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.

Climate Change Solutions: Architects Look To Slums As Models For Sustainable Living (P. Ross)

"[...] large, densely populated, impoverished neighborhoods are in many ways on the cutting edge. Innovation comes of necessity, not because it's trendy, and due to the likelihood the future will bring larger, more densely populated slums, an unusual realm of urban planning has begun to take shape -- one that looks at making slums sustainable, rather than simply blights to be eradicated.

Mumbai (www.ibtimes.com/)

As urban planners seek eco-friendly ways to house a projected 1 billion more slum residents worldwide in the next 35 years, they’re focusing on concepts like gondolas, rainwater catchment systems and vegetative walls that can be easily replicated -- in some cases across other economic zones. What works in the slums may be equally useful in high-rent neighborhoods, or in densely populated, middle-class high-hrise "towns" that are being built in Singapore.

One of the reasons such slums are useful to study is they are indicative of what a consumer society forced to grapple with declining resources could look like. And because the slums consume less than more affluent districts, residents' demands for transportation and water supply infrastructure are often easier to address."

Keep reading.

Ross, P. (2014) "Climate Change Solutions: Architects Look To Slums As Models For Sustainable Living". International Business Times, July 14, 2014.

The Informal City (E. Duhau)

"Dwellings are built and improved step-by-step, depending on household savings and informal loans, and often in response to changes in family size or the incorporation of another, related household unit (usually formed by a male child). In this latter case it is common to build a small new dwelling on a still-free portion of the original plot. Many times, housing incorporates commercial or workshop uses, or the original household builds one or more rooms or small rental apartments at ground level or on a second story. In fact, the combination of housing with commercial, service, or workshop uses, or with the production of rental units, is one of the main factors responsible for the improvement of average socioeconomic conditions in the informal city over time. Other explanatory factors include access to high school and college for many of the initial inhabitants' children and the gradual arrival of better-off households as the colonia upgrades.

Besides housing, new land uses are gradually incorporated in response to growing demand for retail commerce, consumer services, and public facilities (grocery stores, churches, schools, medical clinics, and so on). The spatial distribution of these activities is usually oriented by the emergence of some local commercial districts, mostly corresponding to one or more main streets and to the paths followed by public transport.

trasfondoinformativo.blogspot.com

In spite of the rather low quality and reduced variety of most public spaces, they are usually intensively used and traversed, most of all by housewives buying staples and bringing their children to and from school, or by kids and teenagers playing and socializing. This markedly contrasts with what we can observe in the formal city, where, with the exception of some areas of the old central city, most people avoid public walking as much as possible, and kids are usually not allowed to stay and play in public streets. Additionally, in many colonias populares, local streets are from time to time the scenes of family parties, where neighbours usually are welcome if not expressly invited. And one or more wider streets are converted into a weekly market place, where a tianguis (street market) is set out, and people from the colonia or nearby ones not only buy a wide range of goods but also, especially during the weekends, go for a stroll, eat popular dishes at antojitos (snack) stalls, and socialize. The other side of the coin is that the uses of public spaces are regulated by customs of urbanity that suppose, in order to avoid neighbourhood conflicts, the acceptance of different kinds of mishandlings concerning the uses of the streets and sidewalks."

Duhau, Emilio (2014) "The Informal City". In: Cities from Scratch. Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press. pp 155-156.

Building with books: ISU design students construct micro library with Peruvian students

From the Iowa State Daily, published Thursday, March 27, 2014.

The ISU students collaborated with the Peruvian students from the beginning of the spring semester until about a week before the trip. The students researched micro libraries around the world for inspiration for about a month before they started developing designs for the micro library in Peru. "We would propose a design; they would give us feedback and then they would take that proposal to the community organization who would give them feedback. And then they would come back to us," [Kellen] Pacheco said. "We went through that process about two or three times."

[...]

"As a profession, architecture operates in so many ways, I think that this is one of the ways we have to be humbled as students of architecture, because not everything goes according to plan, especially in these kinds of environments."

Construction of the micro-library. Video by Fraktal.

Workshop 2014: Micro-library, construction

Workshop 2014: Micro-library

In joint efforts with Iowa State University and the neighbours at El Carmen, Comas, we will start building a library unit.

We invite volunteers to participate in the construction, between March 4th and 15th.

Book donations are also welcomed!

Informal Housing: Conventional Wisdoms Reappraised (P. M. Ward)

(www.texashousing.org)

"Since the mid-1970s self-help housing policies have entered the mainstream of international planning conventional wisdom. Prior to this period self-help advocacy was limited largely to academics or research workers concerned to identify the natures of squatter or irregular settlements, the characteristics of their populations, and the processes whereby theses areas were physically upgraded and became part of the urban fabric. They argued that the self-build and the mutual-aid activities in these neighbourhoods should be stimulated through supportive government intervention. This would include the provision of essential services which the residents could not organise themselves or readily afford, and the provision of some sort of tenure security (invariably outright ownership) that would stimulate investment in the dwellings.

[...] the incorporation of self-help philosophy into planning has not been without criticism. Emerging practices are criticised on several grounds. It is said to be an abrogation of government responsibility insofar as housing construction is placed firmly in the hands of the worker rather than those of the industrialist, local or central government. Labour is, therefore, exploited twice over; first in the workplace where wages are low; second, in the home where householders bear the burden of life in poor dwelling conditions with inadequate services and have to use their spare time and labour to build or improve their dwellings. This is a primary means whereby labour is reproduced cheaply. Others have suggested that self-help romanticises and confuses freedom of choice to construct one's own home with no choice at all (Harms, 1976). Politically it is seen as inherently conservative; the acquisition of home ownership through a bootstraps self-help approach fosters a petty-burgois mentality (Harms, 1976). [...] In is increasingly apparent that self-help functions to the advantage of a range of interests: it offers politicians opportunities for patronage and social control exercised through vote catching and negotiation over services and land. The construction industry benefits through an enhanced market for materials; while industry, commerce and the rich in general benefit through being able to pay low wager. Lastly, it is argues that successful consolidation achieved by low-income groups in the past is seriously threatened as economic growth declines, inflation increases, real wages drop and, as self-help policies require, a commitment to pay the costs of land and legal recognition, together with the costs of service installation and land taxes."

Ward, Peter M. (1982) Informal Housing: Conventional Wisdoms Reappraised. Built Environment, Vol 8, No 2. pp. 84-94.

Informal Settlers in Lima (I. Olórtegui)

"The first invasions started in the Forties. Before long the urban popular organisations leading them started an autonomy movement at the State and dominant class which peaked in 1979-80 with the formation of the Federation of Young Towns and Popular Urbanisation of Lima and Callao. The first major group of spontaneous settlements in Lima were originally characterised as “urbanizaciones clandestinas” (clandestine urbanisations), and in 1953 they were officially designated “barriadas” by the National Bureau of Planning and Urbanism. As Ludeña indicates, the criteria to define this qualification were related to the materials of the constructions (brick, adobe, cane or waste materials), the level of advance of the building construction and the supply of services and equipment (stable or slow development, moderated advance, violent development), and mainly the ownership of invaded lands (State land, private property or rented plots)."

Read the whole article.

Slum Upgrading

"Slum upgrading is a process through which informal areas are gradually improved, formalised and incorporated into the city itself, through extending land, services and citizenship to slum dwellers.It involves providing slum dwellers with the economic, social, institutional and community services available to other citizens. These services include legal (land tenure), physical (infrastructure), social (crime or education, for example) or economic.

Slum upgrading is not simply about water or drainage or housing. It is about putting into motion the economic, social, institutional and community activities that are needed to turn around downward trends in an area. These activities should be undertaken cooperatively among all parties involved—residents, community groups, businesses as well as local and national authorities if applicable.

The activities tend to include the provision of basic services such as housing, streets, footpaths, drainage, clean water, sanitation, and sewage disposal. Often, access to education and health care are also part of upgrading.

In addition to basic services, one of the key elements of slum upgrading is legalising or regularising properties and bringing secure land tenure to residents.

Ultimately, upgrading efforts aim to create a dynamic in the community where there is a sense of ownership, entitlement and inward investment in the area."

Cities Alliance

Read all about slum upgrading here.

The Future Of Slums: On The Line Between Hope & Despair

Cities Alliance

"The future of slums can be projected in two entirely different variants: slums of hope, and slums of despair. Based on the prevalent trends, despite some successes which could be termed as ‘best practices’ in formulating slum policies, slums have continued growing in the urban regions of the developing world."

"The need of the hour is to focus on a more comprehensive approach that will integrate factors of emergence and growth of slums and at the same time cooperate with different stakeholders responsible for addressing slum problem. The most striking outcome of past and existing slum policies and strategies are their short sightedness with respect to housing needs in urban regions."

"Governments need a paradigm shift in attitude by looking at the poor settlements not as part of the problem but as part of the solution and look at the poor not as beneficiaries but primary actors of their own development, key tenets of slum upgrading and enabling approaches."

Read the entire article at Urban Times.

Lessons to be taken from slums

Favela Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro
(upload.wikimedia.org)

"I realised that the formal city couldn't survive without the informal city … in the slums I discovered a whole new social geography … I began rethinking my whole profession, unlearning what I had learned, and then re-focused on adaptation and reuse and using scarcity as a resource." (Brillembourg)

[...]

This notion is that the slum at its best – or at least at a conceptual level – is a Wiki city. There are no rules other than the resources available and the collective agreements among residents. "An interest that the profession has had for a few years, and it is shared by the public, is that cities don't need to be so planned," says Zaera-Polo. "That cities can be more varied … this raises interest in the idea of cities that are almost self-built: the Wiki house, and the crowd sourcing of design." [...]

"What is probably most fascinating about going to [slums] is that you see the public realm emerging from the bottom-up, you experience it literally," says Zaera-Polo. "As opposed to those of us who have been lucky and born into wealthy economies where it was already there. To see the favelas and slums in South America gives you an incredible insight into how the public realm emerges out of a group of individuals. I think this is something that advanced economies need to look at now."

Read the complete article at The Guardian.

The Right to the City (D. Harvey) I

"The city, the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, is:

man's most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.

The right to the city is not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart's desire. We need to be sure we can live with out own creations (a problem for every planner, architect and utopian thinker). But the right to remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively different kind of urban sociality is one of the most precious of all human rights. The sheer pace and chaotic forms of urbanization throughout the world have made it hard to reflect on the nature of this task. We have been made and remade without knowing exactly why, how, wherefore and to what end. How then can be better exercise this right to the city?

The city has never been a harmonious place, free of confusions, conflicts, violence. Only read the history of the Paris Commune of 1871, see Scorsese's fictional depiction of gangs of New York in the 1850s, and think how far we have come. But then think of the violence that has divided Belfast, destroyed Beirut and Sarajevo, rocked Bombay [...]. Calmness and civility in urban history are the exception not the rule. The only interesting question is whether the outcomes are creative or destructive. Usually they are both: the city is the historical site of creative destruction. Yet the city has also proven a remarkably resiliant enduring and innovative social form.

But whose rights and whose city?" 

Harvey, David (2003) "The Right to the City". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Published in: Lin, Jan & Mele, Christopher (2013) The Urban Sociology Reader. London: Routledge. p 429.

Housing and the Informal City

Vertical Yard
(www.housinginformalcity.co.za)

Housing Possibilities

"Can we imagine a move away from the ‘shrunken mansion’ syndrome satisfying a perceived aspiration towards a dynamic flexibility which can deliver subsidised housing in which the unit becomes an asset leading to income generation?

[...] The settlement upgrade would be planned for the increased occupation density from the start in terms of infrastructure and social amenities.

The design of the proposed housing types also attempts to incorporate and enable income generation through accommodating rental rooms, retail and small business enterprise. Houses are located close to the street boundary to create a sense of urbanity, surveillance, ease of trading and to limit the amount of unusable space between units. Micro-loans, in addition to a basic starter unit (funded by means of the subsidy), can assist owners to construct quality rental rooms as per various pre-defined options. Part of the resultant rental income would go towards repaying the loan. Both the Vertical Yard and the 14x7m Row House offer two different approaches to achieve growth over time and a mix of uses and economies."

Read full article.

Research project 2008-2010.

26'10 south Architects & Prof. Lone Poulsen (Wits University) in partnership with the Goethe-Institut, South Africa.

26'10 team: Thorsten Deckler & Anne Graupner (26'10 principals), Tahira Toffa, Guy Trangos, Shammemah Davids, Claire Lubell, Lara Wilson, Nzinga Mboup.