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Intelligent Coalitions
One participant, frog’s Robert Fabricant, captured the day’s conversation with a series of sketches.
The one-day Social Impact Design Summit, held on February 27, 2012, brought together individuals who engage in socially responsible design every day: public-interest architects, industrial designers, planners, civil-society designers, landscape architects, engineers, and inventors from Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, working in the private, public and social sectors.
The day focused on the following key questions: What are the gaps that hinder growth? What are the successful and sustainable organizational models? How can we build systemic, sustainable support for current and future designers in the field?
One fundamental gap is limited recognition of the value of design in the social sector, curtailing demand for design services. Social design lacks clearly defined and accessible language, identity, and standards. There is no pipeline in place, nor incentives and limited opportunity to build experiences in the social sector, which prevents practitioners from committing full-time to this area of design. Knowledge gaps exist in understanding socioeconomic and cultural differences and the underlying causes that created the problems, which may in fact require more systemic solutions – not yet prevalent in social design.
Later in the day, more thinkers, funders, and designers joined the discussion to brainstorm strategies and actions. There were a number of ideas formulated, including establishing a culture of evaluation using storytelling; data visualization and case studies to describe the value and impact of design; creating intelligent coalitions such as Web-based knowledge hubs; and imbedded community innovation centers that build local knowledge and capacity through global partnerships among the centers, funders, universities, local innovators, and private companies.
We plan to post a series of short video blogs from the day and have invited participants to write guest posts to extend the conversation. The ideas will be compiled in a white paper this spring.
We want to hear from you, too. Please contribute to the conversation by sharing your thoughts in the comment section below.
Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
The Summit was planned in partnership with the Lemelson Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Social Impact Design Summit
What? Design is a process that can solve problems, and socially responsible design is design that seeks to solve problems which vex the world’s poor and marginalized communities. Simply put, socially responsible design uses innovation and the tools of design to improve access to services such as healthcare and education and increase social, economic, and environmental sustainability.
When? On February 27, 2012, leaders from design, academia, the community, and both public and private sectors will meet in New York at the Social Impact Design Summit. We want to use this event as a chance to broaden the discussion about the current and future state of socially responsible design: What is it? Who’s doing it well? Why does it matter? What does it mean for the future? The Summit is planned in partnership with Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, The Lemelson Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Why? Socially responsible design covers a broad range of design disciplines. As foundations and organizations interested in this topic, we are still learning about the players and pieces that sustain this area of design. We organized this small gathering to learn and hear from people who engage in this work every day.
Why NOW? It is a pivotal moment in the field of socially responsible design. More than ever, design professionals are involved in projects that have a social impact. Student enrollment in educational programs for social innovation is growing exponentially. Tom Fisher of the University of Minnesota has likened the emergence of this area of design to the growth of public health as a field independent from medicine, and we think that is an apt metaphor. Where are we in the development timeline of this new field?
Who? The Summit is bringing together individuals and organizations with innovative approaches to socially responsible design, as well as public and private funders that support invention, innovation, and design efforts. Each member of this group is crucial to the future of this topic—leaders in their field, people with strong opinions and big ideas, people who like to talk!
You can see some of the people and organizations represented at the Summit talk about their work and the ingenious solutions they are working on to solve some of the world’s most complex problems:
- Amy Smith, D-Lab, MIT
- Timothy Prestero, Design that matters
- Bernard Kiwia, Global Cycle Solutions
- Mariana Amatullo, Design Matters
How YOU can participate: At the Summit, we will ask participants to answer some questions. They are not easy questions, and they certainly have no “right” answer. We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think!
- Where are the gaps in this developing field?
- What are the organizational models that support social impact and public interest design?
- How can we effectively prepare future generations of designers for this growing area of design?
Comment below or join the discussion on Facebook.
We don’t expect to solve these problems in one day, but we do expect to get people talking. Watch this space for follow-up blogs and news from the Summit.
Bill Moggridge
Director
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Jason Schupbach
Design Director
National Endowment for the Arts
Photo credits:
Design with the Other 90%: CITIES, Jiko ya jamii (Community Cooker)
Photo: Community Cooker-Jiko Ya Jamii
Design with the Other 90%: CITIES, Floating Community Lifeboats
Photo: Abir Abdullah/Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha
Design for the Other 90%, Kinkajou Portable Library
Photo: 2002-2005 Design that Matters, Inc.
Vendor Power
Photo: Center for Urban Pedagogy
Design Impact at Organization of Development, Action, and Maintenance (ODAM) in Thiruchuli, Tamil Nadu, India
Photo: Daniel Timothy Edmunson
Design for the Other 90%, Bamboo Treadle Pump
Photo: 2003 International Development Enterprises (IDE)
Design with the Other 90%: CITIES, Kibera Public Space Projects
Photo: Kounkuey Design Initiative
Design with the Other 90%: CITIES, Bicycle Phone Charger
Photo: Global Cycle Solutions 2011
Windsor Farmers Market by Project H Design
Photo: Project H Design
The Social Impact Design Summit is made possible by The Lemelson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Surdna Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation.
Constructive Maps
Individuals whose own research explores the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Descriptions of the world’s informal settlements are often filled with two kinds of figures – images of families living and working in deeply impoverished conditions are matched with global urbanization statistics. Mediating between these two types of information is the process of enumeration and community mapping. Produced by citizens themselves, they reveal locations, conditions, and lives often unseen in plain sight.
Ushahidi, an open-source platform for information collection, visualization and interaction, as used on websites such as Voice of Kibera, reverses the top-down, omniscient position of power of institutionally produced maps. These interactive websites follow a methodology developed over 125 years ago by the female residents of the Hull-House Social Settlement located in the slums of the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago, Illinois. There, under the direction of Florence Kelley, a trained social scientist and labor activist, the work of US Census agents conducting a “Special Investigation into the Slums of Great Cities” was translated by Hull-House residents into Nationalities and Wage Maps.
The Hull-House Nationalities Map of the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago, produced in 1893. Paired with a Wage Map of the same area, it revealed a previously unseen dynamic of labor and immigration. Image courtesy University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections [HV4196C4H761895 c5 05-08]
Although they may look conventional to us today, in 1893 when they were produced the Hull-House maps were the first of their kind in the United States. They made visible the complex overlaps of activity, ethnicity, race, income distribution, public and private space, and legal and illegal occupations in this immigrant district, rendering a three dimensional image of a space previously understood only as a “ghetto” or slum. Importantly, Hull-House residents lived within the neighborhood they surveyed and served.
Hull-House Social Settlement resident greeting visitors at the front door. Image courtesy Jane Addams Hull-House Photographic Collection, [JAMC_0000_0125_0528], University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections
Agnes Holbrook, in charge of the creation of the Hull-House maps, understood their importance in creating a “Kodak view [of a] shifting scene” of the district. Immigrants moved in and out of the tenements and old frame buildings were literally rolled away to make room for new factories. Although such social surveys arose out of concerns surrounding industrialization of the American city – thought to be unruly, wild, and uncontrollable – for the residents of Hull-House they were primarily a tool for social activism, and what Jane Addams, a co-founder of the settlement and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, referred to as “constructive work,” what we may refer to today as “social work.” With the information articulated in the maps the settlement’s residents were able to argue for health and sanitation, factory and labor (Florence Kelley founded the National Consumers League), and charity and child welfare (Julia Lathrop became the first director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau) reform in the American city.
Enumeration of a community in Katima Mulilo, Namibia by Shack/Slum Dwellers International, from the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition. Credit: Melanie Fox, Smithsonian Institution, 2011.
While the residents of Hull-House lived in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward, their educational and class status distinguished them from most of their neighbors. Today techniques of census-taking and map-making enables citizens to advocate on their own behalf. Shack/Slum Dwellers International uses the tools of enumeration and mapping for the purposes of improving informal settlements and building communities. Design tools, both produced by residents and shared via horizontal dissemination, community-based mapping stresses local problem solving and community empowerment over top-down planning and control.
Map Kibera on the Voice of Kibera website, integrating the Ushahidi platform, from the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition. Credit: GroundTruth.
So too, Ushahidi advances community-based work, adding the important layer of interactivity and rapid dissemination of information. Where the Hull-House Nationalities map could only snap a picture of a moment in time the online Voice of Kibera is a “living project”, revealing conditions and reporting incidents of the informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya in real time. Overlaid on a locally produced Map Kibera , it is part of OpenStreetMap, an open-source map of the world. Both deeply local through on the ground annotation and networked through the use of GPS, SMS, and the internet, these maps allow a community to visualize and to represent itself – an embedded and embodied globalization.
Sharon Haar teaches architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago and the website Urban Archaeology Chicago. Her current research investigates the role of entrepreneurship, design innovation, and global networking in architectural practices devoted to social activism and humanitarian relief.
Favela Chic
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Top left to right: Waterfront Boardwalk Malecón del Salado (Guayaquil); Water Channel and Promenade in Moravia, Park around Metrocable structure in Santo Domingo, Quality School Antonio Derka in Santo Domingo (Medellin); bottom left to right: Restoration of Juan Bobo Creek in Santo Domingo (Medellin); Metrocable (Caracas); Natural Water Spring Restoration and Park in the favela Guarapiranga (Sao Paulo); Elevator in the favela Morro do Cantagalo (Rio de Janeiro, photo credit: Andy Carman); Metrocable Santo Domingo (Medellin)
With the unprecedented increase of informal settlements, or favelas, and a large percentage of the world’s urbanization happening informally, contemporary urban discourses and practices have re-centered their attention on urban informality. Following a long history of tabula rasa, public housing, self-help, and sites-and-services schemes, current approaches to the favela have evolved to strategies characterized as ‘urban acupuncture,’ aiming to minimize displacement while improving conditions in the area. We are now witnessing spectacular libraries in depressed neighborhoods, gondola systems in marginalized areas, and museums in squatter settlements. It appears we have returned to the notion “slums of hope,” 1 no longer vilifying informal settlements but viewing them as integral in the development of the city, thereby reformulating the discourse of the growing city and the relations between global and informal. With design as a central component in the approach, and through interventions that acknowledge and legitimize informality’s architectural and urban potentials, designers and planners have adopted the favela as a new paradigm in the development of the city; a paradigm I call Favela Chic.
Section diagram of waterfront boardwalk Malecón del Salado, Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Left to right: Waterfront site plan and intervention diagram; Section diagram through existing urban fabric, favela Parque Royal, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Based on comparative empirical work in various countries of Latin America, where some of the most striking efforts to address favelas are taking place, a first part of my research, analyzes the potentials and limitations of current practices in ‘slum upgrading.’ Although current design-centered interventions can be catalysts to claim rights to the city, conversations about key issues, short and long-term outcomes are critical: Why, where and how are these interventions operating?
Favela Chic Tools: Acknowledging auto-construction as a legitimate way of providing housing, and seeking instead to minimize displacement and integrate the favela with the city, projects focus on aspects that are most absent in settlements: infrastructure, public space, and public equipment. Although ranging in types and scales, from small acupunctural projects to expansively designed infrastructural networks, I identified seven common architectural tools based on comparative field studies in Latin America.
As a way to record my research observations, analysis, and travels, I began a blog FAVELissues in 2010. More recently, it has transformed into an interdisciplinary platform featuring emergent and prominent practitioners and researchers in the field of urban informality.
Communal Laundry in the favela Vidigal, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Many interventions failed to recognize internal realities of the area leading to difficult challenges in the long-term sustainability of projects. As a general observation, some of the other major critiques of Favela Chic interventions include: Confused priorities--many of the interventions seen place a great emphasis on aesthetics and representation, overlooking many of the structural issues and recurring problems in the favela; Shortermism--There is a high difficulty in the maintenance and long-term sustainability of projects; Economic outcomes and formal market overlooked--Many interventions disregarding the rise in property values, frequently leading to an absolute formalization, making the system no longer flexible for the residents; Disconnection from the internal logic of the settlement--Many projects use the favela as a backdrop but remain disconnected from the internal needs, use values, and hierarchies of the area.
Expanding on the comparative analysis done, a second component of my research, Rethinking the Favela: Favela Chic to Urban Stitching, focuses on the development of alternative propositions to address urban informality. The goal here is not to establish a set of ‘best practices,’ but to re-evaluate the current standards and practices. Challenging the adoption of an image of social good, and instead encouraging a deeper engagement of cultural specificities and socio-economic realities in each context, the research aims to enable new spatial strategies, policies and political possibilities surrounding the favela. In this manner, the final product, which I am currently working to publish, hopes to further the understanding between design, planning and informality in the workings of an urban project, a commu-nity, and a sustainable and inclusive city.
As a first part of the final product, a set of cards contains questions, quotes and observations as well as a background manual and instructions, presenting an alternative systematized approach for the operations and processes of spatial practices in the context of the favela.
Adriana holds a dual Master’s degree in Architecture, and City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. Born and raised in Colombia (S.A), she received a BS Arch (Honors) from the University of Virginia in 2004. After working for Rafael Viñoly Architects, and OPX Global in Washington DC, Adriana moved to California to begin her graduate studies in 2007. As a 2010 John K. Branner Fellow, Adriana traveled the world, focusing her research, FAVELA CHIC, on socio-cultural aspects of design, particularly analyzing the role and relationship between architecture, planning and urban informality. Adriana is the founder of the blog www.FAVELissues.com, and she is currently working on publishing her research and thesis.
All image credits: Adriana Navarro-Sertich, unless otherwise noted; for Favela Chic Tools, under Skins + Signs: Painted facades in favela Santa Marta source: www.favelapainting.com, Tourist Map of Medellin source: www.medellin.gov.co, and under Tectonic Uplift, Manufactured Sites Renderings source: Estudio Teddy Cruz
1 Perlman, Janice, “Six Misconceptions about Squatter Settlements,” in Development, Journal of the Society for International --Development, l986: 4, pp. 40-44.
Favela Chic
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Top left to right: Waterfront Boardwalk Malecón del Salado (Guayaquil); Water Channel and Promenade in Moravia, Park around Metrocable structure in Santo Domingo, Quality School Antonio Derka in Santo Domingo (Medellin); bottom left to right: Restoration of Juan Bobo Creek in Santo Domingo (Medellin); Metrocable (Caracas); Natural Water Spring Restoration and Park in the favela Guarapiranga (Sao Paulo); Elevator in the favela Morro do Cantagalo (Rio de Janeiro, photo credit: Andy Carman); Metrocable Santo Domingo (Medellin)
With the unprecedented increase of informal settlements, or favelas, and a large percentage of the world’s urbanization happening informally, contemporary urban discourses and practices have re-centered their attention on urban informality. Following a long history of tabula rasa, public housing, self-help, and sites-and-services schemes, current approaches to the favela have evolved to strategies characterized as ‘urban acupuncture,’ aiming to minimize displacement while improving conditions in the area. We are now witnessing spectacular libraries in depressed neighborhoods, gondola systems in marginalized areas, and museums in squatter settlements. It appears we have returned to the notion “slums of hope,” 1 no longer vilifying informal settlements but viewing them as integral in the development of the city, thereby reformulating the discourse of the growing city and the relations between global and informal. With design as a central component in the approach, and through interventions that acknowledge and legitimize informality’s architectural and urban potentials, designers and planners have adopted the favela as a new paradigm in the development of the city; a paradigm I call Favela Chic.
Section diagram of waterfront boardwalk Malecón del Salado, Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Left to right: Waterfront site plan and intervention diagram; Section diagram through existing urban fabric, favela Parque Royal, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Based on comparative empirical work in various countries of Latin America, where some of the most striking efforts to address favelas are taking place, a first part of my research, analyzes the potentials and limitations of current practices in ‘slum upgrading.’ Although current design-centered interventions can be catalysts to claim rights to the city, conversations about key issues, short and long-term outcomes are critical: Why, where and how are these interventions operating?
Favela Chic Tools: Acknowledging auto-construction as a legitimate way of providing housing, and seeking instead to minimize displacement and integrate the favela with the city, projects focus on aspects that are most absent in settlements: infrastructure, public space, and public equipment. Although ranging in types and scales, from small acupunctural projects to expansively designed infrastructural networks, I identified seven common architectural tools based on comparative field studies in Latin America.
As a way to record my research observations, analysis, and travels, I began a blog FAVELissues in 2010. More recently, it has transformed into an interdisciplinary platform featuring emergent and prominent practitioners and researchers in the field of urban informality.
Communal Laundry in the favela Vidigal, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Many interventions failed to recognize internal realities of the area leading to difficult challenges in the long-term sustainability of projects. As a general observation, some of the other major critiques of Favela Chic interventions include: Confused priorities--many of the interventions seen place a great emphasis on aesthetics and representation, overlooking many of the structural issues and recurring problems in the favela; Shortermism--There is a high difficulty in the maintenance and long-term sustainability of projects; Economic outcomes and formal market overlooked--Many interventions disregarding the rise in property values, frequently leading to an absolute formalization, making the system no longer flexible for the residents; Disconnection from the internal logic of the settlement--Many projects use the favela as a backdrop but remain disconnected from the internal needs, use values, and hierarchies of the area.
Expanding on the comparative analysis done, a second component of my research, Rethinking the Favela: Favela Chic to Urban Stitching, focuses on the development of alternative propositions to address urban informality. The goal here is not to establish a set of ‘best practices,’ but to re-evaluate the current standards and practices. Challenging the adoption of an image of social good, and instead encouraging a deeper engagement of cultural specificities and socio-economic realities in each context, the research aims to enable new spatial strategies, policies and political possibilities surrounding the favela. In this manner, the final product, which I am currently working to publish, hopes to further the understanding between design, planning and informality in the workings of an urban project, a commu-nity, and a sustainable and inclusive city.
As a first part of the final product, a set of cards contains questions, quotes and observations as well as a background manual and instructions, presenting an alternative systematized approach for the operations and processes of spatial practices in the context of the favela.
Adriana holds a dual Master’s degree in Architecture, and City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. Born and raised in Colombia (S.A), she received a BS Arch (Honors) from the University of Virginia in 2004. After working for Rafael Viñoly Architects, and OPX Global in Washington DC, Adriana moved to California to begin her graduate studies in 2007. As a 2010 John K. Branner Fellow, Adriana traveled the world, focusing her research, FAVELA CHIC, on socio-cultural aspects of design, particularly analyzing the role and relationship between architecture, planning and urban informality. Adriana is the founder of the blog www.FAVELissues.com, and she is currently working on publishing her research and thesis.
All image credits: Adriana Navarro-Sertich, unless otherwise noted; for Favela Chic Tools, under Skins + Signs: Painted facades in favela Santa Marta source: www.favelapainting.com, Tourist Map of Medellin source: www.medellin.gov.co, and under Tectonic Uplift, Manufactured Sites Renderings source: Estudio Teddy Cruz
1 Perlman, Janice, “Six Misconceptions about Squatter Settlements,” in Development, Journal of the Society for International --Development, l986: 4, pp. 40-44.
Design by the Rest
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
What does it mean to be a developing country? Among other things, it means that the country’s future is to become developed, or so it seems.
In 2010 I launched a competition that challenged the commonly held idea that developed countries are a model to follow with an open call for designers and thinkers from the “third world” to invent creative solutions for some of the most pressing “first world” problems - eating disorders, low birth rate and aging population and consumerism. The Design for the First World competition (Dx1W) was created in part as a call to arms for developing countries to take their future into their own hands, rather than leave it in the hands of well intentioned “do-gooders” or the International Monetary Fund.
Real TIme Chat by Layla Cavalcante, the winning entry in Dx1W
The online competition received 30 design submissions and interest from over 150 countries – from Bangladesh to Mexico. The winning entry was selected by an international jury of designers, architects and thinkers from “third world countries” whose own work is relevant to entire world. The proposal, Real Time Chat, came from Brazil’s Layla Cavalcante. Addressing technology-based isolation an add-on device for headphones indicates the user willingness to chat with strangers. The runner-up was Powdered Neem as Fast Food Condiment from Bangladesh, a provocative proposal that tackles obesity by using the bitter leaf neem on fast food.
Design for the First World organizers declared 2010 as the Year of the First World In Need. In retrospect, as we approach the end of 2011, this might have been the better year for that prescient title. If events continue along the same path it may be an apt title in the years that follow too. Hopefully this will establish a new order where the “rest” can play an equally important role as the “west” - in the only world we have.
Carolina Vallejo is a designer and educator, from Colombia. She currently spends her time between Makerhood, Nexus Interactive Arts and Superflux in London, the Koshirakura Landscape Workshop in Japan, the Institute of advanced architecture of Catalonia in Barcelona and cooking everywhere she can.
Design by the Rest
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
What does it mean to be a developing country? Among other things, it means that the country’s future is to become developed, or so it seems.
In 2010 I launched a competition that challenged the commonly held idea that developed countries are a model to follow with an open call for designers and thinkers from the “third world” to invent creative solutions for some of the most pressing “first world” problems - eating disorders, low birth rate and aging population and consumerism. The Design for the First World competition (Dx1W) was created in part as a call to arms for developing countries to take their future into their own hands, rather than leave it in the hands of well intentioned “do-gooders” or the International Monetary Fund.
Real TIme Chat by Layla Cavalcante, the winning entry in Dx1W
The online competition received 30 design submissions and interest from over 150 countries – from Bangladesh to Mexico. The winning entry was selected by an international jury of designers, architects and thinkers from “third world countries” whose own work is relevant to entire world. The proposal, Real Time Chat, came from Brazil’s Layla Cavalcante. Addressing technology-based isolation an add-on device for headphones indicates the user willingness to chat with strangers. The runner-up was Powdered Neem as Fast Food Condiment from Bangladesh, a provocative proposal that tackles obesity by using the bitter leaf neem on fast food.
Design for the First World organizers declared 2010 as the Year of the First World In Need. In retrospect, as we approach the end of 2011, this might have been the better year for that prescient title. If events continue along the same path it may be an apt title in the years that follow too. Hopefully this will establish a new order where the “rest” can play an equally important role as the “west” - in the only world we have.
Carolina Vallejo is a designer and educator, from Colombia. She currently spends her time between Makerhood, Nexus Interactive Arts and Superflux in London, the Koshirakura Landscape Workshop in Japan, the Institute of advanced architecture of Catalonia in Barcelona and cooking everywhere she can.
Power Tools
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Design as a tool to support the political power of the poor in Cape Town — moving from a dream to reality.
It is time to rethink the significance of design in our urbanizing world. This is one of the many things that I have learned from communities linked to Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Design can be seen as a political tool to support the poor to bridge the divides that exist in cities in the Global South.
Consider a story of just one small community that has become the spark for work across one of the biggest cities in Africa. There’s an area in Cape Town, South Africa, called Philippi, which has many informal neighborhoods with shacks almost literally on top of each other. Along Sheffield Road, there is a small neighborhood of 167 shack households. The shacks there were locked in a tight configuration where the only way to walk through the area was through a narrow maze of dark alleys. There were no toilets and only a couple water points. This land was reserved for future widening of the road. Therefore, the city government had no plans to develop the area.
Sheffield Road residents discuss a plan for "re-blocking" a cluster of shacks in the neighborhood.
But the community used design as a tool to (1) organize itself, (2) plan its space, and (3) negotiate with the city. Led by the women in the community, they began saving small amounts of money. They also performed their own socioeconomic household survey and drew a map of the existing neighborhood layout. These residents also worked with a community architect from a local NGO, the Community Organisation Resource Centre, to design a method for rearranging the shacks in the settlement to open up public space. They discussed the existing social relationships that existed between neighbors and agreed to arrange the neighborhood into clusters of about 15 shacks. In the meantime, the Cape Town city government, impressed by the initiative of the community, decided to bring toilets and water infrastructure to the neighborhood. This was despite the fact that, according to the city’s own rules, no development should occur on a road reserve.
On the day when the first cluster of 15 shacks moved, the change was remarkable. The cluster was arranged around a common courtyard. That very same day, the women in the cluster erected a washing line spanning the courtyard. Now, when I go to Sheffield Road nearly the entire neighborhood is organized in this way. Usually children are playing and parents are chatting outside, looking after their children with a watchful eye.
The neighborhood is a model for communities throughout the city. Communities from other settlements come to Sheffield Road to exchange lessons and strategies for upgrading their own settlements. This Informal Settlement Network has come together and partnered with the city government to work on more than twenty such projects throughout the city. So the work of design in one neighborhood has become a seed for a city-wide process.
Residents of informal settlements throughout the city of Cape Town meet with municipal officials on-site in a new courtyard in the Sheffield Road neighborhood.
The lack of democracy and political inclusion in the halls of decision-making power produces exclusion from services, transport, employment, adequate shelter, and legal rights. The design of the home, the neighborhood, and the city is the foundation on which ordinary poor people are building networks of knowledge and political power. As architects, designers, planners, academics, and politicians, begin to recognize the work that the poor are already doing, they will have to imagine new kinds of partnerships with organizations of the poor. These are partnerships to include the poor in institutions that can produce something other than the divided and unequal cities emerging today.
Benjamin Bradlow works with Shack/Slum Dwellers International documenting the work of SDI-affiliated community organizations throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America and is currently a candidate for a Masters in City Planning in the International Development Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
All image credits: Benjamin Bradlow/Shack/Slum Dwellers International
Power Tools
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Design as a tool to support the political power of the poor in Cape Town — moving from a dream to reality.
It is time to rethink the significance of design in our urbanizing world. This is one of the many things that I have learned from communities linked to Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Design can be seen as a political tool to support the poor to bridge the divides that exist in cities in the Global South.
Consider a story of just one small community that has become the spark for work across one of the biggest cities in Africa. There’s an area in Cape Town, South Africa, called Philippi, which has many informal neighborhoods with shacks almost literally on top of each other. Along Sheffield Road, there is a small neighborhood of 167 shack households. The shacks there were locked in a tight configuration where the only way to walk through the area was through a narrow maze of dark alleys. There were no toilets and only a couple water points. This land was reserved for future widening of the road. Therefore, the city government had no plans to develop the area.
Sheffield Road residents discuss a plan for "re-blocking" a cluster of shacks in the neighborhood.
But the community used design as a tool to (1) organize itself, (2) plan its space, and (3) negotiate with the city. Led by the women in the community, they began saving small amounts of money. They also performed their own socioeconomic household survey and drew a map of the existing neighborhood layout. These residents also worked with a community architect from a local NGO, the Community Organisation Resource Centre, to design a method for rearranging the shacks in the settlement to open up public space. They discussed the existing social relationships that existed between neighbors and agreed to arrange the neighborhood into clusters of about 15 shacks. In the meantime, the Cape Town city government, impressed by the initiative of the community, decided to bring toilets and water infrastructure to the neighborhood. This was despite the fact that, according to the city’s own rules, no development should occur on a road reserve.
On the day when the first cluster of 15 shacks moved, the change was remarkable. The cluster was arranged around a common courtyard. That very same day, the women in the cluster erected a washing line spanning the courtyard. Now, when I go to Sheffield Road nearly the entire neighborhood is organized in this way. Usually children are playing and parents are chatting outside, looking after their children with a watchful eye.
The neighborhood is a model for communities throughout the city. Communities from other settlements come to Sheffield Road to exchange lessons and strategies for upgrading their own settlements. This Informal Settlement Network has come together and partnered with the city government to work on more than twenty such projects throughout the city. So the work of design in one neighborhood has become a seed for a city-wide process.
Residents of informal settlements throughout the city of Cape Town meet with municipal officials on-site in a new courtyard in the Sheffield Road neighborhood.
The lack of democracy and political inclusion in the halls of decision-making power produces exclusion from services, transport, employment, adequate shelter, and legal rights. The design of the home, the neighborhood, and the city is the foundation on which ordinary poor people are building networks of knowledge and political power. As architects, designers, planners, academics, and politicians, begin to recognize the work that the poor are already doing, they will have to imagine new kinds of partnerships with organizations of the poor. These are partnerships to include the poor in institutions that can produce something other than the divided and unequal cities emerging today.
Benjamin Bradlow works with Shack/Slum Dwellers International documenting the work of SDI-affiliated community organizations throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America and is currently a candidate for a Masters in City Planning in the International Development Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
All image credits: Benjamin Bradlow/Shack/Slum Dwellers International
Pitch
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Child’s drawing on the slab of a demolished school, near Eudy Park KwaThema, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2010. Gareth Barry is a veteran player from the English soccer team that played in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
In March 2011, a soccer tournament was staged in KwaThema, a township 45km east of Johannesburg, South Africa. The players, in the weeks running up to it, had practiced in “keep-fit” games and cleaned up piles of rubbish in the park. Before the kick-off, herds of goats and cattle crossed the grounds to get to their grazing areas, and after it ended, the audience transformed into a loud and proud party to celebrate the memory of the lesbian soccer star, Eudy Simelane, who was slain on the same site in 2008. The quirky richness of the event was far from the institutional idea of soccer that has been growing in South Africa since the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
Site cleanup at the Eudy Park, KwaThema by volunteers from the Equality Forum. February 2011.
Eudy Park tournament, KwaThema, February 2011.
Although South Africa’s World Cup bid generated images of children playing on dusty fields alongside informal settlements, the official events took place, without exception, outside of townships (name for informal settlements in South Africa). Even now, there is a considerable royalty from FIFA’s World Cup profits to be spent on soccer development and upgrading by the South African Football Association’s (SAFA) Infrastructure Development Foundation. An outstanding question remains as to whether these profits can be redistributed at grassroots level.
An example of what could go wrong occurred in 2010, when 24 “Legacy Fields” east of Johannesburg, in a standard top-down manner, were irrigated, planted with grass, then surrounded and locked behind concrete palisade fences. Since then, most of the fields, which were previously locally managed for township leagues, have become overgrown and the fences vandalized. Moreover, SAFA’s decision to only recognize games played on turf will leave many dry townships without a certifiable field.
My hope is that the experience of grassroots soccer organizations such as the DreamFields Project, Play Soccer, Grassroots Soccer, SCORE and FIFA’s Football for Hope, all of which run programs that link soccer training to social agendas, will inform the delivery of facilities in places where they are most needed. The remarkable small scale projects such as the DreamFields in Venda, Tsai Design studio’s Safmarine container club prototype and the Orange Cruyff court for Hillbrow in Johannesburg are good examples of what can be done.
Preparing the pitch for the tournament at Eudy Park, February 2011.
More over, community involvement is even more important, as self-organization around soccer predates any South African institutional interventions. Peter Alegi, a historian who writes extensively on African soccer, has related how the creation and management of teams and leagues was an activity that grew spontaneously alongside black urbanization and how individuals gained social and material success denied to them in formal, white-controlled organizations. The space for soccer, similarly, remained officially unsupported and happened on borrowed fields right up until the 1990’s.
Aerial view of Eudy Park, KwaThema. Courtesy of Ekuhuleni Metropolitan Council.
Soccer spaces like the Eudy Park in KwaThema are temporal and self-constructed layers of the township’s urbanism, counter-projects to the growing commoditization and institutional control of soccer. But recognizing its positive qualities raises deep questions about intervening in such spaces. How can spatial intervention sustain such populist, open institutions? How to recognize and support alternative formats for architecture, with its concern for permanence and the absolute ownership of space? Open fields and open institutions are vulnerable to the apparently benign nature of acts of improvement that set them apart from the township’s fluid social space.
The Imvelo Youth Development Brigade, contractors for the PITCH project, prepare a wall for graffiti signage at the edge of the Eudy Park.
Hannah le Roux is an architect and writer, and works at the University of the Witwatersrand. The PITCH project forms part of her practice-based Doctorate in the Arts at KU Leuven. The PITCH blog and its predecessor, the KwaThema Project, can be found at www.kwathema.net.
All image credits: Hannah le Roux, , unless otherwise noted
Pitch
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Child’s drawing on the slab of a demolished school, near Eudy Park KwaThema, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2010. Gareth Barry is a veteran player from the English soccer team that played in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
In March 2011, a soccer tournament was staged in KwaThema, a township 45km east of Johannesburg, South Africa. The players, in the weeks running up to it, had practiced in “keep-fit” games and cleaned up piles of rubbish in the park. Before the kick-off, herds of goats and cattle crossed the grounds to get to their grazing areas, and after it ended, the audience transformed into a loud and proud party to celebrate the memory of the lesbian soccer star, Eudy Simelane, who was slain on the same site in 2008. The quirky richness of the event was far from the institutional idea of soccer that has been growing in South Africa since the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
Site cleanup at the Eudy Park, KwaThema by volunteers from the Equality Forum. February 2011.
Eudy Park tournament, KwaThema, February 2011.
Although South Africa’s World Cup bid generated images of children playing on dusty fields alongside informal settlements, the official events took place, without exception, outside of townships (name for informal settlements in South Africa). Even now, there is a considerable royalty from FIFA’s World Cup profits to be spent on soccer development and upgrading by the South African Football Association’s (SAFA) Infrastructure Development Foundation. An outstanding question remains as to whether these profits can be redistributed at grassroots level.
An example of what could go wrong occurred in 2010, when 24 “Legacy Fields” east of Johannesburg, in a standard top-down manner, were irrigated, planted with grass, then surrounded and locked behind concrete palisade fences. Since then, most of the fields, which were previously locally managed for township leagues, have become overgrown and the fences vandalized. Moreover, SAFA’s decision to only recognize games played on turf will leave many dry townships without a certifiable field.
My hope is that the experience of grassroots soccer organizations such as the DreamFields Project, Play Soccer, Grassroots Soccer, SCORE and FIFA’s Football for Hope, all of which run programs that link soccer training to social agendas, will inform the delivery of facilities in places where they are most needed. The remarkable small scale projects such as the DreamFields in Venda, Tsai Design studio’s Safmarine container club prototype and the Orange Cruyff court for Hillbrow in Johannesburg are good examples of what can be done.
Preparing the pitch for the tournament at Eudy Park, February 2011.
More over, community involvement is even more important, as self-organization around soccer predates any South African institutional interventions. Peter Alegi, a historian who writes extensively on African soccer, has related how the creation and management of teams and leagues was an activity that grew spontaneously alongside black urbanization and how individuals gained social and material success denied to them in formal, white-controlled organizations. The space for soccer, similarly, remained officially unsupported and happened on borrowed fields right up until the 1990’s.
Aerial view of Eudy Park, KwaThema. Courtesy of Ekuhuleni Metropolitan Council.
Soccer spaces like the Eudy Park in KwaThema are temporal and self-constructed layers of the township’s urbanism, counter-projects to the growing commoditization and institutional control of soccer. But recognizing its positive qualities raises deep questions about intervening in such spaces. How can spatial intervention sustain such populist, open institutions? How to recognize and support alternative formats for architecture, with its concern for permanence and the absolute ownership of space? Open fields and open institutions are vulnerable to the apparently benign nature of acts of improvement that set them apart from the township’s fluid social space.
The Imvelo Youth Development Brigade, contractors for the PITCH project, prepare a wall for graffiti signage at the edge of the Eudy Park.
Hannah le Roux is an architect and writer, and works at the University of the Witwatersrand. The PITCH project forms part of her practice-based Doctorate in the Arts at KU Leuven. The PITCH blog and its predecessor, the KwaThema Project, can be found at www.kwathema.net.
All image credits: Hannah le Roux, , unless otherwise noted
Ascendant Public Architecture
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Urban infrastructure in Medellín, Colombia. Informal settlements have been substantially improved with permanent housing, utilities and sewers, and pedestrian walkways – without displacing the former population.
Public architecture in South America put North America to shame. There’s something about the emerging Latin American countries that promotes viable, scalable, building projects that can transform a neighborhood, even a city – for everyone. Unlike many western countries, which have resources but lack the experience of the social dynamics of Majority World countries, South Americans seem to be able to balance access to some level of resources with an understanding of the problems they need to address – and build in a manner that elevates a broad sense of the public.
Parque Biblioteca España in the Santo Domingo neighborhood of Medellín, Colombia. A prominent library and park built in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods has transformed the area and become a destination for people from across the city.
A couple of examples from the mid-2000s: Medellín, Colombia's celebrated program for public institutional buildings and Chile’s efforts to build new public housing. Medellín's schools, parks, and libraries are remarkable, not just for their elevating design and commitment to serving underserved people (“We must build our most beautiful buildings for our humblest people,” in the words of Mayor Sergio Fajardo), but for the social infrastructure that managed such a large number of projects from design to completion – in just four years. The human design management process is every bit as impressive as the buildings themselves. Every aspect of society was involved: universities, bureaucracies, the private sector, churches, community groups, and political operatives who knew how to get projects done. The results speak for themselves.
Renca housing complex in Santiago, Chile. 170 units of 67 square meters built close to the economic center of the city, with access to transportation and services. This housing project replaces informal settlements.
A produce and food store built in front of a homeowner’s house. The value of these individual houses in Renca provides enough equity for owners to take loans and start businesses.
In Santiago, Chile a recognition that public housing was lacking became a rallying point, particularly in a country that prides itself on its ability to create infrastructure. A founding partner of Elemental, Andres Iacobelli, is now the Vice Minister of Housing, recognizing the need for professional knowledge as a basis for action. Elemental’s own program, trading more expensive locations for less individual building (i.e. better economic opportunities closer to the economic heart of the city), resulted in new social housing of significantly higher value – due to the location. Residents completed their houses on their own, and found the value of the completed house was double the investment they and the state made in the original project. They could take a loan against the equity and start a business.
Alejandro Aravena, Elemental’s founder, lamented to me that he’d only been able to build two thousand units thus far in his career. But my response to him: who else has built more?
David Mohney is the Dean Emeritus of the University of Kentucky College of Design, and was the Founding Secretary of the Curry Stone Design Prize . He is developing a research consortium of design schools in both Latin and North America.
All image credits: David Mohney
Ascendant Public Architecture
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Urban infrastructure in Medellín, Colombia. Informal settlements have been substantially improved with permanent housing, utilities and sewers, and pedestrian walkways – without displacing the former population.
Public architecture in South America put North America to shame. There’s something about the emerging Latin American countries that promotes viable, scalable, building projects that can transform a neighborhood, even a city – for everyone. Unlike many western countries, which have resources but lack the experience of the social dynamics of Majority World countries, South Americans seem to be able to balance access to some level of resources with an understanding of the problems they need to address – and build in a manner that elevates a broad sense of the public.
Parque Biblioteca España in the Santo Domingo neighborhood of Medellín, Colombia. A prominent library and park built in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods has transformed the area and become a destination for people from across the city.
A couple of examples from the mid-2000s: Medellín, Colombia's celebrated program for public institutional buildings and Chile’s efforts to build new public housing. Medellín's schools, parks, and libraries are remarkable, not just for their elevating design and commitment to serving underserved people (“We must build our most beautiful buildings for our humblest people,” in the words of Mayor Sergio Fajardo), but for the social infrastructure that managed such a large number of projects from design to completion – in just four years. The human design management process is every bit as impressive as the buildings themselves. Every aspect of society was involved: universities, bureaucracies, the private sector, churches, community groups, and political operatives who knew how to get projects done. The results speak for themselves.
Renca housing complex in Santiago, Chile. 170 units of 67 square meters built close to the economic center of the city, with access to transportation and services. This housing project replaces informal settlements.
A produce and food store built in front of a homeowner’s house. The value of these individual houses in Renca provides enough equity for owners to take loans and start businesses.
In Santiago, Chile a recognition that public housing was lacking became a rallying point, particularly in a country that prides itself on its ability to create infrastructure. A founding partner of Elemental, Andres Iacobelli, is now the Vice Minister of Housing, recognizing the need for professional knowledge as a basis for action. Elemental’s own program, trading more expensive locations for less individual building (i.e. better economic opportunities closer to the economic heart of the city), resulted in new social housing of significantly higher value – due to the location. Residents completed their houses on their own, and found the value of the completed house was double the investment they and the state made in the original project. They could take a loan against the equity and start a business.
Alejandro Aravena, Elemental’s founder, lamented to me that he’d only been able to build two thousand units thus far in his career. But my response to him: who else has built more?
David Mohney is the Dean Emeritus of the University of Kentucky College of Design, and was the Founding Secretary of the Curry Stone Design Prize . He is developing a research consortium of design schools in both Latin and North America.
All image credits: David Mohney
Thailand’s Transport Solution
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Motorcycle taxis: an informal solution for traffic ridden cities
Every day millions of urban dwellers navigate Bangkok on the back of a motorcycle taxi, zigzagging through traffic or flowing into the sleepy movement inside narrow alleys. Outside Thai homes, offices, or shopping malls small groups of drivers sit in the ear-splitting noises of the city, scanning for potential clients. Few words are muttered between drivers and their passengers as they transport them through the city to their destinations. Bills pass hands, and soon, clients forget of the vessels and their captains who navigate the city.
Today about 200,000 drivers operate in Bangkok, allowing the city to function, people to reach their destination in time, newspapers to be ready in shops in the morning and lunches to be delivered to offices. Each driver averages 20 to 30 trips per day, and collectively, the motorcycle-taxi industry delivers between 4,000,000 and 6,000,000 trips per day day—about eight times the number of passengers carried daily by Bangkok’s elevated trains and subways combined. Without the motorcycle taxis, the city would immediately come to a halt, stuck in traffic.
A motorcycle-taxi driver waits for clients in front of a shopping complex.
In my own research, “The Owners of the Map: Motorcycle taxi drivers, mobility, and politics in Bangkok”, I explore the emergence and internal functioning of the motorcycle-taxi industry, as well as the drivers’ personal histories, and their attempts to be recognized as stake holders and service providers in the city. An anthropological analysis of creative ways to find more equitable and sustainable – both economically and socially – forms of transportation. The project looks at one city where motorcycle taxis are taking over, unnoticed, the burden of an unsolvable transportation mesh. My research presents the multiple roles the drivers play as transporters, messengers, and mediators, both in the life of their neighborhoods and between the city and their villages in the Thai country-side. The project was conducted in close collaboration and information-sharing with the newly formed motorcycle-taxis’ trade union of Thailand. The research offers not only an academic study of the internal functioning of informal transportation in Bangkok but also presents policy suggestions for the administration of the drivers and their inclusion into a social-welfare system. Similar processes are taking place in cities of the Global South, from Caracas to Jakarta, Abuja to Kampala, Manila to Rio de Janeiro.
Claudio Sopranzetti is a PhD student in Anthropology at Harvard University. He has been working on issues of equitable cities and urban life in Europe, East Africa, and Southeast Asia.
http://harvard.academia.edu/ClaudioSopranzetti
www.sopranz.blogspot.com
All image credits: Agnes Dherbeys
Thailand’s Transport Solution
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
Motorcycle taxis: an informal solution for traffic ridden cities
Every day millions of urban dwellers navigate Bangkok on the back of a motorcycle taxi, zigzagging through traffic or flowing into the sleepy movement inside narrow alleys. Outside Thai homes, offices, or shopping malls small groups of drivers sit in the ear-splitting noises of the city, scanning for potential clients. Few words are muttered between drivers and their passengers as they transport them through the city to their destinations. Bills pass hands, and soon, clients forget of the vessels and their captains who navigate the city.
Today about 200,000 drivers operate in Bangkok, allowing the city to function, people to reach their destination in time, newspapers to be ready in shops in the morning and lunches to be delivered to offices. Each driver averages 20 to 30 trips per day, and collectively, the motorcycle-taxi industry delivers between 4,000,000 and 6,000,000 trips per day day—about eight times the number of passengers carried daily by Bangkok’s elevated trains and subways combined. Without the motorcycle taxis, the city would immediately come to a halt, stuck in traffic.
A motorcycle-taxi driver waits for clients in front of a shopping complex.
In my own research, “The Owners of the Map: Motorcycle taxi drivers, mobility, and politics in Bangkok”, I explore the emergence and internal functioning of the motorcycle-taxi industry, as well as the drivers’ personal histories, and their attempts to be recognized as stake holders and service providers in the city. An anthropological analysis of creative ways to find more equitable and sustainable – both economically and socially – forms of transportation. The project looks at one city where motorcycle taxis are taking over, unnoticed, the burden of an unsolvable transportation mesh. My research presents the multiple roles the drivers play as transporters, messengers, and mediators, both in the life of their neighborhoods and between the city and their villages in the Thai country-side. The project was conducted in close collaboration and information-sharing with the newly formed motorcycle-taxis’ trade union of Thailand. The research offers not only an academic study of the internal functioning of informal transportation in Bangkok but also presents policy suggestions for the administration of the drivers and their inclusion into a social-welfare system. Similar processes are taking place in cities of the Global South, from Caracas to Jakarta, Abuja to Kampala, Manila to Rio de Janeiro.
Claudio Sopranzetti is a PhD student in Anthropology at Harvard University. He has been working on issues of equitable cities and urban life in Europe, East Africa, and Southeast Asia.
http://harvard.academia.edu/ClaudioSopranzetti
www.sopranz.blogspot.com
All image credits: Agnes Dherbeys
A Tale of Three Peripheries
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
The Global Lives Project team in Indonesia records the daily life of Dadah, an occasional farmer and mother of three in Sarimukti Village on the island of Java. Photo: © Antonius Riva Setiawan.
Rael Feliciano, Kai Liu and Jamila Jad have quite a few things in common. They each live at the rough edges of formal urban settlements. Rael's neighborhood, Jardim Iporanga, is a favela on the southern outskirts of São Paulo, where drug dealers and police are in a constant and often bloody tussle for power. Kai and his wife live in a small room at the back of a convenience store that they manage together - a bridge between their lives as rural farmers and peri-urbanites in Anren, a suburb of Chengdu, China. Jamila was born into refugee life in Shatila, a 62 year-old, UN-managed camp situated inside of Beirut, that has guaranteed Jamila and her family a life of material poverty with little hope of economic mobility.
The three are also extremely generous souls—they have offered the world a very intimate invitation into their everyday realities as participants in the Global Lives Project. For twenty-four continuous hours, volunteer film crews watched patiently, recording every moment of their day. They and their families also gave detailed life story interviews, which anchored their daily lives in a rich and complex context.
Excerpt: Rael Feliciano, São Paulo, Brazil (Global Lives Project, 2006)
Press the small "cc" button for English subtitles
Excerpt: Kai Liu, Anren, China (Global Lives Project, 2008)
Press the small "cc" button for English subtitles
Excerpt: Kai Liu, Anren, China (Global Lives Project, 2008)
Press the small "cc" button for English subtitles
The Global Lives videos allow the viewer a privileged vantage point from which to piece together the similarities and differences in the lives of these three individuals, as well as many others.
Following Rael through winding alleyways as he heads to a Capoeira session in his neighborhood and watching Jamila as she plays paddleball in a strikingly similar corridor near her home, one might notice the parallels of improvised urban design, albeit on opposite sides of the planet. While only a few miles away from either location it would be easy to find modern mega-structures, these communities both share a common neglect on the part of urban planners in their regions. The neglect has consequences that go far beyond the aesthetic—basic services in these areas, from electricity to sewage to telecommunications are all lacking and, in turn, pose serious health threats and significant economic burdens on their residents.
At first blush, it would be strange to compare Kai’s well-stocked convenience store in Anren to the smaller, more anemically appointed stores visited by Rael and Jamila in Jardim Iporanga or Shatila. But one critical element merits a closer look. In each of these cases, such stores are often directly connected to the homes of their owners, or, in Kai’s case, managers. Looking beyond the storefronts and into the living spaces behind or above them, we experience the inevitable coupling of commerce and intimate family life laid bare. Where those who are better off have the luxury of drawing at least an aesthetic boundary between labor and personal pursuits, those who live and work in urban peripheries often confront the fragile economics of their lives close at hand.
Of course, these observations come from a very specific perspective—my own. What might look like suffering or injustice to me could be opportunity and privilege to someone else, and vice versa. I invite you to explore the Global Lives Project’s video library of human life experience and watch from your own perspective at http://globallives.org.
David Evan Harris is the Executive Director of the Global Lives Project and Research Director at the Institute for the Future.
A Tale of Three Peripheries
Over the next months while the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition is on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York several individuals whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
The Global Lives Project team in Indonesia records the daily life of Dadah, an occasional farmer and mother of three in Sarimukti Village on the island of Java. Photo: © Antonius Riva Setiawan.
Rael Feliciano, Kai Liu and Jamila Jad have quite a few things in common. They each live at the rough edges of formal urban settlements. Rael's neighborhood, Jardim Iporanga, is a favela on the southern outskirts of São Paulo, where drug dealers and police are in a constant and often bloody tussle for power. Kai and his wife live in a small room at the back of a convenience store that they manage together - a bridge between their lives as rural farmers and peri-urbanites in Anren, a suburb of Chengdu, China. Jamila was born into refugee life in Shatila, a 62 year-old, UN-managed camp situated inside of Beirut, that has guaranteed Jamila and her family a life of material poverty with little hope of economic mobility.
The three are also extremely generous souls—they have offered the world a very intimate invitation into their everyday realities as participants in the Global Lives Project. For twenty-four continuous hours, volunteer film crews watched patiently, recording every moment of their day. They and their families also gave detailed life story interviews, which anchored their daily lives in a rich and complex context.
Excerpt: Rael Feliciano, São Paulo, Brazil (Global Lives Project, 2006)
Press the small "cc" button for English subtitles
Excerpt: Kai Liu, Anren, China (Global Lives Project, 2008)
Press the small "cc" button for English subtitles
Excerpt: Kai Liu, Anren, China (Global Lives Project, 2008)
Press the small "cc" button for English subtitles
The Global Lives videos allow the viewer a privileged vantage point from which to piece together the similarities and differences in the lives of these three individuals, as well as many others.
Following Rael through winding alleyways as he heads to a Capoeira session in his neighborhood and watching Jamila as she plays paddleball in a strikingly similar corridor near her home, one might notice the parallels of improvised urban design, albeit on opposite sides of the planet. While only a few miles away from either location it would be easy to find modern mega-structures, these communities both share a common neglect on the part of urban planners in their regions. The neglect has consequences that go far beyond the aesthetic—basic services in these areas, from electricity to sewage to telecommunications are all lacking and, in turn, pose serious health threats and significant economic burdens on their residents.
At first blush, it would be strange to compare Kai’s well-stocked convenience store in Anren to the smaller, more anemically appointed stores visited by Rael and Jamila in Jardim Iporanga or Shatila. But one critical element merits a closer look. In each of these cases, such stores are often directly connected to the homes of their owners, or, in Kai’s case, managers. Looking beyond the storefronts and into the living spaces behind or above them, we experience the inevitable coupling of commerce and intimate family life laid bare. Where those who are better off have the luxury of drawing at least an aesthetic boundary between labor and personal pursuits, those who live and work in urban peripheries often confront the fragile economics of their lives close at hand.
Of course, these observations come from a very specific perspective—my own. What might look like suffering or injustice to me could be opportunity and privilege to someone else, and vice versa. I invite you to explore the Global Lives Project’s video library of human life experience and watch from your own perspective at http://globallives.org.
David Evan Harris is the Executive Director of the Global Lives Project and Research Director at the Institute for the Future.
India’s Elastic Cities
By 2030, 40% of India's population will be urban-dwellers. That's 590 million people, up from 350 million in 2011, with the combination of internal migration and population growth placing serious stress on urban infrastructure.
In meeting the challenges raised by an urban future, much attention has been paid to regional master plans and the 'smart city', where large corporations fight for the right to implement their own bundle of technological fixes. We believe that such top-down solutions are short-sighted. In seeing like a town planner, working solely from metrics and quantitative datasets, actors miss the nuances of local meaning and vernacular practice.
Instead, we take a closer look at India's informal economy. As a first step, we jump into an auto-rickshaw. The rickshaw wallah (worker) has entertainment covered: the latest Bollywood tunes blare out of the speakers, a bonus service that keeps you up to date with the latest hits. A corner shop has borrowed their neighbor's television cable to set up a TV booth. If you visit the barber for a shave, you can listen to market updates on the shop radio. The paanwallah sells you tobacco, but he'll also update you with the latest real estate tips. Among the stalls of street food, the horoscope machine of a 'robot wallah' holds your future in its tiny, painted hands.
The wallahs and wallihs show the reach of India's street entrepreneurship. Those who sell you a service also pass on information about property markets and cricket scores. Their information might not be efficient or personalized, but these wallahs comprise an important service infrastructure; as human networked-data-nodes that connect communities, traversing a unique path through the city.
India's smart city already exits. This is an elastic city, resilient and supremely adaptable, with flexible nodes stretching and shifting to accommodate changing techno-social landscapes. A map that would normally look ‘boring’ suddenly becomes far more intriguing, as we populate it with the nodes and providers who service – and constitute – the elastic city.
As part of our Superflux Lab activities, we are exploring the design and development of appropriate tools to facilitate rapid change in India. Eventually, we hope this work will allow city-dwellers to act on an environment where service providers demonstrate entrepreneurial savvy under messy, organic conditions.
by Anab Jain, Justin Pickard and Jon Ardern, Superflux
All image credits: Superflux, unless otherwise noted
India’s Elastic Cities
By 2030, 40% of India's population will be urban-dwellers. That's 590 million people, up from 350 million in 2011, with the combination of internal migration and population growth placing serious stress on urban infrastructure.
In meeting the challenges raised by an urban future, much attention has been paid to regional master plans and the 'smart city', where large corporations fight for the right to implement their own bundle of technological fixes. We believe that such top-down solutions are short-sighted. In seeing like a town planner, working solely from metrics and quantitative datasets, actors miss the nuances of local meaning and vernacular practice.
Instead, we take a closer look at India's informal economy. As a first step, we jump into an auto-rickshaw. The rickshaw wallah (worker) has entertainment covered: the latest Bollywood tunes blare out of the speakers, a bonus service that keeps you up to date with the latest hits. A corner shop has borrowed their neighbor's television cable to set up a TV booth. If you visit the barber for a shave, you can listen to market updates on the shop radio. The paanwallah sells you tobacco, but he'll also update you with the latest real estate tips. Among the stalls of street food, the horoscope machine of a 'robot wallah' holds your future in its tiny, painted hands.
The wallahs and wallihs show the reach of India's street entrepreneurship. Those who sell you a service also pass on information about property markets and cricket scores. Their information might not be efficient or personalized, but these wallahs comprise an important service infrastructure; as human networked-data-nodes that connect communities, traversing a unique path through the city.
India's smart city already exits. This is an elastic city, resilient and supremely adaptable, with flexible nodes stretching and shifting to accommodate changing techno-social landscapes. A map that would normally look ‘boring’ suddenly becomes far more intriguing, as we populate it with the nodes and providers who service – and constitute – the elastic city.
As part of our Superflux Lab activities, we are exploring the design and development of appropriate tools to facilitate rapid change in India. Eventually, we hope this work will allow city-dwellers to act on an environment where service providers demonstrate entrepreneurial savvy under messy, organic conditions.
by Anab Jain, Justin Pickard and Jon Ardern, Superflux
All image credits: Superflux, unless otherwise noted
Design Exchanges
Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition opened last week at the United Nations Headquarters in New York to large crowds and international press. The exhibition’s location provides a unique opportunity to connect numerous stakeholders, including design professionals, non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations, academics, those in the public and private sector, and the general public.
During my field research I found the most successful projects were those that developed from a reciprocal design exchange between residents living in the informal settlements and designers. There are close to 1 billion living in informal settlements throughout the cities in the global south. A number that is expected to grow to 2 billion in 20 years as people are pushed by changing climates and conflict; or pulled by the desire for work and more freedom. Many local municipalities cannot keep up with this rapid urban expansion so it is critical that good ideas and designs can be shared with those migrating to these urban areas. The display of design projects and proposals at the UN, along with the CITIES website, design blog and Design Other 90 Network seeks to expand the conversation about how design role in improving peoples’ lives around the world.
To further this design exchange over the next months, while the exhibition is on display at the UN, individuals and organizations whose own research explores the exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects with an aim to broaden the dialogue raised by the exhibition and to highlight other important work, projects, and ideas.