Lessons From Cairo: How Small Scale Urban Initiatives can Improve a City (A. A. Mohamed)

Cairo, like many cities, is deeply wounded by fragmentation and heterogeneity. It is a complex city with a broken public realm. And while policymakers use lack of money as an excuse for not making substantial improvements, money has no relation with innovation and creativity. Inexpensive, short-term actions can give people the confidence that something is taking place.

Imagine a city as an urban envelope made up of floors, walls, roofs, and dwellers. How can these simple components, with limited capacity, make change?

Some recent small-scale Egyptian urban initiatives, when compared with the government’s expensive plans, are powerful in drawing people into spaces. These following initiatives are good ‘urban acupunctures’ that might heal Cairo. [...]

Coloring Cairo

Cairo is known for being one of the most crowded cities in the word. The city is usually covered with a grey cloud of dust and smog. But colors directly influence our health and mood. Can coloring the “grey city” reduce the frustration of local citizens and improve their mood, satisfaction and productivity? Two independent initiativeshave recently been launched to color Cairo:

Coloring a Grey City: A group of undergraduate students studying interior design at Helwan University’s Faculty of Fine Arts launched a campaign for colouring staircases, walls, and lamp posts in order to add comfort happiness and joy to the working-class in Cairo. The group roamed the city to add brightness to its streets and to introduce a touch that might change people’s live. The initiative aims to cover the whole country. Notably, governmental support was limited to granting permission to paint.

Cairo Dish-Painting Initiative: The Cairo skyline is covered with millions of dusty satellite dishes. This depressing view was a source of inspiration for the American artist Jason Stoneking who decided to change the face of rooftops in Cairo. He started painting rooftops in Ard-Ellewa – an informal settlement in the western part of Cairo where he lives. Many residents invited him to paint more dishes in Ard-Ellewa and in other places within the city. This innovative intervention might add brightness and dynamism to the townscape of Cairo.

Read the complete article + more information on the projects here.

Defining the informal sector (UN-Habitat)

"The informal sector consists of units engaged in the production of goods or services with the following characteristics:

• Small-scale units, comprising, firstly, ‘informal, ownaccount enterprises – that is, those unincorporated enterprises that are run without regular employees (but perhaps with unpaid family workers or occasional hired labour)’; and, secondly, enterprises of informal employers who employ one or more persons on a continuous basis.
• Few barriers to entry: initial capital and skill requirements are low.
• Informal skills acquisition: most entrepreneurs learn through informal apprenticeships in the sector, while a few have received vocational training.
• Limited access to formal credit: capital needs are met informally from family, friends, money lenders and other business interests.
• An informal internal organization with a relatively flexible and informal hierarchy of work and roles: often the own account or self-employed worker is worker, manager and owner, all at once. They display little or no division between labour and capital as factors of production.
• Informal relationships with suppliers, clients and the state: few have licences or formal contracts, their hours of operation are flexible and contacts are irregular. They therefore tend to be ‘invisible’, unregulated and uncounted by official statistics, particularly by economic censuses. Thus, the entrepreneur avoids taxes, licence fees and requirements to conform to standards. Labour tends to be unprotected. Labour relations – where they exist – are based primarily on casual employment, kinship or personal and social relations, rather than on contractual arrangements with formal guarantees.
• Combinations of different activities can exist in a single unit: these can exist simultaneously or by frequent change in activities, so it can be difficult to classify the business according to the standard industrial classification. Products may be made and sold in the same place and other producers’ products may also be sold.
• Predominance of an undercapitalized or labourintensive process of production: the limited nature of the technology being used may hamper the ability of business to produce continuously and may limit the operator’s ability to plan for investment and improved operation.
• Consumption and production are not separated: part of what allows informal-sector businesses to keep operating is their use of personal and domestic assets, such as living quarters, vehicles and furniture. Furthermore, business expenditures, income, assets and labour are almost seamlessly linked to those of the household. This can be a problem for policymakers who like to separate consumption and production as different spheres for statistical and taxation purposes."

UN-Habitat (2003) The challenge of slums - Global report on human settlements. London & Sterling: UN-HABITAT - Earthscan. pp 100-101.

Kids in India Are Sparking Urban Planning Changes by Mapping Slums (S. Sturgis)

"As part of a broader civic campaign centered on "child clubs," groups of children are creating detailed "social maps" of their marginalized neighborhoods to voice their concerns about public space, as first reported in Citiscope, a CityLab partner site. [...] 

Teams of young mappers and adult facilitators spend roughly 45 days traversing their slums. They learn the shape of their neighborhood, how streets interconnect (or don't), and the the density of homes there. This information becomes the map's skeleton. Then, they fill in the specifics. They stake out what's needed through the eyes of children—where underserved public areas could become play spaces, where trash bins could be added in an area they regularly see littered with filth. Their ideal neighborhood is drawn and detailed onto the map. Then, after it's complete, leaders from the child clubs present their work to local officials.

[...] Human activism, on the other hand, is a better indication of reality. Regardless of whether these child maps lead to more equitable urban development or not, it's indicative of a young Indian generation coming to the fore with a keen awareness of disparity—who are eager to correct it."

Read the article here.

Imaginario (A. Huffschmid)

We not only have the physical experience of the city, we not only walk or feel in our bodies the meaning of walking around for a long time, of travelling by bus, of standing up, of being out in the rain waiting for a cab; but we also imagine, while travelling, we construct suppositions about what we see, about the people crossing our way, the zones of the city that we do not know but have to pass through in order to get another destination; in a word, about what is happening to us in relation to the others in the city (Garcia Canclini 1999:89)

"Imagination in urban contexts, as a socially shared level, articulates social desires, feelings, fantasies and explanations related to city life. The outcome of collective imagination was conceptualised by Armando Silva, García Canclini and others as urban imaginario. It is the imaginario, as a key dimension of the sociocultural and semiotic constitution of the city, where social meaning and memory, senses of community and belonging, inclusions and exclusions are produced and negotiated. The imaginario approach relativizes and complements - without replacing - the weight of material features (socio-economic condition, built environment, urban planning) by incorporating immaterial dimensions such as semiotics, subjectivity and aesthetics in order to recreate the symbolic territoriality and cultural power relations in and of the city. [...]

(bifurcaciones.cl)

Exploring imaginarios means focusing on how the city is perceived, conceived and lived by the citizen, as the inhabitant and user of urban space; and incorporates into the analysis his or her subjective "spatial experience". This spatial subjectivity does not emerge directly from the physical or visual experience of space, but is created by sense-making narratives: a sequence of imagining, experimenting and telling space. These narrations can be analyzed on the level of artistic practices (music, literature, visual arts) as well as [...] on the level of social or urban practices, inscribed in the routines and disruptions of urban life. 

[...] imagination or subjectivity here are not to be reduced to the level of individual cognition or psychology, but to the amplified as "socially shared" imagination, on the grounds of a socially shared culture seen as a "flexible and invisible cage in which one's own conditioned freedom might be exercised" (Carlo Ginzburg 2000). Stating the social dimension of imaginarios is to acknowledge the intrinsic interrelation of the social and symbolic organization of urban life, the interconnectedness between material and immaterial dimensions, the impact of architecture and physical texture on perception and imagination. Within the "flexible and invisible cage" of culture, urban subjectivity is produced by and at the same time produces social experience in the city, including the exercise of cultural power such as community-building, identity politics or boundaries of exclusion. Imaginarios are to be seen as products of specific historical and cultural processes as well as the producers of the urban, such as for instance the proliferation of urban fear, the use of public transport or environmental behaviour, the perception of informal commerce or urban "otherness", disputes over cultural heritage and memory practices in general."

Huffschmid, Anne (2012) From the City to "lo Urbano": Exploring Cultural Production of Public Space in Latin America. Iberoamericana, Año 12, No. 42. pp. 123-124.

The smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology (The Guardian)

Ignore the futuristic visions of governments and developers, it’s humble urban communities who lead the way in showing how networked technologies can strengthen a city’s social fabric.

We are lucky enough to live at a time in which a furious wave of innovation is breaking across the cities of the global south, spurred on both by the blistering pace of urbanisation, and by the rising popular demand for access to high-quality infrastructure that follows in its wake.

From Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting and the literally destratifying cable cars of Caracas, to Nairobi’s “digital matatus” and the repurposed bus-ferries of Manila, the communities of the south are responsible for an ever-lengthening parade of social and technical innovations that rival anything the developed world has to offer for ingenuity and practical utility.

[...]

The La Latina neighbourhood of Madrid was once home to a thriving market hall, and later a well-used community sporting facility, demolished in August 2009 to make way for planned improvements. But with Spain in the grips of the 2008 economic downturn, the money earmarked for the improvements failed to materialise, and the site remained vacant, cordoned off from the rest of the city by a chainlink fence. As such sacrifice zones will tend to, this site, el Campo de Cebada, increasingly began to attract graffiti, illegal dumping and still-less salutary behavior. Alerted to the deteriorating situation by neighbours, city authorities claimed they were powerless to intervene, apparently in the belief that they had no right to intercede on land belonging to private developers.

Exasperated with this state of affairs, a group of community activists, including architects of the Zuloark collective, cut through the fence and immediately began recuperating the site for citizen use. Following a cleanup, the activists used salvaged material to build benches, mobile sunshades and other elements of an ingenious, rapidly reconfigurable parliament – and the first question they put before this parliament was how to manage the site itself.

Mobile grandstands created by the architecture collectives
 of El Campo de Cebada.Photograph: C de Carmona/Zuloark

This self-stewardship was successful enough for long enough for the collective to eventually obtain quasi-official sanction from the municipal administration. Some three years on, in its various roles as recreation ground, youth centre and assembly hall, el Campo has become a vital community resource. If it has problems now, they are of the sort that attend unanticipated success: on holiday weekends especially, the site attracts overflow crowds.

Where’s the technology in all of this? Beyond canny use of Twitter and Facebook, and an online calendar of activities, there isn’t much. That’s the point. The benches and platforms of el Campo aren’t festooned with sensors, don’t have IPv6 addresses, don’t comply with some ISO wireless-networking standard. The art walls aren’t high- resolution interactive touch surfaces, and the young people painting on them certainly haven’t been issued with Palava-style, all- in-one smartcards. Nevertheless, it would be a profound mistake to not understand el Campo as the heavily networked place it is [...].

Read the complete article here.

Micro-library, Comas 2014

Hong Kong, informal sitting arrangements (M. Wolf)

See the complete collection here.