Green-Washing Mumbai: Part 1
The Open Mumbai Exhibition (image source: http://www.pkdas.com/)
Taking a slight segue from the general narrative on our blog, I would like to introduce an extremely interesting phenomenon that is currently taking shape in Mumbai- articulating the need for “open space” in the city. Architect P.K. Das recently launched a phenomenal exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai titled “OPEN-MUMBAI- Re-envisioning cities, the case of Mumbai”, an exhibition that re-imagines and expands the notion of public spaces within the city. In a dense and over-populated city like Mumbai, creating open spaces within the city has historically been a practice of community agency and participatory politics. Either through vote bank politics or through the support of religious trusts, or through sports clubs, open spaces are created and protected from being occupied. However, these efforts do not provide the necessary respite and pervious ground the city requires, making open space one of the many most contested planning issues in the city. Read More…
For “Bankability” (Part 3)
bank•a•ble, adjective banka’bility noun
1. Acceptable for processing by a bank: bankable checks and money orders.
2. Considered powerful, prestigious, or stable enough to ensure profitability.
3. Dependable or reliable: a bankable promise
Continued from Part 1 and Part 2
Creation of the Bankable City
While the prime ministers speech explicitly speaks about making the poor bankable, the idea of making cities bankable is more implicit. The plans imagination of the bankable city has two aspects one it should be a city that attracts investment and second that it should be a city that can pay back its dues. The idea of slum freeness ties up to both these imaginations. This segment tries to trace the relationship of property tenure and slum freeness to the creation of a bankable city.
A World Class City: A city that attracts investment.
Until now Indian cities have largely been perceived as Mega Cities that are off the Global Cities Map. Unlike the global cities that are the command and control nodes of the economy, Mega Cities are perceived as being “big, but powerless”[1]. As Jenny Robinson notes the regulating fiction of the Global City vs Mega City has pushed Mega cities to try and make their way to the map by emulating the “best practices” and aesthetics of the global cities. A good example of this is the Vision Mumbai report produced by McKinsey and Co for Bombay first[2] The report stated that if Mumbai wanted to catapult itself into becoming an investor friendly, “World class city”, it should use Shanghai as its role model and push for neoliberal reforms. The report was quickly adopted by the Government of Maharashtra which set up a task force to put the plan into action. One of the targets that the report set up was to reduce the number of slums in Mumbai from 50 % to 10 %, making an implicit relationship between the presence of slums and investor unfriendliness. The idea of a “Bankable City”, relates closely to this idea of a “World Class City”. The Bankable City is the well serviced, efficiently running; investor friendly city that creates an atmosphere that guarantees returns. A city ridden with slums cannot be showcased, as the slum is seen as being symptomatic of bad governance and instability. Hence the issue of slum freeness becomes of prime importance for the “bankability” of a city.
Property Taxes: A city that pays its dues.
In his speech the prime minister states,
“As you are well aware, municipal finance is in an extremely unsatisfactory state. This is on account of an inability to properly tap and utilize proceeds from property tax, due to the inadequacies of the property valuation system and inefficiencies in tax collection systems. Municipal governments are not able to recover Read More…
Urban Informal Expressions I: Guerrilla Gardening
Formal vs. Informal Does it mean anything?
Post by Silvia Soonets [Proyectos Arqui 5] on Caracas
Adriana’s last post, More Definitions: Informality vs. Informalities, made me think, once more, about the meaning of informality. I’m not talking in an academic or philosophical sense, but from the practical approach of someone that it is supposed to offer solutions to the problem. What does informality mean? Has this meaning any impact in our decisions as designers?
There are, certainly, many informalities, and most, but not all, of them are related with poverty and developing countries. The high class settlements South East Caracas and the street vendors in LA are only two examples of these exceptions.
Caracas is a showcase of any kind of informality we can think of: regular (traditional?) slums, street vendors and varied informal economic activities everyway, rich zones very beautiful but built according the same principles of a slum, the new vertical slums inside Read More…
The Thrift of Sambinha: Catadores and Waste Mitigation
“Or do without.” That’s the last line of the American axiom, left off of this World War II era poster promoting thriftiness in support of the war effort. It may be that the typesetters ran out of room, but more likely it became truncated for being the downer line. Who wants to do without after all? It’s bad for sales. Actually, according to Giles Slade author of “Made to Break” the US went in cycles of thrift and squander between the World Wars. As advertised in the propaganda poster, the wars created times of scarcity where all available resources were to contribute to victory on the battlefield. However, after the war machines went quiet, sales could not be allowed to slump and so the watchwords once again became buy new, buy now. Read More…
Edges, Patches, and Street Vendors
Dramstad, Wenche E., James D Olson, and Richard T. T Forman. Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land-use Planning. [Cambridge, Mass.] : Washington, DC : [Washington, D.C.]: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1996.
With today’s post, I am diverging a bit and beginning with a focus on street vending in Los Angeles, where I reside.
At the recent American Planning Association’s Annual Conference in Los Angeles, I participated in a workshop dedicated to informing local efforts to legalize street vending – alarming to some, but, yes, in Los Angeles all street vendors, from the shopping cart tamale vendor to the stand-alone freshly-sliced fruit vendor are, to put it simply, selling their goods illegally. The organizers of the workshop, largely members of the local Leadership for Urban Renewal Now Network, hoped that the workshop could assist in “laying out an innovative municipal code that legalizes mobile food vending and incorporates street vendors into the community to support culture, jobs, business activity, and safety.”
We were broken into different focused groups – safety, public health, licensing, scope of activity, and area. I ended up in the “area” group in which fellow group members and I were tasked with discussing “the areas in which vendors should be permitted,” with consideration of the following questions: Should the ordinance prioritize certain areas of the city? How can the city help drive traffic to areas that need more business activity? What departments should be engaged, and what are the issues we should consider?
Slumscapes
Jeff Gillette, “Mondrian,” image courtesy of the artist
The title of this post is taken from a series of paintings by Jeff Gillette, a Southern-California-based mixed-media artist and painter. Gillette, in his artist’s statement, writes of his visits to several slums in Kolkata, Mumbai, and Delhi: “Aside from the seething humanity, the suffering, the unfairness and cruelty of the slum was a strange beauty. The cacophony of filthy debris rising from oceans of garbage comprises an architecture of poverty and necessity. What emerges is a living environment of aesthetic wonder, of spectacular variations of color, form, and texture.”
Gillette’s paintings display a high level of artistic control. Building materials, topography, and structural forms are clearly specified and arrayed in rhythmic compositions. The kaleidoscopic colors and textures are just bright enough to signal that the viewer is in a hyperrealistic environment, and to call attention to the consumer-waste origin of the building materials. Human inhabitants are absent (though human and Disney characters are sometimes included in order to make a visual pun on “squatting.”)
I wanted to focus on Gillette’s work here because it is a good reference point for discussing representations of urban informality and aestheticization of poverty, topics we frequently address here in Favelissues. As Gillette expressed to me, the visual and aesthetic are the primary content of his work, and his approach is basically objective. In that sense his images are the ultimate aestheticization of slums, as he is occupied with problems central to art and philosophy, not policy.
Jeff Gillette, “Caracas,” image courtesy of the artist
But Gillette’s paintings can stand in for a tendency in our own minds to let an image or the “skin” of an informal settlement push aside a fuller understanding of the complexity of urban informality. It’s so much easier to hold an image Read More…
Questions of perspective
“Sport Mega-Events and the Crisis of Youth Exclusion” source: http://youthandsport.idebate.org/
Last week I attended a conference about youth and social exclusion in the context of sporting mega-events. Sport and play are strongly associated with children and youth; and as the organizer’s note, the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup “were founded on the theory that by providing healthful, demilitarized spaces where the youth of the world could realize their potential, they would come to embody a new kind of non-nationalistic, peaceful breed of humanity.” The present-day reality of mega-events, particularly the Olympics and the FIFA World cup, ironically rely on exclusionary policies and police practices that disproportionately affect young people. The organizers and participants of the conference; a healthy mix of academics, activists, and youth advocates; explored this contradiction and asked “How can public policy makers, youth organizations and event organizers ensure that the arrival of these sports mega-events, which are almost universally heralded as economic and social opportunities for their host communities, do not isolate, exclude and target local underprivileged youth?”
One of the sessions addressed ‘security’ and young people in Rio de Janeiro as the city prepares for the 2014 FIFA Men’s World Cup followed by the Summer Olympic Games two years later. The speakers included a sociology professor from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and two community activists who worked with NGOs in different favelas in the city. The three presenters were congenial—they got a long; they sat in a row together in the audience before presenting. They all seemed committed to social and economic justice, human rights, democratic participation and citizenship. They all denounced police corruption and abuse in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and agreed that reducing inequality in the city ultimately rested with the state’s ability Read More…
Favela and Futebol VI: its not only about winning
Socrates, a great player with a political conscience (1954-2011)
June of 1982. The Seleção directed by Tele Santana enchanted the world with their beautiful soccer. I clearly remember the first game against the USSR (it happened on my birthday, as it very often do). The soviets scored first and Brazil spent the whole game on attack. The equalizing goal came only at 30 min of the second half. With 3 minutes left Paulo Isidoro crossed from the right before the penalty area, Falcão opened his legs for the ball to continue its transversal to Eder who shot one of his cannon balls into the goal. Brasil 2×1 against a strong Soviet team. Paulo Isidoro and Eder (plus Luizinho and Cerezo) being from my beloved Atlético Mineiro I could not get a better birthday present. Three weeks later they lost to Italy and entered history as the another great Brazilian that deserved to win but did not.
June 1982. The same day that Brazil played the Soviets marked the cease fire at the Malvinas (or Falkland) islands. Argentina’s war adventure had failed and the result is that they broke their own treasury, accelerating the end of the dictatorship. As dominos falling, that year would see defaults in Mexico and Brasil. By the end of the year all major Latin American countries were in economic trouble. By the end of the decade all dictatorships had fallen: Argentina, Brasil, Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay.
Redemocratization brought new hope for the favelas. Social movements were now part of the political process and not underground organizations. Newly elected governments in Rio de Janeiro for instance started to recognize the favelas not as a problem (to be extirpated) but as cheap solutions to an enormous housing shortage. Oscar Niemeyer started designing the CIEPS, full time schools built on the periphery of Rio to educate, feed and entertain kids. The largest Brazilian cohort ever was born that year (1982) and is now turning 30, certainly enjoying the best labor market ever since.
But the same crisis of external debt that helped bring the dictatorships down also ensured that the 1980s would be the “lost decade” in Latin America. Brasil, Argentina and Mexico saw their economies stagnate during the 1980s. The effect on the favelas was that the new political liberties were not matched by parallel investments for absolute lack of money (supported by IMF stringent guidelines). Later in 1986 Diego Maradona won the World Cup almost by himself while at home the fresh (and still financially broke) democracies of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay were cooking Mercosur, starting a collaboration that changed the region’s geopolitics.
Sometimes loosing here helps you win further down the road.
Adriana Navarro Sertich
Lubaina Rangwala
Jennifer Renteria
Kirsten Larson
Proyectos Arqui5
Tucker Landesman
Namrata Kapoor
Paula Restrepo-Cadavid
Andrew Carman
Jose Antonio Ramirez
Fernando Luiz Lara
Bethany Opalach
