hired to draw perspectives. Last but not least, 28-year-old Oswald Mathias Ungers was responsible for the key part of the design: the conceptual general plans of the entire New Town and most importantly the masterplan for the housing part.56 Ungers’ ideas for the housing areas were based on the concept of Habitat laid out in the Doorn Manifesto of 1954 by Team X.57 The Doorn Manifesto questioned the dogmatic universalist claim of CIAM’s “Charta of Athens” and the CIAM grid with its separation of the four functions dwelling, working, recreation and circulation. Based on Patrick Geddes “Valley Section” diagram58, it emphasized the relationship of architecture with its particular Habitat – the immediate social environment and community it is embedded in – and aimed at integrating investigations and reflections on local construction, lifestyles and forms of community into the modernist repertoire.59 With its emphasis on Habitat it meant the grounding of universal modernist ideas in the local social context. This soon led to a dispute with Steiler, for whom Ungers’ plan looked too “disordered and chaotic”.60 For the civil engineer Steiler the project should aim “to [...] define the best, most economic and useful planning system of a city for the staff of the steel works.”.61 He was clearly not that interested in conceptual experiments, but rather wanted to focus on the technical challenge of the project. For him the commisson bore

56. Claus Coupette, interview with the author, Essen, December 7, 2005. Werner Baecker, interview with the author, Cologne, December 8, 2005. 57. In July 1953 Ungers visited the CIAM congress in Aix-en-Provence where on initiative of Le Corbusier the question of “Habitat” was discussed. During this event the “old” functionalists around Le Corbusier received harsh criticism from the “young” modernists around Alison and Peter Smithson, the emerging Team X. According to Jasper Cepl the congress can be regarded as a key event for the development of Unger’s own approach. Ungers’ early work was consequently strongly influenced by the less rigid, more rough, organic and brutalist approach of the Smithsons as is visible in one of his early designs for the Oberhausener Institut zur Erlangung der Hochschulreife from 1954. See: Jasper Cepl, Oswald Mathias Ungers: Eine intellektuelle Biographie, Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, Band 33 (Cologne: Walther König, 2008), 38-45. 58. Patrick Geddes’ valley section diagram argues that the city is closely interconnected with its regional context and its hinterland and that these parts have to be treated as an integrated whole. Interestingly, the town planner, biologist and environmental sociologist Geddes was professor in Mumbai and planning consultant to many Indian municipalities and states between 1914 and 1919. He was very influential in spreading Howard’s Garden City movement and in promoting interdisciplinary, research-based and more community-sensitive approaches of urban planning in India. See: Glover, “The Troubled Passage,” 101ff. 59. Alison Smithson, ed., Team 10 Primer (Boston: MIT Press, 1968). 60. Werner Baecker, interview with the author, Cologne, December 8, 2005. 61. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 12.

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Doorn Manifesto, Team X, 1954 (source: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Smithson, A (Alison) & P.D. (Peter Denham) Archiefdeel Team 10 / Archivalia, nummer toegang TTEN, inventarisnummer 9-f4)

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the rare opportunity to develop an “ideal plan” from scratch 62 and he did not want organic designs63 or questions of the local Habitat to distract from its realisation.64 Ungers left the team and the young architect Werner Baecker – a decade later Cologne’s city architect – was hired as a free lancer to take over Ungers’ task.65 Baecker, like Ungers, was a former student of professor Otto Ernst Schweizer, one of the most distinguished German urban planners of that time and was his assistant at Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, a leading architectural school in West Germany.66 Schweizer was known for the academic disputes he had with his colleague Egon Eiermann. While Schweizer was teaching urban planning, Egon Eiermann was responsible for architecture. Together they influenced a whole generation of German post-war architects. In contrast to the ambitious O. M. Ungers, who presumably saw Rourkela as a possibility to integrate modernist thinking with the local context, Baecker seemed to be much more pragmatic. Given the enormous time pressure, to which the Indians were also adding67, he drew upon what he had learnt from Schweizer and drafted the masterplan for the housing areas within one week.68 As he states in a publication,69 his design was quite literally modelled on

Cover of the book by Otto Ernst Schweizer, Die architektonische Großform, 1957

62. “Dem deutschen Stadtplaner [...] bot sich mit diesem Auftrag eine mit europäischen Augen betrachtete ideale Gelegenheit des vollkommenen Planens, wie sie selten ein Städtebauer erhält.” Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 3. 63. See note 57. 64. Confirming Roy’s remark that the preconstruction sites of the steel plants were regarded as “blank” territories by the planners (Roy, Beyond Belief, 139), Steiler writes in an essay that “simple, mostly primitive peasant’s villages” with surrounding rice fields are located inside the site boundaries and that it was agreed with the Indian client to ignore them for the planning of the city. Konrad Steiler, “Rourkela – eine neue indische Stadt,” in Neue Heimat, Heft 10, (1957); 56, 59. Equally, Coupette comments in an article in Der Spiegel: “Most of the small peasant’s nests have to vanish.” “Stahlstadt im Riesfeld,” in Der Spiegel, no. 23, June 1, 1955, 24. 65. Claus Coupette, interview with the author, 2005. Werner Baecker, interview with the author, 2005. 66. Assistenten und Mitarbeiter von Professor Dr.-Ing. E.h. Otto Ernst Schweizer, Erinnerungen, Episoden, Interpretationen, eigene Arbeiten (Karlsruhe: Buchhandlung Mende, 2005), 192.

Otto Ernst Schweizer teaching a class at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, around 1960 (source: Otto Ernst Schweizer Forschung und Lehre, 1930-1960, Karl Krämer Verlag, 1962)

67. Already during his first field trip Coupette reports that the HSL director wanted to have the detailed plans for a first sector to start building as soon as possible. (Claus Coupette, “Betr. Stadtplanung Rourkela – Bericht Nr. 1,” Letter with first report from field trip to Konrad Steiler from New Delhi. 11.9.1954. Essen: Personal archive of Claus Coupette. Claus Coupette, Stadtplanung Rourkela – Bericht über die Informationsreise von Herrn Dipl.-Ing. Claus Coupette nach Indien in der Zeit vom 8.9. - 3.10.1954 (Essen: Personal archive of Claus Coupette, 1954), 56, 70, 73.) 68. Werner Baecker, interview with the author, Cologne, December 8, 2005. 69. Stadtbausysteme und Ergebnisse - Adaptionen, Ergänzungen und Weiterentwicklungen zu Otto Ernst Schweizers “Über die Grundlagen des architektonischen Schaffens,” in: Assistenten und Mitarbeiter von Professor Dr.-Ing. E.h. Otto Ernst Schweizer, Erinnerungen, Episoden, Interpretationen, eigene Arbeiten, 98-100.

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Director

Konrad Steiler Kleinwohnungsbau Krupp gGmbH Civil Engineer

Team

Claus Coupette Project Manager Civil Engineer

Theory

Werner Baecker Lead Architect

ARCHITEKTONISCHE GROSSFORM

Kleinwohnungsbau Krupp's project team for Rourkela

Heinz Teschner Architect

HABITAT

Otto Ernst Schweizer Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe

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O. M. Ungers Lead Architect

Team 10 A. & P. Smithson, J. Bakema, G. Candilis, S. Woods, A. van Eyck, G. de Carlo, S. Wewerka et al.

Hanns FeldhÃ¼sen Architect

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two theoretical projects of his mentor: the Idealplan einer Großstadt (Ideal Plan for a City) from 1931 and the Idealzentrum einer Großstadt (Ideal Centre for a City), initially conceived in 1931 and developed further until 1957.70

KRUPP’S “NEUES ESSEN”: THE PLAN FOR ROURKELA The striking feature of the plan for Rourkela is Steiler’s early idea to separate the New Town’s housing areas from its polluting industrial counterpart by using the Durgapur Hills, an existing ridge of hills that rises up to circa 100 meters, as a natural barrier.71 To assure the supply of goods, the steel plant as well as light industries and trading enterprises were located to the south of the hills, next to the existing regional road and train station, while the living quarters were placed to the north of the hills, and were thus shielded from polluted winds from the south.72 Plant and township – “Wohnstadt” (residential city)73 – are located at a distance of five kilometres from each other and are connected by a huge, four-lane ring road that intersects the hills at two existing depressions and becomes the main circulation of the New Town. The ring road is embedded in green corridors and was to be flanked by bicycle tracks (that were never built). Bus lines were to run along the ring road and the stops were to be located at a maximum walking distance of 500 m (15 minutes) to each inhabitant’s home.74

Main conceptual idea for Rourkela, 1955. Functional separation of polluting steel plant and housing areas by the Durgapur hill range (source: IndienGemeinschaft KruppDemag (ed.), 'Rourkela', Übersee Schriftenreihe No.5, 1959)

The Wohnstadt has a decentralized layout that is hierarchically subdivided into different neighbourhood units.75 It largely resembles the concept of an ample and dispersed Garden City with an average density of circa 80 inhabitants per hectare on

70. Otto Ernst Schweizer, Die architektonische Großform (Karlsruhe: Braun Verlag, 1957), 118, 148-149, 154-155. 71. Claus Coupette, interview with the author, 2005. Werner Baecker, interview with the author, 2005. 72. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 4-7. 73. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 3. 74. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 8-10. 75. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,”4.

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Spatial framework, 1955. The steel plant is connected to secondary light industries, airfield, road and train in the South. The Durgapur Hills shield off the housing areas in the north from polluted south-westerly winds (source: Otto Ernst Schweizer, Forschung und Lehre 1930 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 1960, Karl KrĂ¤mer Verlag, 1962)

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Initial proposals for the general structure of the Wohnstadt: Centralized city, (left), twin city (middle), linear city (right), 1955 (source: Otto Ernst Schweizer, Die Architektonische Großform, Braun Verlag, Karlsruhe, 1957)

General plan for Rourkela, 1955. The twenty neighbourhood units of the Wohnstadt align with the ring road. The centre is located along the existing road to Hamirpur in the north and to the steel plant in the south (source: Immo Boyken, Otto Ernst Schweizer, 1890 – 1965, Bauten und Projekte, Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 1996)

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a total surface of 1200 hectares.76 After the planners had delivered three options77 – from a more centralised to a more de-centralised organisation – the clients finally chose for the structure of a “decentralized city” that aligns the neighbourhoods on both sides of the northern section of the ring road.78 Connected to the ring road by a network of secondary streets, each of the 20 “village-like” neighbourhood units accommodates 5000 inhabitants made up by the workers, their families and service population. Each sector allocates all services necessary for daily life such as a community centre with a cinema, a health centre, shops and initially even religious buildings.79 The sectors are carefully embedded into a system of existing creeks that runs from the Durgapur Hills to river Koel. In the plan they serve as recreational buffers between the neighbourhoods, where schools, sports fields and playgrounds are located and where inhabitants of different sectors could come into contact with each other.80 For the big majority of steel plant staff and their families standardised singlestorey houses of different types were provided.81 This intimate small-scale typology with vegetable gardens was already being used in many Indian worker’s settlements, such as Bokaro and Sindri. To get an impression of local building standards Coupette had visited some of them on his first trip to India in September 1954.82 In his report he remarks that especially the bungalow houses of Bokaro, that were built under HSL’s director, should serve as a model for Rourkela’s neighbourhoods83 as they their loose layout guaranteed a good ventilation of the housing units, which was essential given the tropical climate.84 Although the neighbourhood plans for Kleinwohnungsbau Krupp initially only featured bungalow types, some freestanding buildings of two to three storeys with three room apartments, meant for German technicians and their families, were also built in some sectors.85 The bungalows were developed for an average household size of five persons.86 Their sizes range from 47 m2, to 102 m2 and 167 m2, featuring a living room, a kitchen, a

76. Steiler, “neue indische Stadt,” 67. 77. Steiler, “neue indische Stadt,” 60. 78. Claus Coupette, Betr. Stadtplanung Rourkela – Bericht Nr. 1, Letter with first report from field trip to Konrad Steiler from New Delhi. 11.9.1954. Essen: Personal archive of Claus Coupette. 79. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 4. 80. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 7, 9. 81. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 31. 82. Claus Coupette, interview with the author, 2005. 83. Claus Coupette, “Betr. Stadtplanung Rourkela – Bericht Nr. 1,” Letter with first report from field trip to Konrad Steiler from New Delhi. 11.9.1954. Essen: Personal archive of Claus Coupette. 84. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 6.

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85. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 31. 86. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 4.

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Zoning plan of three neighbourhood units and the commercial area of the city centre and park, 1955. Sector B (right) was the first neighbourhood built (with a different layout) (source: Indien-Gemeinschaft Krupp-Demag (ed.), 'Rourkela', Übersee Schriftenreihe No.5, 1959)

Plan of two neighbourhood units to the west of the city centre (right), 1955. Community programmes are located at the interface of green spaces and neighbourhood units (source: Konrad Steiler, 'Rourkela – eine neue indische Stadt', Neue Heimat, Heft 10, 1957, p.56 -70)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Exemplary plan of one neighbourhood unit with community centre in the middle and schools along the bordering green spaces, 1955. The plan features "cul-de-sac" streets, that were not realised (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Drawings of health care centre surrounded by three different bungalow types, 1955 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

bathroom, and one to three bedrooms respectively.87 According to Steiler, they should accommodate every steel plant employee, “from the director down to the door man and the last security guard. Nehru wanted it like that.”88 Each sector had a mix of different bungalow sizes and consequently accommodated different income levels. In the vein of the prevailing rhetoric of modernity and emancipation, social subdivisions were strictly banned from the plan for Rourkela by the Indian government.89

87. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 31. 88. “Stahlstadt im Riesfeld,” in Der Spiegel, no. 23, June 1, 1955, 24. 89. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 13.

Model of bungalow type, 1955 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Plans and elevations of the small bungalow types (72 m2 and 64 m2), 1955 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Reference bungalow type for Rourkela in Bokaro, 1954 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Detailed masterplan for the Wohnstadt by Werner Baecker, 1955. The neighbourhood units are divided by a landscape system that integrates existing creeks and absorbs flood water during the rain period. A 200 m wide green buffer zone along the ring road protects the neighbourhoods from noise (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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The city centre was placed centrally on the intersection of the ring road and the existing road to the village of Hamirpur. This offered the shortest connection to the steel plant and to the rail station.90 From north to south the centre was subdivided into functional zones for culture and education in the north, for administration, trade and shopping in the middle and for recreation and leisure in the south.91 With a surface of 300 hectares it offered programmes with an urban reach, like a theatre, schools for higher education, the city hall, clubs, a hospital, shopping facilities and a sports stadium. The design resembled a landscape park flanked by large, free-standing buildings of up to five storeys with shops in the ground floors, oriented towards a green space with sports fields and an artificial lake in the middle. Car traffic was warded off in the centre and limited to its periphery.92 The influence of Schweizer’s Idealplan concept on Baecker and the design for the Wohnstadt is obvious. The city centre with its circulation system, the flanking buildings and programmes and the linear park is a literal copy of the Idealzentrum concept. Most of the other design principles for the housing areas – such as the linear layout of the sectors along the main transport spine, the short walking distances, the position of the city centre on the intersection of the main transport routes, and the green corridors and buffers between transport and neighbourhood units – were borrowed from the Idealplan.

Otto Ernst Schweizer, Idealplan einer Großstadt, 1931 (source: Otto Ernst Schweizer, Die architektonische Großform, Karlsruhe: Braun Verlag, 1957)

However, two important features of Schweizer’s concepts were not considered. As a reaction to the disadvantageous urban conditions that uncontrolled industrialisation had created in Germany, Schweizer’s Idealplan aimed at establishing a comprehensive structure for the city – the architektonische Großform. By treating dense architectural islands and dense zones of landscape as

90. Claus Coupette, “Betr. Stadtplanung Rourkela – Bericht Nr. 1,” Letter with first report from field trip to Konrad Steiler from New Delhi. 11.9.1954. Essen: Personal archive of Claus Coupette. 91. Steiler, Rourkela –neue indische Stadt, 67. 92. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 8-9.

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Otto Ernst Schweizer, plan of Idealzentrum, 1957 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

Otto Ernst Schweizer, model of Idealzentrum, 1957 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Commercial area of the city centre with park in the middle, 1955. Traffic is warded off to the flanks. Shaded shops are located on the inside along the park (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

Otto Ernst Schweizer, Illustration of Idealzentrum with shaded shops along park, 1957 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Cover of advertisement brochure with pedestrian area along the park of the city centre, 1955 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Cultural area in the city's central park, 1955 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Original birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s-eye perspective of Rourkela, 1955. The mosques and palm trees in the picture show little knowledge of the local context, considering that India is a predominately Hindu society and that palms are very uncommon in Rourkela (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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equal compositional elements it gave nature and (urban) culture a key importance. The concentration of buildings – that were inspired by the mixed, 20-storey slabs for living and working of Ludwig Hilbersheimer’s Hochhausstadt from 192493 – should keep a maximum area of nature untouched and “unite landscape and built space to a large-scale form”.94 Although Kleinwohnungsbau’s first idea for Rourkela related to this concept by proposing denser row housing as the main building types, the HSL rejected this idea and opted for the bungalow typology.95 As a consequence, neither a Großform nor an Idealplan were achieved, but a sprawling suburban succession of bungalows. The other fundamental feature of the Idealplan was what Schweizer called “elasticity”. From the structure of the city layout to the skeleton structure of the buildings everything should be flexible and adaptable to changing demands.96 The Großform should offer an “elastic framework” in order to absorb “the heterogeneity and rhythm of modern life processes.”97 Inspired by Tony Garnier’s Cité industrielle from 1904, this idea was deliberately conceived as an alternative to the rigidity and vastness of Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine from 1922.98 Instead Schweizer proposed a linear layout, in which housing areas, industrial areas and city centres, interrupted by pockets of nature, are reachable at a walking distance of no more than 30 minutes, and that, similar to Soria y Mata’s Ciudad Lineal from 1882 or Milyutins proposal for Stalingrad from 1930, can grow in a linear direction.99 Although Baecker incorporated the ideas of linear sectors and walking proximity into his plan for Rourkela, the closed structure of the ring road made growth as Schweizer envisioned impossible.100

93. Immo Boyken, Otto Ernst Schweizer, 1890 – 1965, Bauten und Projekte (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 1996), 14. 94. Immo Boyken, “Otto Ernst Schweizer zum 100. Geburtstag,” in Bauwelt, no. 81 (1990): 869. 95. Claus Coupette, “Betr. Stadtplanung Rourkela – Bericht Nr. 1,” Letter with first report from field trip to Konrad Steiler from New Delhi. 11.9.1954. Essen: Personal archive of Claus Coupette. 96. Boyken, Otto Ernst Schweizer, 14. 97. “Wir brauchen ein neues Ordnungsprinzip, das weit umfassender ist, als die Systeme früherer Zeiten. Es muß unsere Großformkomplexe, das Gebaute, das Gewachsene und die Welt der Technik, die ‘Welt der Ratio’, zusammenbinden. Es muß eine elastische Fassung für die Vielgestaltigkeit und die Rhythmik moderner Lebensvorgänge bieten.” Schweizer, Die architektonische Großform, 10. 98. Boyken, Otto Ernst Schweizer, 14. 99. See: Constandinos A.Doxiadis, “On Linear Cities,” in The Town Planning Review, Vol. 38, no. 1 (Apr., 1967): 35-42. 100. Alfred Schinz, “Rourkela – die moderne indische Industriestadt,” 245.

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Modified bird's-eye perspective of Rourkela without mosques, palms and air planes at Indian Industries Fair in New Delhi, 1955 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Nevertheless, Steiler intended his design for Rourkela to be an application of the Linear City concept101 and he knew that growth could be expected after the construction of the New Town.102 Coupette and Steiler were also familiar with Otto Koenigsberger’s influential planning work in India that promoted the concept of Linear Cities and their ability to expand103. This was first exemplified in his development plan for the old Indian steel town of Jamshedpur from 1945, but also in his later plans for Bhubaneswar and Sindri.104 However, any possibility of Rourkela’s expansion was deliberately ignored by Konrad Steiler so as not to impair the completeness of his “ideal plan”. In an essay in the Bulletin of the Indian Embassy in Bonn he writes: “a city of such an industrial importance” must surely consider the possibility of growth through “emerging secondary industries”. But extending the city would destroy the “unity of steel plant and city”.105 “The delivered plan has an order that should not be changed in its main principles, as otherwise the danger of an inorganic and amorphous urban structure will prevail”.106 If necessary, he suggests, a new “self-contained” city should be planned nearby, possibly with the same layout.107

Otto Koenigsberger, Jamshedpur Development Plan, 1945 (source: https:// scroll.in/magazine/881630/ the-german-architectwholed-independentindiasfirstattempt-atprefabricatedhousing)

Besides the fact that these considerations of town extensions were never developed, by stating this, Steiler makes clear – like many of his colleagues at that time – that he assumed urban expansion was only possible in a topdown manner and that it could be planned and controlled by a central power

101. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 7. 102. Already in late 1954 Coupette reports to Steiler, a concern expressed by Mumbai’s special engineer M. V. Moda that the area along the rail tracks could develop into an “uncontrollable slum”, if the plan for Rourkela did not include this zone. Claus Coupette, Stadtplanung Rourkela – Bericht über die Informationsreise von Herrn Dipl.-Ing. Claus Coupette nach Indien in der Zeit vom 8.9. - 3.10.1954 (Essen: Personal archive of Claus Coupette, 1954), 35. 103. During his field trip Coupette had visited Jamshepur and Sindri. In his report to Steiler he mentions that he has received Koenigsberger’s plan for Sindri. He highlights that it bears similarities to Kleinwohnungsbau’s plan for Rourkela in terms of its subdivision into neighbourhood units and their separation with green spaces, and that the plan is conceived to grow in a future development stage. Claus Coupette, Stadtplanung Rourkela – Bericht über die Informationsreise von Herrn Dipl.-Ing. Claus Coupette nach Indien in der Zeit vom 8.9. - 3.10.1954 (Essen: Personal archive of Claus Coupette, 1954), 25-33. 104. Similar to Schweizer, Koenigsberger used the term “elastic planning” to describe a plan’s ability to grow. See: Rachel Lee, “From Static Master Plans to ‘Elastic Planning’ and Participation: Otto Koenigsberger’s Planning Work in India (1939-1951),” in Past as Guide to Sustainable Futures. Proceedings of the 16th International Planning History Society Conference (University of Florida: International Planning and History Society, 2014), 606–619 105. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 8. 106. “Die vorgelegte Planung ist so geordnet, daß sie in ihren Hauptzügen nicht geändert werden sollte, weil sonst die Gefahr besteht, daß ein unorganisches und amorphes Stadtgefüge entsteht.” Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 13. It is interesting that in Steiler’s text “inorganic” is used to describe unplanned, informal development, while the term “organic” is associated with the order that the subdivision into neighbourhood units creates (see Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 8). 107. “Es darf [...] nicht außer acht gelassen werden, daß eine Stadt von solcher industrieller Bedeutung [...] sich zwangsläufig über den zuerst vorgesehenen Rahmen hinaus entwickeln wird [...]. Es wird deshalb für richtig gehalten, eine solche Weiterentwicklung schon jetzt zu bedenken und zu beachten, daß die jetzt zu schaffende Stadt nicht planlos erweitert werden kann. Die mit dieser Planung jetzt erzielte Einheit von Werk und Stadt, deren Teile in jeder Beziehung ausgewogen und hinreichend ausgefüllt sind, muß in diesem Rahmen auch abgeschlossen und abgegrenzt bleiben, weil die Stadt sonst unorganisch, unwirtschaftlich und überlastet wird. Für eine Entwicklung darüber hinaus sollte dann eine neue unabhängige Anlage an anderer gegebener Stelle in der Nähe evtl. nach gleichen Prinzip angelegt werden.” Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 7-8.

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such as the HSL. The consideration of bottom-up growth dynamics triggered by the participation of various inhabitant groups are clearly not part of the Zeitgeist of that era. A problem, which would become obvious soon. Later, when the city was finished, critics nicknamed Rourkela – with its Autobahn ring, its car-free pedestrian precinct and its fenced single-family houses – “neues Essen” (new Essen), ironically arguing that Rourkela looked much more like a new version of Alfried Krupp’s German home town than an Indian city developed according to local conditions.108 Nevertheless, in Steiler’s view the plan represented “the best solution” that “German experts”, on the basis of their “site examination” and their “long-standing experience in European urban planning” could deliver “in consideration of the special Indian circumstances”. He was sure that Rourkela would become “one of the most modern and exemplary cities in India and in Asia.”.109

MODERNIST PATCHWORKS: ROURKELA, BHILAI AND DURGAPUR The plan for Rourkela is a hybrid patchwork of several reduced, modernist concepts. Its was strongly shaped by the interests of Krupp, Nehru and the West German government, by the economic pressure to quickly industrialize India and by the skills, ambitions and working conditions of the West German planners during the post-war era. Following these intense circumstances all parties involved chose for established planning concepts, instead of conceptual innovation. Rourkela’s small houses, the neighbourhood units and the ring road, feature aspects of Howard’s Garden City, but lack its concentric layout and its agricultural hinterland. The principles of functional zoning, landscape planning, standardized housing and the emphasis of caroriented transport, are borrowed from the Functionalist City, however its high-rises are replaced by low-rise bungalows. Finally, the orientation of built spaces along transport spines and the walking proximities from Schweizer’s Idealplan resemble a Linear City, however, without it’s possibility of growth. 110 The mixing of different modernist concepts can also be found in the “international” designs for the other steel towns in Bhilai and Durgapur that were developed nearly in parallel. They both also feature the universal principles of functional zoning, proximity,

108. William Manchester, Krupp – Chronik einer Familie (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1968), 691.

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109. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 13. 110. Roy, Beyond Belief, 142f. Quoting Nehru’s phrase “out of this amalgam something new and good will emerge”, Roy sees in the “planned hybridity” of Indian steel towns or in the “mixed economy” of the Indian state nation-building strategies “to produce something new by combining features from disparate external elements”.

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hierarchic neighbourhood planning, car-oriented transport, standardized architecture and top-down development combined with the locally established bungalow structures. Like Rourkela they were both planned in regions close to sources of raw materials, good transportation conditions and ample water supplies and were based on massive evictions of local populations. They were all more or less conceived as hybrids between Garden Cities and (rigid) Linear Cities, oriented towards main transport lines, each one with a housing area for 100.000 workers, their families and service population in proximity to the steel works. The steel town of Bhilai is located in Madhya Pradesh, circa 450 km to the west of Rourkela on a major rail line and in proximity of ample sources of iron ore. Although the plant was designed by the Soviets, the HSL commissioned the Indian architects Durga Bajpai and Piloo Moody from Mumbai to design the New Town.111 Bajpai, a former employee of Alvar Aalto, and Moody, a former student of Erich Mendelsohn, were known for several projects designed in International Style such as the Intercontinental Hotel in Delhi and the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. 112 Their plan for Bhilai spans a linear band of three parallel main roads between the steel plant in the east and the mid-sized town of Durg in the west along existing rail tracks and a regional road. The roads are regularly intersected by secondary streets in north-south direction, creating a grid of 12 sectors of which 10 are residential, one is dedicated to the main hospital and one houses the city centre in the middle of the plan.113 Similar to Rourkela, each neighbourhood provides local services such as playgrounds, schools and commerce and features bungalow types with private gardens, though different from Rourkela, with a majority of multi-storey houses. When the construction of the New Town started in late 1956, 2000 native families had already been resettled or moved away.114 Similarly, for the construction of Durgapur 16 villages were destroyed and circa 2000 local families were displaced.115 Unlike the underdeveloped contexts of Rourkela and Bhilai, Durgapur is located in the Damodar River Valley, a region that was already developing new industries at that time due to nearby coalmines and its proximity to Kolkata. When the construction for Durgapur started in 1960 it thus already consisted

111. K. C. Sivaramakrishnan, New Towns in India: A Report on a Study of Selected New Towns in the Eastern Region (Kolkata: Indian Institute of Management, 1977), 20. 112. Jon T. Lang, A Concise History of Modern Architecture in India (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2002), 44 and 51-52. 113. Sivaramakrishnan, New Towns in India, 20. 114. Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 150-151. 115. Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 152.

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Location of Bhilai, Durgapur and Rourkela (source: K.C. Sivaramakrishnan, New Towns of India. A Report on a Study of Selected New Towns in the Eastern Region, a Homi Bhabha Fellowship Award Project with support from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, 1976-1977)

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of dispersed industrial estates and company townships that were co-existing side by side without any connections except with the historic, 2500 km long, Grand Trunk Road between Kolkata and Kabul, and the rail lines that run through the site.116 For the design of Durgapur the architects Stein, Polk and Chatterjee with an office based in Kolkata were hired.117 Joseph Allen Stein, a former employee of Richard Neutra who had moved to India in 1952 to head the Department of Architecture at Bengal Engineering College in Kolkata, is known for his regionalist approach to modernism. After Durgapur he designed several important buildings for postcolonial India in Delhi

116.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Sivaramakrishnan, New Towns in India, 26. 117.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Sivaramakrishnan, New Towns in India, 28.

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such as the India International Centre, the headquarters for the Ford Foundation, the UNICEF and the World Wild Life Fund for Nature, and the India Habitat Centre (from 1977 in collaboration with Balkrishna Doshi).118 Stein’s, Polk’s and Chatterjee’s design for Durgapur adds another, though much larger, industrial island and township to the existing settlements. Similar to Rourkela the steel plant is located to the south of the main regional road while the housing areas were located to the north of it. From the steel plant two main roads – one in the north and one in the south – link to the Grand Trunk Road, connect to the township and intersect in its centre. From there, a wide green strip flanks the southern road and incorporates several parks, educational and recreational facilities as well as the city centre. Beyond this strip a hierarchic street grid of self-sufficient neighbourhood units is laid out. They consist of the well-known bungalow typologies that are mixed with low multi-storey slabs. 119

THE CONSTRUCTION: A COLD WAR BATTLE In December 1954 the plan for Rourkela’s township, example designs of the sectors and perspectives, were finished and delivered to the Indians.120 In November 1956 the Hindustan Steel Limited separately contracted the Indiengemeinschaft Krupp-Demag and 40 other German firms to execute the steel works in collaboration with nearly 3000 German subcontractors. The value of the services and products delivered by the Germans counted ca. 1 billion DM.121 However, probably to underline India’s ambition for autonomy, the contract appointed the Indiengemeinschaft merely as consultants for the construction and as suppliers of the technical material, while the HSL stayed in charge of the plant construction office.122

Alfried Krupp during a meeting in Rourkela, ca. 1956 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

118. Stephen White, ed., Building in the Garden: the Architecture of Joseph Allen Stein in India and California (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 119. Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 153. 120. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 3. 121. Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 249f. 122. Later, after huge problems during the construction process and on pressure of the German government, German engineers were finally allowed to join HSL’s office. See: Unger, “Stahlwerk im Dschungel,” 374.

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For the construction of the township German help was not needed. 123 After the plans were delivered and exhibited in the Indian Industries Fair in October 1955, the HSL took over the detailed design of the neighbourhoods – or commissioned other architects to do so 124 – and supervised the execution.125 The construction started in late 1955. Locally established construction and design techniques, such as on-site brick burning and the carrying of materials on the heads of unskilled workers (male and female), were applied in the same way as in the industrial settlements in Sindri or Jamshedpur, which Coupette had seen during his first visit. They enabled the Indians to build the township at a relative high pace and to finish the Werkstadt in 1962.126 The execution of Rourkela resulted in some changes of the original plan. Of the 20 planned sectors three sectors in the very west were not built and one sector in the east was moved further eastward. As the township counted 92.000 inhabitants when the steel plant was largely finished in 1963127, the lack of two sectors can be explained by a lower number of inhabitants than originally expected. The third sector is most probably missing, because the staff housing for the fertilizer plant was not built within the steel township, but directly adjacent to the steel works in the south.128 Another deviation from the plan was that the airfield was placed in another location. Not next to the steel works, but beyond the hill range in the northwest, where an existing field landing strip was paved at the beginning of construction to receive prominent state representatives.129 The strip of light industries and trading enterprises between the rail tracks and Durgapur Hills was never realised and immediately attracted the development of major slums as soon as construction had started.130 Also, the green corridors, recreational buffers, lakes and parks were not executed to the planned extent. 131 Still, despite these deviations and the absence of Steiler, Coupette and Baecker during the construction process, the general principles of Krupp’s “neues Essen” are to this day quite recognisable in Rourkela.

123. Although there were initial plans to send German architects and engineers to also supervise the construction of the township. Claus Coupette, Stadtplanung Rourkela – Bericht über die Informationsreise von Herrn Dipl.-Ing. Claus Coupette nach Indien in der Zeit vom 8.9. - 3.10.1954 (Essen: Personal archive of Claus Coupette, 1954), 58. 124. Interestingly, in 1955 also Stein and Polk were assigned to design several buildings of the steel plant’s integrated fertilizer plant as well as one sector, most probably the fertilizer township, in Rourkela. See: Benjamin Polk, Building for South Asia – An Architectural Autobiography (New Delhi: Abhinav, 1993), 20ff. 125. Sivaramakrishnan, New Towns in India, 15 and 62. 126. Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 317. 127. Indische Botschaft Bonn, Bulettin der indischen Botschaft Bonn, Band XIII, no, 5, May 1963 (Bonn: Indian Embassy, 1963): 6. 128. Sivaramakrishnan, New Towns in India, 15-16. 129. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 10.

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130. Sivaramakrishnan, New Towns in India, 16. 131. Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 138.

Preparation of construction site for the housing areas, 1956 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

Workers with collective housing in the background, sector 4, 1956 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Brick construction in first neighbourhood, 1956 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue On-site brick burning in the foreground, community centre (right) and first buildings in the background, 1956 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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First semi-detached bungalows for engineers in sector 4, 1956 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

Small bungalow types in sector 4, 1956 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Collective apartment bungalow in sector 4, 1956 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

Adivasi village on the construction site of the township, 1956 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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While the execution of the housing areas went quite smoothly, the opposite can be said about the industrial part of the New Town. In fact, at least initially, the construction of the steel works threatened to become a nightmare for West Germany’s most prestigious large-scale project abroad. The Cold War context further aggravated this situation. Aiming to show the superiority of Soviet communism over western capitalism, Soviet propaganda actively promoted a Cold War battle in the Indian, Russian and German media between the nearly accident-free construction of the steel plant in Bhilai and the endless problems besieging the construction of Rourkela's plant. As a consequence, scornful headlines in the German media called Rourkela the “Indian Grave Stone of German Industry”132 or the “Stalingrad of German Industry”133, drawing more attention to the Rourkela project and putting more pressure on its success.134 In 1961 the general manager of the HSL, Mr. Shri M. Ganapati, summarizes the Indian discontent with Rourkela’s performance in clear terms:

“Maybe the Russians make too much propaganda for their steel works in Bhilai – but who cares? They also have double the amount of production compared to Rourkela. Here [in India] only production numbers count.” 135

Although Rourkela’s first blast furnace could be inaugurated on 3 February 1959, one day earlier than Bhilai’s, in January 1960 Bhilai had produced 361.000 tons of raw iron and 43.000 tons of raw steel, while Rourkela had only produced circa 190.000 tons of raw iron and circa 37.000 tons of raw steel.136 The reasons for Rourkela’s low productivity can be sought in the German’s lack of experience with large-scale projects in developing countries and, hence, in a certain naivety towards the complexity of such an endeavour and an insensitivity towards the Indian context. In contrast, the Soviets with their extensive knowledge of building steel plants in underdeveloped and diverse cultural settings throughout the USSR and in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, could exploit the Bhilai project much better strategically.

132. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” in Der Spiegel, No. 14 (March 30, 1960): 22. 133. Referring to Nazi-Germany’s devastating defeat against Stalin’s troops in the battle of Stalingrad. “Rourkela – Sieg der Deutschen,” in Der Spiegel, no. 14 (January 10, 1966): 68. 134. Obviously, “West Germany’s” Rourkela in contrast to the “United Kingdom’s” Durgapur was regarded as a better opponent to represent the West in this Cold War battle as the construction of Rourkela and Bhilai went in parallel, while the construction of the plant in Durgapur started. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” in Der Spiegel, No. 14 (March 30, 1960): 29. Also, the fact that Germany was the USSR’s enemy in World War II, obviously guaranteed better media footage. 135. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” in Der Spiegel, No. 14 (March 30, 1960):25. 136. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” in Der Spiegel, No. 14 (March 30, 1960):25-26.

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In technical terms this lack of experience on the German side came to the fore in the management and planning of the project. The Russian government had agreed to co-finance Bhilai under several conditions that would make their work easier. For example, they integrated all the Russian firms and agencies involved into a single consortium with a single representative that coordinated relations with the Indian client.137 To execute the project, they sent specifically trained engineers who could teach the local workers. Six journalists of the national Tass agency were permanently located in Bhilai to exclusively disseminate its success story. And on top of that, Nikita Chruschtschow personally visited Bhilai to underline the importance of the steel plant and India for the Soviet Union.138 The Germans failed to do all that. Although the West German government had co-financed the project in 1959, 1962 and 1964 with circa 1,6 billion Deutsche Mark in total139, it did not negotiate better working conditions. The Indiengemeinschaft and each of the 40 German firms had individual contracts with the HSL making it very difficult to organise coordinated actions.140 There was also no knowledge about the training unskilled workers needed and indeed no initiative to organise such a thing. Without a professional public relations plan, Germany’s minister for economy Ludwig Erhard had visited the German social club in Rourkela only once and when asked if he would also visit the steel plant he rejected the idea with the comment: “I have seen enough steel works.”141 The bad management resulted in endless problems during the construction and production process which in turn caused severe delays and a low productivity of the plant. Raw steel could not be processed further as important facilities were not yet finished. Brand-new cast facilities deteriorated because there was no experience in maintaining them. In addition, supply posed a problem and materials often arrived more than four months late. Travelling a distance of circa 15.000 kilometres, most of the plant’s construction parts were shipped in from Hamburg via Kolkata. Although they usually arrived in time at Kolkata the transportation of a total volume of ca. 350.000 tons to Rourkela over one single rail track was nearly impossible. In contrast, the Russians managed

137. Stümpel, Das Hüttenwerk Rourkela, 119. 138. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” in Der Spiegel, No. 14 (March 30, 1960): 33. 139. Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien, 185.

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140. Stümpel, Das Hüttenwerk Rourkela, 118. 141. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” in Der Spiegel, No. 14 (March 30, 1960): 33.

Steel plant during construction (source: Der Spiegel, nr. 14, 1960)

West German president Heinrich Lübke and his wife in Rourkela, 1962 (source: Josef Maria Hunck, India Tomorrow: Pattern of Indo-German Future, Verlag Handelsblatt, 1963)

Cover of Der Spiegel, "Rourkela Stahlkocher Heinrich", 1960

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Advertisement for GutehoffnungshĂźtte (source: Josef Maria Hunck, India Tomorrow: Pattern of Indo-German Future, Verlag Handelsblatt, 1963)

Advertisement of Fried. Krupp AG, 1962. The inauguration of Rourkela's first blast furnace by Indian president Rajendra Prasad in 1959 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

Advertisement for DEMAG, 1958 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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Hamirpur

Resettlement Colony Jhirpani

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Airfield 4 (11)

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Durgapur Hills

Rourkela Station Panposh Station

Steel Plant

Rourkela Village

Fertilizer Plant Fertilizer Colony

Resettlement Colony Jalda Villages Steel plant Sectors Steel Townhsip Civil Township Site boundary Steel Township Rail tracks Roads Water and creeks Flooding area 1 km

Rourkela after the construction of the New Town in 1962 (source: Ali Saad)

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to convince the Indians to dedicate the well-connected port of Vizagapatam exclusively to the construction of their steel plant.142

Resettlement Colony Bandomunda

Regional Road

On the other hand, the German technical ambitions were very high. Although the briefs for all steel plants asked for the latest technology, only Krupp-Demag took this seriously. They did not rely on established systems, but introduced the so-called LinzDonawitz (LD) method in Asia with their plant for Rourkela. Up to that time, it had been built only once in 1952 in Linz by the Austrian firm VÖEST, who also joined the Indiengemeinschaft.143 Blowing oxygen directly into raw iron, this method should greatly improve the productivity and quality of steel and, hence, lead to faster production, higher amounts and higher prices compared to the conventional, oxidation-based Siemens-Martin method that the Soviets employed.144 The Russians openly ignored the Indian demand for innovation, but this had strong advantages. As they had realized the Siemens-Martin method all over their sphere of influence145, they could build faster and cheaper with nearly no technical risk, as the system had been tested many times and thus a smooth and continuous production was guaranteed.146 The German lack of experience also triggered social problems. To build up the steel plant Krupp-Demag’s engineers were asked to live in Rourkela. Each German engineer had a house within the township and could fly his family in from Germany. Soon after their arrival protests about their ignorant behaviour could be heard in Indian politics and society. Their social infrastructure, such as the social club, hospital and school, was exclusively dedicated to the German work force and did not allow Indians to enter. Alcohol consumption, loud parties and visiting local prostitutes (this was all prohibited in Odisha) frequently recurred. In addition, several cases of sexual abuse of house maids by German engineers further

142. Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 259-265. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” in Der Spiegel, No. 14 (March 30, 1960): 23,24, 30. 143. Röh, Rourkela als Testfall, 248. 144. Already by 1970s the LD technique had superseded the Siemens-Martin method. In the year 2000 it was used in circa 60% of the steel plants worldwide. See: Vaclav Smil, Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 99.

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145. Ironically, the first Siemens-Martin steel plant was built by Krupp’s father in 1936 in Russia under Stalin. „Rourkela – Sieg der Deutschen,” in Der Spiegel, no. 14 (January 10, 1966): 68. 146. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” in Der Spiegel, No. 14 (March 30, 1960): 30.

Rourkela's German Club (source: Der Spiegel, nr. 14, 1960)

Informal shops on the construction site, 1958 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

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aggravated the anger of the local population and led to insults and harsh criticism of the neo-colonial behaviour of the Germans in Indian and also in German newspapers. Again, the Soviets showed a much more sensitive approach towards the local context and propagandistically exploited it very well. Their consortium did not ask for an exception to consume alcohol and their engineers were taught to respect Indian habits. They lived together with the Indians and shared their facilities such as hospitals and clubs.147 This whole situation unfolded, until an extensive title story on the disastrous situation in Rourkela appeared in March 1960 in the renowned German news magazine Der Spiegel entitled “Russen auf dem Dach” (Russians on the Roof).148 In 1961 it was followed by a detailed report of the Federal German Information Agency on the bad reputation that Rourkela had generated for the Germans in India.149 In the context of the Hallstein doctrine these revelations damaged the reputation of the West German government and made it impossible for the them to keep ignoring the problems in Rourkela. Consequently, several expert commissions were sent to Rourkela to inspect the situation and give advise on solving the problems. As a result, special attention was given to management, technical training and cultural education of German employees.150 Finally, in 1965 Rourkela’s smoothly running LD-method was producing a turnover of 7,3 million Deutsche Mark – twice as much as Bhilai and Durgapur151 – and the technical direction of the plant was handed over to the Indians.152 In 1966, Der Spiegel publishes an article with the title “Rourkela – Sieg der Deutschen” (Rourkela – Victory of the Germans) and Rourkela could finally fulfil its promise of being “Asia’s most modern steel plant”.

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF ROURKELA Arriving at the train station today, one gets a completely different impression than the one Nehru, Krupp, Steiler or Baecker must have imagined Rourkela would make. What appears is a dense palimpsest of small-scale houses, brightly coloured shops, 147. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” in Der Spiegel, No. 14 (March 30, 1960): 26-28. For a detailed analysis of the German community during the construction in Rourkela see: Jan Bodo Sperling, Die Rourkela-Deutschen – Probleme der Verhaltensweisen deutscher Techniker auf einer Großbaustelle in Indien (Bonn: Schwarzbold, 1965). 148. “Rourkela-Stahlkocher Heinrich,” in Der Spiegel, No. 14 (March 30, 1960): 22. 149. Unger, “Rourkela, ein ‘Stahlwerk im Dschungel’”, 379-380. 150. “Rourkela – Sieg der Deutschen,” in Der Spiegel, no. 14 (January 10, 1966): 68-70. Unger, “Rourkela, ein ‘Stahlwerk im Dschungel’”, 281ff.

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151. “Rourkela – Sieg der Deutschen,” in Der Spiegel, no. 14 (January 10, 1966): 70. 152. Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien, 208.

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Koel Resettlement Colony Jhirpani

Hamirpur

Koel Nagar

Market

Airfield Sankh Biju Patniak University

Chend colony

Durgapur Hills

Industrial estate

Mumbai Panposh Station

Brahmani

Areas No.7/8

Natio Techn

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Basanti colony

Rourkela Station

Uditnagar

Rourkela Steel Plant

Fertilizer Colony Resettlement Colony Jalda Villages Steel plant Steel Townhsip Civil Township Adivasi fields inside RSP territory RSP territory Rail tracks Roads Water and creeks Flooding area 1 km

Map of contemporary Rourkela, 2020. The open spaces on the territory of the steel township are nearly entirely filled in by the informal fields and villages of the Adivasi (source: Ali Saad)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Rourkela station area after the construction of the New Town has started, informal township, 1958 (source: Personal archive of Claus Coupette)

onal Institute of nology

Resettlement Colony Bandomunda

Kolka

Regional Road

Main road, informal township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

dusty billboards and tangled electrical wires, endlessly aligned along a main road, which is permanently congested with bicycles, rickshaws, cars, trucks, people and animals. You are thrown into a Rourkela that has adapted to local conditions in a way that stands in harsh contrast to the original visions and plans. From 1958, when the construction had just started, until 1964 the whole area around Rourkela grew from circa 23.000 inhabitants to 158.000 inhabitants.153 People from all over India – mainly from Punjab, Madras and Bengal – were coming to Rourkela to find work in the steel plant, most of the times 803

153. Schinz, “Rourkela – die moderne indische Industriestadt,” 242-243.

Main road of Rourkela's informal township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

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Shops on the main road, informal township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

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Side street, informal township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

unsuccessfully.154 In the shortest time the city became a religious, ethnic and social condensation of India’s diversity. Indeed, a new growth pole – that in 2011 counted circa 552.000 inhabitants155 – had emerged, however, without any planning. As only more educated people were hired by the steel company and allowed to live in the Wohnstadt, the newcomers who did not get a job settled beyond the controlled administrative boundaries of the steel township, on public land along the rail tracks and along the main regional road located between the steel plant and the hills.156 The rejected were forced to think of alternatives and started to build illegal houses and small businesses in order to survive. An informal “shadow town” emerged that became the actual centre of Rourkela. With circa 441.000 inhabitants it houses circa four times the inhabitants that live in the planned part of the steel township today.157 By 154. Meher, Stealing the Environment, 102. 155. Census of India, Raurkela Urban Region (New Delhi: Office of the Registrar General adn Census Commissioner, 2011), accessed March 1 2020, http://www.census2011.co.in/census/metropolitan/226raurkela.html. 156. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 22ff. Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 144. 157. According to the last Census of India from 2011 the Urban Agglomeration of Rourkela counts 552.239 inhabitants in total. Although 216.410 live inside the official perimeter of the New Town, 105.138 (48,58%) of them live in slums and not inside the planned houses. The other 320.040 inhabitants of the agglomeration live beyond the boundaries of the New Town. 114.468 (35.77%) of them are slum dwellers (Census of India, Raurkela Urban Region. (New Delhi: Office of the Registrar General adn Census Commissioner, 2011), accessed March 1 2020, http://www.census2011.co.in/census/metropolitan/226-raurkela. html.

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Typical bungalow neighbourhood, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

now it has become a central commercial hub for the whole region and basically consists of everything that the politicians and planners did not want in the steel township: Adivasi villages and their resettlement colonies, informal settlements, planned lower, middle and upper class neighbourhoods of non-steel workers, temples, mosques, churches, brothels, small-scale businesses and various processing industries.158 When the size of the shadow town had reached unsupportable dimensions already in 1963 the regional administration of Odisha was forced to act. As the steel company was rejecting to take responsibility for the developments beyond the official perimeter of the New Town, these parts were retroactively declared a so-called “Notified Area”, a civil administrative unit for rural areas transforming into urban areas with an own bureaucracy and planning department.159

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158. Friedrich Stang and Ramon Brüsseler. “Rourkela: Development and Regional Impact of an Industrial Centre,” in Dimensions of Human Geography: Essays in Honour of Professor Bireswar Banerjee, ed. Jayati Hazra, (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 1997), 63-81, personal manuscript of the authors, 14. 159. Schinz, “Rourkela – die moderne indische Industriestadt,” 243.

Typical neighbourhood situation, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

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Small bungalow building, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

Two-storey apartment building, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Two-storey row houses, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

Three-storey apartment building, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

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Empty community centre with shops, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

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Typical street and traffic situation, steel township, 2006. Streets are mostly used by bicycles and scooters (photo: Ali Saad)

On the other side of the hills a much calmer situation prevails. What appears here does not so much remind of Essen, but of an idyllic Garden City embedded in a softly undulating landscape on the backdrop of the hill range with relatively well-maintained roads and dispersed buildings. Birds are singing, traffic noise vanishes to the background and the temperature is considerably lower. The bungalows, hidden behind lush greenery, have developed some patina and their gardens are mostly full of flowers, as it turned out that the climate is too dry for the cultivation of vegetables.160 Except for these slight signs of time passing, at least at first glance, the housing area of the steel town looks as if nothing has changed since it was built. New Town and shadow town form kind of an urbanistic thesis and antithesis.161 While the informal township is a dense and mixed structure, the so-called “steel township” is a calm and green suburb. The one is a controlled, maintained, healthy and green, but also an expensive, “boring” and static company town on the “right” side of the hills, while the other is a "chaotic" and growing informal city, next to polluting

160. Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 138. 161. This principle can be traced back to colonial planning on the Indian subcontinent. British colonial towns featured planned settlements with green bungalow typologies, next to segregated dense and unplanned neighborhoods in which the indigenous populations were settled. See: Glover, “The Troubled Passage,” 98-99. Also see: Janet Abu-Lughod. “A Tale of Two Cities – The Origins of Modern Cairo,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Volume z, Issue 5, July 1965, 429-457.

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industry, that is dense, urban and lively. Directly next to Nehru’s, Steiler’s and Baecker’s idealist vision of how “happy” workers should live, in reaction, reality had produced the exact opposite of their good intentions, an “amorphous urban structure”162 that includes everything that they had tried to avoid. And Rourkela is no exception. According to Ervin Galantay, it is typical for industrial New Towns to “accommodate the necessary labor force” and to act as “growth poles for a regional development policy” in remote locations. However in developing countries, they most often trigger uncontrolled migration dynamics of unskilled people who remain unemployed and start building their own shelter. As a consequence, he argues, plans of industrial New Towns must be relatively flexible.163 Prakash confirms these dynamics for Indian industrial New Towns. They were developed as “walled industrial cities”, rather than “growing points to serve regional development”.164 Consequently like Rourkela, also Bhilai and Kursipar–Supela165 or Durgapur and Bhiringi-Benachity166 form exclusive industrial islands with adjacent informal shadow towns.

INTERDEPENDENCIES Rourkela’s New Town and shadow town are highly interdependent and in fact form one urban system.167 The boom of the informal city led to the decline of the planned centre. As its oversized buildings were not feasible for average Indian income ranges, they remained mostly empty and shop owners preferred to open up smaller businesses in the tightly structured informal township.168 The steel township was disconnected from commercial competition, because the amount of shops, cinemas, bakeries or supermarkets was centrally determined by the steel company and did not originate from basic economic rules – and it turned out that these provisions were tremendously underestimated.169 As the principles of supply and demand exist outside the steel township, the prices are lower and the variety is bigger in the informal township.170

162. Steiler, “Rourkela in Essen entworfen,” 13. 163. Ervin Y. Galantay, New Towns: Antiquity to the present (New York: George Brazillers, 1975), 38-40. 164. Ved Prakash, New Towns in India, 112-113. 165. Sivaramakrishnan, New Towns in India, 22. 166. Sivaramakrishnan, “Durgapur: Case Study of an Indian New Town,” 152. 167. Also compare with: Prakash, New Towns in India, 111. 168. Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 140.

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169. While the informal township had 12 residents per job in 1967, the steel town only featured 30 residents per job. Schinz, “Rourkela – die moderne indische Industriestadt,”, 243. 170. Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 140.

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Unplanned temple and shops in the city centre with closed cinema in the background, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

According to social anthropologist and ethnologist Christian Strümpell the economy of Rourkela’s shadow town is highly dependent on the economic performance of the steel plant which in turn is directly linked to the ups and downs of the global steel market. After the steel company, now called SAIL 171, entered into recession in the late 1980s due to the low steel prices China was offering, it had to reduce its number of employees from 38.701 in 1981 to 15.000 in 2014, of which 2000 were employed as non-permanent trainees.172 After great profits up to 2009, global recession hit the steel plant again. It was followed by a comprehensive modernisation that extended its total capacity to 4,2 million tons of raw steel per year. During modernization phases thousands of temporary engineers and construction workers usually come to the city and spend their money in the shadow town. After they leave the sales for the shop owners go down again. The same fluctuations happen when SAIL, depending on their turnover, pays or ommits to pay yearly boni to its employees.173

171. Today the four steel plants still belong to the Steel Authority of India (SAIL), a public sector enterprise that emerged out of the HSL in 1973. See: Steel Authority of India Limited, 2013. Accessed March 1, 2020. http://www.sail.co.in/background_history. 172. Christian Strümpell, “Precarious Labor and Precarious Livelihoods in an Indian Company Town,” in Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism – Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject, eds. Chris Hann, Jonathan Parry (New York & Oxford: Berghahn, 2018), 135, 142. 173. Christian Strümpell, interviewed by the author, Berlin, September 12 and 13, 2016.

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Both parts of Rourkela are also closely linked in social terms. At least until 2008 around 50% of SAIL’s workers were living outside the steel township in villages, slums or other settlements. On the one hand because the township offered too little accommodation, on the other hand because some workers preferred to stay inside their communities.174 After the last cinema moved from Rourkela’s steel township to the busy informal township, the city centre and its park were not used by strolling workers as envisioned by Steiler and Baecker, but by the Adivasi to cultivate their rice fields. The Adivasi’s fields and villages have encroached on the whole steel township and are located in immediate proximity to the creeks that the original plan designated as recreational zones. Most of what was planned to serve as public space originally, today is also dedicated to diverse informal uses of the “unwanted”: car tires are being recycled along the green corridors of the ring road, inhabitants are praying in front of illegal temples that according to HSL’s will were not included in the plan175, cows are grazing on unused leisure grounds and daily goods are sold in garage-like tin boxes along major roads. Despite these developments, SAIL – who still manages the steel township – is still trying to keep up the steel township’s inherited exclusivity. According to Strümpell people who do not work in the steel plant – except for some accredited public servants like judges, policemen, lawyers and journalists – are officially still not allowed to live in the township and use its services, i.e. the hospital or its schools. Social exclusivity now also prevails inside the township, not so much along caste distinctions, but along ethnicity. After the ethnic riots and murders of Muslims in 1964176, Muslim workers were placed in one block in sector 15. For foreign workers a block of luxury flats was reserved in sector 9, Bengalis used to concentrate in sector 7 and Punjabis in sector 16. As a reaction to the criticism that the steel plant was not supporting local workers, since 1968 the employment policy has shifted towards more or less exclusively employing Oriyas, which today form the large majority of the steel plants employees. Besides the refurbishment of some leased-out bungalows, no major new developments since the 1960s are at all visible within the steel township.177 However, the efforts to maintain exclusivity are constantly being challenged, the pressure on the steel township is rising and its control over its territory is gradually being corroded. In 1993 the government of Odisha took the ownership of the steel 174. Strümpell, “Precarious Labor,” 136, 145. 175. Sperling, Rourkela - Sozio-ökonomische Probleme eines Entwicklungsprojekts, 31.

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176. Jonathan Park and Christian Strümpell, “On the Desecration of Nehru’s “Temples”: Bhilai and Rourkela compared, in Economic & Political Weekly, (October 5, 2008): 47-57. 177. Christian Strümpell, interviewed by the author, 2016. Christian Srümpell, interviewed by the author, Berlin, February 21, 2020.

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plant’s territory and leased it out again to SAIL for 99 years.178 Since the mid-1970s unused SAIL land is successively handed over to the informal township in order to reduce maintenance costs.179 This land amounts to circa 4.000 acres of the original 20.000 acres that belonged to the steel township.180 The surrendered surplus land is getting developed by the informal township and sub-leased to private stakeholders, developers or public-private partnerships. In this way, various developments have appeared since the 1970s: new neighbourhoods such as Areas No. 7 + 8, Koel Nagar and the planned Vedic City were built for a new middle and upper class that developed mostly from entrepreneurs with successful secondary businesses related to the steel plant, such as sponge iron production.181 So-called “Lower Category Residences”, such as Basanti Colony or parts of Chend Colony, were built by public authorities since the 1970s and have been leased out on a long-term leasehold basis to poorer working classes as a form of social housing.182 Higher educational facilities for engineering disciplines were built, like the Biju Patnaik University which was located on Adivasiclaimed fields next to the airport in 2009, or the expanding National Institute of Technology, one of the state-owned engineering schools in India. And, small to medium scale private industries appeared on the foot of the Durgapur Hills (right were Steiler’s team proposed, but the HSL did not realize them) and along the regional road in Kalunga on the other side of Brahmani river, such as the mentioned sponge iron facilities.183 The persistent public pressure created by the riots of 1964, NGOs, politicians and local interest groups obliged the steel plant administration to accept illegal informal settlements inside their territory in 1995 and grant them access to basic services, like water and sanitation. However, no efforts are made to accommodate this and the situation is worsening.184 Most of these new developments are located along the ring road. Despite Rourkela’s rigid plan and the supposed absurdity of building an “Autobahn” in an underdeveloped context, the ring road has seemingly become the backbone for the city’s growth on the long-term. As cars were initially too expensive for the average Indian income range, it was only used by bikes and motorcycles until some years ago and was mainly busy during shift change. This has changed since 2009, when SAIL gave cheap loans to its

178. Information according to an Odisha state officer. Strümpell, interviewed by the author, 2020. 179. Sudersan Sahu, Member of the planning commission of Rourkela Development Authority in the Rourkela Municipality, interviewed by the author, Rourkela, February 20, 2006. 180. Strümpell, “Precarious Labor,” 141, 151. 181. Strümpell, interviewed by the author, 2016. 182. Strümpell, interviewed by the author, 2016. 183. Sahu, interviewed by the author, 2006. 184. “Industrial Township Roadblock for Rourkela’s Growth,” The New Indian Express, April 21, 2016, accessed March 2 2020, https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/odisha/2016/apr/21/IndustrialTownship-Roadblock-for-Rourkelas-Growth-927110.html.

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Advertisement on ring road for Rourkela Steel Plant aimed at their workers, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

workers to buy cars (which raised the sales in the informal township).185 Even now, sixty years after its implementation, the ring road is still free of major traffic jams and still has not reached its full capacity. Besides its original function of connecting the housing areas with the steel plant, it functions as a distributor for the aforementioned developments. The growth of Rourkela’s informal township also changed its administrative status. In 2014 it transformed into the Rourkela Municipal Corporation (RMC), the highest level of urban administration in India that its megacities Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata also share. Among future projects of the RMC are the establishment of a canalisation system for the entire municipality, the building of new shopping malls and health care centres, the construction of an eco-friendly riverfront along Brahmani river, road construction and the extension of public transport.186 Probably the biggest success of the RMC so far is that Rourkela, as one of only two cities in Odisha, was chosen to be one of India’s

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185. Strümpell, interviewed by the author, 2016. 186. Strümpell, interviewed by the author, 2016.

Ring road during working hours, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

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Ring road during shift changes of the steel plant staff, steel township, 2006. Even today it is mainly used by bicycles and scooters (photo: Ali Saad)

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“Smart Cities”.187 With these massive investments, the RMC shows the ambition to build up a more hybrid economy in order to reduce its dependency on the steel plant. But while its context is dynamic, the steel township remains static and no common activities of the RMC and the steel plant administration can be observed. Despite the rising pressure, the impression prevails that the steel plant administration, as a relic from the past, is not so much interested in change, but in conserving its inherited exclusivity and in focussing on its core business.188 In this context Alfred Schinz’ vision for Rourkela’s future development from 1967 is still relevant today: to him the way Rourkela was planned represents an “incomplete planning process”, that was focussed purely on technical and administrative questions and did not give adequate thought to the social, political and economic implications of its regional development. To counteract this a holistic development plan is needed, that stimulates different economies such as manufacturing, commerce and agriculture of different scales, and that embeds them into a regional network, beyond the pure focus on steel production and secondary, material supplying and steel processing industries.189 However, to achieve Schinz’ vision a singular public administrative body for both, the shadow and the steel township is inevitable. Without it, Rourkela’s development will be quite limited and will continue to depend on the economic performance of the steel plant. If public opinion continues to see the steel plant administration as an obstacle to the city’s future development190, it seems quite obvious that Rourkela’s (administrative) double life will sooner or later end.

CONCLUSION: OPEN INFRASTRUCTURE When seen in the light of India’s post-independence ambition for autonomy from former superpowers, Rourkela’s contribution to the development of the country’s steel production, despite the initial problems the plant had, can certainly be regarded as a success. On the other hand, seen in the light of Nehru’s ambition to plan a New Town that is more than a pure Werkssiedlung, a New Town that can accommodate regional growth, private initiative, job opportunities and a good living environment for the local population, the plan for Rourkela has certainly failed.

187. “Pradhan Calls for Speeding Up Rourkela Smart City,” Deccan Herald. September 26, 2019. Accessed February 19, 2020, https://www.deccanherald.com/national/national-politics/pradhan-calls-forspeeding-up-rourkela-smart-city-764122.html 188. Stang, Die indischen Stahlwerke und ihre Städte, 146. The New Indian Express, April 21, 2016 189. Schinz, “Rourkela – die moderne indische Industriestadt,” 246ff. 190. The New Indian Express, April 21, 2016.

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Toul Le Mouse ir a il Milt on K eyne s Poul ad S hahr 10th of Ra ma d an Epilo gue Adivasi village (background) and rice field (right) in the central park, steel township, 2006. The path crosses a small creek that irrigates the field (photo: Ali Saad)

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It failed because the politicians and planners did not take their own premise that the city would rapidly grow seriously. They did not carefully consider the existing situation nor the development which could be expected, but tried to prescribe social behavior and exclude important social groups (and the steel plant administration continues to do so to this day). Consequently, the plan did not make an effort to organise the social and economic needs of the heterogeneous stakeholders, but tried to impose on them the spatial translation of a social vision that was alien to the context. As such the planning of Rourkela was not conceived with a holistic and pragmatic approach and as a result it was socially segregating from the beginning. By choosing this form of social engineering, rationality was replaced with ideology and the static, mono-functional and exclusive plan that was created ignored Rourkelaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rapid growth and the basic needs of the local population.

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Adivasi fields and grazing cow in Rourkela's central park, steel township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

The neglect of the needs of local social groups that were not able or willing to fit into Nehru’s social vision accelerated the transformation. Similar to Chandigarh, the plan did not foresee any allocation of housing for existing populations and low-income classes.191 Also, it underestimated the amount of services needed and did not offer a more hybrid spectrum of jobs. The shadow town compensates this lack and offers everything that the administration and the planners had neglected to provide. As the steel plant administration does not advocate other interests than the steel workers have, its legitimacy as a public body is being questioned and its responsibilities are being increasingly curtailed. Thus, the municipality is taking control over more and more of its territory and new interest groups, such as the Adivasi or the new middle and upper classes, could enter the area. The plan for Rourkela failed at the moment the state was not fulfilling its promise of welfare for all strata of society anymore. The modernist city model, its social ideology and the way it should be operated, was useless for the new stakeholders and they used it in a way that matched their local needs and their understanding of space. As a result, open spaces like Rourkela’s central park became 191. Jagdish Sagar, “Revisiting Chandigarh,” in Back From Utopia: The Challenge of the  Modern Movement, eds. Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002), 368-374.

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rice fields. They were not understood as public spaces in a modernist sense – where according to Schweizer’s Idealzentrum concept the modern society could stroll after work192 – but purely as a resource for the livelihood of the Adivasi. Seen in this light, the failure of Rourkela’s vision as an exclusive Wohnstadt, led to the success of its patch-worked plan.193 The large-scale elements, such as the ring road, the rail tracks or the system of green spaces that Steiler and Baecker envisioned became crucial infrastructures for the future development of the city. In this way, Krupp’s plan could unfold local potential and become the field of interaction and negotiation for the local needs, habits and practices of its users. Despite Nehru’s hypothesis, local society did not adapt to the prescribed operation modes of the modernist plan, but used it in a way that suited its own needs and possibilities. Similar to Jyoti Hosagrahar’s observations on Delhi, in Rourkela it was not the “West” or “modernity” that was imposed on the “local” or “native”, nor was it the local context that rejected modernism. It was a more ambiguous process of negotiation between modernist ideals and local reality.194 In that sense “all modernisms are the consequence of negotiations of an imagined ideal with the particularities of a place and its socio-political context, and hence are indigenous modernities.”195 The failure of Rourkela as an exclusive worker’s township and its transformation into an “indigenous modernity” turned Rourkela into a “normal” and sustainable city. The urban theorist Wolfgang Kil simply calls such an adaptation of modernist urban structures to new, contextual factors “normalization”. It is characterised by a structural crisis of the original settlement causing the re-negotiation, re-interpretation and re-organisation of its existing spaces to accommodate new realities for the diverse interests of existing and new social groups. According to Kil this transformative interaction between informal society and urban structure and the passing of time are key factors for creating awareness of heritage and identity. In that sense, a process of transformation and normalization contributes to the long-term efficiency of the New Town’s social, material, cultural, economic and spatial resources and can be seen as a process that leads to sustainability.196

192. Boyken, Otto Ernst Schweizer, 16. 193. On the Indian discources on the “failure” of Indian steel towns see Roy, Beyond Belief, 135-137, 144-150, 155-156. 194. Jyoti Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities – Negotiating Architecture and Urbansim (London: Routledge, 2005), 6-8. 195. Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities, 191.

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196. Wolfgang Kil, Die Zukunft liegt in der Normalisierung der Moderne, Beitrag für die offene Vorlesungsreihe „Stadtumbau als Impuls für die Berliner Großsiedlunge, Berlin-Marzahn, 20.11.2003. Accessed February 19, 2020, https://static.twoday.net/mehrwert/files/031120%20vortrag%20kil.pdf. Also see: Wolfgang Kil, “Soziale Stadt (III): Ostdeutsche Großsiedlungen – Nicht Umbruch, sondern Normalisierung,“ in Deutsche Bauzeitung, no. 8, (2000), 28-29.

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Walled villa and cars in Areas No. 7/8, informal township, 2006. This richer neighbourhood, that houses people who run secondary industries, is one of the few places were cars can be spotted in Rourkela (photo: Ali Saad)

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Rourkela’s story reminds us that cities are in a permanent process of adaptation and normalization triggered by the conflicts and negotiations of its heterogeneous interest groups. They can not be planned, but must be understood and conceived as open infrastructures that cater to their citizen’s needs, rather than as foreseeable, exclusive and thus rigid final products. This perspective not only has implications for India’s old and newly emerging New Towns, but also for the so-called developed countries as it demonstrates that it is possible to adapt modernist relics of the past like the Microrayons, Plattenbausiedlungen or Grands Ensembles to new political, social, economic and, like the case of Rourkela illustrates, even to new or changing cultural conditions triggered by migration. Against the current backdrop of crumbling welfare states, economic crises, strong migration dynamics, populist rhetorics and social exclusion, it becomes important to acknowledge the city as a place of social co-existence and heterogeneity. This calls for an approach in urban design and planning that is research-based, holistic, multi-scaled and inclusive, beyond the demands of a specific project brief or the boundaries of a given site, and that acknowledges urban space as the political field of negotiation of its actors. This does not mean that we do not need large-scale plans anymore. The case of Rourkela shows that especially large-scale infrastructures became the triggers for growth, appropriation, social diversification and the ultimate normalization of the city. Rather, what needs to be defined is what should be planned centrally and what is better left open for public participation in order to induce an interaction between planning and society. This way the inevitable transformations necessary through time are accommodated, as opposed to the exclusivist and dirigist approach of modernist tradition that often still prevails in contemporary masterplans around the world. At this point Oswald Matthias Ungers becomes interesting again as his thoughts on the Großform, which were also strongly influenced by Schweizer’s idea of elasticity, were precisely about that: “The Großform creates the frame, the order and the planned space for an unforeseeable, unplannable process, for a parasitic architecture. Without this component all planning remains rigid and lifeless.”197

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197. "Die Großform schafft den Rahmen, die Ordnung und den geplanten Raum für einen unvorhersehbaren, nicht planbaren, lebendigen Prozess, für eine parasitäre Architektur. Ohne diese Komponente bleibt jede Planung starr und leblos" Oswald Matthias Ungers, "Großformen im Wohnungsbau" Veröffentlichungen zur Architektur, no. 5 (December 1966), Reprint by Erika Mühlthaler (ed). (Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2007), 39.

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House in Basanti colony, informal township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

Basanti colony, informal township, 2006 (photo: Ali Saad)

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Toulouse-Le Mirail: The ideology of De Gaulle meets Team 10 Wouter Vanstiphout

TOULOUSE LE MIRAIL, FRANCE

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How Charles de Gaulle’s political ideas and constitutional project, hovering between capitalism and socialism, democracy and colonialism, nationalism and regionalism, modernisation and tradition, saw their contradictions mirrored by the most integrated realization of Team 10’s design ideology. A WALK ACROSS TOULOUSE-LE MIRAIL IN 2009 As Tolstoj wrote in the beginning of Anna Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’1 Paraphrasing this statement, we can also say: ‘Each happy city is happy in its own way; all miserable cities are alike.’ This observation springs to mind on exiting metro station Reynerie, in the heart of Ville Nouvelle Toulouse-Le Mirail, south of the provincial capital of Toulouse. This urban environment at the far end of the metro line could be located on the outskirts of any major French city, the vibrant, historical and invariably unique city centre that you left half an hour or an hour before. 837

1. Leo Tolstoy, Richard Pevear (translator), Larissa Volokhonsky, Anna Karenina, Penguin 2004

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All the attributes of the poor and dangerous Cité are accounted for: the immense square, newly paved with stone only a couple of years ago and already vandalized again.2 The few shops that are still open, a bakery, a pharmacy, a snack bar and a telephone shop. The many parking spaces and the few cars and of course an impressive forest of high-rise slabs and towers that seem monolithic due to their relatively small windows. Some buildings are painted with huge geometric patterns that cut across the simple horizontal lines of the apartment blocks with quasiorganic or perspectival effects and pastel colours. The alienating atmosphere of this place already starts to announce itself during the metro ride: you find yourself in an increasingly empty metro, the last of the white French people have gotten off earlier and you end up as part of a small group that alights collectively. Among the apartment blocks it is conspicuous that the population is almost invariably black African, West Caribbean or North African. This is also true of the shopkeepers. There are exceptions, but they only emerge in the morning; then you can find a few elderly French ladies timidly scurrying about with their shopping trolleys. In the afternoon, the atmosphere changes radically: the mothers and children and the elderly ladies quickly disappear into apartments that are fortified with triple locks and bars and the public space is taken over by the now awake unemployed boys and young men.

2. ‘Cité’ is the word the French use for large-scale, [planned] social housing neighbourhoods, analogous with the UK ‘estate’ or the US ‘projects’.

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Center of quartier La Reynerie, 2009

Center of quartier La Reynerie, 2006

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Looking from Reynerie to Bellefontaine, 2009

Overview at the lake at quartier La Reynerie, 2006

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The groups of boys take up position at the entrances of the apartment blocks or at the telephone shop, while pairs of them loaf about the galleries. They wave at each other, nod and mumble something. They hiss at unsuspecting visitors, or throw things at them. There is hardly any police about, despite the presence of a – heavily armoured – police station in the shopping centre. If there is, the patrols consist of at least five men, armed, in permanent radio contact with their headquarters, moving along nervously in paramilitary-like outfits. Dark blue police vans with barred windows occasionally speed by, invisibly ensconced boys catcall and sometimes pelt projectiles from the galleries. The parking spaces near the shopping centre bear blackened spots in which the vague contours of cars are still recognizable. Strikingly, many of the buildings on the street side are boarded up, or partly demolished with the openings in the remains of the building provisionally closed. The spaces around and between the apartment blocks are interspersed with rows of concrete traffic barriers or boulders to keep cars from penetrating deep into the area. An unusual phenomenon that begins to stand out after some time and then turns out to be omnipresent comprises graceful black spiral patterns on the ground. These are the traces of the deafening wheelies the boys make on the asphalt, sometimes for hours on end, with the rear wheels of their scooters and mopeds: the graphic reflection of chronic boredom and nuisance. Walking away from the terrains vagues between the apartment blocks and car parks and following the flow of people carrying bags or children, you end up in what is now the shopping centre, with a post office, the police station, Bar ‘PMU’, a small

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supermarket: the rudiments of an ‘ordinary’ French street with the basic facilities still present. This architecture is clearly newer and wants to differ from the concrete slabs and the asphalt in every respect. It comprises pavillionesque brick two-storey buildings covered with terracotta-tiled pitched roofs. They represent an attempt to introduce French normalcy in this forest of scaleless concrete giants and asphalt plains that, if you don’t look up or to the side, is convincing for several dozens of metres. There is even a sidewalk, with benches, only some of them burned. Noticeable only after a while is the peculiar relationship between ground level and adjacent buildings. The original shops have a provisional relationship with the ground level, as if they were not meant to be there. The same applies to the entrances of the apartment buildings: tiny steel doors that do not have the character of an entrance but instead look like emergency exits or back doors. Indeed, it appears that the original entrances where located one level up, on a plateau accessed by stairs and walkways that has partly been demolished. This plateau leads to a different world, one that was clearly designed as an integrated space that follows the bent shape of the gallery flats. This is where the original entrances to the apartment buildings are, often in the corners. The remains of a designed public space are still recognizable in the benches along the balustrade, the empty ponds and planters, remains of pavilions and a colonnade underneath the apartment buildings, everything in that same, relentless and now weathered concrete. Quartier La Bellefontaine, 2006

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Quartier La Bellefontaine, 2009

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University of Toulouse-Jean JaurĂ¨s, 2006

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Dalle at quartier La Bellefontaine, 2009

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Looking down from this plateau, the so-called Dalle, the coherence of this Cité begins to reveal itself: a network of huge apartment buildings, connected by the partly demolished Dalle. Precipices have replaced pedestrian routes that led over the thoroughfares to the next apartment building or down by a series of stairs. Another striking feature is the strangely consistent architecture that keeps stringing the same materials – concrete, tiles and moveable panels – together. In the smaller buildings, a cubic collection of spaces, voids and masses creates a geometric Kasbah-like effect. From the plateau, one can see smaller clusters of apartment buildings at some distance, some eight floors high, that simply stand on the ground level, and Mediterraneanlooking clusters of terraced, roughcast patio bungalows even further away. Besides as consistent and highly designed, Toulouse-Le Mirail also manifests as vast. On the one hand, the complex is a mega structure in the urban landscape of the post-war city – the landscape of thoroughfares, separated traffic levels, petrol pumps and huge furniture stores that flank the exit roads of every medium-sized city. The apartment buildings, car parks and ruinous open spaces of Le Mirail make an almost perfect match. On the other hand, a romantic park landscape reveals itself almost miraculously between the apartment buildings, containing historical follies from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. It seems like the New Town was meticulously placed in this landscape, the apartment blocks overlooking the green like platforms. It is as if two highly coherent and extremely different spatial and historical worlds were cut to Dalle at quartier La Bellefontaine, 2006

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Dalle at quartier La Bellefontaine in the 1970s

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Dalle at quartier La Bellefontaine, 2009

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ribbons and placed alongside each other, the result being that each apartment overlooks a contemporary concrete desert on one side and an aspic-like rudiment of a centuriesold man-made French landscape on the other. This is when similarities to generic Banlieue misery found earlier here, similarities shared with hundreds of similar sites in numerous other French cities at the far end of a public transport network, start to fade. This miserable place is miserable in its own way after all. That is, its misery, which is generic in itself, is exacerbated, turned sublime almost, by the overriding appearance of (landscape) architectural aspirations that are found here in such a monumentally ruinous condition. Precisely by the stunning beauty of the concept – the megastructure in the historical landscape – and by the realization that the apartment buildings are not only physically connected to each other but also to smaller buildings, that they were designed in a single coherent and utterly consistent architectural language, that together they form a single building, a single design, a single idea. What culture, what civilization was able to design an entire city as if it were a single building? The difference with other high-rise neighbourhoods in the Banlieues is huge. Places like Clichy Sous Bois or Sarcelles feature a bureaucratic repetition of generic public spaces, standard facilities and identical apartment buildings. Here, one walks among the ruins of an attempt to design a whole new world, from the patterns on the big apartment buildings to the design of a public space at an 8m height using pergolas and concrete ponds. It is a single sculpture, a single ruin, a single three-dimensional experience that can only be compared to that of ancient ruins such as Paestum or Persepolis, where everything from the details of the bas reliefs to the contours of the architectural volumes forms a single immense whole of weatheredthrough-the-ages material: sandstone or concrete. Another thing Le Mirail has in common with a millennia-old excavation is that the people walking around in it make an alienated and even dazed impression: they do not know the rituals and traditions that once gave meaning to these spaces and architectural details anymore. Parts are broken off in crucial places, furthermore, once self-evident connections and transitions are no longer visible and the coherence of the complex is no longer comprehensible. This effect presents itself especially on de remains of the Dalle. The space, clearly designed and perhaps once used as a place where people ran into each other, is now empty and deserted. The ground level, on the other hand, which was never meant as a public space, has now become the place where people park, shop, take shelter and enter and leave their homes, ride mopeds and hang out – it is unplanned and in no way designed. 850

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Indeed, the architect or historian who visits Toulouse-Le Mirail is like the rare archaeologist who visits Persepolis: the only one with an â&#x20AC;&#x201C; academic â&#x20AC;&#x201C; overview of the way the complex was once conceived and how it used to function. He is the one that walks across the area with a detailed three-dimensional image of the complex in its heyday on his mind and he recognizes, in the merest of traces and most banal of details, the landmarks that allow him to imagine the restoration of the monument. In the holes in the sides of the buildings, covered with blue tarp, he recognizes the former attachment of the Dalle to the now demolished cultural centre of this vanished 1960s, 1970s community and can explain to his audience what function this element had, who went there, what rituals developed there, what clothes people wore and what ideas they had about the world around them and the part their existence played in it. Here, while a group of giggling Algerian boys of about 12 years old listen in, he points at the illustrations in a weathered architecture book and explains that the architects of Le Mirail attempted to build a new city in this location, one that would be more beautiful, more happy and more attractive than the medieval Toulouse at the other end of the metro line.

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Presentation of the Concorde to the Toulousains, 1968 (source: Fonds André Cros, wikimedia)

PREMIER KOSYGIN VISITS TOULOUSE-LE MIRAIL, 1966 In December 1966, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin and minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko visited France. After the official reception by President Charles de Gaulle in Paris, the Russian leaders were taken on a trip along highlights of French progress, science and technology by Georges Pompidou, the French premier. In Grenoble they visited the CENG nuclear research centre and in Toulouse they visited the factory that had built the supersonic Concorde airliner, the ultimate symbol of French progress. After the nuclear research and aeronautical engineering as marvels of French progress, they went on to address the subject of urban development. The satellite town Toulouse-Le Mirail, near the airport and the Concorde factory, was its most spectacular and large-scale example. In 1966, the

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first section of the city that was to have 100,000 residents was nearing completion. Of the 20,000 residents the Bellefontaine neighbourhood would eventually house, the first 1,000 had already arrived in October. Kosygin, Gromyko and Pompidou – hundreds of Toulousains in their wake – walked across the futuristic pedestrian square that hovered above the motorways and on which the immense apartment buildings displayed their abstract patterns of moving panels. Part of the megastructure had not been completed at that time, but rather existed as a concrete skeleton. Therefore the two premiers and the minister could see the extraordinary scale and precision of the construction method that was used here: like Concorde and nuclear energy, yet another spearhead of the French industrial urge for expansion. The delegation admired the cultural centre that would house the library, childcare facilities, community centres and cinema and make up the social heart of this section of Bellefontaine. They ambled among the already occupied apartment buildings, elegant blocks of five floors each arranged in abstract patterns. They visited the first, light, Mediterranean-inspired primary schools that had already managed to fill some classes with the children of young French families that had taken the plunge and moved to this futuristic city miles away from ancient Toulouse. From Toulouse-Le Mirail, the parade of shiny Citroën DSs drove to the stately Hotel de Ville on Place Capitole in the heart of Toulouse‘s medieval centre. There the gathering, sitting opposite a huge model of the new megacity of which they had just seen the first part, witnessed a presentation by its architect, Georges Candilis. He was a Russia-raised ethnic Greek who had come to France after the Second World War to work for Le Corbusier and who had won the competition for a new, 100,000-resident city near Toulouse together with his partners Alexis Josic and Schadrach Woods in 1961. In his autobiography, Bâtir la Vie, Candilis relates how he attracted the attention of the Russian premier, who had fallen asleep once the presentation had started.3 He requested Pompidou’s permission to address the guests in Russian, his first language until he was 12. When he uttered his first sentence, ‘With Le Mirail, we have attempted to build a satellite town for all residents, without differentiating between the classes’, Kosygin started to his feet and stood beside Candilis next to the model. The premier, previously the mayor of Leningrad, said he himself had struggled with many similar challenges. He called two of his advisors and asked them if this plan was known to 853

3. George Candilis (récit recueilli par Michel Lefebvre), Bâtir la Vie. Un Architecte témoin de son Temps, Paris 1977.

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them. When they said it was, Kosygin asked them what they thought of it. ‘Interesting, but way too expensive,’ was their direct response. In Bâtir la Vie, Candilis relates how Kosygin immediately flew into a rage about this judgement, which he believed was founded on nothing at all and was completely worthless without reference material. As Candilis tells it – no-one can confirm or contradict him as the exchange was in Russian – the premier apologized for the ‘absurd response’ of his advisors after a brief silence and then turned to them, saying: ‘I demand that this plan is published and popularized in Russia.’4 The story ends with Georges Pompidou approaching Candilis after the incident, asking him why he and the Russians had been talking about space travel – the only word he had in fact understood had been ‘sputnik’, the Russian word for satellite as well as satellite city.5 Given the efforts Candilis took to sell his plan to the ideologists and administrators of the Soviet Union as an egalitarian city for all classes, it is peculiar that elsewhere in his biography, he quasi-naively claims to be surprised by the fact that ToulouseLe Mirail was described as a socialist city in a BBC documentary on European New Towns.6 Candilis: ‘I had never imagined it would be possible to give a city a specific political colour and it had never crossed my mind to build a specifically socialist city.’ He added, however: ‘Still, I also realized that the introduction of private interest in the city condemns it to decline.’7 With this remark he refers to the double struggle he was deeply involved in at the time, with bureaucratic services that laid down and enforced social housing rules and standards on the one hand and with private project developers that developed part of the housing and wanted to minimize mixing privately financed with subsidized sections. Candilis, on the other hand, did aim for an all-out mixture of incomes, dwelling types and, therefore, of developers and government departments. Candilis’ paradoxical yet pragmatic political awareness of the plan mirrors the complex political context in which it was developed. Kosygin’s visit sheds light on the interaction between global politics and France’s local, regional and national politics during the Cold War period. For just as Candilis also used his presentation to Kosygin and Pompidou to score points in his struggle with bureaucrats and project developers over the realization of the plan, Pompidou and De Gaulle also used the visit of the Russian delegation for their internal political agendas.

4. In the handbook of Russian author A. W. Ikkonikov, translated into German under the title Gestaltung Neuer Wohngebiete, Toulouse le Mirail is indeed presented as one of the most interesting examples of implemented Western experiments in the field of large-scale housing. A. W. Ikkonikov, Gestaltung Neuer Wohngebiete, Berlin (DDR) 1970, p. 35-36. 5. George Candilis (récit recueilli par Michel Lefebvre), Batir la Vie, Un Architecte témoin de son Temps, Paris 1977, p. 266 – 269 6. George Candilis (récit recueilli par Michel Lefebvre), Bâtir la Vie. Un Architecte témoin de son Temps, Paris 1977 7. George Candilis (récit recueilli par Michel Lefebvre), Batir la Vie, Un Architecte témoin de son Temps, Paris 1977, p. 266 – 269

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The American Time Magazine, which never left any doubt as to which side of the Cold War it was on, addressed Kosygin and Gromyko’s visit to France in a somewhat disapproving comment. It described the unusual warmth and nervousness with which president De Gaulle received the Russians and the extremely well-planned and staged tour of the highlights of modern France. Barely concealing its cynicism, Time quoted the admiring statements Kosygin made about his host and host country. Among other things, Kosygin said that the visit was the beginning of a period in which the relationship between Europa and Russia would develop anew and that the rapprochement between West and East Europe was of the utmost necessity. The comment also mentioned how Kosygin’s exuberant enthusiasm for De Gaulle led to consternation among members of the communist party that, powerful in Toulouse, was De Gaulle’s greatest enemy inside France. Time was well aware that the programme of the trip that led to technological highlights in Grenoble and Toulouse was hardly accidental: it took the Russian premier to places where De Gaulle was politically the weakest and left-wing political parties the strongest. When Kosygin visited the Concorde factory and the futuristic New Town surrounded by hundreds of cheering labourers, he was not only a representative of the Soviet Union, but also an envoy of the central French authority that sought to strengthen its relationship with a chronically rebellious urban region.8 The communist sympathies of the Toulousains and the tension between the French authorities and the provincial capital are essential to the proper understanding of the radical nature of Toulouse-Le Mirail. Their joint origin lies in the end of the Second World War.

TOULOUSE VS. LA FRANCE: REGIONALISM VS. NATIONALISM The resistance had taken over Toulouse weeks before the Free French Forces led by Charles de Gaulle ‘liberated’ the city in September 1944. For months, Toulouse had functioned as an autonomous city state led by the CNR, the Conseil Nationale de la Résistance, an umbrella organization of the socialist and communist resistance movements. In that wondrous period comprising the summer, autumn and winter of 1944, Toulouse was rapidly reorganized in accordance with a revolutionary ‘socialisthumanist’ programme of communist-inspired self-government. The former resistance especially made its power felt to the major companies, which had collaborated with the Vichy Regime and with the German occupying forces. The airline industry, for 855

8. Rosemary Wakeman, Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse 1945 – 1975, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1997, p. 61 - 68

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example, was cleared of ‘collaborator’ managers and placed under a form of workers’ control. The same thing happened to the city council and public utilities. Historian Rosemary Wakeman describes how rather than by an unadulteratedly communist agenda (nationalization of privately owned companies), this takeover process was motivated by the necessity to use all available resources to fulfil the immediate needs of the urban population. It was a collective socialist-patriotic project that was therefore described as ‘the ideology of a legal revolution under the dual banner of socialist humanism and the tricolour’.9 An important component of this revolution was the Accord de Toulouse, by which 32 municipalities in and around Toulouse were agglomerated into a single immense urban zone that could hence be planned as a single whole.10 This scale increase represented a radical change of course compared to the ‘localism’ of the Vichy Regime and was considered a necessary condition for the modernization of Toulouse and its region. In the resistance’s idealistic programme, workers’ control and large-scale planning were in line. Now projects on a large scale were possible, such as the construction of an international airport and the renewal of the Canal du Midi, built under Louis XIV, that connects Toulouse to the Atlantic Ocean and to the Mediterranean Sea.

Toulouse Délivré Les Editions Braun, 1944

Toulouse’s modernization agenda gradually became a matter of national policy as well. De Gaulle appointed Commissars to bring ‘rebellious’ cities and regions back under central government authority, as if they were colonial territories that had to be secured. What ensued was a complex sparring match between the Commissars and local authorities, aimed at the alignment of national and local interests. Large-scale economic and spatial modernization made the integration of the two agendas possible. The major projects in Toulouse and the surrounding area would therefore always play a key role in a process of continuous negotiation between the conservative government in Paris and revolutionary, communism-inclined Toulouse. The projects themselves would thus have different meanings, depending on the political context within which they are understood.

9. Rosemary Wakeman, p. 62 10. Rosemary Wakeman, p. 64

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THE FIRST WAVE OF MODERNIZATION, 1944-1958

Pierre Mendès-France, leader of the Parti Socialiste Unifié, speaks at a rally against the Algerian war, with Raymond Badiou, Mayor of Toulouse, next to him. January 20th, 1962 (photo: © André Cros)

In 1944, socialist politician Raymond Badiou was elected mayor of Toulouse. He used his power to enforce a compact development of the city through strict building limitations. These were meant to prevent the city expanding from covering the surrounding villages and fields with low-density detached dwellings because this would lead to an uncontrollably large city and high costs for roads and public utilities. All building had to be realized within these limits, including the thousands of dwellings that were needed to solve the housing shortage and to replace homes destroyed during the slum clearances. The compact city policy immediately became a point of sharp ideological conflict between the right-wing conservative parties on the one hand and the socialists and communists on the other. The latter supported the prioritization of Badiou, who treated housing needs as a collective problem rather than the sum of individual desires. This was about the housing of the working class and not about facilitating the petit-bourgeois’ consumer dreams of le banlieue pavillionaire.11 The criticism of the right-wing and conservative parties was of course that the interests of the population were ignored, that the mayor abused his powers and that the extreme desification he favoured would make the city uninhabitable. Badiou found an ally in the national government, however, though its reasons were completely different. The ministry that led the reconstruction of post-war France, the MRU (Ministère de la Reconstruction et de l’Urbanisme), pursued a policy to approach the reconstruction highly systematically, modernistically and on a large scale. The functionalist city and the industrialized construction industry were its most important components. From 1946 onward, the MRU branch in Toulouse launched modernist, industrial housing projects in the city. To that end, it started

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11. Rosemary Wakeman, p. 77 – 79

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the HLM (Habitations à Loyer Moderé, low-rent dwellings) programme in 1947, also known of the later Cités and Grands Ensembles that emerged in the peripheries of numerous French cities by the hundreds of thousands.12 Initially, however, the measures taken by Badiou and the MRU exacerbated the housing shortage in the city. They shut the door to the construction of cheap, small-scale housing projects in villages just outside Toulouse that had met housing needs for centuries. Moreover, the policy implied the radical transformation of construction methods and therefore the end of small contractors’ businesses. The launch of large, industrial and centrally managed and subsidized construction companies, finally, met with difficulties. The situation was to worsen and deteriorate significantly for several years before reconstruction in accordance with modernist principles would begin to pay off. The first high-density collective housing construction projects under Badiou’s building limitations were three Grands Ensembles in the Joliment, Empalot and Madrid neighbourhoods. Slabs and towers were placed amid green on wastelands in existing neighbourhoods, some of them created by allied bombing, some of them left empty because housing projects that were part of old zoning plans had never materialized. It was a relatively quick way to parachute thousands of dwellings of a totally new typology and scale into the city. On either side of the Garonne River, the Toulouse skyline was complemented with the silhouettes of modernist slabs counting 6, 15 or even 30 floors. Between 1948 and 1961, 30,000 new dwellings were built for the rapidly growing population, 60 per cent of which lived in 224 high-rise complexes. Despite its size, this first phase of Toulouse’s modernization was achieved project by project and was not based on an integrated plan. This happened a lot during the early stages of European cities’ reconstruction, when there was an immediate need for large-scale building production but no time to draft master plans and ensure their political acceptance. The realization of this programme under Badiou’s strict development limitations and in accordance with the industrial method of the HLM continued to fuel the urban debate about the transformation of the city. Opponents of the policy saw how the cityscape was affected by the crust of modernist high-rise buildings. Toulouse’s

12. HBM was the postwar successor to the 1930s HBM (Habitations à Bon Marché, Cheap Dwellings). The best-known HBM dwellings are the monumental, neo-classic and Art-deco blocks built in a circle around the Parisian city centre.

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historical city centre, furthermore, was left behind in terms of modernization: there, 51,000 people lived in premodern, overcrowded conditions and the city centre additionally had to accommodate tens of thousands of cars on narrow streets that were not designed for motorists. The densification of the city also caused a sharp rise in land values and thence speculation and frustrated individual enterprise by building contractors. The socialist city administrators and the modernist national planners countered this by referring to the large numbers of worker families that had been liberated from uninhabitable slums and given modern, spacious apartments that were fitted out with all modern conveniences. By the end of the 1950s it was clear that the modernization and expansion of Toulouse needed upscaling. The complex tension between national interests voiced in Paris, socialist interests voiced at the Toulouse city hall, the conservative interests of the Catholic middle classes and the communism-inclined demands of the working classes and the more radical of the former resistance fighters determined the next phase. Both national and international politics faced radical changes as well. In 1958, another socialist mayor came into power: former resistance fighter Louis Bazerque. In that same year Charles de Gaulle, who had been writing his memoirs in his home village of Colombey for 12 years, won back the presidency. Moreover, the Algerians’ liberation war against French colonial power was at its peak in 1958. These three factors would have a decisive influence on the exponential modernization and upscaling that Toulouse would face from 1960 onwards, its most visible result the satellite Toulouse-Le Mirail.

THE LOSS OF ALGERIA AND THE RETURN OF DE GAULLE, 1954-1961 After France had lost Indochina (the later Vietnam) in 1954, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria where the only significant colonies the country had left. But in the 1950s there, too, independence movements began to make so much noise that the French government was forced to take action. Unlike in Indochina, numerous Europeans had settled in Algeria, leading an essentially European life under French rule there; this group is commonly called the pieds-noirs.13 Many of them were not of French origin but came from Spain, Greece or Italy. According to historian Tony Judt, Algeria was nevertheless a little France outside France, comparable with Northern Ireland, where

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13. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term pied-noir refers to ‘a person of European origin living in Algeria during the period of French rule, especially a French person expatriated after Algeria was granted independence in 1962.’

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there is also a dominant minority that claims support and protection from local national indigenous groups of the colonizing country.14 Like the Toulouse resistance movements during and directly after the Second World War, the Arab nationalists had been hoping for an incremental increase of their autonomy, starting with self-rule at the local level. When the French government failed to take any steps in this direction after the liberation, compromise-oriented reformers were marginalized in favour of the militant, Islamic freedom fighters of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) who did not shun confrontations with the French. In the early 1950s, multiple armed revolts forced the French government to reform; in 1956 Tunisia and Morocco were the first African countries to win their independence. In Algeria, this led to an uproar among the European minority on the one hand and to an increasingly intense battle of the FLN against the French on the other. The French army backed away from Paris control more and more and began acting increasingly cruel, excessive and chaotic. With the Battle of Algiers (1956-1957), a period of particularly violent confrontation in the capital, the rebels took the fight from the countryside to the cities, where they used bombs to attack civilians as well, which in turn led to brutal and illegal retaliations by the French army. Meanwhile, mass demonstrations organized by those that feared the French government would leave Algeria to the Algerians filled the streets of Paris. A general called for the return of General De Gaulle, who was expected to hit the rebels with the decisive battle. The atmosphere was one of attacks, conspiracies and the threat of a coup and made people fear for the collapse of the French state. In a 1958 referendum, 80 per cent of the French voted for the return of De Gaulle as president, giving him a mandate of unprecedented proportions. De Gaulle, however, did the opposite of what many of the French had been expecting. He soon saw that a French Algeria was an anachronism and in 1959, he offered the country self-rule.15

Poster announcing a rally, protesting for a ceasefire and self-rule in Algeria, to be held in the Salle Senechal in Toulouse, March 4th 1960 (source: Marie de Toulouse, Archives municipales)

14. Tony Judt, Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945, London 2005, p. 285 - 286 15. De Gaulle’s pragmatic choice for autonomy made the French army in Algeria rebel, which led to a failed coup in 1961 and to a series of attacks on De Gaulle’s life. However, the independence negotiations in Evian in 1960 and 1961 had already made it perfectly clear that Algeria was lost to the French and to the Europeans.

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The atrocities of the French army made it impossible for most pieds-noirs to stay on in free Algeria. Hundreds of thousands at a time, they moved to France.16 The majority settled in the south of France, harbouring a huge grudge against the French government that had forced them to leave the environment in which they had lived for generations and that they had considered unalienably French. The rancour of the pieds-noirs was not the only trend that was tearing up France by the end of the 1950s. In 1956 Pierre Poujade, a simple bookseller, would win 52 seats in parliament for a one-issue party that claimed to stand up for the common man who had had enough of being lied to by an indifferent regime.17 His was Europe’s first populist party and it took advantage of the deep division and frustration that prevailed among the people. The discontent of the population was dangerous, fed by a stagnating economy, high unemployment and an unremitting housing shortage coupled with the humiliation of France in the face of an international community that had sided with the Algerian freedom fighters. All these disturbing aspects formed the background against which Charles de Gaulle would pursue his radical policies between 1958 and 1968.

THE SECOND WAVE OF MODERNIZATION, 1958-1969 Characteristic for his politics, De Gaulle’s interior modernization agenda and economic strategy were inseparable from his international policy. On the international stage, he wanted France to acquire a special position that would transcend the simple East-West polarity of the Cold War. The humiliation of having had to depend on the United States during the war with Indochina and the estrangement between France and the international community during the Algerian conflict drove De Gaulle to follow an individual course. France would break away from the NATO command structure and work on its own nuclear arsenal, rather than allow that of the United States on its territory. This is the backdrop against which modernization projects aiming to realize the first commercial supersonic flight in a European context (which would lead to the building of the Concorde) took place, as well as the construction of dozens of nuclear power plants across the country and other examples of rapid Space Age technology that France used to secure an autonomous position in the world.

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16. After Algeria had become independent in 1962, some 800,000 pieds noirs with the French nationality left Algeria for France. Some 200,000 pieds noirs stayed behind, but most of them left the country during the 1960s after all. 17. Tony Judt, p. 487

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This leap forward had a domestic function in particular. De Gaulle’s projects and personality would reunite the torn country, give the French back their pride and provide them with employment, incomes, higher standards of living, better education and more mobility and access to recreational and cultural facilities. The fragmented and chaotic 1950s were overcome by this second wave of modernization, which would be much more than a reconstruction: it would create a France that had never existed before. ‘Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France,’ De Gaulle wrote in 1954, four years before he returned to French politics.18 The time had come to realize this idea. A central part of De Gaulle’s ‘Idée de la France’ pertained to the shape of the city. Its adaptation to the quantitative and technological requirements of the new age was not supposed to be purely functional, and the city certainly did not merely exist to solve housing problems.19 The city became a central part of a cultural project led by the legendary André Malraux, author and minister of culture under De Gaulle, with whom he had survived a bomb attack by rebelling French troops. Malraux‘s ideas about the French city and culture together with De Gaulle’s modernization agenda were to materialize in an unprecedentedly comprehensive form in Toulouse. Malraux’ cultural statism had major consequences for provincial cities in France especially: in terms of scale, economic significance as well as culture, some of them were designated to grow into metropolitan areas. In Malraux’s view the aim was not so much to cultivate and stimulate local cultures to create local identity, but rather to precision-bomb provincial cities with firstrate highbrow culture and carefully distributed innovative industry. This was underpinned by a concept of France as a rarely diverse, ancient and authentic producer of culture. France’s modernity was embedded in a narrative about more than a thousand years of cultural superiority in a country with an extraordinary diversity of landscapes, histories and even

18. Charles De Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre (Tome I), L’Appel 1940 – 1942, Paris 1954 19. Tony Judt, p. 377 - 378

Paris, Grand Palais, January 1961. Minister for the reconstruction Pierre Sudreau, presents the models of Paris of the future to President Charles de Gaulle (source: © Terra)

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languages, all of them united in the Republic. In France, culture was mainly used to create a unifying factor in a fragmented country. After all, at that time France was a country about to explode as a result of internal conflict along ethnic, regional, classrelated and political fault lines. Une certaine Idee de La France was meant to reunify the country. And regional diversity, modernization and cultural history were important unifying ingredients. Malraux’s view of a France in which every city was of cultural significance required a different use of the resources of urban design, planning and architecture. Whereas the 1950s had focused on the practicalities of meeting a quantitative housing challenge, the extension of cities now suddenly became a cultural challenge. Under the name Metropoles D’Equilibres, this national regime of culturalist modernization was concentrated in some eight urban areas and cities; one of them was Toulouse.20 Paris exercised a large degree of control over these cities and regions, but huge sums of money were made available to them as well.21 The idea was that the massive investment of resources, money, education, modernization and culture in these metropolises would trickle down to the region, the small towns, villages and hamlets. Consequently, every French citizen would benefit from the leap forward.

MAYOR BAZERQUE’S GRANDS PROJETS, 1958-1971 Meanwhile, in Toulouse proper, the political landscape transformed parallel to the national Gaullist ‘revolution’. Far more than his predecessor Badiou, Mayor Louis Bazerque became known as a proponent of large projects. His influence would grow into the urban equivalent of the Pharaonic presidential power of Charles de Gaulle and his successors, that put their country on the map by means of Grands Projets. Bazerque played games of autonomy and even rebellion against the Parisian regime, even though he, with his indefatigable craving for expansion and modernization, actually represented the Gaullist ideal. This was of major importance on a local level, because risks of conflict and thus separation ran particularly high in Toulouse. The appeasement of left-wing and resistance-related movements, the reception and employment of new, frustrated pieds-noirs and the tempering of populist ‘Poujadist’ movements remained a work in progress.

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20. The Metropoles d’Equilibre model designated three urban zones as growth poles: Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing in the north and Lyon-Saint-Etienne – Grenoble in the south and five individual or twin cities: Nancy-Metz, Strasbourg, Nantes-Saint Nazaire, Bordeaux and Toulouse. 21. For the most part, supervision was in the hands of a service called DATAR (Délégation de l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Action Regionale) established under the rule of De Gaulle.

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In Toulouse, more than in other French cities, the mayor had to play a complex game to on the one hand oppose Paris, and on the other make the most of the resources the national government had to offer. This had an immediate effect on urban planning. One of the first actions Bazerque undertook was to draft a Plan Directeur for the development of Toulouse.22 Rather than at limiting urban growth and designating high-rise construction sites for housing projects, like Badiou had done, the Plan Directeur was ambitiously aimed at the modernization and rapid growth of the city and the region. In addition, the plan had a political role: it was used to channel the resources of the national policy of the Metropoles D’Equilibres and was developed in close consultation with the government in Paris. It is easy to recognize the preoccupations and strategies of De Gaulle and Malraux’s Idee de La France in the plan’s themes and components, even though Bazerque of course presented it as a purely Toulousian idea for which he had surreptitiously secured funding from the Parisian administrators. One of the key elements of the Plan Directeur was that it declared the entire historical centre of Toulouse a centre archéologique. The restoration of historical buildings and the revival of French Monuments Historiques was a theme that played an enduring and central role in art theorist Malraux’s strategy. However, the transformation of historical French cities into monuments was inextricable linked to the modernization of the city. The new Toulouse, which the governments had designated the French centre of electronic and aircraft industry, had to be embedded in the Idee de La France of culture, history and diversity. Quite literally, this meant that the medieval Toulouse, a chaotic overcrowded mass, had to be cleaned and offered to the new Toulousians, to the French and to the world as a shining example of glory and culture. This ‘cleaning’ not only referred to the façades, but also to the clearance and replacement of the worst and poorest parts of the medieval cite centre.

‘Le Capitole’, the monumental building housing both City Hall and a Theatre on Toulouse’s Main square, 1923 (source: IVC31555_20123102181NUCA - Elévation antérieure. - Friquart, Louise-Emmanuelle; Krispin, Laure, (c) Ville de Toulouse; (c) Inventaire général Région Midi-Pyrénées)

Thus, one of the three large-scale spatial interventions of the Plan Directeur was a slum clearance in the Saint Georges area east of the

22. Manon Daumur, La formation de Toulouse comme ville industrielle à travers les plans d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de 1948 à 1975, in: Dumas, Architecture, aménagement de l’espace. Paris, 2016

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centre. The slums were to be replaced by huge cultural and commercial facilities, a first step in the gentrification of the old centre. Toulouseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s second Grand Projet was the Rangueil-Lespinet science centre south-east of the city and the third project, the most monumental and bold, was a satellite town south-west of the centre for 100,000 residents designed entirely from scratch: Toulouse-Le Mirail. In 1960, the contours of the New Town were established and the competition was held in the spring of 1961. 865

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As the foregoing shows, first, Toulouse-Le Mirail cannot be seen as an expression of the local megalomania of a mayor: this megalomania was a carefully staged and prepared part of a national policy that combined local and national interests. Secondly, it appears that Toulouse-Le Mirail in no way represents a modernist rejection of the city and of history, but that it resulted from a radical and holistic strategy for the entire city in which particularly the embedding of modernization and expansion in the history and specific culture of the city plays a central role. The construction of Toulouse-Le Mirail and the designation of Toulouse Intra-Muros into a Centre Archeologique are connected. As it turns out, the scale and sociocultural aspirations that distinguish Toulouse-Le Mirail from the first generation of Grands Ensembles with their repetitive functionalism dovetails with the ambitious agenda of the De Gaulle-Malraux government.

ZUP: ZONE À URBANISER PAR PRIORITÉ The New Town Le Mirail was to be constructed as a ZUP, a Zone à Urbaniser par Priorité, a planning tool that had been introduced by presidential decree more than a year before the competition.23 It allowed municipalities to prioritize certain areas as expansion areas. Given the concentration of the buildings, they could guarantee that there would be enough residents, which made it profitable to develop urban amenities in advance, including schools, shops, public transport and cultural facilities. Using upscaling and concentration, the ZUP wanted to solve the problem of the many Grands Ensembles that had come under attack because they lacked basic facilities in the first years of their existence. ZUPs upscaled not only the size, but also the complexity of the programme and the process of urban developments. Public, semi-public and private parties had to realize dwellings (75 per cent of them social housing), roads, schools, shops, public spaces and other programmes jointly and in accordance with a single plan. Setting up ZUPs also meant that the 1950s practice to build over available land opportunistically and ad hoc was abandoned; authorities could now plan integrated neighbourhoods and urban districts, even satellite cities. This prevented one of the problems of building Grands Ensembles: the first generation of high-rise projects, such as Sarcelles north of Paris, lacked centrality, community spirit and a clear identity and contributed to uncontrollable building in the urban periphery. 23. ZUP was policy from 1959-1967.

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ZUPs like Toulouse-Le Mirail were part of a broader movement towards a more largescaled and integrated development of cities. Among other things, this movement led to the concept for a Paris Parallèle conceived by the editorial team of architecture magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Led by editor in chief André Bloc, the magazine proposed to develop a satellite city for 8 million residents at 40 km from the ancient city.24 Of course the plan was rejected, but it would turn out to have prophetic value with respect to the scale increase in French urban planning: from Grands Ensembles to Villes Nouvelles, and more specifically to the five Villes Nouvelles that were planned around Paris in the second half of the 1960s and that are now counted among the more successful components of the periphery.25 As one of the largest ZUPs planned in the early 1960s, Le Mirail came very close to realizing a Toulouse Parallèle similar to the Paris Parallèle Bloc and his cohorts had conceived. The first urban expansion that was deliberately designed and constructed as a satellite city, one could consider Le Mirail France’s first post-war New Town.

COMPETITION FOR A NEW TOULOUSE The competition Mayor Bazerque organized in 1961 for a 100,000-resident satellite city on the opposite side of the Garonne River was based on a detailed programme of requirements, a meticulously described agreement between participating local, national, public, semi-public and private parties. Toulouse’s municipal urban planners had based their preparation on the Charter of Athens, on the CIAM principles with regard to the separation of functions, living in high-rise buildings amid the green, the separation of traffic systems and the fading out of streets and blocks Le Corbusier published in 1943. However, the abstract Ville Radieuse-schedules were supplemented by a hierarchical and organic structure comprising the clustering of high-rise buildings in the city centre and their gradual, outward dilution and greening.26 Not only were the programmatic margins of the competition small, but it also provided a radical urban planning ideology, a functionalist method and even a cultural interpretation of a hierarchical city structure. As a result, the competition focused on a single question: What shape was the New Town going to have? Or: What shape would allow the combination of a ZUP, the Charter of Athens and the industrialized construction industry?

24. Carola Hein, The capital of Europe: architecture and urban planning for the European Union, p.63, Westport (CT) 2004.

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25. The five Villes Nouvelles are Melun-Sénart, Cergy-Pontoise, Marne-la-Vallée, Evry and St.-Quentin-en-Yvelines 26. Stéphane Gruet, Rémi Papillaut (eds.), Le Mirail, Mémoire d’une ville: Histoire vécue du Mirail de sa conception à nos jours, Toulouse 2008, p. 52

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Milt 'Concours Z.U.P. Le Mirail Toulouse' by Candilis, Dony, Josic and Woods, 1961

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The competition consisted of two rounds: an open first round, from which the jury would select ten teams for the second round. The fact that the jury divided the 22 contributions that made it through the technical assessment into purely formal categories such as Radio Concentrique, Quadrillage, Grand Axe Nord Sud or Ceinture Parabolique is telling us a lot about the aesthetic focus of the competition. One category was reserved for proposals that did not allow classification: the Projets Particuliers.27 The proposal of the young team of Candillis, Josic & Woods fell into this category, like that of the famous ‘figurative’ Grands Ensembles-architect Emile Aillaud and the also highly sculptural work by Louis Arretche. A plan likely to receive special attention at the opening of the envelopes was the one submitted by the father of the modernist city in France, Le Corbusier himself. A group of local Toulousian architects had approached the old architect for a collaboration, but their concept did not stick to the required proportions of single-family dwellings and high-rise buildings and ignored many of the other preconditions. Instead, theirs was an extremely pure projection of the Corbusian toolbox onto the location: an abstract grid of infrastructure and green carrying, among other things, some 20 Unités d’Habitation, identical to the ones in Marseilles, Berlin and Nantes. It was as if the team had leafed through Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre Complete and emptied it out onto the location: a highly principled yet impractical approach. We can speculate that the plan nevertheless made it through the first round because it was so clear who its author was and because the jury did not already want to exclude the most famous architect in the world who, moreover, was the inspiration for the modernist reconstruction of France‘s cities. Two thirds of the team that would win eventually, the office of Candilis, Josic & Woods, consisted of former long-time employees of Le Corbusier and they showed the extent to which the Corbusian grammar had developed compared with the work of the master himself. Instead of a near-mechanical grid with Unités drawn in like a formation of naval vessels, Candilis, Josic & Woods proposed a tree-like structure stuck organically onto the landscape. Its cross section consisted of a stacked parking garage, pedestrian platform and ‘backbone’ of high-rise buildings. From here, lower clusters of buildings incrementally merged with the remaining landscape. The city was in fact designed like a single building for 100,000 residents. This shows that their approach to urban design was of a completely different order than the classic Charter of Athens-repertoire. Whereas Le Corbusier’s plan was founded 27. Stéphane Gruet, Rémi Papillaut, p. 55

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Milt Competition model of the first prize winning project by Candilis, Josic & Woods. Mayor Louis Bazerque third from right (source: CROS, André, Mairie de Toulouse, Archives municipales, Cote)

on a neutral urban planning basis, upon which the Unités could subsequently be placed, Candilis, Josic & Woods interwove infrastructure, urban development and architecture into a single, all-devouring megastructure. Zooming in on the architectural scale, on the floor plans of the dwellings, the cross sections of the high-rise buildings, materials and details, however, the huge debt owed to Le Corbusier is clear: from the rue interieur through the slabs and the split-level maisonettes in the high-rise buildings to the beton brut finishing of the complex.

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The origin of the winning office was after all the construction site of the very first Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles. Georges Candilis (1913-1995) was its project architect

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Georges Candilis (l) and Schardach Woods (r) with a model of Le corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseille, 1950 (photo: David S. Boyer)

Candilis and Woods with a model of their Cité Verticale in Casablanca, 1952 (source: Avery Architectural Library, Department of drawings and architecture, Columbia university, New York, USA)

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until its completion in 1952. After the completion of the Unité, Candilis and another of Le Corbusier’s employees, the American Shadrach Woods (1923-1973), joined another project started by Le Corbusier: ATBAT – Afrique, a Casablanca-based studio of designers and builders that focused on building modern housing in African cities. The first independent works by Candilis and Woods thus were the later famous Nid d’Abeille (Honeycomb) housing projects in the new suburbs of Casablanca, where the Corbusian repertoire was implemented using Moroccan resources in an architectural tradition of Kasbahs and informal construction. In ATBAT, the duo was joined by Yugoslavian architect Alexis Josic (1921-2011) and the three of them subsequently settled in Paris as independent architects in 1955.28 The history of the designers of Toulouse-Le Mirail is important because they themselves provided their oeuvre with rhetorical content by referring to its roots in the work of Le Corbusier as well as in the spontaneous, organic dynamics of the informal North African city. We can analyse the design of Toulouse-Le Mirail on the basis of the dialectic between a highly architectural, mechanical approach on the one hand and an approach based on contextualism, spontaneity, uncertainty and flexibility on the other as well. One glance at the competition contribution is enough to view this paradoxical combination: an immense city designed like a single futuristic building, its shape referring to the spontaneous, organic growth of North African informal settlements. Candilis, Josic & Woods were members of an international family that addressed the same themes. The group consisted of young architects, CIAM members that were asked in 1953 to prepare the tenth CIAM congress of 1959 with respect to content. Dutchmen Jaap Bakema and Aldo van Eyck, the English Alison and Peter Smithson, the Italian Giancarlo de Carlo, and Candilis and Woods formed the core of this group. They used the opportunity to discontinue the annual CIAM congress and to continue the organization as a group of rather more idealistic, loosely connected like-minded people: Team 10. The various members of Team 10 shared a philosophy of architecture that was anthropological by nature, included a strong interest in the use of space by people and in the informal and the spontaneous. At the same time, they saw the upscaling and mechanization of society as a challenge to architecture. Balancing Le Grand Nombre of the industrial housing production necessary to alleviate the housing shortage, or the motorways, airports and shopping centres as the new meeting places of the masses, was what Team 10 focused on. During their annual meetings, they presented their latest projects and commented on each other’s work on the basis of these starting points. The records kept of 20 years of discussions show how an experimental, exploratory design 873

28. Tom Avermaete, Another Modern: The Post War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods, Rotterdam 2005, p. 38

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Site plan showing the existing historical city and the new extension of le Mirail. Figure-ground drawing of the existing green structure on the terrain of Le Mirail. (source: T. Avermaete, Another Modern, the post-war architecture and urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods, NAI Publishers (2005). Avery Library Special Collections, Columbia University, New York)

approach was implemented on an increasingly larger scale and how the real, physical and social challenges of Le Grand Nombre became ever more concrete in character. They became visible in projects ranging from the Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens housing in London and Jaap Bakema’s Terneuzen City Hall to the biggest Team 10 achievement of all: Toulouse-Le Mirail. Candilis, Josic & Woods therefore presented Toulouse-Le Mirail as a synthesis of a ten-year ‘study’ comprising projects in Europe and Africa in each of which some aspect of a new urban concept had been addressed. The urban expansion Bagnol sur Cèze was about the relationship between a modern neighbourhood and an ancient city; their project for a New Town near Hamburg centred on the combination of buildings to form a neighbourhood, a Grand Ensemble near Caen focused on the return of the street, and so on. Toulouse-Le Mirail would bring all of this together in a total concept. At the same time, the design was that of a classic New Town with a structure that did not depart from the Garden City principle. It is a city

Model of the competition entry by Candilis, Josic & Woods, 1961 (source: Fonds Jean Dieuzaide – Mairie de Toulouse, Archives municipales)

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made up of houses that form neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods that form districts and districts that make up a city, each scale with its own facilities, everything functioning according to a strict socioeconomic algorithm. For example, the tree model consisted of five Quartiers of each 20,000 people. These Quartiers were divided into neighbourhoods that coincided with interior spaces formed by the large residential slabs and had primary schools and kindergartens. However this spatial hierarchy did not result in neighbourhoods and districts that were clearly separated by green wedges, as is common in the ‘classic’ New Towns. It was absorbed by an architectural structure that allowed centres to merge into one another by means of a Dalle (raised pedestrian platform) and connected neighbourhoods and districts into a single ‘organic’ megastructure. The greenery in Toulouse-Le Mirail therefore did not play the part of buffer green that keeps neighbourhoods apart; it had an autonomous meaning of a completely different order. The tree structure was wrapped around large coherent landscapes, the natural and cultural monuments of which were maximally exploited and restored. The rivers, parks and castles of this exceptional landscape were framed by the immense concrete megastructure, but also provided the quartiers with an identity, as they were named after the castles and country estates from the Renaissance period. This way, very concretely, the Idee de la France was embedded in the design.

Newspaper La Dépêche du Midi, reporting on the first houses finished in Toulouse-Le Mirail, December 29th, 1964

BUILDING THE BACKBONE The first tranche of Toulouse-Le Mirail, whose realization began in 1964, consisted of three of the five Quartiers: Bellefontaine, Reynerie and Le Mirail. The concept immediately clashed with the strict financial and bureaucratic frameworks of the French reconstruction, with its semi-public finance companies, strict regulations and technocratic planners and administrators. The plan could never have survived those clashes without the support of Mayor Bazerque, Toulouse-Le Mirail’s major political supporter. The problems primarily focused on one of the essential components of the plan: the experimental public and green space. Characteristically, rather than superimpose an efficient grid upon the landscape, the plan wanted to restore the landscape as a cultural historical and natural heritage with which

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Milt Mayor Louis Bazerque visiting Le Mirail with the Minister of Public Works, Edgar Pisani. November 26th, 1966 (source: DDM, archives. © André Cros)

Architect Georges Candillis explaning a project to a delegation comprising Mayor Louis Bazerque. March 25th, 1968 (photo: © André Cros)

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Team 10 gathering in Toulouse Le Mirail, 1971. From left to right: Sia Bakema, Peter Smithson, Samantha Smithson, unknown, unknown, unknown, unknown, Alison Smithson with Soraya, Hannie van Eyck, Giancarlo De Carlo, unknown, Christiane Candillis, Brian Richards, Sandra Lousada, Oswald Mathias Ungers, unknown, unknown, Stefan Wewerka, Simon Smithson, unknown. In the foreground: Takis Candillis, Jerzy Soltan, Georges Candillis, Jaap Bakema (source: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Smithson, A (Alison) & P.D. (Peter Denham) Archiefdeel Team 10 / Archivalia (TTEN), inv.nr. TTEN26)

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The same location in 2000

... and in 2006

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the new buildings would enter into a symbiotic relationship. This of course meant a major investment in collective infrastructure that would never repay itself. However, the most important component of the plan was the concept pertaining to the public spaces inside and between the buildings, the kilometre-long, dozens of metres-wide Dalle: a concrete pedestrian area raised above the ground that had to connect all of the 100,000 residents of the New Town. This was the backbone of the plan or, in the words of Shadrach Woods, the ‘stem’ or ‘stalk’ of the tree-shaped structure that held Toulouse-Le Mirail together. Over the previous ten years, Woods in particular had been theorizing about this idea of a ‘stem’ as an architectural tool for solving the apparent tension between the desire for spontaneity and freedom and the demand for technology and large-scale solutions. Architects would have to build the ‘stems’ to which urban life would subsequently attach itself. This involved three-dimensional structures that could be added to the city to structure its growth while allowing room for individual and collective interpretation. Within Team 10, there were many varieties of this ‘stem’. Bakema’s ‘core wall buildings’ presupposed a similar dialectic between infrastructural and architectural contributions, and the large platforms of the Smithson’s Berlin Plan were added to the existing city like an extra layer for encounter and logistics. Ultimately, of course, all these ideas resulted from the search for a separation between pedestrian and vehicular traffic that was first solved by the earliest Garden Cities in England and America. In Toulouse-Le Mirail, however, this idea was implemented at an unprecedented scale. Candilis, Josic & Woods aimed to create a new type of urban space as a successor to the streets now colonized by cars. In that sense, it was a reinterpretation of the traditional French streets where the elderly could relax on benches and where there was room for children to play. The Dalle would return the urban space to the pedestrians, to spontaneous use and encounter, to the creative freedom of the city people. But the introduction of the Dalle also meant that the plan required an investment in infrastructure that did not fall within the usual fundable categories, and thus made the plan as a whole extremely expensive and complex. For the Dalle to function as a successor to the street, for example, it had to be flanked by commercial and public facilities, schools, libraries, shops and restaurants in the bases of the adjacent residential buildings. But since the residential buildings were built with money from finance companies dedicated exclusively to housing, these properties were not allowed to accommodate anything but dwellings. 880

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Milt Members of Team 10 walking through Tououse-Le Mirail, 1971 (source: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Smithson, A (Alison) & P.D. (Peter Denham) Archiefdeel Team 10 / Archivalia (TTEN), inv.nr. TTEN26)

This is why rather than with a continuous base of facilities, the Dalle was provided with clusters of freestanding pavilions, and why the Centre Lineaire became less linear in the first version. It is just one example of the almost heroic struggle Candilis had to put up as the project architect of Toulouse-Le Mirail to impose his concept on the French planning and construction institutions of the Trente Glorieuses â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the threedecades-long heyday of post-war France (1945-1975). Because the plan was a synthesis of urban design, landscape, infrastructure, housing, shops, facilities and public spaces in a single three-dimensional structure, it was extremely difficult to match the plan to the financial and bureaucratic sectors of the urban expansions of the 1960s. Precisely by capturing the spontaneity and organicity they sought in a balanced architectural concept, Candilis, Josic & Woods had created something extremely inflexible that was difficult to realize. Therefore, the fascination for the socialist city and the absence of private interests Candilis showed during Andrej Kosyginâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s visit of Toulouse-Le Mirail is in that sense understandable. In Western European, capitalist France, he had to navigate his plan and the unambiguously social concept that underpinned it through a political landscape in

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Photographic reportage of the opening of the crĂ¨che De la Reynerie by Mayor Pierre Baudis and Georges Candillis, April 23d, 1974 (source: Mairie de Toulouse, Archives municipales)

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which regional and national politics, public and private monies were combined in everchanging proportions and regular democratic elections cut long-term support for any plan in periods of at most a couple of years.

THE FIRST DECADE Despite all the difficulties the team faced during the first years of the realization of Toulouse-Le Mirail, the period between the winning of the competition in 1961 and the resignation of Mayor Bazerque in 1971 must be considered the projectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wonder Years. After all, the architects that struggled to keep the plan alive had its political initiator on their side during this period. At the same time, Le Mirail had the wind of public opinion about architecture and urban planning in the modernization of France in its sails. Construction began with the section located the furthest from the existing city, gradually closing in on Toulouse. Of the Bellefontaine, Reynerie and Le Mirail districts, the first was largely realized under Bazerque; large parts of Reynerie were achieved by his successor and Le Mirail was realized afterwards for the most part. The Candilis, Josic & Woods concept is recognizable in equal proportions. The completed Bellefontaine was a fairly complete representation of the original concept; Reynerie already suffered from major compromises, like a much smaller Dalle and some smaller residential buildings that, moreover, were not connected to the Dalle. In Le Mirail, only the constructed infrastructure and the university building are recognizable as belonging to the original master plan and a much smaller development consisting of single-family dwellings was realized within its urban structure. In other words, what we see looking from the south to the north is a building structure that mirrors a political shift from a heavily collective, intervening state to a political movement that is increasingly based on private interest and individual consumerism. During the twilight of the Trente Glorieuses, we can also see a substantial shift in urban planning preferences, from megastructures to the small-scale village-like structures of the 1970s. And, finally, we see the werdegang of the architects that won the competition that found it increasingly difficult to keep all facets of their synthetic project afloat on all scale levels. In 1971, the year of the mayoral elections, 5,900 dwellings had been developed and 55 per cent of the first tranche of the master plan completed. The Bellefontaine Quartier had been completed, the Reynerie district half completed and the outlines of Le Mirail established. In addition, however, it had become clear how much the plan was going to cost the municipality of Toulouse, how difficult it was to realize the satellite city according to plan and how many complaints and problems from the building sites

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and realized neighbourhoods were going to hit city hall. The execution of the plan was furthermore seriously delayed by the difficult negotiations between the architects and planners, and the finance companies and construction companies. The latter had great difficulties with the integrated character of the project, which meant that literally everything was connected to everything else, with unusual floor plans, huge investments in public space and communal facilities and architects who wanted to have strict architectural control of their projects. Since everything was new, everything had to be combated as well. Instead of a great mayoral masterpiece with which Bazerque could make an impression nationally and internationally, as during the visit of the Russian premier in 1966, Toulouse-Le Mirail was increasingly considered a debacle and as such, it became a pawn in the elections. The new democratic candidate, Pierre Baudis, played on local feelings of discontent with the plan and viewed it as political dynamite he could use against incumbent mayor Bazerque. This resulted in an electoral victory for Baudis and thus to an extremely challenging phase in the realization of Candilis, Josic & Woods’ master plan. From that moment on, the project Toulouse-Le Mirail was gradually terminated. First by realizing certain designs differently than they were originally described in the master plan, for example by building lower apartment blocks on Lac du Reynerie, by reducing the size of the Dalle and building single-family dwellings in Le Mirail, the section in which Candilis had planned slabs along the Dalle. Baudis, secondly, allowed the construction of a new housing estate adjacent to Le Mirail, Les Pradettes, with the distinct intention to build an ‘anti-Mirail’ that offered new residents suburban singlefamily dwellings rather than collective residential buildings.29 Thirdly, authorities decided not to realize the second tranche, which meant Toulouse-Le Mirail would never have more than three of the five Quartiers the architects had envisaged. Rather than a tree-like structure that branched out into the historical landscape around Toulouse, Le Mirail would never amount to more than a linear city, its heart a megastructure of concrete buildings. This city was furthermore located in a landscape that, rather than the culturally historical Arcadia that the architects had meant it to be, gradually turned into an area covered by banlieu pavillionaire: the suburban single-family dwellings for which the modernist architecture had been seeking radical alternatives, from the Grands Ensembles to Toulouse-Le Mirail, from the 1950s onward.

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29. Stéphane Gruet, Rémi Papillaut, p. 268 - 273

Public space in the first realized part of Tououse-Le Mirail, Bellefontaine, ca. 1968 (source: Fonds Candilis. SIAF/ Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine/ Archives d'architecture du XXe siècle)

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Milt Entrance to the primary school, Tououse- Le Mirail, 1969 (source: Fonds Candilis. SIAF/CitĂŠ de l'architecture et du patrimoine/Archives d'architecture du XXe siĂ¨cle)

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Announcement of the building of 1350 dwellings in Toulouse – Le Mirail, La Dépêche de Midi, April 8th 1966

The Toulouse-Le Mirail that was completed in the 1970s had made major concessions to the French construction industry and to the bureaucracy of financiers and changing politics. In a mere ten years the tide had turned not only politically, but in terms of the socioeconomic landscape and the corresponding spatial preferences as well. Rather than the ultra-modernity of the megastructure, it was single-family dwellings gathered in village-like suburbs and connected by car to large supermarkets and to the old city centre of Toulouse that represented the future French citizens desired. Candilis, Josic & Woods’ principled design approach, in which the bareness and abstraction of the concrete Dalle and the Corbusian slabs were supposed to stimulate the free citizens to design their own environment, was not a success. Rather than in the abstract emptiness of the Dalle, the citizens found their freedom in the emerging hypermarchés and in traditionally styled maisons individuels. A single decade after its conception, the hybrid city that Candilis, Josic & Woods left behind in the 1970s had already become a layered, fragmented city. Political and social changes had left their marks on the ‘stem’ that Candilis, Josic & Woods built. They had,

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of course, not been made according to the architects’ plans. The architects chiefly saw the defeats they had suffered against the conservative, reactionary, provincial forces of politics, commerce and bureaucracy. But the design was basically doomed to disappoint their expectations from the start. After all, it contained a fundamental paradox because it wanted to encourage spontaneous and free appropriation by society through a megastructure that was controlled down to the very last detail. The anthropologically inspired theories with which the office explained its idea of the ‘stem’ and the design of Toulouse-Le Mirail hardly addressed the role of institutions, existing organizations or political or economic structures. The book The Man in the Street: A Polemic on Urbanism by Shadrach Woods, which best explains the theme ‘stem’ and the urban theory of Candilis, Josic & Woods, centres on the architectural environment as it is provided by cities and villages and that forms the backdrop for the spontaneous, collective and individual behaviour of people.30 There is no room for an analysis of the institutions that mediate between people and their physical environment in the analysis of Team 10. But the completed Toulouse-Le Mirail of the 1970s shows how precisely those institutions left most traces on the original design.

EPILOGUE: TOULOUSE LE-MIRAIL AFTER CANDILIS, JOSIC & WOODS The second half of the 1970s, when the influence of Candilis, Josic & Woods on the project had come to an end, shows that the New Town had definitively lost the favour of both political and public opinion. This period was characterized by the inauguration of the new French president Giscard d’Estaing in 1974, who ended the ZUP policy. With the political foundation under large-scale expansion projects swept away, attention focused on the construction of single-family dwellings. At the same time, large-scale housing projects had also lost the favour of the French population, which developed a massive preference for the banlieue pavillionaire and the suburbanly built second generation of Villes Nouvelles as well.31 This was also the period in which the immigration from France’s former colonies in North Africa and the Caribbean began to grow significantly. The young, large families were increasingly housed in Le Mirail’s apartment buildings. The already problematic solidarity between residents of subsidized apartments and of those in the private sector,

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30. Shadrach Woods, The Man in the Street: A Polemic on Urbanism, London 1975 31. Untill the middle sixties new housing projects on the scale of an entire town, like Le Mirail, were built as densely packed ‘grands ensembles’. With the Villes Nouvelles planned and built from the sixties and seventies onwards, new housing projects were not less centrally planned, but built in a less dense manner with much more individual homes.

Postcards of Toulouse – Le Mirail, 1970 (source: Mairie de Toulouse, Archives municipales)

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Bellefontaine, 2006 892

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Milt Graffiti advertising current drug prices (source: https://france3regions.francetvinfo.fr/ occitanie/haute-garonne/ toulouse/quand-dealersaffichent-leurs-tarifsaux-pieds-immeubletoulouse-1399551.html)

‘Thank You Candilis’ (source: S. Gruet, R. Papillault Le Mirail, Mèmoire d’une ville, Éditions Poïésis – AEREA, Toulouse)

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which were brought together in the massive buildings, was subjected to even greater pressure. The tensions between immigrant families and the French residents were directly reflected in precisely those architectural elements that were matters of principle to Candilis, Josic & Woods. First, more and more of the traditional French shops and cafés abandoned the pavilions on the Dalle because their French clientele moved away and was replaced by an entirely different population with very different preferences. So the Dalle became empty. But the places in which the tension was most clearly visible were the rues intérieurs that connected the apartment buildings to one another on the upper floors and that made it possible to walk from Reynerie to Bellefontaine across the seventh floor without ever being on ground level. Each and every one of these pedestrian areas located dozens of metres above the ground was closed off by walls and fences, actually reducing the hundreds of metres-long residential buildings that formed a vertical city together to apartment buildings that were organized around their stairwells and elevator shafts. The division of Candilis, Josic & Woods’ organic, interwoven, networked city in spatial segments ran parallel with the policy of clustering the new immigrant groups together to minimalize their impact on the rest of society. The idea of an integrated collective, the layered and diverse social structure of which was reflected by the architectural fabric, gradually disappeared.

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“Cars are burning, tension is mounting again in the projects”, La Dépêche du Midi, November 29th, 1999

From the 1970s, Toulouse-Le Mirail developed into a ghetto, like many other Grands Ensembles from the Trente Glorieuses: having a postal code there reduced one’s job opportunities, people from other districts shunned it, its crime rates were the highest, those who could afford it moved away as quickly as possible.

“A Social Revolt”, Tout Toulouse, January 31st, 2001

Suggestions to demolish large parts of Candilis, Josic & Woods’ project in order to solve its social problems were made as early as the 1980s. The Dalle and more specifically the underground parking garages were increasingly becoming a problem. After all, the garages were coproprieté of the apartment residents rather than public space and could boast neither univocal management nor safety measures. They were counted among the most dangerous places in the district. Therefore in the late 1980s, authorities decided to partly demolish the Dalle and reintroduce ‘normal’ shops at ground level. Along with the connection to the new metro to Toulouse proper, Toulouse-Le Mirail was thus once again the site of large-scale construction projects, this time to demolish and replace urban structures barely a decade old. 896

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Milt Reconstruction of Cultural Centre Alban Minville, Toulouse – Le Mirail, 2006

As from 1996, Toulouse-Le Mirail became the object of a new wave of centralist urban policy, this time aimed at solving the problems that had emerged in the former ZUP’s: the Politiques de La Ville. An important component of this policy was the establishment of Zones Urbaines Sensibles (sensitive urban areas), which attracted large amounts of money and national policy. Many of these ZUSs were former ZUPs. An important component of the Politique de la Ville was the demolition of large-scale urban planning structures and their replacement with ‘normal’ streets and squares and the substitution of collective buildings by smaller-scale buildings. This policy was intended to lure back the middle classes from their banlieus pavillionaires and also to make these areas lucrative and attractive for private investment again.

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Areas like Toulouse-Le Mirail suddenly turned from national projects for the modernization of France into big problems that became the subject of new, major national policies to solve them. Actually, Toulouse-Le Mirail has never had the opportunity to develop at its own pace; it has continuously been the subject of largescale, project-based national policy. The hypothesis that it could develop some kind of equilibrium on its own terms has never been tested.

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The areas that were the subjects of the large-scale demolition and new construction projects of the Politique de la Villes, however, were increasingly cut off from French society in general. In the case of Le Mirail, the psychological distance to Toulouse in particular grew ever bigger. Toulouse-Le Mirail was increasingly associated with burning cars, repressive police conduct and riots occurring every few years. All-time lows were the years 1998 and 1999 and of course 2005, when riots broke out across France in the Grands Ensembles on the edges of French cities. The 1998 riots followed the pattern typical of riots in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, familiar from the United States, England and the rest of Western Europe. A police intervention on 13 December led to the death of a North African boy from Reynerie named Habib Mohamed. This occasioned massive protests that resulted in fights with police, in vandalism and in looting. This is what happened in 1998 in Toulouse, and this is how it began in the suburbs of Paris in 2005. In the latter case, the death of two boys in the Grands Ensembles of Clichy Sous Bois during a police chase triggered the riots. This time, they were not confined to the city itself: helped by the media and the Internet, they spread across France up to and including Toulouse. The association of modernist architecture with ghettos and riots was adopted as an almost universal truth. Politicians and advertisers found a direct link between the large scale and the alienating aesthetic of concrete behemoths and the behaviours of their populations. The 2005 riots were even called ‘the legacy of Le Corbusier’. They were used as a retroactive argument for a process that had been in progress for a decade already: the massive demolition of the Grands Ensembles.32 In the Netherlands, too, where the restructuring of post-war residential neighbourhoods was at its peak, housing associations and policymakers used the riots in Paris and the association of modernist architecture with social problems as an argument for the policy that they were already executing.33 The question remains, however, how the relationship between the architecture of Toulouse-Le Mirail and the social behaviour of its residents really works. Looking at the four decades that separate the design of Le Mirail from the disastrous, apocalyptic footage of the area in 1998 and 2005, we must conclude that this New Town never had the opportunity to develop in a ‘normal’ way. It has always been the subject of largescale, national, experimental policies. After being a ZUP for 15 years, and therefore the

32. Wouter Vanstiphout, De Architect heeft het gedaan!, in: Justitiële Verkenningen, volume 36, editie 5, 2010/8/1, p. 13 e.v. 33. Wouter Vanstiphout, idem

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Stills from video to Kamikaz ‘BLC’, filmed in Toulouse – Le Mirail, 2019 (source: Kamikaz – BLC, https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tTX-APtkAtU)

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stage of dozens of power shovels, cranes, architectural field trips and national grants meant to create a new world, it became a ZUS almost overnight. Once again there were cranes, power shovels, bulldozers, architects, ministers and television crews, this time to noisily correct the mistakes made in the past. The first wave of political and architectural ambition created a positive mirage of a spontaneous, free, modern society of chance encounters and individual freedoms, with the residents as extras in an architectural dream. During the second wave of policy, in contrast, the people where the ones who were the problem and the architecture was seen as the solution. Too many residents were criminals, too few of them had jobs, too many were immigrants, too few were ‘French’, too many were unemployed, too few were students and so on. The architecture was used as a means to make an intervention in the demographic structure of the city. Is it possible that it was not the architectural paradigm of Le Corbusier and his heirs that led to so much aggression in Toulouse-Le Mirail, but that the real reason for the vulnerability and highly flammable nature of the area lies in the fact that for 40 years, the city was continuously designed and conceived, built up and demolished from the outside, hardly leaving its residents the opportunity to actually appropriate the city? If we take another look at the current Toulouse-Le Mirail now that we are familiar with Candilis, Josic & Woods’ fascination with layers, change, spontaneous interpretation and appropriation, we can imagine that this city could develop into a credible, hybrid part of Toulouse, with a strong character of its own; that after the erratic beginning, even more layers could emerge in the coming decades; that it could become a district whose original principles are less important than the traces left behind by generations of residents and entrepreneurs; that it could become a place that is not so much determined by the machinations of politics and the ambitions of architects, but rather by the lives that are lived here. This would ultimately be a more convincing materialization of the Team 10 ideology of a responsive, organic urban design and architecture of freedom and humanism than the architectural one created by the architects themselves. Perhaps the only chance Toulouse-Le Mirail has of a future as a city that Shadrach Woods would include in his manifesto The Man in the Street lies in leaving it alone architecturally for a half-century or so. ■ 900

Toulouse â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Le Mirail, 2006

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Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

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Public housing blocks in 10th of Ramadan (Photo: Rachel Keeton, 2016)

10TH OF RAMADAN, EGYPT

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Getting to the New Town of 10th of Ramadan, located in the vast desert outside of Cairo—Egypt’s capital and the largest city in Africa and the Arab world—is an unusual experience. In some ways, it is reminiscent of driving to Palm Springs in California: after having left the chaotic megacity of Cairo, there is only desert on either side of the road for miles, occasionally alternated by small-scale structures and advertising billboards. Suddenly, a city springs up from the sand. Upon entering the city, one is led down a boulevard adorned with greenery in stark contrast to the surrounding desert, like the entrance to a golf club or tacky Mediterranean holiday resort. Finally, one passes a number of concrete housing blocks and arrives at the city centre: here, the likeness with Palm Springs ends. The infrastructure seems overscaled and at the same time strangely neglected, whereas the centre reveals a souk of booths, cafés and signs with a frenetic, cacophonic life, resembling a ‘little Cairo.’

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Desert cities have something very peculiar to them. They are built modern utopias daring the conquest of a space and climate where most life is impossible, and the endless expanse of the landscape around them stands as a metaphor for unlimited possibilities. But whereas the luxury Western-style leisure resort of Palm Springs is full of tourists living the American dream on their holidays, 10th of Ramadan has a sadness to it, seeming more like a built necessity. One is overcome with the feeling that no one comes here just for pleasure. However, the original 10th of Ramadan New Town is not some relic stuck in the modernism of the postwar era. Since its founding in 1977, 10th of Ramadan has evolved into a living local heterotopia, developing its own folklore and charm. Nowadays the various areas of the city each contain a more differentiated scenery than once planned for: large new private villas, smaller self-built houses, and apartment buildings are emerging amongst the palimpsest of built and half-built projects in the older modernist residential areas. These areas have since undergone urban stratification through a manifold of initiatives. Shops and services have opened all over on the ground floors of building blocks, windows have been altered and diversified, balconies rebuilt and facades painted. Meanwhile, public spaces, originally envisioned to shape the backdrop for collective living, are dilapidating. 913 10th of Ramadan City today (Photo: Marie Bruun Yde, 2009)

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Built from scratch and originally dominated by prefabricated housing units laid out in orderly squares, 10th of Ramadan was a product of out-and-out modernist architectural intentions. But since its founding, as with every other planned city in the world, this idealistic plan has had to struggle with fulfilling the demands of its residents in order to realise itself as a living city. National economic scarcity and neoliberal development prevented the implementation of central parts of the master plan for 10th of Ramadan: suffering from segregation, lack of social and cultural facilities, and poor transportation links to the surrounding region, the imagined city never actually came to be—only some parts of the puzzle were laid out. The communal New Town concept seems to have fallen through in the Egyptian context, but nevertheless the city has been endowed with a rich life and activities. After the planning and incomplete execution of the city, society has moved into it and the envisioned utopia has been compromised. Still, what has emerged stands as a continuation and reinvention of the original urban planning system.

EGYPT AND THE WEST During the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was forced to announce his withdrawal after 61 years of ‘public service,’ as he himself put it, stretching back to his commission as a pilot officer in the Egyptian Air Force in 1950. Educated in the Soviet Union and later becoming a friend of the American military due to geopolitical interests, Mubarak certainly incarnated an image of the ever-changing political development of the Egyptian state. Reflecting the opportunism of state affairs, urban history in Egypt is marked by a similar oscillation. Initiated in 1977 to reduce Cairo’s expanding population and increasing demand for industry, as well as to grow the economy, the Egyptian New Town programme was the largest modernist urban scheme within the African continent. Since most New Town policies in developing nations had been based on the creation of a single big city, this programme was unique in miming and multiplying the European urban satellite system. However, contrary to most satellite cities in England, France, Sweden, or the Netherlands, which mostly used existing villages

Nasser and Nikita Khrushchev press the button to begin demolition of barriers on the Nile as construction begins on the Aswan Dam in 1964 (Al-Ahram)

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as their starting point, Egyptian New Towns would be created on virgin sites. The nightmarish conditions of the overcrowded capital (and the Nile Valley as a whole) made it popular in Egypt to look to the desert for New Town planning. According to developers and the government, this was the only solution to the housing problem. As the pioneer city of this program, 10th of Ramadan brilliantly illustrated the Egyptian situation, politically trapped in an apparent dichotomy between East and West as well as between state and people. The story of 10th of Ramadan is one of conflicting ideologies as well as of the conflicting power of top-down and bottom-up forces. Designed by Cold War-neutral Swedes and erected in the bare sand desert, in the essentially indifferent North African context, 10th of Ramadan is today hybridised through inhabitation and new activities, and stands as an example of a city where the collision of urban internationalism and locality is explicitly and visibly expressed. Processes of change during the post-planning phase in 10th of Ramadan tell the story of how the master planned city distinctively clashed with the more spontaneous elements of urban life, embodying some answers to the question of how to inhabit modernist spaces today. Based on urban planning ideals developed in Europe and the Soviet Union and carried out under the direction of Swedish architects and planners in conjunction with their Egyptian counterparts, 10th of Ramadan was part of a larger urban scheme inspired by the 1960s regional plan for Paris. Aiming to urbanise desert land for millions of people, the Egyptian New Town policies were megalomaniac in scale and goals. Critics have compared the proportions of this urban development project to those of the pyramids. â&#x20AC;&#x153;[M]oving towards the future with...import of advanced technology from the developed nationsâ&#x20AC;? was the governmental hypothesis.1 By remodelling the built environment, planning authorities also aimed to change the lives of ordinary citizens, echoing the desire for renewal in Egyptian society. This wish was inspired by the Western model of modernisation, not so much in terms of Western values but in terms of business. Egypt adopted a neoliberal Zeitgeist in opening its economy for investment and implementing free market reforms. At the core of this modernisation project was the transformation of a traditionally agricultural society into an urbanised, industrialised, service-oriented economy. Descriptions of the Egyptian capital are loaded with quantitative superlatives. With a population having grown from 5.5 to over 20 million in less than 50 years, Greater Cairo has become a mega-city. Despite its history of drastic population increase and urbanisation, however, the city is still made up of traditional, socially 915

1.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Arab Republic of Egypt, Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction, Programme of Reconstruction and Development, Cairo 1977.

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vital neighbourhoods. In Egypt as a whole, between the years 1986 and 1996, 45 per cent of new housing units constructed were private and informal, while 28 per cent were state-built and 27 per cent private and formal.2 Iris Lenz, head of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations in Stuttgart, Germany, describes Cairo as “a conglomerate of cities that emerged one after another, on top of and next to each other, thrust into each other, laid out, built and extended by various rulers, dynasties, occupying cultures and powers.”3 Settlement in Egypt is extremely concentrated: 96 per cent of Egypt consists of desert, and 95 per cent of the population lives in the Nile Valley, which makes up the remaining 4 per cent of the country’s area. Dealing with such over-congestion, authorities were seduced into delusions of grandeur. Egypt’s New Town policies were influenced especially by British and French policy models and drew heavily upon Soviet large-scale planning models which had been studied by Egyptian academics during the period of close Egyptian-Soviet relations, from 1955 to 1972. Experts from Sweden,

2. UN-Habitat, Cairo: A City in Transition (Nairobi: UN-Habitat, 2011). 3. Iris Lenz, “Urban Reviews,” in Cairo: Building and Planning for Tomorrow (Stuttgart, ifa-Galerie Stuttgart, 2006), 118.

Nasser observing the construction of the Aswan Dam, 1963 (uncredited / Bibliotheca Alexandrina)

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France, Germany, the US and the Netherlands took part in drawing up the New Towns around Cairo. These New Towns were part of an extensive industrialisation programme and conceived as components of a long-term policy of national development. They were designed to match the international modernist New Town model, with welldistinguished neighbourhoods and functional separation. In the postwar decades, North Africa became a field of experimentation and investigation for Western architects, and the region was perceived as an urban laboratory. In Egypt, many transnational joint teams were formed, leading to plans for Cairo which were far beyond Egyptian standards of the time. Today an even greater number of people in the Arab world reside in buildings that have been influenced by modern Western architecture. The modernisation and Westernisation brought about by the upper and intellectual classes in Arab countries—and regarded by them as a privilege—has been described as an inescapable fate to the masses.4 Yet the entanglement of modernism in Egypt must be understood in conjunction with the country’s uneven relationship to urbanism due to shifting political agendas. The new desert settlements and the greater Cairo master plans were indicative of spatial practices enmeshed within the production of a social welfare agenda in the first postwar decades, which would be replaced by an increasingly neoliberal agenda from the 1970s onward.5

POLITICAL TRANSITION Modernity has influenced Cairo since the 19th century, and with the exception of religious ideas, many elements of Egyptian life have undergone dramatic changes since then. During the Khedive Muhammad Ali dynasty from the early 19th until the mid20th century, Cairo grew more Europeanised and master planning was introduced.6 From 1882 until independence in 1953, Egypt was a de facto British colony, and the cultural hegemony of the colonial power included control of town planning, settlement policy, residential building and everyday life. In 1867, Khedive Ismail Pasha visited Baron Haussmann’s new Paris and was inspired to remould Cairo as a European capital replete with boulevards and villas. Soon one of the most comprehensive 19th century transformations of a historic Islamic city along western lines took shape. French-style

4. Mateo Kries, “Von Hassan Fathy bis Downtown Dubai – Arabische Wohnkulturen und die Moderne,” in Leben unter dem Halbmond: Die Wohnkulturen der arabischen Welt, ed. Alexander von Vegesack et al. (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2003), 264.

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5. Cf. Omnia El Shakry, “Cairo as Capital of Socialist Revolution?” in Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, eds. Diane Singerman & Paul Amar, (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006). 6. Khedive Muhammad Ali governed Ottoman Egypt from 1805-1848, ending several hundred years of Mamluk rule. His dynasty remained formally in power until the Nasser Revolution in 1952.

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Heliopolis, now merged with Cairo as one of its districts, is one of the most affluent areas in the city today (Magdy Tanious / Flickr)

houses and avenues designed by European experts were superimposed onto the existing historic fabric, and a Belle Epoque Paris bloomed along the Nile. In the beginning of the 20th century the first Egyptian Garden City, Heliopolis—the city of the sun—was built by the Belgian Baron Edouard Empain. Empain stripped away the socialist, cooperative agenda of the planned city, thereby breaking with Ebenezer Howard’s sociopolitical intentions, but maintained the formal planning elements.7 The emerging local bourgeoisie chose to live in the new environments, while the population accumulating in the old city was stigmatised with backwardness and lower social status. Heliopolis was a typical colonial project, not intended as a prototype for building further garden cities, but rather as an exception. Heliopolis was part of a broader development of profit-oriented luxury urban expansion in the wake of Cairo’s growth during the later colonial period. When a group of military Free Officers overthrew the British-backed monarchy in 1952, a revolutionary change in the political history of Egypt set in. President Gamal Nasser came to power in 1954 and began a process of socialist reforms throughout the country. Where Egypt had previously never had a joint social housing policy, an urban policy emerged which concentrated on large-scale projects, and the state became involved in providing welfare services. The heavy influx of rural migrants and rapid

7. Khaled Adham, “Cairo’s Urban Déjà Vu: Globalization and Urban Fantasies,” in Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World, ed. Yasser Elsheshtawy, (London: Routledge, 2004).

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growth as a result of high birth rates brought Cairo into catastrophically decaying urban hygienic conditions in the postwar years, and shantytowns spread on the periphery of the city. The economic and strategic tool chosen by the Nasser regime to spare arable land was a poly-nuclear decentralisation approach. State intervention was introduced in urban development, and in 1956 the first master plan for Cairo—put forth by several Egyptians trained in the West, mainly in Great Britain—recommended the creation of outlying sub-centres. Rather than a detailed scheme, the master plan was an overall regional plan for the Cairo metropolitan area addressing broader issues such as the placement of industry, housing, infrastructure, and agriculture. This plan can be seen as a result of previous planning steps going back to the 1940s such as the Egyptian Delta master plan of 1940 or the plan for Awqaf City in Giza, Cairo, from 1944. One of the most influential architects involved in town planning and public planning authorities was Mahmoud Riad (1905-1979), who was trained in Liverpool, and interned on the site of the Empire State Building in New York.8 The 1956 master plan recommended the implementation of six satellite industrial cities within a 30 km radius around Cairo. Nasser was eager to create new housing, infrastructure, and industries and to offer better living conditions to the middle class, which was the basis of his government. Although social housing programs were formulated to benefit the working class, in reality rents proved to be too expensive for the lower classes, and these programs turned out to be mainly beneficial for the middle class. The bipolar nature of the Cold War conflict became clear in Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis and war in 1956. To avoid affronting the superpowers, Nasser became active in the Non-Aligned Movement of positive neutralism, which also counted among its members Yugoslavia, Sweden, India, and others. This allowed the Egyptian state to receive funding from the United States as well as the Soviet Union at roughly equal measures, without placing Egypt in either camp.9 However, the former colony remained dependent upon global powers. Nasser lobbied for funds for his development programme around the world, mainly through the United Nations, the World Bank and the Western democratic nations, but soon sought assistance from the communist nations as well.

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8. Mahmoud Riad was one of the most prominent names in a group of Egyptian architects trained at the University of Liverpool School of Architecture between the First and the Second World War, others being Muhammad Refa’at, Aly Labib Gabr, Mustafa Ruschdy, Mahmud Zaki al-Tauil, Muhammad Scherif Noman, Mahmud Al-Hakim, Amr Gharbou, Fathy Hassan, Aly Hassanein, Moris Aziz Doos, Shaker Girgis, Tawfik Ahmad Abd al-Gawad, Abd al-Fattah, al-Tabrizi, Abd Al-Magid Saleh, Hassan Tawfik, Aly Al-Harriry. Al Imara #5-6, Kairo 1942, quoted in Ihab Morgan, “Entwicklung des modernen Stadtzentrums von Kairo im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert” (PhD thesis, ETH Zürich, 1999). 9. Anne Alexander, Nasser (London: Haus Publishing, 2005), 79.

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In 1955 Nasser defied the Western embargo on arms to Arab nations in a state of war with Israel by contracting with Czechoslovakia for delivery of some $200 million in advanced Soviet weaponry and aircraft. By doing so Nasser jeopardised Western funding of the High Aswan Dam.10 To punish this action, the US withdrew their offer to build the Aswan Dam in 1956, drawing Nasser and Egypt into closer relations with the Soviet Union. Now the political conflict exploded: in response to this provocative demonstration of American power Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. This resulted in a war, with Israel joining forces with the former imperial masters France and Great Britain, who understood Egypt’s bold action as an act of political defiance. Nasser’s stance of independence and anti-imperialism was a radical gesture confronting the world powers. His actions made him a hero in popular opinion, not only in Egypt but across the Arab world. However, he was lucky that the US did not sympathise with the British-French-Israeli military action that brought Egypt close to an overall military defeat. The attacking countries were forced to withdraw by the superpowers once the conflict threatened to draw the world into nuclear war. Still, Nasser succeeded in appearing as “an expression of Arab pride, a leader who had humbled the old imperial powers and maintained his independence of the superpowers.”11 Even though Nasser had become closer to the Soviet Union, in the end he succeeded in also sustaining a relationship to the US and receiving American aid. Still, the Egyptian-Soviet alliance was accompanied by a shift towards socialist ideology. While accepting aid from the USSR, Egypt received military and technical advisors from the Soviet Union who took part in developing the economy, politics and architecture, with projects such as the Helwan steel plant. After achieving sovereignty, socialist anti-imperialist models inspired and determined development in many new Arab nation states such as Ba’athist Syria and Iraq, influencing concepts of modernisation and state planning especially in urban centres. Nasser proffered the idea of an Arab socialism in an attempt to reconcile the paternalism and politics of the state with Islamic teaching.12 The term “Arab socialism” was coined initially by the Syrian philosopher Michel Aflaq, one of the founders of the Ba’ath party, in order to differentiate the hybrid socialist and Arab nationalist movement from the international socialist movement. The idea was elaborated in Nasser’s national charter from 1962 and included a programme of widespread nationalisation of private assets that were transferred into the public sector. Generally, Arab socialism as defined by Nasser was an

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10. John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 11. Alexander, Nasser, 96. 12. Hasan-Uddin Khan, “The Impact of Modern Architecture on the Islamic World,“ in Back from Utopia, eds. Hilde Heynen and Hubert-Jan Henket (Rotterdam: nai010, 2002), 182.

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ideology loosely based on Western socialist ideas adapted to the postcolonial situation in the emerging Arab nation states. The nationalist and anti-imperialist elements were stronger than the implied social agenda. However, Nasser did not fully turn to communism, and in fact fought against communists in Egypt. He was rather pragmatic, and his attitude to the Soviet Union remained complex and ambivalent. His main focus was on economic development, Arab unity and the strengthening of the Non-Aligned Movement.13 From 1960 on, frustration over low investment in the economy by the old Egyptian elite led to a change of strategy. The Nasser administration started to nationalise first foreign, then large domestic companies, followed by small businesses until almost the entire economy was state-controlled. Subsequently, large-scale agricultural cooperatives were established to boost economic activity. This turn toward a state-planned economy was met with great scepticism by the US, which terminated its funding of Egypt by the mid-1960s.

Nasser meeting with Syrian leaders Salah al-Din al-Bitar, Lu’ay al-Atassi, and Michel Aflaq during tripartite unity talks between Egypt, Iraq and Syria in 1963 (uncredited / Bibliotheca Alexandrina)

In the 1960s, gargantuan social housing projects were erected on the outskirts of Cairo for the middle class. These five- to six-storey prefabricated walk-up flats, regarded as working-class housing, were similar to Soviet-bloc mass housing projects, and served as political symbols of Nasser’s modernisation and nation-building efforts without any reference to local building codes or the existing context. This Khrushchev-style vision of Cairo stretched all the way to the suburbs, constituting a ring surrounding the city. The debut of the prefabrication industry was the result of a barter agreement: in return for supplying the Soviet Union with cotton and textile products, Egypt bought prefabricated building components from Russian and Eastern European factories.14

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13. Amin Huweidy, Minister of War, as quoted in Raymond William Baker, Sadat and After: Struggles for Egypt’s Political Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 80. 14. Nezar AlSayyad, Cairo: Histories of a City (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 248.

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Nasr City, one of Nasser’s many new housing estates (source unknown)

By the end of the 1960s, the optimism of the initial revolutionary years had faded. Having lost American support and suffering defeat in the war against Israel in 1967, Nasser became more critical regarding his own socialist course, which seemed to be malfunctioning. However, socialist-inspired Nasserite cities continued to be erected until 1974, when Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt from 1970 to 1981, instituted economic liberalisation. Sadat’s policy of Infitah, or ‘opening the door’ to private investment, brought an end to the social housing policy. Whereas Nasser rather isolated Egypt from the Western world, Sadat wanted to reconnect Egypt with the global economy.15 His pro-American stance and reconciliation efforts with Israel, while creating distance from the Soviet Union, aimed at re-integrating Egypt into the Western world economically and politically. As the historian Raymond W. Baker has stated, this made Sadat popular with his Western allies: “Anwar Sadat was the one Arab leader whom Americans thought they knew and understood. In American eyes, Sadat was the man who repudiated socialism and expelled the Soviets from Egypt; he made peace with Israel, liberalised the Egyptian policy, and returned Egypt to the Western fold.”16 As a consequence it was not surprising that Egypt was the second largest recipient of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) in the world during the Sadat years.17 The new laissez faire capitalism initiated by the Sadat administration resulted in two distinct forms of built environments, one luxurious and one humble, with the

15. See e.g. Dona J. Stewart “Cities in the Desert: the Egyptian New Towns Program,” in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86 (1996): 3. 16. Baker, Sadat and After, 1. 17. Bahgat Korany and Ali E. Hillal Dessouki (eds.), The Foreign Policies of Arab States: The Challenge of Globalization (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008), 189.

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latter often deteriorating to become quasi-slums.18 The role of the public sector was diminished and limited to the provision of low- and medium-cost units, mainly in the New Towns. Sadat reopened the economy to global investment, especially attracting money from the oil-exporting Arab states. This resulted in a building boom and considerable economic growth at the cost of producing a more classdivided and segregated society. Public services, which had been at the core of Nasser’s modernisation of Egypt, were neglected by Sadat: “the much-maligned public sector, the Nasserists pointed out, still dominated the economy in the eighties; throughout Egypt, the public schools built in the heyday of Nasserism stood as neglected and dilapidated reproaches to an indifferent government; similarly, understaffed or empty medical clinics in the countryside reminded the rural poor of the abandoned promise of a better life.”19 Having abandoned many of the political and economic tenets of Nasserism, and in large part due to his efforts to broker peace with Israel, Sadat was assassinated by a faction of the Egyptian military in 1981. Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s vice president, was sworn in as President a week later, taking on a role he would hold for three decades. His regime oversaw the development of the second and third generation New Towns, including major centers such as New Cairo, Sheikh Zayed City, Obour, and El Shorouk. Under Mubarak, New Town development grew increasingly privatised, with NUCA selling off large tracts of land to private developers below market rate. This was part of a larger trend toward liberalisation throughout his reign, as he notably reduced government expenditures by cutting essential social services such as education, healthcare and public transport in addition to housing. Mubarak also removed rent controls on agricultural land and on housing, a policy which had previously protected the middle class.20 Meanwhile, between the beginning of his rule in 1981 and his ouster in 2011, informal settlements in Cairo, known as ashwai’yat, increased dramatically. These areas, mostly self-built and nearly all built illegally, now house some 70% per cent of Cairo’s population.21 As Egypt’s population skyrocketed between 1996 and 2006, 78 per cent of this growth was absorbed into the ashwai’yat, while formal Cairo absorbed less than 7 per cent. New Towns, meanwhile, accounted for only 15 per cent of this growth. In the years after the 2011 revolution in particular, it was reported that informal building increased two- to threefold compared to pre-2011 rates.22

18. Mohamed Abdel-Karim Salheen, “Cairo in the 20th Century,” in Cairo: Building and Planning for Tomorrow (Stuttgart, ifa-Galerie Stuttgart, 2006), 124. 19. Ibid, 80. 20. Dina Shehata, “Sixty Years of Egyptian Politics: What Has Changed?” The Cairo Review, Spring 2018, https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/sixty-years-of-egyptian-politics-what-has-changed/.

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21. Emanuele Midolo, “Inside Egypt’s new capital,” Property Week, 8 March, 2019, https://www.propertyweek.com/insight/inside-egypts-new-capital/5101721.article. 22. David Sims, “The Arab Housing Paradox,” The Cairo Review, Fall 2013, https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/the-arab-housing-paradox/.

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The Egyptian Revolution of 2011, a key event of the broader Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, would see Mubarak overthrown and the unprecedented, if brief, rule of Egypt’s first democratically-elected president, Mohamed Morsi. An assessment of Egypt’s housing policy since the revolution, including the fate of the New Town programme and the government’s approach to it, requires an understanding of the increasing militarization of the public sector since then. This trend, much remarked on since the coup d’etat of 2013 which led to the administration of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has deep roots in the structure of the Egyptian state dating back to the modern nation’s founding.

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THE MILITARY IN EGYPTIAN POLITICAL HISTORY In many ways, the political history of Egypt can be framed primarily through the role of the military in government, including any and all state efforts in housing and urbanization. Zeinab Abul-Magd, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at Oberlin College, has written extensively on the military-industrial complex in Egypt, and especially its long-lasting success in both political revolutions and profitable business endeavours in the private and public sector. Since the earliest Egyptian revolutions, Abdul-Magd argues—as far back as the Urabi revolt of 1879-82 against British and French forces—the military has promoted the so-called ‘good coup’ narrative, the national myth of itself as the saviour of the people in times of crisis. Under this guise, the military has nearly monopolized large parts of the Egyptian economy, chief among them the building and infrastructure sectors. With the sole exception of Mohamed Morsi, all of Egypt’s heads of state have come from the military establishment. Nationalisation efforts dating back to the Nasser era, and all the struggles against privatisation that have occurred sporadically since, should be understood as primarily military efforts. The military, organised under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) since 1954, has enjoyed a great degree of economic and political power since the very beginning of the modern Egyptian state. Socialist in name, the Nasser administration did indeed nationalise the country’s economic assets and built massive public enterprises. However, as Abul-Magd has noted, “[a]rmy officers installed themselves as the managers of these state-owned enterprises—a task for which they were largely unqualified. The military issued a new socialist constitution that stated that ‘the people control all means of production,’ and army officers were the self-appointed deputies of the people in controlling these

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The ashwai’yat of Cairo house nearly three-quarters of the city’s population Nowhereman1977 / Wikimedia)

A soldier stands guard at Cairo’s Supreme Court as the government aimed to suppress protestors during the 2013 coup d’etat (Voice of America)

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means.”23 While the military’s influence would wax and wane over the next half century, it never fully lost this grip over the economy. The Sadat regime, on the other hand, saw decreased military influence. Sadat sought to consolidate his power against the lingering influence of the military, which had deeply penetrated the state and the economy under Nasser. His efforts included reversing 1960s policies in order to politically marginalize the military, increasing the number of civilian technocrats in the cabinet and in various bureaucratic roles, and liberalising the economy (the Infitah policy), so that state enterprises—that is to say, military enterprises—had to share influence with a rising capitalist class. The National Service Products Organisation (NSPO), established under the auspices of the Ministry of Defence after the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, remains one of the lingering militaryindustrial entities of the Sadat years. A state corporation that produces ‘military and civilian products,’ the NSPO competes with private enterprise and to this day enjoys state subsidies and tax relief, with no accountability to any government body. Joint projects between the NSPO and NUCA have flourished under the Sisi regime in particular, including the new administrative capital, which began construction in 2015. Mubarak facilitated the return of military dominance in three distinct phases. During the 1980s, the military remained relatively dormant, with economic activities limited to the production of goods and participation in infrastructure projects by the NSPO. By the 1990s, Mubarak’s programme of economic liberalisation was in full swing, and the military was allowed to open new companies and factories which had public sector status but would compete with private enterprises. The last decade of Mubarak’s rule, however, had perhaps the most lasting effects on the militarization of public life in Egypt today. Throughout the 2000s, Mubarak greatly increased appointment of (mostly retired) military officials to bureaucratic and public sector posts across the state structure. This phase saw retired army generals take up administrative posts in key strategic posts for the Egyptian economy, as Abul-Magd writes: “While the former army officers took positions in every part of the country, they preferred certain locations where influence and wealth were concentrated. For example, eighteen of the twenty-seven provincial governors are retired army generals. Typically they run administrations in key places such as the tourist regions of Upper Egypt, all the Suez Canal provinces, the two Sinai provinces, the major Nile Delta areas, and Alexandria. And if they don’t make governor, then they serve as governors’ chiefs-of-staff, or as directors of small towns, or heads of both the wealthy and the poor but highly 23. Zeinab Abul-Magd, “Understanding SCAF,” The Cairo Review, Summer 2012, https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/understanding-scaf/.

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populated districts in Cairo.”24 This assessment, from 2012, still holds largely true as of this writing. In 2019, as Sisi serves his second term, former military personnel continue to hold leadership positions across the Egyptian state, including the Minister of Defence, the Minister of the Interior and 19 of 27 provincial governors. During the transitional period in 2011-12, after the revolution, the SCAF ran the country and revived the ‘good coup’ myth, promoting itself as the protector of the Egyptian nation. The government halted most building and infrastructure projects during this period. Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president, made an uneasy pact with the SCAF. He traded a hands-off approach to the military’s economic empire for political and commercial gains for his party, the Muslim Brotherhood, which had suffered repression throughout the Mubarak era (and has historically served as a scapegoat for Egyptian political machinations). Morsi struggled to gain full constitutional power during his tumultuous reign, and had little domestic policy to speak of. Ultimately he was ousted by the SCAF under the guise of popular will in a 2013 coup d’etat: though demonstrations against Morsi had occurred sporadically throughout his regime, supported in particular by the upper and middle classes, significant evidence later showed that the military was behind the supposedly grassroots movement that eventually prompted Morsi’s ouster and the rise of Sisi. There are a number of ways to interpret Sisi’s housing policy, including his approach to the New Towns. First and foremost, it is important to understand that from the beginning, his approach to housing has always been just one piece of a much larger national programme of building and infrastructure, including megaprojects such as the expansion of the Suez canal as well as the proposal and rapid development of a new administrative capital for Egypt. The goal of such projects are threefold: to support his claims that he would boost the Egyptian economy and provide jobs, to keep elements of the old regime happy (namely the military, who continue to receive the lion’s share of contracts for said projects), and to attract foreign investment. While this tripartite strategy has been employed to varying degrees by the administrations before him, Sisi’s policies are unique in their sweeping scale and ambitious timelines, which have largely kept apace of their targets (often by going far over budget). Additionally, in the housing sector in particular, Egypt has seen greatly increased foreign investment since Sisi took office. Nonetheless, Sisi’s housing policy, especially with regard to the New Towns, has essentially maintained the status quo: promising low-income housing which nonetheless excludes the poorest in Egyptian society, failing to address the 927

24. Ibid.

Aerial views of the Suez Canal expansion, taken in August 2014 and April 2016 (NASA Earth Observatory)

Unfinished, empty apartment blocks on the outskirts of Cairo, 2015 (Mohamed El-Shahed / AFP)

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various factors that make New Towns unattractive or inaccessible for the majority of Egyptians, and forging ahead with the construction of additional New Towns despite these shortcomings. The so-called Fourth Generation of New Towns under Sisi are overwhelmingly additions to or extensions of existing New Towns. Sisi’s Prime Minister, Moustafa Madbouly, has also served as Minister of Housing and Urban Utilities since 2014, and as of 2019 continues to hold both posts concurrently. His tenure as housing minister saw the implementation of the so-called “million housing units” project, which had first been proposed by his predecessor Mohamed Fathy al-Baradei in 2011 as the Social Housing Project (SHP). The program, which was on hold during the series of administrative shake-ups following the revolution, promised to provide a million units for ‘low income households,’ though application requirements would exclude the bottom 20 per cent of earners in Egypt, as well as some 60 per cent of the work force which is employed in the informal sector and therefore would be unable to prove their salary. In 2014, Sisi redeclared his commitment to the project, announcing an agreement with an Emirati construction firm who would build the houses on land in 18 locations nationwide, to be provided by the Egyptian army. A revised version of the agreement announced later that year held that, instead of the army, NUCA would allocate the land for the units, primarily in the New Towns.25 By the end of 2018, the SHP had reportedly produced 500,000 of the promised units, and delivered just over 160,000 of them. Though units were built across all 27 governorates of Egypt, the number of built SHP units were largely concentrated in New Towns. SHP units were particularly concentrated in the governorates of Asyut (over 8,500 units), Cairo (over 14,800 units) and Sharqia (over 16,600 units), where 10th of Ramadan is located.26

NEW TOWN PROGRAMS The building of brand-new and freestanding desert cities on the edges of the Egyptian Delta reflected the equivocal nature of urban policies implemented in Egypt in the 1970s and 1980s. Plans for the creation of 44 New Towns in total called for a future desert city population of up to 18 million people. New Towns were

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25. Maria Golia, “Egypt’s Need for Low-Income Housing,” Middle East Institute, 15 January 2015, https://www.mei.edu/publications/egypts-need-low-income-housing#_ftn8. 26. Yahia Shawkat, “A Million Homes for Whom? 6 Facts About the Social Housing Project,” The Built Environment Observatory, May 2018, https://www.academia.edu/38483663/A_million_units_for_whom_Six_ facts_about_the_Social_Housing_Project_-_BEO.

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part of the rationalisation of the city structure and were believed to be profitable by expanding production and providing employment. Further, New Towns were seen as a great advance in the industrial revolution the country was striving for, and the Egyptian government was eager to use them as a tool to urbanise rural populations and modernise peasant lifestyles. The thought that urban development could be an instrument for reforming society and making the Egyptian people accept new values influenced the national framing of this urban rebirth: “The general objective of developing new cities in Egypt is to create new settlement patterns that will break away from established traditions...They are a tool which, if used successfully, could alter drastically many of the accepted conceptions in the minds of most Egyptians.”27

27. Ministry of Development, Egypt, “Summary of programs and potential for investments in Egypt,” 1982, c-44.

Housing development in New Cairo just after its completion in 2011 (Jason Larkin / CNN)

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Despite changes in the program’s ambitions over time, and especially the increasingly unequal wealth distribution of New Town inhabitants, Egyptian leaders have continued to place significant emphasis on satellite cities as part of domestic policy. In 1996, Mubarak reaffirmed his commitment to the New Town agenda in an address to Egypt’s Parliament, nominally motivated by Egypt’s impending population crisis: “[T]he ‘conquest of the desert’ is no longer a slogan or a dream but a necessity dictated by the spiraling population growth. What is required is not a token exodus into the desert but a complete reconsideration of the distribution of population throughout the country.”28 It has been clear since at least the 1980s, however, that the New Towns have failed in this capacity, and that this failure in large part has resulted from both mismanagement and negligence on the part of the government and planning authorities. Economist and urban planner David Sims, an expert on Egypt’s desert urbanisation efforts, has

28. David Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams: Development or Disaster? (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014), 1.

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written extensively about the government’s continued sleight of hand in championing the New Town programme. While each successive administration claims to be addressing the needs of the people by building endless ghost towns, they neglect and misallocate desperately-needed funds for the 95 per cent of the population living in Cairo and other, older urban centres. In the preface for his book Egypt’s Desert Dreams: Development or Disaster? he writes, “Not only is the Old Egypt starved for even crumbs of the annual budget, but the government’s spatial approaches to it seem limited to nonsensical talk about de-population and de-densification in order to reshape what is left into some image of a modernist Egypt that never arrives. The over-the-top promotion of desert projects and of how these will miraculously solve Egypt’s many ills (you name it: excessive population growth, national food security, housing crises, antisocial behavior, even terrorism), allows an easy out, a way of continuing to ignore the ills and problems of the Old Lands.”29

THREE MASTER PLANS As the idea of planning the national economy gained ground in the Nasser years, the first Cairo Master Plan was initiated in 1953 and approved in 1956. The government aimed to set up plans for future urban development in Egypt, mainly through industry and housing. The 1956 plan aimed less at containing the growth of the capital and more on increasing zones of urban habitation and accompanying industrial zones. It focused on industrial development and decentralisation and included the planning of six industrial satellite cities within a 30 km radius of Cairo, to be established next to already existing industrial centres. Urban extensions were projected east of Cairo into the desert, and the satellite cities were to combine home and work, thereby avoiding transportation. However, since planning authorities were afraid that it would be unpopular to disperse workers outside of Cairo, government action was only taken on one of the satellite towns: Helwan. In the 1960s, Helwan was developed into an industrial city with steel factories and workers’ housing. Located 25 km south of central Cairo, it was transformed into a workers’ city and one of the largest public housing projects in Egypt at the time. The poor implementation of the master plan, however, accentuated the imbalance of the urban structure.30 The primary outcome of the plan was that the government began to get involved in infrastructure and subsidising lowcost housing. By 1965, almost 15,000 units for low-income families had been erected on

29. Ibid, 68. 30. UN-Habitat, “Metropolitan Planning and Management in the Developing World: Spatial Decentralization in Bombay and Cairo”, (Nairobi: UN-Habitat, 1993).

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the fringes of the desert. Yet the planning tools proved inappropriate; most plans were left behind in favor of self-organised building, and the city developed more anarchically than foreseen. In the 1960s, the Nasser administration realised that the first master plan was insufficient in dealing with Cairo’s rapid urban development and set up the Greater

The 1969/1970 master plan for Cairo was never implemented, but three proposed New Towns were carried over into the 1983 plan: 6th of October, Badr, and El Obour (Source: Sutton, K. and Fahmi, W. (2001) Cairo’s urban growth and strategic masterplans in the light of Egypt’s 1996 population census results. Cities Vol 18, Iss 3. Pp. 135-149)

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Cairo Planning Commission (GCPC) to prepare a new master plan. From 1966 to 1969 the commission collected data and in 1970 the new preliminary master plan was presented. In the new plan, the GCPC responded to the apparent flaws associated with the first master plan, namely its inconsistency with the realities of the political apparatus and its failure to assess Cairo’s urban situation adequately. Disappointed with the result of the first master plan, the committee made the new plan more pragmatic and realistic.

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Given that the second master plan was developed during the last years of the Nasser regime, Sadat effectively adopted this plan from Nasser. This political change would also materialise in the further elaboration of the master plan. The preliminary plan was officially approved in 1973, at a time when foreign aid began pouring into the country again and a paradigm shift from planned to market economy was well on its way. With the emergence of international aid organisations and the World Bank as dominant actors on the urban scene, large contracts were given to consultants from the Western world—in the case of the second master plan this included the American firm PADCO and the French consultants IAURIF. The American planners played a particularly central role in the development of the plan, which was marketed by the Egyptian government as the “American Plan.”31 Due to the changing attitudes of Western governments and aid organisations towards the global problem of large-scale uncontrolled urbanisation, which were made explicit at the UN-Habitat conference in Vancouver in 1976, funding and expertise was made available to projects trying to tackle the problem of expanding megacities. As a result, urban planning activities in Egypt at the time became dominated by Western experts who turned planning institutions like the newly founded General Organization of Physical Planning (GOPP)—which replaced the GCPC in 1973—into agents for the administration and acquisition of foreign aid. The policies introduced in the wake of Infitah did not only concentrate industrial activities on export products and open Egypt for foreign aid and investment, but in turn also made the Egyptian state budget dependent on World Bank loans. In 1976, due to a sovereign debt crisis, the Sadat administration was put under pressure by the IMF and the World Bank to reform its system of food subsidies. When Sadat cut subsidies for staple foods in half, large-scale riots broke out in Cairo in January 1977. “Furious Cairenes,” writes urban theorist Mike Davis, “in turn, attacked such in-theirface symbols of the Infitah’s luxury lifestyles as five-star hotels, casinos, nightclubs, and department stores, as well as police stations.”32 It was during this desperate period, in the late spring of 1977, when Sadat laid the foundation stone for 10th of Ramadan, promising that the first settlers could move in later the same year. A third master plan for the spatial planning of the Cairo region was launched in 1983 under Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt from 1981 to 2011. Developed in

31. See Michael R. T. Dumper and Bruce E. Stanley (eds.), Cities of the Middle East and North Africa: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 113. 32. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 110.

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collaboration with the French consultants IAURIF, the Long Term Development Master Plan introduced a new population map of Egypt with an extensive scheme for breaking out of the old Nile Valley and extending the Greater Cairo agglomeration. It envisaged the completion of the ring road, the construction of new settlements at the borders of the existing city, and a division of the capital into 16 zones to form independent, selfsufficient urban entities. While supportive of Egypt’s objectives to redistribute the population of Cairo and protect arable land from urbanization, donors generally favoured a more modest approach than insisting on the ambitious New Town scheme of the first two master plans. Running from 1980 to 1982, a National Urban Policy Study (NUPS) sponsored by USAID and the Ministry of Development was set up to evaluate and ‘guide’ urban development policies, essentially assessing whether USAID should fund the desert cities or not. The study ultimately declared the desert cities programme unsustainable. Being devoid of convincing economic rationale, poorly integrated into the existing urban system and unlikely to recover its costs, it was recommended that it be replaced by less expensive, more integrated satellite cities.33 The Minister of Development rejected the warning, but the study influenced the further planning of new communities, which were subsequently divided into three families: New Towns, satellite cities and ‘new settlements’—which are really urban extensions—all established on desert land. The distinction between the categories was, of course, blurred in practice. The first of the new urban communities to be launched were the autarchic New Towns, situated at some distance from the capital and offering employment in their own industrial zones. Following 10th of Ramadan, construction commenced on Badr, located halfway to Suez in the east, as well as Sadat City, 90 km to the north. Both were intended to facilitate a population between 500,000 and 1 million, and each was to be economically independent. The following phases, consisting of satellite cities and new settlements, were inspired by the English New Town concept, but with somewhat less independence. The satellites—among them 6th of October, Obour and 15th of May—were located closer to the old city centre, but still clearly separated from the capital by arid lands. The housing model chosen for these cities was the same as that for the less well-to-do classes in the New Towns. The urban extension settlements were communities on the edge of Cairo, taking existing structures and employment bases as their urban point of departure.

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33. No doubt this judgement was influenced by the economic failure of the American New Towns in the same period.

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New Towns in Egypt can generally be categorized into four generations, grouped by the period in which they were completed. While the first built generation of desert cities (1977-1982), of which 10th of Ramadan was the first, numbered seven new entities, the second generation (1982-2000) included another eight to make 15 new cities in total. The third generation of New Towns (2000-2014) saw the completion of seven new cities, bringing the total number of completed projects to 22 as of this writing, all of which are under the jurisdiction of the New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA). The fourth and current generation accounts for an additional 22 cities and communities currently under construction, including extensions or additions to major existing New Towns such as 6th of October, Sheikh Zayed City, and Obour. This generation also includes the new administrative capital of Egypt, initially suggested by Mubarak as far back as 1996 and officially set in motion by Sisi in 2015. These newest cities are expected to accommodate 30 million people in total, representing 25 per cent of Egypt’s projected population of 120 million by 2030.34 The new capital is expected to house five to seven million people, accommodating at least 15 per cent of this growth.

HISTORY OF 10TH OF RAMADAN In 1976, the Egyptian government commissioned the Swedish architectural and engineering firm Sweco to draw up a master plan for 10th of Ramadan together with the Egyptian firm Shawky-Zeitoun. The legendary name of the city referred to the date of Egypt’s victory over Israel in the October War of 1973—which began on the 6th of October, the date after which of one of its sister New Towns is named.35 Since it was the first city to be built, 10th of Ramadan was the pioneer, expected to become an oasis with an intense urban social life. There was no experience with large-scale New Town planning in Egypt previous to this.36 The city was projected strategically 50 km northeast of Cairo, halfway to the Sinai Peninsula and the harbour at the Suez Canal, and initially aimed to reach a population of half a million; by the 2018 census it had just surpassed this original target, although the government has set a new target of 2.1 million inhabitants by 2030.37 10th of Ramadan is totally isolated in the desert with no natural water resources, no vegetation, and nothing except the highway leading to the city of Ismailia at the Suez Canal. Thus created to live its own life, the programme and 34. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects 2019. 35. The name can be found in many variations: Madinat al-Ashir min Ramadan in Arabic, 10 Ramadan, Ramadan 10th City, etc. in English, 10th of Ramadan New Industrial City in the first reports of the Ministry of Development, and the nickname Tenram was used among the city planners. 36. There was one small project earlier for New Gourna Village, designed by the famous Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, author of Architecture for the Poor, which was inspired by the New Town concept, but also decidedly anti-modern in the sense that it was inspired by local architecture and planning traditions. 37. “10th of Ramadan,” New Urban Communities Authority, http://newcities.gov.eg/know_cities/Tenth_Ramadan/default.aspx.

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layout of the city were designed to create a totally autonomous New Town. In any case, there was no reason for inhabitants to leave the city. Together with the Stockholm office Sweco, the main consultant on the project, the Egyptian sub-consultants Shawky-Zeitoun Associate Architects drew up the master plan. Both educated at the University of Illinois School of Architecture in the 1940s, Mustafa Shawky and Salah Zeitoun have been called “ardent vectors” of modernism, particularly of the American variety which began to take precedence in Egypt by the mid-20th century.38 Zeitoun had also worked with Frank Lloyd Wright. The detailing and the housing types for 10th of Ramadan were developed along with the Egyptian architecture and urban planning office COPA, and the regular workforce remained half Swedish and half Egyptian during the entire planning period. COPA, led by the architects Ismail Reda and Abdel Rahim El Rimaly, hired more architects for the commission to fulfil the desire for a 50/50 split of Swedish and Egyptian architects. In contrast to the Swedish architects, many of the Egyptians—including El Rimaly—held doctorates obtained at Western universities. Sweco, employing some 14,500 people worldwide as of this writing, was founded in Stockholm in the late 19th century and was first called Vattenbyggnadsbyrån (VBB): office for water engineering. It was originally an engineering company designing hydroelectric plants and played an important role in the industrialisation of Sweden in the first half of the 20th century. In the early 1960s Sweco was responsible for the master planning of Stenungsund New Town, the centre of a large-scale petrochemical industry establishment on the west coast of Sweden. Sweco was internationally oriented right from the start, beginning in 1903 with the firm’s first international assignment in St. Petersburg and the 1926 establishment of ties to work in the British Empire.39 In the late 1940s, Sweco engineer and consultant Bo Hellström (1890-1967) met some Egyptian engineers involved with the Aswan Dam while on holiday in southern Egypt, who told him about the plans to build a hydroelectric plant there. Sweco was commissioned to come up with a proposal for a location for the hydropower plant in connection to the old existing dam. The proposal, to place the plant above the old dam, was awarded the contract, and Sweco carried out the project from 1953 to 1960.40

38. Mercedes Volait, “Mediating and domesticating modernity in Egypt : uncovering some forgotten pages,” in Docomomo 35 (September 2006), 30-35.

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39. Nordisk familjebok Uggleupplagan 38, Supplement, Riksdagens Bibliotek – Öyen, Tillägg (1926), 1187-1188, http://runeberg.org/nfcr/0640.html. 40. “Hydropower project acts as springboard in Egypt,” Sweco, 25 December, 2014, http://www.Swecogroup.com/en/Sweco-group/Projects/Historical-projects/Hydropower-project-acts-as-springboard-inEgypt/.

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In 1961, the Nordic Council agreed on a common strategy for technical assistance to developing countries.41 As a result Sweco’s activities in the developing world, especially in the Middle East, intensified: examples include the Water Towers in Kuwait (1965) and the relocation of the Abu Simbel temples in Egypt (1964-1968) to prevent them from being flooded by the creation of the Aswan Dam. By the time Sweco was commissioned with the planning and design of 10th of Ramadan, the firm was no stranger to the Middle East, and especially not to the Egyptian context. Sweco’s 10th of Ramadan project manager Alf Bydén was the father of the proposal for a belt city built up symmetrically on both sides of a longitudinal centre. The structure was to be expandable to the north, not limited to a central core as in a radial scheme. The advantages of the extendable belt city had been discussed in architecture and planning circles since the war, especially by the planner Constantinos Doxiadis. His ‘Dynapolis,’ a model future city with a parabolic, unidirectional growth that was expandable in space and time, exploded all known scales in urban planning. “One can say that 10th of Ramadan is Doxiadis’ philosophy combined with the experiences from Swedish neighbourhood planning during the ‘50s and ‘60s in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö transposed into practical reality,” Sweco urban designer Harald Sterner explains.42 The rational and scientific, rather than aesthetic, approach of Doxiadis appealed to the Swedish engineering firm, who fused it with the detailing of a less uniform, ‘warmer’ composition. Social integration, adaptability, flexibility, harmony and smooth transitions are keywords in the passionate text of the master plan, which ascribed a therapeutic effect to these qualities.43 Combining concentric neighbourhoods with a linear New Town structure, the open-ended linear city of 10th of Ramadan was moulded around a central spine. It was planned to be constructed in four stages, each for an average population of about 125,000—except for the first stage, which anticipated 150,000 inhabitants. According to initial plans, the city would be completed within 25 years, with a population of half a million spread out over an urban territory with a diameter of 8 km. The master plan focused on the physical arrangement of activities in relation to their functions and aesthetics within the built environment. Broad traffic veins and green belts separated residential areas from each other and from the city centre and businesses. Some light and medium industry was distributed along the edge of the town, while heavy industry

41. “Forms of Freedom: African Independence and Nordic Models,” Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2014. 42. Harald Sterner, interview with Marie Bruun Yde, 2007. 43. Sweco and Shawky-Zeitoun, “10th of Ramadan Master Plan,” Arab Republic of Egypt, Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction, (1976); see e.g. p. 28.

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ue Epilo g 10th of Ramadan Master Plan, 1976 (NUCA)

was placed in a separate zone south of the Cairo-Ismailia Desert Road. Within the neighbourhoods, paths linked the housing areas with open spaces, parks and centres, which included commercial buildings, schools, sports facilities, mosques and churches.44 The master plan report presented a neighbourhood unit on the western wing, consisting of smaller lots predominated by houses of two storeys. The original residential areas were supposed to consist of a mix of building typologies for different income groups, 939

44.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; The majority of the 10 per cent non-Muslim Egyptian population is Christian.

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Illustration of a community centre (source?)

“so that segregation can be avoided” and “equity and solidarity” be provided.45 But most of the houses that were built were four- to five-storey walk-up flats in the typical prefabricated ‘Plattenbau’ style. The illustrations nevertheless visualised predominantly low-rise houses arranged into cubist white villages, the modest building height and ramifying density underscoring the impression of a clustered village structure. The internal layout of the main structure was shaped by the familiar hierarchy of postwar New Towns. Eight neighbourhoods of about 4,500 citizens each surround a core of commercial and public facilities, forming a community. Four communities of about 35,000 citizens each (140,000 in total) form one district of the city, and also share 45. Sweco and Shawky-Zeitoun, “10th of Ramadan Master Plan,” 31.

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a core of commercial and public facilities. The four districts are designed on either side of the linear city centre with commercial and public facilities. A standard for New Town planning was thus given a practically and technically accentuated infill. The design for 10th of Ramadan was not radical, but simply followed the international model based on numbers and hierarchy. Site and services projects were presented in the final report as a means to assure the inclusion of the poorest, who would be unable to pay the price for a finished apartment. Part of a national effort to reduce squatting and slum settlements, such cost-effective self-help projects were popular with the government, which was eager to minimise 941

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housing subsidies.46 The architects tried to combine the financial advantages with their democratic beliefs. With a ‘core housing’ concept of providing basic expandable structures—kitchen and bath—in sites already equipped with public services and infrastructure, they sought to guarantee the actual participation in and satisfaction of the residents with their own homes. As Sweco and COPA put it in their final report, “The future owner has a stake in the process of house construction and is in a position to influence its outcome. Control over the method and speed of construction fosters a sense of self-reliance, just as working with neighbours to install streets and walkways improves community interaction.”47 The central principle here was the ownership of the houses, which would encourage people to care for them and support neighbourliness. But the poorest did not have the resources to develop the building skeletons as demanded, and even amongst those who did, few actually became owners of their selfconstructed homes. The master plan report for 10th of Ramadan was finalised and submitted in 1976, and in 1978 the actual city construction began. Well-distinguished neighbourhoods would offer several types of housing accessible to the various population categories within the upper or middle class, while excluding the underprivileged classes who were accommodated in site and services projects. Illustrations showed joyful, elegantly dressed Europeans strolling around the new environments. Women, some of them blond, did not wear headscarves, but instead sported uncovered jewellery and tight dresses which left their shoulders bare; opposite sexes were in close contact. This imagery was not only un-Islamic, but in stark contrast to the reality of Muslim culture, where distinctly different restrictions and values permeate personal presentation, behaviour and social conventions in public space. The architects’ dream residents were happy, active, standing, walking, talking or shopping. People smiled; leisure time was a pleasure. They had style, fashionable purses and enough disposable income to buy consumer goods. The illustrations presented a Mediterranean holiday atmosphere and the inner centres were drawn as clubs, with bartenders standing around holding drinks, artists painting, and people sitting in groups around tables or under trees, being served. The open spaces in the residential areas facilitated games, play time and recreation. These illustrations coincided with the opening up of the Egyptian economy and the easing of political relationships with Western countries. Here was an underlying sense of the Egyptian ambition to develop towards globalised international standards.

46. COPA and Sweco, “10th of Ramadan: First Stage Final Report,” Arab Republic of Egypt, Ministry of Development and New Communities (1978), 18. 47. Ibid, 20.

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ue Epilo g Construction of 10th of Ramadan (source?)

The idea that the Egyptian New Towns would create a modern, democratic, emancipated society was an implied and recognised premise in the process of their planning. The plan for 10th of Ramadan applied European standards of physical planning to the context of Egypt, where approximately 90 per cent of the population was (and remains) Muslim. The architectural and urban design for the city thus became the spatial incarnation of a civilising project with fixed standards for future inhabitants. “The inhabitants of 10th of Ramadan should feel that it is their city,” the master plan report states, thereby touching on the oxymoron of planned independence.48 Community, not individuality, was what the New Town was designed to intensify. Through various urban strategies, the architects and planners believed they could equip the city with a character of its own: “A physical plan today must have qualities to meet changes that can be anticipated, but are not known at the present...[A]n ‘instant’ city like 10th of Ramadan needs [a] high degree of independent flexibility for the major elements of the city, large versatility of employment options, fast construction of communication elements, and early local social life.”49 With the site and services

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48. Sweco and Shawky-Zeitoun, “10th of Ramadan Master Plan,” VII. 49. Ibid, 29.

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projects for instance, the basic needs for building a house were to be at poor people’s disposal to help them get started. However, what appeared to be an invitation for the underprivileged to take active part in a development was actually used to forestall and prevent informal housing. “[T]o avoid unplanned and dispersed squatter settlements” was the task of planning and a reason for Egypt to desire planning as a means to formalise the informal.50 But the discrepancy between the Egyptian and Swedish planners’ ideas of what would constitute a perfect desert settlement led to opposing designs for and presentations of the content of the New Town.

SWEDISH ARCHITECTURE FOR THE MIDDLE EAST The Sweco architects had their roots in the influential Swedish New Town planning movement, which became known as new empiricism. The principle of neighbourhood units was the basis of Swedish housing production, involving small- and medium-sized housing estates with a “slightly folksy tone.”51 Soon the qualities of urban variation and legibility, emphasised in areas built in the 1940s and 1950s like Vällingby, set the Swedish standard. As a planning phenomenon and architectonic experience, Sweco’s Stenungsund (1961-1964) is a first class example of Swedish ‘welfare state’ design. The chief architect of this plan, Sune Lindström, was educated with Gropius and Meyer at the Bauhaus and had been involved in the production of previous Stockholm satellites. He equipped them with enormous complexes, closer to Le Corbusier’s visions than anything else in Sweden. Using elliptical and oval forms in the elaboration of buildings and their placement, Lindström mellowed the massive volumes with a combination of continuity and vicissitude. Following the modernist scheme of functional separation, Stenungsund was built up of houses no higher than three storeys. In the shopping centre, located just next to the boat harbour, low two-storey wood covered buildings stimulate a thoroughly utilised space of short and slender promenades, creating an intimate atmosphere. Seen from a distance, this high standard centre seems to be floating on the water. In the first generation of Swedish planned cities, the relation between the neighbourhood units and the streets resembled that within the traditional urban fabric. Neighbourhood centres were integrated into the street network, and although

50. Ibid, 3. 51. Rasmus Wærn, “Architecture in Sweden,“ in Swedish Culture (Stockholm: The Swedish Institute, 2001), 5.

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set in open, green spaces, residential building blocks still related to the streets and helped define the streetscape. The design of spatial transitions was used to define and distinguish elements such as street, courtyard, landscape and different kinds of open space in terms of public, semi-public and semi-private categories. ABC towns, an acronym for Arbete-Bostad-Centrum, meaning work-housingcentre, were constructed around Stockholm. Vällingby, the first New Town, became famous for its balance between built and open spaces. Trees and rocks, waterside views, and generous, scenic spaces were mixed with well-equipped parks and detailed pedestrian areas in the centre to form a harmonious city-landscape. Housing blocks were situated in a way which created spatial coherence and atmosphere within the city, allowing all segments of society to live harmoniously. Vällingby became a model for the development of so-called humanist town planning in Sweden, which was highly concerned with adapting plans to the character of the landscape. Through the use of varied sequences of streets offering focal points and open places, Swedish architects designed with rhythm and variation in order to soften the massive scale of these new cities and to provide legibility, orientation, character and identity. In designing 10th of Ramadan, Sweco saw it as their task to create a living city, not a suburb of Cairo but rather an independent entity. Sweco urban designer Harald Sterner arrived in Cairo in August 1977 to take part in the detailing of the master plan, beginning immediately with the planning of the first neighbourhood. It was mainly planned with apartment houses which COPA already had in their drawers and which had already been used to erect housing in Suez, as financed by the Saudis. COPA, in Sterner’s view, was more interested in urban plans and architecture that could be shown in international magazines than in shaping living spaces for poor people. Sweco architects struggled to include site and services projects within 10th of Ramadan’s residential areas, thereby translating the egalitarian ideal of the Scandinavian New Towns to Egyptian society. The Egyptians disliked this, however, as they saw a certain segregation in the disposition of the lots according to social conditions as an adjustment to reality.

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The task of the Swedish urban designers was to apply the programme of the lots to the physical sections bounded by the principal road network: residential areas, neighbourhood centres, community and main centres, industrial areas and parks. Given the variety of housing types, their corresponding climate conditions, and the varying dispositions of the building plots, main streets and footpaths, mosques, and neighbourhood units in the four communities, the Swedes sought to create variation in

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order to facilitate orientation and identity. Housing types were ultimately staggered to vary the shape and size of the green spaces in between them, and the architects had to persuade the administration and the ministry to allow a distribution of lots of varying sizes to allow for a broad mix of typologies. The master plan proposed two-storey site and service buildings, two-storey core houses, four-storey blocks of flats, two-storey attached houses and two-storey detached houses and villas. The low-rise site and services and core house typologies were explicitly intended for very low-income groups and were supposed to be largely self-built. In the first stage, which was meant to provide housing for 150,000 inhabitants, 40 per cent of all dwellings were planned as either site and service or core house typologies.52 This mixture was an important part of the plan, giving inhabitants of all classes the opportunity to live side by side. These would be functional structures in which one could develop and influence one’s own living spaces through private endeavour. Although the master plan intended for large percentages of plots to be allocated to low-income groups, the actual development turned out to be much more conventional, favouring established construction companies and international investors: “The modernist developmental ethos further precluded large-scale construction of semiformal owner-built neighbourhoods which would have been genuinely accessible to ordinary Egyptians. Instead the new desert cities have 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 have become associated with luxurious gated communities since the 1990s.”53 The social structure within the future city that Sweco fought for was not glamorous or compelling, but was an integral part of the Swedish planning tradition. COPA’s ambitions, on the other hand, were very different. Even though they had been hired because of their experience with Egyptian culture and life in Cairo itself, they were rather more interested in Western architecture and ideas. Much of COPA’s staff had received their architectural and planning education in France, England, Canada and the United States. The contrasting aspirations of the two architectural offices are illustrated by their interpretations of the master plan configuration. What COPA saw as a tulip, as stated in the master plan report, Sweco’s project manager Alf Bydén described as a camel’s footprint. The Europeans and their Third World counterparts’ attempts to become familiar with each other’s culture produced the most hackneyed of expressions.

52. COPA and Sweco, “10th of Ramadan: First Stage Final Report,” Table 3.5, Parcelling Programme Stage 1. 53. W.J. Dorman, “Exclusion and Informality: The Praetorian Politics of Land Management in Cairo,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, 5 (2013), 8.

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Ostensibly meant to boost recognition and promote a ‘cross-pollination’ of cultures, these suggestions for interpretations of the New Town’s morphology instead rather signalled stultification and imbalance. Broad ideas of Westernness and Arabness tended to exoticise each other, leading to a disparity in which the Swedes believed that they could strengthen Egyptian self-conception, while the Egyptians were eager to learn unilaterally from the West. Symptomatically, 40 years after the city has been built, Harald Sterner wonders why the Egyptian architects did not contribute more contextual knowledge about everyday living in Egypt. Such knowledge was solely applied in the orientation of the mosques towards Mecca. Sterner notes that there was “no topography worth mentioning” considered in the urban design.54 None of the Swedish architects had worked with the desert previously and they did not see any guidelines in the flat sandy terrain. This on the one hand opened up endless creative possibilities, while on the other hand it limited thinking to the figurative plan in designing the real city.

THE TRADITIONAL EGYPTIAN CITYSCAPE The common organically-grown Egyptian cityscape is a patchwork of formal and informal, designed and self-built structures. Completed buildings are frequently extended with two or three storeys, and shantytowns continuously sprout up in the suburbs (the most notorious of which being Cairo’s Cities of the Dead built upon graveyards). Souks, the colourful Arabic bazaars which form important trade and meeting places in everyday life, are found all over in narrow streets and passages. In the historical Arab city everyone—high and low, rich and poor—lived together in an extremely dense configuration. Traditional urban patterns in Cairo, as in other Islamic cities, are characterised by a high level of congruence with the natural, religious and socio-cultural environment. Mosques, for instance, are situated in connection to other buildings within residential areas. Modernist socio-spatial zoning, meanwhile, goes against the integration and multiplicity characteristic of the labyrinthine street systems in historical Islamic urbanity. The programmatically mixed urban makeup of the older parts of Cairo results in a high flow of people. Many Egyptian families are dependent on secondary earnings and perform smaller informal financial activities such as keeping shops, cafés or kitchens, or engaging in small-scale production, which are both a source of income and a part of the social services sector. In order to run these businesses, they need passers947

54. Harald Sterner, interview with Marie Bruun Yde, 2007.

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by: in mono-functional residential areas, however, visitors do not pass through spontaneously, reducing the possibility of this kind of supplementary income. Islamic architectural and urban structures are not conceived as abstract, detached forms, but as vibrant shells of human activity, expressing and responding to life. As the architectural historian Stefano Bianca writes, “The formation of the urban structure is not subject to the purely quantitative division of large space into smaller fragments but based on an incremental or ‘organic’ aggregation process, originating in the definition of socially relevant micro-spaces which are then connected into larger units.”55 According to Bianca, the enclosure of voids by correlated solids, repeated in countless variations, is the generating principle of urban form. As open spaces and circulation systems are incorporated into the urban structure from the beginning, wastelands or lost spaces do not occur. These traditional Egyptian economic, cultural and social structures have not been incorporated in the design of Cairo’s New Towns. In contrast, modernist planning in Egypt often seems to produce an alien prairie of buildings floating as isolated blocks in vacuums of abstract space.

Aerial photo of 10th of Ramadan today (Google Earth)

55. Stefano Bianca, Urban Form in the Arab World: Past and Present (Zürich: vdf Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH Zürich, 2000), 208.

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REALISATION OF 10TH OF RAMADAN Take a drive from Cairo to 10th of Ramadan—it’s the only available option—and you will be led from the main highway via the ‘stalk’ to the ‘petals’ of the tulip that form the heart of the city. Along the way you will pass plots of greenery, a park, a few buildings and a lot of empty desert. 10th of Ramadan is the largest industrial zone in Egypt, and major businesses—concentrated along the southeastern edge of the city—include plastics, paper, medical supplies, textiles, and manufacturing.56 10th of Ramadan boasts over 2,000 factories, both Egyptian and foreign, which provide over 350,000 jobs.57 Planners separated the residential areas of the city from areas of heavy industry due to concerns over pollution: as a result, the main part of the city was moved far away, and industrial warehouses and factories were placed strategically along the highway. Contrary to the planned provision for pedestrians, this road can only be traversed with a vehicle: the overscaled proportions of the scheme are illustrated by the boy in 10th of Ramadan using the pavement edge as a bench. Public transport in the city is limited to bus lines which mainly connect 10th of Ramadan to Cairo. In 2017, the Egyptian government announced that an electricallypowered train—the country’s first—would be constructed between 10th of Ramadan, New Cairo (another New Town southeast of the capital), and the proposed new administrative capital of Egypt to the east of Cairo.58 This was followed by the announcement in 2019 of an interurban light rail line between 10th of Ramadan and Cairo.59 Despite these promising developments, the bus system suffers the same fate as most Egyptian infrastructure: after initial investments, projects are underfunded and lack of maintenance results in dysfunctionality and widespread decay. Distances here are far and separations clear-cut, with roads often splitting communities like highways. Trucks drive by at frightening speeds, breaking the silence every once in a while. Homes, shops, mosques and industrial sites are spread out over a large area, meant to hold a much larger population. What 10th of Ramadan’s first residents encountered was a plan in need of a city. Distinctions between neighbourhoods—encompassing differences in building quality, level of infrastructure, and management of public areas—seem especially apparent due to their dispersal,

56. Rachel Keeton, “10th of Ramadan, Egypt,” in To Build a City in Africa: A History and a Manual, eds. Rachel Keeton and Michelle Provoost, International New Town Institute (Rotterdam: nai010, 2019) 266. 57. “10th of Ramadan,” New Urban Communities Authority, http://newcities.gov.eg/know_cities/Tenth_Ramadan/default.aspx. 58. Al-Masry Al-Youm, “Transport Ministry signs 2nd contract for electric train,” Egypt Independent, 16 January, 2019, https://ww.egyptindependent.com/transport-ministry-signs-2nd-contract-for-electrictrain/. 59. Keith Barrow, “Financing agreed for Cairo interurban light rail line,” International Railway Journal, 16 January, 2019, https://www.railjournal.com/africa/financing-agreed-for-cairo-interurban-light-rail-line/.

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with broad streets, huge swaths of desert, and several kilometres between them. The open planning and vast stretches of sand, where planned greenery was never planted, emphasise this sense of isolation. The desert and its dust are very present. Today, a half-completed look characterises all but the oldest neighbourhoods of the city. This reveals another aspect of the existing urban condition: vernacular art forms like graffiti and murals are scripted into the modernist urban fabric, while private gated enclaves are being built on empty lots alongside individually-built houses, manifesting the cultural and economic variety of the New Town. The latter have particularly long construction periods due to the financing and permission system for private individual loaners, turning the city into one big building site. A dense and popular Mubarak-era housing area, with mostly five-storey buildings intended for â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;young families,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; has been erected and inhabited by the middle class. Nearly all the newer houses are constructed in a modernised traditional Arabic style, with integrated ornaments like crescent-shaped balconies and windows, balustrades, and cornices, and these tend to be more varied than their modernist neighbours. Many villa owners spend most of the year in Cairo.

The first community center erected in 10th of Ramadan (source?)

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As with most other planned cities across the world, the New Towns around Cairo have turned out differently than imagined. From the beginning, the implementation of 10th of Ramadan was inconsistent with the egalitarian, communitarian intention Swecoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s plans. Due to a lack of public facilities, people were hesitant to move to the new city, and the state constantly retreated. Half a million people were initially intended to settle in 10th of Ramadan: while this target was eventually reached (exceeded, in fact, as of the 2018 census) it represents roughly a quarter of the 2030 target. Approximately 75 per cent of the urban area is currently occupied. Given the proliferation of vacant lots and buildings along with dozens of streets laid out, equipped with streetlights, but as yet still not furnished with houses, 10th of Ramadan has been called a ghost town.

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The last ten years, however, have seen private interventions bring about a new building wave. 10th of Ramadan is today the third largest of the Egyptian New Towns, after 6th of October and New Cairo. Of the 44 New Towns originally planned, 19 have been only partially realised and many are now flourishing as high-walled gated communities for the rich. Today, approximately 20 million people are actually living in New Towns—the number initially planned for—but they are certainly not distributed as originally intended. Locations designated for the establishment of New Towns are presently used for luxury resorts. People who have economic power and are dissatisfied with the quality of life in the congested metropolis have sought a suburban lifestyle. Cairo has been deserted by academics. Some of the first people who bought apartments in 10th of Ramadan were Cairenes who could afford to use them as weekend and holiday residences: going to the New Town was an outing, a luxury. The level of mobility required to move freely in and out of the city was itself a luxury as well. To the majority of the Egyptian population, the poor and low-income households, the thought of desert life was neither affordable nor attractive. Known for strong familial bonds, Cairo residents are attached to the place they live. Despite this, public surveys studying inhabitants’ needs were not part of the urban planning of 10th of Ramadan. 10th of Ramadan faced serious initial problems in attracting inhabitants as well as industry. Governmental construction of subsidised housing proved to be expensive, with land values multiplying ten times and construction costs five times between 1975 and 1982. 10th of Ramadan turned out to be undesirable for a myriad of reasons: it was too expensive to live in, did not provide required services, suffered from water shortage for long periods of time, lacked the intrinsic social patterns of informal areas, and was never connected to Cairo with a railway as planned. Many of the social condensers of the master plan were never implemented and the inhabitants themselves had to establish common facilities such as shops and cafés. The stadium, the clinics, the cinemas, the theatres, the social welfare centres, the swimming pool: nearly all were omitted when 10th of Ramadan was actually built. There was no medical treatment, few public services, and few schools. The administrative centre, which belongs to the centre of the city, was placed many kilometres outside of and detached from it. Public local transport is still today nearly non-existent, forcing inhabitants to use expensive taxis and private minibuses. Houses all across the desert New Towns remained predominantly empty throughout the eighties and nineties. Jobs were available in 10th of Ramadan long before housing was completed, and people tended to commute instead of moving there. Today, approximately 50 per cent of the city’s factory workers are still living elsewhere; they are reluctant to move to 10th

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of Ramadan because of the high costs of living, their existing social relations, and the alienating modernity of the city compared to their rural background.60 The first section of 10th of Ramadan was completed in 1979. The first inhabitants took up residence in all-new collective housing made up of nearly identical blocks, densely laid out, with poor-quality construction and finishing. By 1982, homes for 30,000 people had been built, but only 1,000 were living in them. Eventually, numerous government efforts at enticing people and firms to settle in the desert did prove very effective. The industrial sector, 10th of Ramadan’s economic base, primarily consists of textile production for export. Ten-year tax exemptions were given to industries setting up shop in New Towns, while industrial development within the Greater Cairo Region and on arable land was prohibited. Firms relocating to 10th of Ramadan were offered housing at subsidised rates for their employees, and government employees were offered doubled salaries. These and other economic incentives pushed people to the relatively underdeveloped site. Facing low educational, housing, healthcare and urban standards, most people came together on a less-than-voluntary basis. Yet certain factors made 10th of Ramadan attractive to some Egyptians: access to fresh air and green spaces, higher living standards, and an escape from the chaos, pollution and dirt of the big cities.61 Demographic trends in 10th of Ramadan indicate that the population that settled here is educationally and economically well-off by Egyptian standards. The average income level in the city is higher than the national average, and three-fourths of the inhabitants have completed secondary school, with almost none being illiterate against a national illiteracy level of over 25 per cent. The limited number of inhabitants has actually partly compensated for delays and shortcomings in the city’s development. Services might be inadequate from a Western viewpoint, but compared to Egyptian standards they are, in the description of one young inhabitant of 10th of Ramadan, “impeccable.”62 Another resident emphasises the benefits of the parks, amusement facilities and public libraries.63 It would seem, then, that two parallel yet contradictory narratives exist here. This large-scale urban plan was conceived as a total design, but was implemented incompletely and not furnished with the needed urban facilities for day-to-day living. The first inhabitants of 10th of Ramadan encountered a number of difficulties in pursuing normal, everyday life.

60. See Bénédicte Florin, “Urban Policies in Cairo: From Speeches on New Cities to the Adjustment Practices of Ordinary City Dwellers” in Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the City, eds. Abdulmaliq Simone and Abdelghani Abouhani (Dakar: Codesria, 2006). 61. This is probably part of a wider problematic of the high financial costs of building new cities, making them inaccessible for the poorest.

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62. Al-Ahram, 11 October 1997, in Florin 2006, 46. 63. Cairo hardly has any green areas. One larger park has been established to be the “green lung“ of the city, but instead of being a public park, it has become an upper class reservation, gated and with an entrance fee; see http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/azharpark.htm.

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THE POLITICAL SHIFT Egyptian authorities and the Egyptian people have each in their own way destabilised and distanced themselves from the original ideas of the New Towns. The exported Western model, which residents and users respond to by either changing or disregarding it, has proved to be of dubious suitability to the Egyptian context. 10th of Ramadan is today made up of uncoordinated actions and reactions, of static and dynamic entities, not organised in a connected whole. How did this happen? Throughout the 1970s, as 10th of Ramadan was being realised, a process of privatisation took hold, along with the dissolution of collective structures and a refusal on the part of authorities to take responsibility for the wellbeing of the people. This represents a drastic shift from earlier holistic models for building a communitarian society. Sadat’s “active but ad-hoc intervention”64 a strategy of withdrawing the state as an actor in social housing, has had the result that “[p]ublic investment [for housing] has been largely wasted.”65 The shift in political framework for the development of urbanism disaggregated the ethics of welfare into neoliberal economic development. Through the authorities’ support of New Town planning, the dishing out of compensations, and opportunistic rhetoric aided by the use of architectural aesthetics, the lack of concern for real day-to-day problems was legitimised. Public institutions in Egypt are generally isolated in their own systems and badly coordinated, resulting in contradicting agendas. National policies lack connection to local decision-making, paralysing development processes and leading to administrative anarchy. Additionally, Egyptian urban planning in the last several decades has been characterised by the abandonment of earlier plans, impatience with ongoing developments, and the exaggeration of successful developments. The holistic plans for coping with the large-scale growth of Cairo—which made good sense and had a high level of social involvement—have vanished due to a series of opportunistic actions. Initially based on research, problem-definition and rational solutions, planning concepts have gradually been muddled up, resulting in something completely different. Suddenly in the 2000s, a private city like New Cairo has boomed and replaced three smaller, state-planned communities. New Cairo is the product

64. Twenty million people in Egypt live today in houses that are detrimental to their health and safety. Ahmed M. Soliman, “Tilting at Sphinxes: Locating Urban Informality in Egyptian Cities” in Urban Informality. Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia, eds. Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004), 176. 65. Ibid, 202.

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of a radical turnaround in the government’s desert development policy, regardless of whether its current rate of expansion may match the success in the long term. 6th of October is another example of a new urban settlement which gained popularity in the 2000s and subsequently expanded through the implementation of gated communities, amusement parks and tourist resorts galore. The guarded, impenetrable gated community in 10th of Ramadan, a private real estate promotion intended for the wealthy class, will be followed by more. Today the New Towns more often than not create private enclaves for the rich far away from the poor, leaving Egyptian society with little cohesion or sustainability. While the New Towns have become cities for the upper middle class and the rich to flee to, Cairo continues to suffer brain drain and grows still poorer and more overpopulated.

A map of the Cairo region today shows the old New Town structures being transformed into theme parks and gated communities; 10th of Ramadan is located in the upper right (source?)

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Egypt’s New Towns were primarily intended as a means to kickstart the Egyptian economy. Originally aiming to house all classes of society as part of Nasser’s socialist vision, New Town policy changed with the neoliberal politics of Sadat. Shifts in Egyptian governmental policy and political standpoints are mirrored in the development of the New Towns. The work of modern urban planning to regulate and minimise some of the worst byproducts of capitalist urban development have been absorbed by capitalism itself. In this way, the government’s dedication to industrial development, affordable housing and the development of a bustling capital zone by means of New Towns with housing for different income levels—the very virtues of New Town urbanism—have been lost. As the Italian architectural theorist Manfredo Tafuri concluded in 1980: “Faced with the rationalisation of the urban order, presentday political-economic forces demonstrate that they are not interested in finding the ways and means to carry out the tasks indicated by the architectural ideologies of the Modern Movement.”66 66. Manfredo Tafuri, “Problems in the Form of a Conclusion” (1980), in Nesbitt 1996, 362.

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In the early 1990s the Egyptian state, led by Muburak, started handing the future of the desert cities over to private promoters. The land prepared by the state began to flourish, and this policy has largely been continued under Sisi. Two main groups have benefited from partnerships between private enterprise and local governments: owners of commercial and industrial capital, and the bureaucratic and technocratic leadership within both the private and government sectors. At the same time, the advantages of a profitable financial climate for industry began to counterbalance the advantages Cairo had to offer, and a real boom in medium and light manufacturing set in. Today the spatial emphasis on social divisions in Cairo is accelerating: on the one hand the city is toying with suburbanisation and non-stop private construction, and on the other hand squatting and informal housing continue to proliferate. 10th of Ramadan came into existence as a conception of the city as a controllable, connected whole, backed by the belief in the possibility of planning for equality and freedom. Despite this, it has largely turned into a product of a market-based economy with little thought for democracy or social integration. Thus, it has become the paradigmatic example of state capitalism— an authoritarian political system supporting a capitalistic economy.67 Yet the New Town has not been totally usurped: the private capitalist city camps within the confines of the collectivist city, which is still evident everywhere.

10TH OF RAMADAN TODAY Egypt is a society in which the public sphere is not very heavily regulated, and there is a lack of collective consciousness around cleaning common property, especially within low-income communities. In Cairo, especially, an extreme opposition between private and public prevails. Inside private homes everything is kept presentably clean, whereas outdoor public space is not cared for. The mosques hold a certain position in society not just because they are sacred, but also because they are clean and wellgroomed spaces. It might be said that the Egyptian people, “a population that routinely resists official designs for the organisation of the city,” let the New Towns decay.68 The individual citizen feels responsibility for his family and home, not for public space. There is lots of garbage on the pavement and reckless driving in the streets. The bus station in the centre of 10th of Ramadan, dirty and dilapidated, looks forlorn. The sharply cut international style pillars and roof constructions signalling organisation

67. “The ‘Egyptian Regime’...is one that has prevented freedoms of speech, assembly, and association and has especially denied democracy and other political rights. The law-making process, along with political and security institutions, is used more to thwart political opposition and civil liberties than to protect (let alone expand) them. Mubarak keeps Egypt an authoritarian system, far from the democracy that he claims it to be.” Countries at the Crossroads 2005, Freedom House, http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=140&edition=2&ccrpage=8&ccrcountry=84. 68. Eric Denis, “Urban Planning and Growth in Cairo,” Middle East Report (December 1997), 7.

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ue Epilo g The central bus station, located in the centre of the city, is 10th of Ramadan’s main transportation hub, though the promised railway station may change that (Photo: Rachel Keeton, 2016)

and systematics go unnoticed by daily passengers. Simple carelessness has left the place looking vandalised or twice as old as it is. Still, the failure of the Egyptian New Towns to fulfil their original plans should not overshadow the recognition of what is actually there now: the present-day reality of 10th of Ramadan at the level of the inhabitants. The process of diversification that occurred despite the exhaustion of the master plan, the various structural crises the city has faced, and gradual adaptation of the residents all show how these places take on new meanings as they age. What is left today of the original ‘soul’ of 10th of Ramadan? Which are the events connected to the process of urban revitalisation?

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In spite of the ‘failure’ of top-down planning, day-to-day use of the city by its inhabitants has demonstrated vibrant reinterpretations of space in 10th of Ramadan. After the architects and planners have left, the people, with their own cultures and ways

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ue Epilo g The central bus station (Photo: Marie Bruun Yde, 2006)

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The oldest residential neighbourhoods in the city are some of the most complete (Photo: Marie Bruun Yde, 2006)

of living, have settled in the city and made it their own. In the oldest residential areas improvements have been made to houses: doors and windows are replaced, balconies reshaped and painted, facades decorated; small semi-private gardens have been established in front of houses, blurring and mediating the otherwise abrupt transition between inside and outside, private and public; convenience stores and coffee shops have been erected in the streets and on small squares; ground floor flats are converted into shops and small mosques have been built. Clothes are hanging from balconies and windows and on lines in the gardens, extending private living rooms into public space. Street and courtyard become the place where the reserved and private inner life extends into the open air. The deeper you move into these neighbourhoods, the more peaceful things become. There are always people, activities or sounds in the air (at least in the inhabited areasâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in some blocks, flats remain empty). The establishment of basic public facilities and the management of the landscape seem to have been left

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ue Epilo g Buildings in the city centre today bear few traces of their modernist origins (Photo: Marie Bruun Yde, 2006)

to the inhabitants. The latter seems to be most successful in backyards, which are the most obvious Swedish remains. Here, where yellow and turquoise houses lie staggered between one another, creating harmonic half-open courts, the grass is green, trees and bushes are well-arranged, well-kept and well-cut, and the atmosphere is that of a fertile oasis. Some places are quiet and deserted by people, while in other places children run around in groups and play. The spirit of a pleasant, recreational, and communal habitat is alive, if fragmented.

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The downtown centre, El Ordoneya, has been transformed into a lively souk. The appropriation of the original buildings at ground level is so elaborated that the modernist origin of the architecture is hard to discern: one has to look up to recognise the bare sober facades. Billboards, sun-blinders, facade coverings, windows in all sorts of shapes, chains of coloured light bulbs, small fences, flag strings, banners and

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signs mask the built environment in a colourful circus. Even cars are layered with patterned stickers that signal, ‘I’m-going-fast,’ resembling cartoon vehicles. Groups of stalls, owned by many traders selling a variety of food items and other goods to the residents, make up the bazaar. It is indicative of the understanding of space and the self-conception of the residents that in most of Egypt’s New Towns a market was the first amenity to be set up after the arrival of the inhabitants. Street life in the city centre is active. People, predominantly men, hang out in cafes, drink tea, talk, shop, stroll, and traffic is busy with pedestrians, bikers and cars. Looking closer at the organisation of the city reveals another set of substantial functional changes that have taken place. There is no squatting in 10th of Ramadan, which typically signals that no urban poor are living there. However, settlement follows a squatting pattern in certain areas. Neighbourhood 14 (the southernmost neighbourhood in the western wing of the city) is built up as a mix of walk-up apartment houses and site and services core houses, each originally consisting of a room, a bath and a sink.69 An aerial photo shows the clear difference between the two typologies: the core housing communities, by now more densely grown together than the larger organised apartment blocks, have developed into something akin to slum settlements. This is one of the few places Neighbourhood 14 is clearly differentiated between in 10th of Ramadan where the site and traditional apartments to the southwest and site and services housing to the northeast (Google Earth, services approach was actually applied. year?)

The area of commercial activity in Neighbourhood 14 is bigger than projected in the master plan, given that a temporary market and stores were erected. Instead of being concentrated in the centre of the neighbourhood as intended, the shopping areas have been scattered all around along the main spines, indicating that residents prefer having facilities in the vicinity of their home. People have opened shops and workshops on their own lots, offering services like bicycle and car repair and serving several

69. A field study of this neighbourhood has been carried out by Ayman Ashour, Bashayer Khairy & Ruby Morcos, “Developing a Strategy for Urbanization in Developing Countries: Site and Services” (Cairo: Ain Shams University, 1997).

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surrounding neighbourhoods. Religious and educational services have been reduced, compared to the plan. Only one mosque (of two) has been built, and the two projected nurseries have not yet been built. There are still plans to erect the lacking amenities. Only a fifth of the planned recreational areas have actually been completed. None of the intended landscaping or green space exists there. By self-initiated efforts, residents have planted the land directly around their houses with grass, flowers, trees and vegetables. Half the neighbourhood is categorised as ‘unknown use’—mainly undefined, empty, or unused space which was never planted with greenery, developed for recreation or prepared as parking lots. Several alterations have been made to the basic model of the core houses. Residents have divided the units; increased each unit’s area by incorporating courtyard areas into each house, leaving only small courts for illumination; extended the houses vertically to have more than one floor; and occupied part of the pedestrian pathway as private gardens. These alterations have been made haphazardly and vary from house to house. None of them are in accordance with the model extensions given by the planning group, but nonetheless they serve the needs of the families living there. The site and services model has been criticised for not giving ownership to people as intended. Many units have been sold to factories, which let them to their employees instead of giving ownership directly to the inhabitants, resulting in forced evictions of retired citizens. The local planning committee has not supervised this process. The places that are owned by the residents themselves have been the most successful in terms of personal involvement and maintenance. Ownership creates incentives to engage in upkeep and to follow individual impulses in shaping these houses into homes. The general trend is that the layout of both functions and of built forms has been revised with regard to the original planning and individually adjusted to the fullest extent. Through a combination of repeated programmatic and aesthetic manipulations of their surroundings, people in 10th of Ramadan have managed to define their own environment and identify with it. Characterised as informal by Egyptian authorities and academics, many of these initiatives point to the coexistence of the urban ‘underground’ and more formal urban laws and legislations. While these interventions are often clumsy, illegal and provisional, they are also vivacious and deeply meaningful efforts by local people to empower themselves and reconnect their surroundings with the day-today realities of life. 963

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ue Epilo g The New Town is characterised by large open spaces (To Build a City in Africa, p. 274-75, photo: Rachel Keeton, 2016)

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On the other hand, the redistribution of shops in Neighbourhood 14 and the consequent decentralisation of street life there is a sign of how 10th of Ramadan inhabitants have actually revived certain elements of the true spirit of the New Town. Where meeting and congregating spaces have been lost, inhabitants work to recreate them, and where people’s lives and activities have been separated, they work to reintegrate them. But the friction between the desire for urban life and the original segregated disposition of the urban elements has necessitated a shake-up of the monofunctional status quo. The businesses that have sprung up throughout residential areas give people from elsewhere reason to pass through and run errands. In this way the inconsistencies between planning and urbanism are corrected, and ghettoisation is avoided. Those mechanisms of appropriation developed in the residential areas of 10th of Ramadan can be seen everywhere: space is furnished and reprogrammed in accordance with long-established regional and cultural customs. Walls are overgrown with graffiti. Many of those one-dimensional buildings that were from the outset raised with a single grey slab now haven’t even got two identical windows. New glass, frames and paint in a rainbow of colours have been added. The overwhelming scale of the industrial architecture is made more innocuous because it is optically diminished. Like a mouse hole in an expanse of wall, the decorated openings in the facades celebrate the small hospitable home. The processes of adaptation in 10th of Ramadan bring out the peculiarity of urban life and its independence from architecture. Spatial hierarchies and structures of power seem to depend rather on the use of buildings and their functions than on constructions and idealized programs alone. Although perhaps forced into reaction, the inhabitants of 10th of Ramadan have made apparent the availability of other entrances and exits than the ones asphalted and framed.

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ARCHITECTURE AND SOCIETY WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE DEVELOPMENT OF 10TH OF RAMADAN? While Egyptian critics have been busy rattling off lists of obstacles to the success of 10th of Ramadan,70 the city that is there has not only been inhabited, but has grown and developed into a place of qualities and peculiarities that diverge from any universal modernism, and which cannot be measured or grasped by reference to original projections alone. There are a number of essential cultural and perceptual differences between the New Towns of the so-called First and the Third World. While New Towns and urban extensions tend to be regarded as ghettos in the West today, they are often perceived in a less negative, more nuanced way in African, Middle Eastern, Asian and Latin American countries. This is a result of their more complex history in these contexts, characterised by changeability. New Towns outside of the West are as often believed to maintain dependence as they are to offer the possibility of emancipation. Taking quite the opposite view of many Westerners who would deem these projects ‘containment camps’ for the lower class, it is not unusual for the intellectual and upper class in Islamic countries to see in modernism a possibly emancipatory way of dwelling and living. Consequently, New Towns have become places of refuge for the elite. Although this might not be the case for the lower classes, this phenomenon refutes the prevalent Western view that large residential areas derived conceptually and stylistically from modernism were solely designed for lower class residents—or would even produce socially less well-off people—and that as such their mechanised rigidity would doom them to catastrophe. Although the New Town programme has been far from successful in achieving its stated goals, there have been a variety of building activities in the New Towns during the last ten years and new communities are still being planned today. The ambition of the programme remains unchanged: to provide solutions to the housing crisis through alternatives to capital’s explosion and the so-called ‘wild’ urban expansion into farmland.

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70. Egyptian architects have declared the city a disaster, see e.g. Ahmed Shetawy, “The Politics of Physical Planning Practice: The Case of the Industrial Areas in Tenth Of Ramadan City, Egypt” (PhD thesis, University College London, 2004).

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The architecture of the New Towns around Cairo has created spaces, sequences, buildings and whole cities that did not exist before. These built forms purport to be the cause of the social, material, systematic, institutional and individual forms of existence that arise, develop and camp in them. However, left to deal with an incomplete and dysfunctional city, people in 10th of Ramadan have depended much on their own efforts in developing their new environment according to their needs. Thus, the power of architecture has manifested in its ability to reach out and meet various contemporary phenomena outside itself. The reception of the urban plot has produced a multifarious sub-cultural melee of local intervention, mediating between top-down ideology and individual, subjective desire. A description of these urban transformation processes can highlight the degree to which they take place in relation to or independent of the built environment. A walk or ride through the oldest areas of 10th of Ramadan shows that the local residents are capable of realising their own idea of how space should be. The way public and official discourse is received and reformulated at ‘the bottom,’ by ordinary city dwellers, can be observed through the numerous adaptations and transformations of both private and public premises. Buildings and public space are modified and their uses changed, diversifying formerly identical units. It is especially the earliest modernist areas that have undergone such changes. The most ordinary of urban interventions reveal a fabric of space and time defined by a complex realm of social practices, which due to their improvisational nature often have a very tactile character. These activities produce distinctive spatial forms, some of which are temporary, and some of which acquire more permanent architectural manifestation. The urban fabric here has been encircled by new layers of forms and functions reflecting desires and dystopias at street level: what people want, what they do not want, and how they compromise. Until now, the most well-researched studies on the post-planning phase and actual state of Cairo’s New Towns at the level of city dwellers have been carried out by French geographer Bénédicte Florin. The customisation of space taking place in the desert cities, Florin assumes, bears witness to the attempt to reduce the discrepancy between the discourse around residential areas and their reality as perceived by inhabitants. By implementing localisation strategies, New Town residents confront their illusions about the phantasmagoria of the New Town and work to deal with its imperfections. The way modernist spaces are used demonstrates how the constraints of these alien estates can be circumvented and points out the variety of uses to which they can be put. The aforementioned practices of adjustment, as Florin writes, all have to do with “adapting to a new situation as well as to the practices relating to production in, and of,

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the city. Both demonstrate the ability—and sometimes the claim—of the inhabitants to be full-fledged city dwellers despite the obstacles they encounter in these uncompleted areas and the feeling of relegation.”71 Spaces and surfaces that were initially without description or properties are given uses and functions by the way the inhabitants act in and inscribe them. Through collective activities that transform residential areas, people seek to create their own spaces: “the unequal, gradual and diverse actions of inhabitants on initially undefined ‘interstitial’ space (neither private nor public) attributes properties, meanings and uses to the space.”72 In their interactions with the New Town, people maintain their original cultural and social identity, showing that the pre-established nature of the Egyptian people exists and is adaptable. It is not a nature that prevents them from settling in the desert towns. Over time this hybridized milieu attains a new status, begins to make sense and obtains significance. Florin writes, “[W]hat was originally undefined, unoccupied no man’s land, merely crossed, or not even visited, becomes, in its turn, gradually adapted, used and named.”73 Well beyond planned intentions we can observe the emergence of ordinary or novel activities as well as normal and abnormal forms of use which transform the urban atmosphere and give specific practices and meaning to space. “The use of space in the residential area and some aspects of its layout (…) show how a built-up area which, at first sight, appears very stiff and restricting can become a resource in its own right,” as Florin describes.74 The city has become a product of the activities and movements of its people. Modernism has questioned whether national and cultural affiliations are embedded in or produced by designed forms. In observing the significant production of culture in 10th of Ramadan after the planning of the city, the question comes into its own. Practices, customs, beliefs and social behaviour relating to people and place were not contained in the pre-built environment, but are brought to being with the performance of urban actors. Although streets, houses and squares were planned as finished objects, they reveal themselves not to be just endings, but also beginnings. As architectural imperialism tries to mould its subjects, native heritage does not disappear but rather mutates. The anti-form project itself was not liberated from form, but the handling of space can be.

71. Florin 2006, 54. 72. Ibid.

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73. Ibid, 56 74. Ibid.

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The inhabitation, appropriation and furnishing of New Towns bear witness to the forms of differentiation that have responded to the proposed universal city. Investigating the present reality of these cities, especially those outside the West, reveals a patchwork of urbanities that are far removed from mono-functionality and sameness. Despite 10th of Ramadan’s heavily-planned material presence, the city has not had a calculable afterlife. Whereas the history of New Towns generally points back to the same original urban and architectural planning model, an empirical analysis endeavours to discover the myriad ways in which these cities, while ageing, have developed, altered, disintegrated and absorbed the vernacular, leading to locally and culturally camouflaged and hybridized cities. Depending on the situation, modernist planned cities often demonstrate a level of plasticity. They can accommodate different, sometimes conflicting images of reality. In this light, the Western disapproval of New Towns appears to be a luxury. New Town ghettoisation is a First World phenomenon; in the Second and Third World, these places generally do not have a ghetto image. Political will and changes in social structures have created ghettos in the West, not architecture. The productive question today is how to develop these often unhappily un-urban estates. Which qualities distinguish them from other building cultures, planned or unplanned? Planners can learn a lot from taking the urban reflexes and attitudes of the inhabitants to this kind of dwelling form as their starting point. Vernacular production in space can help us discover and suggest what should be protected by design and what should be left to its own devices. In the documentary Neuland (2007), which discusses the shrinking cities of Eastern Germany, architecture critic Wolfgang Kil talks about the contemporary fragmentation of society being a symptom of increasing individualism. According to Kil, the idea of the master plan and belief in collective ideas only emerge in times of crisis, like in the postwar decades. Revolutionary situations only break out when society is threatened. In the Egyptian context, the master planning that began in the Nasser era was nourished by the energy of the revolutionary years in the 1950s and 60s, but as soon as Egyptian society falls into political standstill the master plans are given up and become stagnant. Turning to opposite extremes within a single society, Egypt’s leaders have historically used the same urban planning system to materialise contradictory visions of a nation. While Nasser propagated a mix of socialism and Islamism, Sadat turned to neoliberalist reforms and capitalisation, totally rejecting the original New Town community spirit. Increasing privatisation and the growing influence of the military, however, have

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tipped the scales toward the latter vision. Mubarak and Sisi, while paying lip service to the notion that New Towns would provide for the Egyptian people and relieve them from the crowding and overpopulation that continued to plague them, continued and amplified Sadat’s neoliberalist agenda.

NEW TOWNS IN A NEW EGYPT Before the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, 10th of Ramadan reflected a society that had lost any thought or idea of collectivity, a society that was not a society anymore, a city without ideology. The contrasts within the built reality of Egypt are enormous: Cairo and its New Towns are full of vacant private houses and gated communities, while the majority of the people live in slums. But suddenly, out of this lost society, totally unpredictably, emerged a revolution in Cairo’s urban space, turning everything upside down including social order, culture and housing. The official stance of the authoritarian regime with respect to colonialism—to keep outer powers at a distance— has been exposed as propaganda against the will of the people, and a conflict between what is said and what is actually done. The events of the revolution in Egypt witnessed the rise of a collective consciousness that things can be shared more equitably. Cairo and 10th of Ramadan were undone once again, but with the hope to pick up and unfold the lost narratives of democracy and urban appropriation. The headquarters of the National Democratic Party, under which Mubarak secured his authoritarian rule, was set on fire during the 2011 revolution (Failed Architecture)

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While the democratic spirit of the 2011 revolution was in many ways crushed in subsequent years, new developments in the New Town programme have moved forward. Chief amongst these are the plans for the new administrative capital, tentatively named Wedian City. First officially announced by Sisi at the Egypt Economic Development Conference in 2015, the project has seen many phases and shifts in the roles of planner, developer, and owner. It was initially announced that the master plan for the city would be prepared by the American architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, but by 2017, a group of five Egyptian firms operating as the Urban Development Consortium had begun producing plans and rendered views of the

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proposed capital.75 Superlatives abound in the widely publicized plans for the city: it will allegedly contain the tallest tower in Africa, the largest church in the Middle East, the largest opera house outside of Europe, a park twice the size of New York’s Central Park, an airport larger than Heathrow, a theme park four times the size of Disneyland, and a presidential palace eight times larger than the White House. The government formed a new agency to administer the project, the so-called Administrative Capital for Urban Development (ACUD), which is a joint venture between the Egyptian military (51%) and NUCA (49%). According to Egypt’s investment minister, the project is to be entirely privately funded. While several Gulf developers were initially tied to the project, the state signed agreements with the China State Construction Engineering Corporation between 2016 and 2018 to develop most parts of the city. Projections for the completion of the capital were so accelerated as to seem almost comical: initial claims by the Egyptian government held that the city would be completed by 2020, just five years after it was announced. Nonetheless, completed parts of the city’s first phase by mid-2019 included the mega-mosque and cathedral, along with a hotel and conference center and three out of eight residential districts.76 While the timeline and funding structure for the rest of the phases remains to be disclosed, the targeted ribboncutting date for the first phase has held steady, hovering between 2020 and 2022. A target population of 5 to 7 million in a 700 km2 area makes this the most ambitious purpose-built capital to date: it would dwarf the present-day populations of Islamabad (1 million), Brasília (3 million) and Canberra (400,000) combined.77 The city is planned to contain 21 residential districts, including at least 1.1 million units, though the proportion of ‘affordable’ housing units remains undisclosed. Speaking to The Guardian in 2018, project spokesman Khaled El-Husseiny avoided giving details on pricing: “Forget the numbers, they’re not important and not fixed. We have a dream, and we’re building our dreams now.”78 Plans for the new capital will necessarily differ from other New Towns due to its scale, the type and quantity of amenities planned, and the fact that it is intended to serve as the new base for Egypt’s government agencies and activities. Egypt urbanisation expert David Sims has noted that housing in the new capital would likely remain unaffordable for the lower middle class, and especially for the poor who make

75. This consortium is comprised of architects, urban planners and engineers, including the following firms: Archplan Architects & Planners, Yasser Mansour Concept Architects, Cube Consultants, Land Consultants and Ökoplan Engineering Consultations. 76. Mohamed Abdallah and Aidan Lewis, “Egypt’s new desert capital faces delays as it battles for funds,” Reuters, 13 May, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-new-capital/egypts-new-desertcapital-faces-delays-as-it-battles-for-funds-idUSKCN1SJ10I. 77. All estimates from 2017 census in each country. 78. Ruth Michaelson, “‘Cairo has started to become ugly’: why Egypt is building a new capital city,” The Guardian, 18 May, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/may/08/cairo-why-egypt-build-newcapital-city-desert.

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ue Epilo g A rendering of the proposed new capital, showing the main park and the central business district (Urban Development Consortium)

Model of the New Capital presented at Egyptian Economic Development Conference in 2015 (Reuters)

Construction in the new capital ((Khaled Desouki / AFP)

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up most of the informal settlement population in Cairo. By his estimate, however, “upper-level employees can probably afford these units,” especially if the government follows through with subsidising mortgages.79 This falls in line with most New Towns around Cairo, where even a relatively stable mid-level civil servant’s salary is nowhere near enough to cover the cost of living in most housing developments. Despite scepticism regarding its scale, infrastructure demands, environmental impacts and population targets, which have plagued the development of nearly every planned city in Egypt’s history, the new capital appears to be materialising at a rapid pace. While there are vast differences between the new administrative capital and other typical New Towns, the approach and response to this project holds a number of lessons for the New Town programme in Egypt, both cautionary and exemplary. Positive aspects of the proposal include diversity of program and robust infrastructural links. Unlike other New Towns, where amenities beyond the mosque and the supermarket almost always fail to materialise, construction seems to be well underway on promised facilities such as hotels and green space. Additionally, there are some indications that other New Towns may benefit from the development of the new capital. The Sisi administration has declared its commitment to constructing a railway between old Cairo, the new administrative capital, and 10th of Ramadan. Egypt’s Ministry of Transport signed contracts with the Export-Import Bank of China between 2018 and 2019 to fund a suite of rail projects connecting these and other New Towns including El Shorouk, Obour and Badr. Unlike unfulfilled infrastructure promises of the past—which have plagued 10th of Ramadan since its inception—work was said to have begun as of February 2019, and was expected to be completed within two years. This and other ‘halo’ effects allow Cairo and surrounding New Towns to benefit from the development of the new capital.

The new capital’s mega-mosque, Al-Fattah Al-Alim, was inaugurated in January 2019 (Al Ahram)

On the other hand, several aspects of the new capital are cause for concern—both for Greater Cairo and for the New Town programme as a whole. As mentioned, the city will be largely unaffordable for even the middle class, let alone the working class and poor. This proves especially ironic considering the stated purpose of the city to 79. Midolo, “Inside Egypt’s new capital.”

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ue Epilo g Islamic-influenced new housing in New Ismailia City, part of the Suez Canal Area Development Project (Ahmed Gomaa / Xinhua)

Sisi and Xi Jinping visit the temple of Luxor (Getty << other image??)

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serve as Egypt’s new administrative base, as most civil servants in the country make far less than required to afford to relocate there. Aesthetically, the imagery produced by firms engaged in the design of the city, tentative as it may be, shows an alarming lack of regional consideration, instead mimicking the aesthetic of the neo-futurist metropolis. In all its slick homogeneity, the government’s vision for a new capital falls short of promising efforts in other New Towns to incorporate Arab and Islamic cultural markers in housing design. In addition, the project is potentially devastating from an environmental standpoint, as the projected population, scale, and proposed speed of construction raise concerns about waste disposal, energy and water supply, and the city’s carbon footprint. As the aims and efforts of the Egyptian New Town programme have shifted along with the national upheaval of the revolution, geopolitical shifts outside of the country have had an impact on urbanism in Egypt as well. Whereas the Cold War years saw the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union play out in Egyptian cities, the increased prominence of China on the world stage has resulted in an entirely new set of players in the building and construction sector in Egypt. In 2014, China and Egypt announced a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership,’ encompassing trade, investment, and political ties. A suite of deals signed between Sisi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2018 included development of railways, energy projects, and real estate.80 While this reflects broader trends—China surpassed the US to become the leading trading partner for all of Africa in 2009, and has invested heavily in infrastructure projects across the continent—New Towns in Egypt have also benefited directly from Chinese investment. The China State Construction Engineering Company (CSCEC), the world’s largest construction company by revenue, is set to build at least 20 towers in the business district of the new administrative capital, and NUCA signed agreements with the 80. Heba Saleh, “Egypt sees Chinese investment, and tourists as a ‘win-win’ boost,” Financial Times, 30 October, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/e490d960-7613-11e8-8cc4-59b7a8ef7d3d.

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Chinese CGC Overseas Construction Group in 2018 to establish the first industrial zone in the fourth generation New Town of New Alamein. Meanwhile, increasing Gulf interest in Egypt over the last several decades has also influenced development patterns across the country. Beginning with the funding of Sheikh Zayed City at the behest of Sheikh Zayed himself—the founding father of the United Arab Emirates—Egypt has seen increasing direct investment from the UAE (construction, infrastructure) and Saudi Arabia (arms) in particular. “You may call them satellite cities, but they’re not satellites any more—now they’ve become the planets themselves,” claimed NUCA Vice President Adel Naguib in an interview with The Guardian in 2010.81 More than 40 years out from the inception of the programme, the economic, environmental and urban implications of the Egyptian New Towns certainly cannot be denied, and 10th of Ramadan is no exception. In its postplanned, heterotopic state, 10th of Ramadan holds many lessons about the reality of cities, the application of space, the direct interaction between city dwellers and material organisation, and the mutability of the urban fabric. In terms of its relative openness, flexibility, and the will of its people to make the city their own, 10th of Ramadan can provide an alternative vision to the droll, forward-marching ambitions of Egypt’s current New Town programme, especially as manifested in the new administrative capital. It is a representation of individual social requirements and collective formation impulses pointing towards what an authentic future city might look like, a materialised urban manifesto highlighting the advantage of and need for democratic bottomup planning procedures. The salvation of languished cities like 10th of Ramadan is inherent in the cities themselves.

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81. Jack Shenker, “Desert storm,” The Guardian, 11 June, 2011.

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*Epilogue

How to survive the twentieth century?

The fate of the old New Town, the rise of the new generation, and the ongoing search for context.

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Literature A CITY DESIGNED FOR THE OPEN SOCIETY J. Tellinga, De Grote Verbouwing. Verandering van naoorlogse woonwijken, Rotterdam 2004, p.20. WiMBY! Welcome Into My Backyard. Internationale Bouwtentoonstelling Rotterdam-Hoogvliet, Rotterdam 2000.

Boris, Iofan. “O printsipial’nykh polozheniyakh planirovki i zastroyki mikrorayonov.” In Mastera sovetskoy arkhitektury ob arkhitekture, 2, edited by Mikhail Barkhin, 240–242. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975.

Dale, David. “Divided We Stand: Cities, Social Unity and Post-War Reconstruction in Soviet Russia, 1945–1953.” Urban Societies in Europe 24, no. 4 (2015): 493–516.

Bratskaya GES imeni 50-letiya Velikogo Oktyabrya. Tekhnichesky otchyot o proyektirovanii, stroitel’stve i ekspluatatsii, 2, edited by Ivan Naymushin. Moscow: Energiya, 1975.

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Colofon "New Towns on the Cold War Frontier" 2006-2020 © Crimson Historians and Urbanists, The International New Town Institute and the authors. With support of: Creative Industries Fund, EFL Fund and The International New Town Institute. It was not possible to find all the copyright holders of the illustrations used. Interested parties are requested to contact crimson@crimsonweb.org.

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