„The Urban Planet“
The details of the large picture / discovering the simple in the complex
The fact that currently urbanized areas concentrate more than half of the world population is widely discussed. Alone in India 380 Million people are estimated to migrate from rural zones into urban centers within the next two decades that means to accommodate about 20 more cities the seize of Mumbai or Sao Paulo. While there is clear demographic and geographic evidence that migration flows in South America, Africa and Asia point towards further urbanization, one would assume cities must get prepared for the consequences of this flow. Paradoxically only few politicians or bankers, or urban designers have managed to leave the phenomenological level of this discussion behind, to enter into the realm of reality and as a result, cities are still largely unprepared for people, and people are unprepared for the city.
Contemporary Cities as the predominant human living environment are today widely seen as the solution to the question of how we shall live. But as we passed the check mark of 50% or 3.45 Billion people living in cities we think it is time for a reality check. We started to ask ourselves a series of questions: what are these cities actually like, who lives there, and how? Can we as architects promote the city as a model that is in its scale and dimension so new to us, that paradoxically despite most of us living there, we know so little about. To prove this thesis, we measured it against today’s problem solving incapacity in urban areas.
Is the city today with a total of 3.45 Billion urban population and 1 billion (29%) of these people living in Slums a model we can seriously endorse without better researching the underlying conditions of urban life? If we where to know more, what would then be the issues, could we prioritize and better react to address them? As cities grow in population, territory and wealth, they increase as well, almost proportionally, in pollution, congestion, crime, and poverty. The good news is, that it is clear that if solutions exist, only here in the urban centers the creativity and with it, the possible projects will emerge from.
“Cities are largely unprepared for people, and people are unprepared for the city.”
In Caracas the city that we live and work, we have witnessed a massive increase of closely inter-related systemic problem scenarios, and we know that they will not clear away by themselves. The City Governments a typically externalizing the question for the simple reason that the seriousness of the problems is already today too large to attend. An example that illustrates this strikingly is the dominating fact of increasing population. Metropolitan Caracas lacks 2 million of social-housing units; only a few ten thousands (50.000 to 80.000) are built every year while the city along with the problem continues to growing.
Our research shows, that if solutions exist they too often stay on the surface and fail to addressing the core of the problem, frequently they are unfit to serve over a larger territory. City Administrations are inexperienced, they find themselves challenged both financially and technically and have no solutions at hand when most needed, typically administrative and management capacities are limited. In short, no-compliance has become the accepted rule of governments, and leaves a resigned civil society behind.
When we started Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) more than a decade ago as an ONG based in Caracas, Venezuela, we first entered a process of critical questioning of the conditions of a city that we accepted in principal as a contemporary reality. This quickly turned into a fundamental research project, which made clear that an evident need for a profound change in the very understanding of urban culture is necessary. The results of this research were published in 2005 in a book together with our partner and initiator Kulturstiftung des Bundes. (Informal city / Caracas-Case, U-TT, Brillembourg/Feireiss/Klumpner, Prestel 2005).
U-TT is today an agency for research and development, and an agent to initiate change, which placed us over the last decade between revolution and everyday life, engulfed in the process of making a few rather small interventions resulting in a big change of our understanding, for our work. (see MoMA exhibition “Small Scale-Big Change”, curated by Andres Lepik) Socially responsible city building starts with the interaction between citizens with a growing number of people from different backgrounds. Moving our attention away from registering people’s wants to understand their needs, and from form and product to content and process. We believe we need to design cities that include ideas for the growing masses, and we need a democratization of architecture, a downward mobility of an architecture for the masses and by the masses, a democratization of design.
We at Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) promote alternatives in the planning culture from consumption to production. The idea of maximizing consumption as growth model sits deep in the legal codes and norms systems and has to be scrutinized in form of an urgent moratorium to allow for a space of transition and transformation. The idea of unlimited resources, unlimited cheap labor and unlimited growth, versus an alternative concept of a city of production, learning and creation, recycling and distribution is still far away from a formal public acceptance
As we move once again towards novel models of globalization, perhaps global-collaboration and global- design development, to distribute knowledge and innovation rather than growing profits could mark this next phase. The task of moderating and animating this process to show what is possible is the first step to allow the growing cities of the south to become the centers of innovation, collaborative and applied R/D on planetary scales. For this we are working in our offices in South America, India, and since 2010 also at the chair of architecture and urban design at the ETH in Zürich Switzerland.
An Urban-Planet / reality is stranger than science fiction
The house has often been regarded as a metaphor for the city, and likewise the city for the world, the entire planet. We believe today that these discoveries of the simple in the complex have lead us at the beginning of the 21st century to a next stage of globalization and the first realization of an Urban-Planet. The project of continuous urbanization was long understood as fragmented, as described in the Global City (London, Tokyo, New York, London, Saskia Sassen, 1998) and the Global Slum (Caracas, Sao Paulo, Karachi, Zimbawe, Lagos, U-TT, Pontresina Architecture Conference 2001). We know today that they are the two faces of the same coin, engaged in an intercourse of informal practices on the scale of an Urban-Planet. Our declaration of this Urban-Planet, the contemporary Makropolis (first approximation in Science Fiction Literature by American writer Isaac Asimov as Trantor) makes a reassessment of the very existance of the built and unbuilt human habitat, city and nature, along with the remaining surface area, land and water and air for future urban development necessary.
Characteristics for the rapid urbanization pattern of our Urban-Planet are the parts of a larger system of globally distributed hot spots. These are already visible as archipelagos of diverse local variations of urbanity that are currently in the process of connecting and covering with their infrastructures both in physically (built mass, train tracks, roads, cables, pipelines, satellites, planes) and non physically ways (phone and radio waves, social organizations, economic relationships, networks, culture, etc.) the entire globe. Citizens of the Urban-Planet have no choice but to internalize all aspects of live and take responsibility for all processes of their existence. This is the first time in history that we do not have to live in a city anymore to lead an urban live, as we are unable to leave the urbanized territory with different degrees of urbanity we have no choice but abandoning the concept of different cities and the idea of either city or country altogether. This is why we proclaim today “Caracas is everywhere” and what we see is what we got, this is not a planet full of houses but a house the seize of a planet.
Islands and Ghettos / crisis in cities of abundance and cities of scarcity
Three Megatrends namely Urbanization, Globalization and Informalization (Elmar Altvater, U-TT, Informal city p51-55) have brought us the proliferation of Gated Communities, often called Islands and Slums, often called Ghettos. We have concentrated our efforts on translating the intense but ignored interchange between them and their various interfaces into building types and programs.
Islands and Ghettos are the predominant formats of contemporary urbanization and represent aprox. 90% of the total world residential construction. They are realized almost entirely without the participation of architects. These two co-evolving urban species along with the significant informal relations that connect them have made them our core research interest. The resilience and potential of informality in any possible crisis situation has made them even more interesting and the capacity as driver of change and motors for urban production have been widely recognized and transforms increasingly in ever-changing practices. Informality has been so economically successful that informal practices have become an interest of the global urban elites. The interest in the Slum of Dharawi in Mumbai shows the potential of slums as development zones that urban elites recognize as the only remaining large-scale inner city land reserves. One gets a sense of the gentrification of informality as we have registered Harvard Business school students are becoming frequent guests in researching informal land practices and cooperations delivering food for thousands of office workers. , This emancipator potential of informality is beyond doubt, but lets not forget that too many Slums are still in neglect and abandonment and in danger of breakdown if major innovation does not occur.
What is missing in our view is a joint effort with a stronger focus on connecting top down and bottom up initiatives to make cities an international priority issue and respond today to the modest original demands of the population in energy, transportation, infrastructure, buildings, waste treatment, food, water, and social networks in order to built test sites of assisting communities to growing their cities on the grounds of need. What face in Slums today is a 50 year long innovation debt without precedent, only matched by the financial debt crisis, over the past two years.
Caracas provides us with an ideal Laboratory of what we can expect to happen, the Barrios (slums) of Caracas originated as consequence of a definitive ignorance of the realities and the deficiencies in the city during a long period of time, roughly 30 years between 1958 and 1989. This was not so much a question of ideology but rather the lack of common sense from an uninterested public that slowly buried itself under the load of a pile up of problems that manifested themselves over time, accompanied by the emergence of slum zones that house today 60% of a metropolitan population of a total of aprox. 4 Million people. The consent of a two party system based on the manufactured idea of, everything is all right, “todo bien”, and was largely accepted by that part of the population who externalized the reality of growing Slums as the problem of these people, and relegated its resolve to a later moment, while enjoying the privileges of depleting the oil and other resources. This situation is best illustrated in the fact that in Caracas today petrol is cheaper than drinking water, another urban scenario of the Urban-Planet that feels much like what we call Bladerunner in the Tropics.
accepting the unacceptable / common sense is not so common
While some of us have trusted in the widely debated message, that cities are already the answer and solution to the pressing problem of rapid urbanization of humanity, we tell you, Think Again. Cities on our Planet need much more than CBD,s, Museums, Opera Houses, World Exhibitions, Olympic Games, Soccer WM, and Airports.
We are aware that this account from the front lines of urbanization sounds slanderous to the reputation of cities that are associates to be the engines of wealth creation and focal points of raising living standards. That side of the story is “in average” true for most statistical analysis on western countries, having reached degrees from 70 to 80% of urbanization. But did statistics based on a theoretical average consider the raising income disparities that are associated to the creation of more wealth for a smaller segment of the overall population and the decline of Millions of people into poverty. The answer is No. The consequence is the creation of Slums or Slum-like Zones from the Banlieues of Paris to the City States and Shrinking Cities in Germany.
In the meantime, and because of the indicators mentioned above, poverty has become an urban phenomenon. Poverty in cities means, latent struggle for survival and total or partly exclusion from resources and basic rights to the city. Concretely no water, no health service, no school, but exploitation, prostitution, child labor, and so far very little attention has been given to this reality by anybody and certainly less so by urban designers or architects.
The positivistic view on cities has been largely favored a selective look on the dominating economic success of Global Cities without taking in consideration that every global city today needs its Global Slum. We have come to accept the realities of this contemporary situation as challenge and prepare to face this reality in an orchestrated way. We have learned that delayed delivery of concrete response in this urban crisis will result in revolution, but Schumpeters notion of search and destroy will lead at the current situation to potentially greater problems for all of us. The bottom of the Pyramid the Masses are our hope to provide a motive for a new discourse in architecture practices that includes visions and motivation to realization through reform in small but tangible scales. This is where we at Urban-Think Tank has directed his efforts and our conviction to develop accessible socially responsible design solutions that are collected in our a Toll-Box (Urban Tool Box, U-TT, SEHAB 2009) of concrete buildings that have an educational message and at the same time inspire a young generation of architects and urban designers who are invited to act in participating changing society.
Not-Not Sustainable
We are concerned about the abuse of words like Climate Change, Poverty Relief, Green City, and most of all Sustainable. The circumstances that lead us into this field are many, and more arise as we move on. They are both local and universal in character through which they are relevant as basic principles for preserving the vernacular and the cultural diversity of urban lifestyles as values for our human habitat beyond the concept of sustainability as a predominantly technical issue that can be subscribed. The project of our cities certainly is a cause of global dimensions, the forces that are set free on this Urban-Planet are unmatched in history both in scale and seize and most importantly in their social consequence. The collective memory of a Billion people who are growing up in Slums around the world is of truly biblical dimension and the acceptance of scarce resources and rapid changes are providing a framework that leads inevitably to simplicity as a response to the resource imperialism that is in practical terms “not sustainable” even though the discourse about particular developments and buildings might suggest that. The cities we are talking about are already settled and construct themselves on top of existing cities not on green fields or in the dessert. As designers we must address this systematic search for a solution-based way of doing things better for a much larger number of people, our idea of collaborative teams basically represents an interdisciplinary community of designers, builders and local end-users.
Turning Accident into Design / the raise of the real
Teddy Cruz recently said in during a recent lecture at the ETH, “It is time to put Marcel Duchamps Urinal back on the wall”. The image of the realization of an ideal planned city for the larger part of humanity is unrealistic. Therefore a re-examination and correlation of our contemporary life and the cities we have already built for us is long overdue, the omission of failures in the evaluation is symptomatic. On the level of buildings the debate of what we can afford if we like to reach all citizens regardless of income, race, religion, age and gender is long overdue, simplicity might only serve as first lead. Our research shows that particularly the cities that are growing to become the world’s largest urban hot spots are a difficult environment for a growing number of fellow citizens excluded from basic services and without resources. We have reached a point where half of our citizens can no longer recognize their city looking in what conditions their next-door neighbors lives. Looking away has become common practice replacing common sense. That means we have the wrong models in mind building our cities and to satisfy the needs to a dignified live, without spoiling our resources for the future. We have to work on possible scenarios to solve some of these issues. Simply built has become the credo we accepted for our work and the stand-up mentality of Slum Dwellers in South America that has thought us that after the Mudslides or Earthquakes such crisis have been translated in resources of providing new available land even with the perspective of a reoccurring catastrophe. We like to call this the construction upon a catastrophe; the catastrophe however is not the event triggered by a natural cause of rainstorm etc. but a sign of the vulnerability of the people in slums. The quite acceptance of exclusion and efforts of re-building ephemeral make shift solutions is also a sign of resignation and speechlessness fueled by the abandonment of authorities and the lack of support of government and civil society in the process of building a livelihood. Despite the perspective of repeated and anticipated failure The idea of short term use, disposable yet recyclable buildings and lifestyles provide a short time solution that is superior to the ignorance, exclusion and a statement against colonization of forms exploitation. We raise our voice against deliberate negligence, not only by correcting the course we are designing in our cities but promoting a clear condemnation of existing practices and a complete redefinition of what is given the circumstances “acceptable”.
In our best common interest / start thinking what would happen if tomorrow would be yesterday
Caracas suffers the loss of 60 mostly young man and woman in the poorest areas of the city killed every weekend, and it comes as no surprise that our city has been awarded the dubious distinction being the city in Latin America with the highest murder rate. (La Liberacion, 16th of February 2011) in the ambient of a brutal urban warfare in our cities. In the face of this reality the very act of developing building programs and inventing building typologies for the masses of children and adolescence has become a morbid but at the same time urgent exercise to act within the consequences of the existing system. We have seized to try to comprehend the inequality in cities within the framework of national government.
The very fact of the realities that surround us has already been laid out. The irony is the inappropriateness of existing opinion, which still provides a display of presenting the urban south as exceptions and the west as “standard” model of urban development. We know that for the larger part of the urban population it is the other way around and the numbers proof us right. This inverse viewpoint is however a necessary one to put the topic of contemporary urbanization in perspective. Your western models will not work for the Urban-Planet we have to design new and hopefully better ones.
Reboot the Urban-System / Democratization of Design
At Urban-Think Tank we see that we have today the possibility and the feeling of obligation to question if we can seriously recommend anybody to built their emerging urban societies on the basis of the paradigms that have proved not only wrong from a social point of view but also deepen the economic and environmental problems we pretended to solve. Namely building cities for our common future.
The “old” new economy promoted a practice of selling to cities, mostly in the developing world a lot of interlocking outdated ideas like infrastructures, etc. to maximize profit and create long-term dependency. This was long accepted and justified by the salesman slogan: Better I do it before somebody else will do it. The question of collaboration, partnership and innovation was not in the vocabulary. The overriding theme we have experienced in the urban south is the powerlessness and the predominantly negative effects on people in the urban world by knowingly repeating errors over and over again for the sake of short-term business success. (Centralized infrastructure, automobile and fossil fuel dependency) This is still a common practice, but has to be brought to public awareness and to a full stop. We have seen the decision makers in city halls and their advisors intentionally spreading disinformation and public officials accepting the consultants claims uncritically and willingly for a hand full of dollars underneath the table. This male-practice has lead to a serious drain of valuable investment that could had been placed towards long-run instability and by compromising with conventional technology the future investments we deprive ourselves from a Millennium-chance of building the most advanced urban environments free from the baggage of the urban- centers of the northern hemisphere in the urban-south. The distribution of knowledge and resource access is a dual responsibility that we as architects embrace and the state of our urban environments requires urgent action. This will be a long term urban-design process of progress and innovation not an event to deliver a product..
So our challenge at U-TT remains how can we provide the growing urban population of 3.45 Billion with solutions by design? For this we need partners in the industry, fabrication and trade. Their greatest challenge too is to understand how to reach the growing masses at the bottom of the wealth and pyramid. The cultural and civilization crisis of a billion poor living in our cities has to be attended with combined efforts between all parties involved and scientific and technical excellence. Working in Slums, zones that represent not areas of a lack of investment but as we have seen again and again of no investment, raises not only technical questions but on the fore ground ethical, social and cultural questions that need to be addressed. Only with this in mind can we measure to what extend change is possible and who is the agent of this structural change in cities. The attention of the children and adolescence along with all the other segments of the population that are generally presented as fringe groups, single mothers, senior citizens, disabled people, etc. are in total the vast majority in our cities and our projects are designed to attend them.
We are working in a complex environment that demands simple solutions. The reason is commonly used materials and a construction ideology, which is based on price. Most people believe a cheap building is of bad quality; an expensive building is of high quality, this along with our expectation of how a building is developed must change. Appropriate solutions in the urban environment respond to local and vernacular culture social realities if we change our expectation from product to process and from finite object to infinite development we can provide cheap solutions for the masses.
Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner / Urban-Think Tank
Chair of Architecture and Urban Design Swiss Institute of Technology
ETH, Zurich
