Informality |
Urban INTERVENTION |
Creative and innovative solutions arise from the informal and playful. 85% of housing worldwide is built illegally, or outside the structure of urbanization, design, and policy.
For architecture, informality has been a theme ever since John Turner’s research in Lima, Peru, highlighted the capacities of the urban poor to house themselves. Yet, many informal settlements are not limited for the urban poor and the slum. Informality in architecture is as much about the process as it is about form. The goal is not to romanticize poverty, for the urban slums of the world are places of precarious health conditions, crime, and other social ills. Instead, despite their disorder, slums are also places of entrepreneurship and human energy – neighborhoods that, with proper support, could one day become the vision.
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Modernist architects looked to find a cure for social ills by cutting up the city and trying to fix the blemishes of urban informality. Today’s architects can abandon that medical metaphor for another: stitch the city together through urban intervention. Urban intervention responds to opportunities; as much as solving problems they offer possibilities. It is an activist strategy of design, that highlights social and spatial and seeks relationships to intervene within the current environment of the city. Small architectural interventions in the city, can create big and meaning change.
Latin AmericaLatin America is an important case study about urbanization and architecture and one can even regard it as home of some of the greatest experiments in urban living. While there has been a significant trend in the rapid urbanization of cities, Latin America experienced mass urbanization long before China and Africa. Many countries in Latin America have high levels of urbanisation that has forced city governments deal with issues in the urban environment. Many people think of Latin America as part of the developing world, but there are elements of modernity, a stable economy, and politics that makes Latin America more developed and more progressive than some of its West counterparts.
No other region of the world has demonstrated the kind of collective effort and imagination that Latin America has in addressing the chronic symptoms of rapid, unplanned urbanization. Whether we’re talking about tackling housing, crime, transport, segregation or the lack of political participation, this continent has set precedents that could have a transformative effect in other parts of the developing, and indeed, the developed world. Design as ActivismThe return of the political to architecture does not involve designing a building but designing a process of political engagement - one by which architectural ideas, strategies, practices, and values are developed and disseminated in collaboration and contestation with greater society.
To create a new way of designing, and a new way of conceiving the city new methods and equipments need to come into the surface of the sustainability movement. The conventional wisdom of what is now taught as economics by-passes the poor, the very people for whom development is really needed. The economics of giantism and automation is a left-over of 19th century conditions and 19th century thinking and it is totally incapable of solving any of the real problems of today. A practice that calls for social engagement and pragmatism as a guiding principle is about architecture and design that is: -cheap enough so that they are accessible to virtually everyone -suitable for small-scale application -compatible with man’s need for creativity |
From the Middle-Out
Some think that the solution to the problem is a bottom-up approach where citizens are empowered to solve society's greatest problems. They demand better practices and it is from them that paradigm shift takes place. Others think that the real issue is on a lack of responsible top-down governance. It is the systematic tenets of capitalism, neoliberalism and globalization that allow corporate and political powers to control capital and other resources. Grassroots, bottom-up mobilization is truly inspiring, but is not enough to ensure sustainability. The solution is perhaps a middle-out approach, convincing both the top down institutions and the grassroot movements about the importance of sustainability.
In addition, often times these public private partnerships that work somewhere in the middle are the most successful in instilling long term change. In terms of social sustainability we want a bottom-up approach so bad. There are academics, critics, and urban scholars that urge for the resurgence of Equity in Sustainability and the principal framework. Yet, the "bottom" is not available.
In addition, often times these public private partnerships that work somewhere in the middle are the most successful in instilling long term change. In terms of social sustainability we want a bottom-up approach so bad. There are academics, critics, and urban scholars that urge for the resurgence of Equity in Sustainability and the principal framework. Yet, the "bottom" is not available.