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…
“Informal” Designers, Part 2
Street scene in Diadema, São Paulo
My last post looked at stair design in favelas in São Paulo, Brazil, and how spatial constraint, material availability, and communal negotiation impact design. This post will look at another aspect of self-built environments in the same context – semiprivate buffer zones or transitional spaces between the street and the private residence. The street pictured above is located in Diadema, a municipality that is part of greater São Paulo. The settlement was originally an agglomeration of shacks in a steep ravine. The municipal government, led by the Workers’ Party, had redistributed legal lots to the original residents and upgraded the utilities, and by 1996 it was in the process of becoming a lower-middle-class neighborhood.
Due to the spatial constraints on the settlement, each family’s lot was only about 11 by 45 feet, and circulation paths were narrow. The density, lack of privacy, and animation at the street level can be seen in the photo above. As a way of mitigating density, strengthening security, and providing semiprivate outdoor space, a large majority of the houses (about 80%) had a semiprivate, usually gated, outdoor transition zone between the street and the entry door. Many of these spaces served laundry or other utilitarian purposes, and they were often made beautiful with potted plants and birdcages.
[caption id="attachment_2699" align="alignnone" width="420" caption="Buffer zone in Diadema, São Paulo Read More…
“Informal” Designers
As I noted in my last post, professional architectural design has recently come to be seen as a valid and potentially effective approach to improving informal settlements. I have long had an interest in the spatial and material qualities of built environment of informal settlements, and the recent shift in thinking about “design in favelas” presents an opportunity to expand the discussion to include architectural design as practiced by the residents themselves. As a point of reference, I would suggest that spatial constraint is typically the factor most at play in the process of architectural design in an urban informal settlement, and that its impact can be observed in every piece of the built environment.
Part of my architectural research in São Paulo focused on documenting stairs and semiprivate outdoor spaces, as these were common elements visible from the circulation spaces which showed a lot of individual expression. At first glance, designing a stair in an informal settlement might seem like a simple project. In fact, the number of factors that have to be addressed by the designer is surprisingly high. The first design decision would most likely be the selection of a location. In the spatially constrained context of an informal settlement, the builder may wish to encroach on an adjacent circulation path. These “public” spaces appear to be created and maintained by local agreement, although I have not investigated how the encroachment process occurs in that context.
But whether the stair was within the zone of a resident’s home, or encroaching in the circulation space, the guiding principle appeared to be to serve the purpose in the minimum space possible. Stairs were almost always narrow rather than wide, and within the great variety of stair configurations I documented, I rarely encountered full landings where a stair changed direction – typically, a triangular step or two would serve the purpose. As the photo above shows, the two angled treads appear to be designed to encroach as little as possible into the adjacent circulation space.
Fortunately, the best material for designing these freeform stairs is also one of the most inexpensive and readily available. Poured-in-place Read More…
Why Design?
I’d like to take as my starting point the blog entries posted here by Proyectos Arqui5 about their experiences designing upgrading projects in barrios in Caracas, Venezuela. I’m struck by the sense of frustration and urgency in Ms. Soonets’ and Ms. Pocaterra’s writing. We in the US can only imagine the strange reverses they are witnessing which are, in their view, resulting in the downgrading of the planned city. They describe a professional context in which laws and sources of political support are frequently turned upside down, and projects that have been in planning for years are inexplicably stonewalled.
In thinking about the challenges of practicing architecture in such a context I thought back to my own education at UC Berkeley and my architectural research in favelas in Sao Paulo in the mid-1990s, when the idea of architects designing projects in squatter settlements would have sounded quite bizarre to most people. At that time, studying community design had gone out of style. Computer-generated rendering was beginning to be taught, so that a student could put a glittering skin over any form and present it as a building. Most students’ focus was on the building as an object, not on design in the service of users (in spite of the best efforts of the faculty) and the real estate boom of the last fifteen years saw many of us working on large, costly buildings.
The knowledge that we spend so much of our time mastering – complex planning and building codes, sophisticated materials, structural, lighting, HVAC, and LEED requirements – is specific to the formal context and has little to no relevancy in a less formal setting. Instead, relevant areas of knowledge might include participatory design, local social, political, and commercial practices, health, violence, sanitation, transportation and water issues, local land use policy, tenure and access to credit, sustainability in the context of the local geography, the socio-economic programs Read More…
From Occupation to Squatting?
Encampment at Tahrir Square, July 2011, by Jonathan Rashad
“Occupy” is both the title and the defining directive of the current global protests against income inequality and lack of accountability for the economic crisis. The word occupy, in English, has at least three definitions, two of which apply to the process of claiming and using space. One definition refers to the simple act of being in a place, while another is tied to our legal framework and the concepts of land ownership, tenure, and squatting.
At first, it wasn’t clear that that the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park were not like others in recent history. In the US, we are accustomed to seeing protests either in the form of large single-day mobilizations, or small “vigils” that peter out after a few days or weeks. These protests could be considered to fall under the first definition of occupy; the participants are physically present in a public space, using that space, but without the expectation of long-term shelter.
But with protestors’ refusal to move, inspired by the Arab Spring demonstrations, a point of transition to the second definition was established, and this put officials and police in an unfamiliar situation. The Occupy encampments – large-scale, organized establishment of the functions of dwelling in a public space without the necessary infrastructure – are something new and jarring to the US, where we are accustomed to living in a context where almost all property (and housing) is private. As Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City, said, “The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out. But it doesn’t give anyone the right to sleep in a park or otherwise take it over, to the exclusion of others. Protesters have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.” Health and safety concerns were cited (and possibly exaggerated), we heard echoes of Latin American squatter settlement eradication rhetoric, and bulldozers and dumpsters were brought in.
Post-eviction view of Occupy Oakland by EKA Photography
Cooking utensils post-eviction, Occupy Oakland, by EKA Photography
The visual appearance of the encampments brings media attention to the movement, but the tents, which can be seen as substandard homes in this context, also remind us of the foreclosure crisis in the US - the canary in the coal mine that prefigured the near-collapse of the economy in 2008. As encampments continue to be removed, activist groups like Take Back the Land are putting forward the idea of organized squatting in foreclosed homes as both form of protest and as a housing solution.
Foreclosed home in Riverside, California, by Kevin Anderson
Income inequality, one of the rallying cries of the protests, has long been correlated to the rise of informal settlements in less developed countries. Could the same process be occuring in the US? Current research shows that income inequality has been growing steadily in the US since the 1980s. The enormous differences in economic, social and cultural contexts would make it challenging to apply any research from developing countries to the US. But seen in its simplest form, if squatting as a housing solution was to spread in the US, it would be driven by the same basic needs, and the same inability to pay market rates, that drive informal housing creation in less developed countries. The questions of whether housing is a right or a privilege, and of who controls public spaces, are still unresolved in the US, but the Occupy protests are bringing both to the forefront.
The Architect’s Gaze
Intro Post by Bethany Opalach
In representational works of art, the image itself is the object of our perception and attention, while the subject is transformed into only part of the story. When the subject of a photograph is a slum, favela, or other informal settlement, it can become morally quite difficult to allow ourselves to acknowledge beauty within the image, knowing that real suffering and inequality were present when the photograph was taken.
- Credits: Image of Sao Remo favela, Sao Paulo, by Bethany Opalach
But architects don’t have the luxury of avoiding this contradiction. The primary requirement of our profession is to create usefulness and beauty within the constraints of a project, and we can’t help but appreciate these qualities wherever we find them. The beauty in the way light falls into a narrow alley, the care taken by a builder to bring greenery into a cramped courtyard – the fact that these phenomena are captured in a photograph of favela or slum doesn’t mean we must disregard them. Builders of informal settlements use many of the same design rules used by vernacular builders in other contexts, and in fact, they are often the same design rules we “professional” designers use. As Teddy Cruz notes, “It’s not from places of abundance that new ideas will be generated, but from places of constraint.”
- Credits: Image of Sao Remo favela, Sao Paulo, by Bethany Opalach
Architects sometimes become enthralled with the medieval-hill-town qualities of favelas like Rocinha, and have often been criticized Read More…
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
