REDIFINING TENURE

The first criteria for what defines “adequate housing” according to the UNHCR is:

"legal security of tenure, especially in the form of protection against forced evictions;"

Brookings Institute pg. 130

Tenure is the most difficult issue to overcome with housing that hovers between temporary and permanent housing. Most often it is mired in the longevity of solving complex political situations as well as the government accepting a situation they still aim to change. Tenure begins with solidarity of ownership, whether that be an individual or an entity, public or private. Renting and cooperatives have stemmed from this unilateral stance on land ownership. However, there are many historical examples of creating communal ownership or removing ownership, often led by socialist and communist intellectuals. 

Ownership has come to signify stability in many countries, both at a large scale and within an individual's ambitions. In establishing a new state, regulating land tenure is one of the first requirements for preventing rogue individuals from monopolizing control through power. Within an individual life, home ownership becomes a goal of achievement, not only as "the American Dream" but the global dream. It is difficult in society to remove this notion of ownership, but it provides a solution to the complex issues of land tenure in displacement situations that is in some ways more realistic than settling individual ownership. 

Tony Garnier provided a model in his Cite Industrielle. While most of the socialist models do not deal solely with tenure, it is what is included in that effort that also interests me. Tony Garnier provided "a significantly radical break with the traditional definition of an architect's role in society" (109). He believe in a "productive alliance between a reformative city government and an architect" (110). He "synthesized in one body of work all the principles that subsequently redefined an architect's role in society" and showed that "architecture should apply itself to the task of bettering society" (112). 

Garnier's definition of adequate housing was based on light and required "at least one window to the south, big enough to light the entire room and allow direct sunlight"--this also went for any enclosed space (114). While he only specified these regulations for private home, he strongly suggested that they apply to all public buildings as well. He regulated density by saying the only half of all plots of land may be built up. He required that the unbuilt of the lot had "unimpeded passage from the street to the building" (115). All buildings were placed at the back of the lot, so there was a contiguous defacto park open to the public between all the buildings. Streets were set at 43-66 feet wide, and landscaping was required. (It should be noted that there was a height restriction which limits available density). 

Labor components were inherent in urban socialist models. Employment offices and union officers had "guest quarters and restaurants for persons waiting to work," similar to the worker's clubs of USSR (116). Finally, "each section [was] arranged so that it can grow independent of other sections," whether that be schools, hospitals, labor halls, or housing. Garnier embeds a caveat that the city can adjust and accommodate its needs as it grows. 

DEFINING ADEQUATE

IDPs, Somaliland

Displaced persons is an issue that occurs globally, either due to manmade or natural disasters or the lure of opportunity in the city. The result is immediate need for temporary housing that becomes married with the need for a long-term solution--all occurring with varying degrees of success. To some degree, it seems like context does not necessarily matter. It is happens everywhere. The standards for what is considered "adequate housing" has a global definition. It is set by both UN-HABITAT and the UNHCR. 

“Adequate housing” is defined as that which affords its occupants:
•  legal security of tenure, especially in the form of protection against forced evictions;
• available services and infrastructure (access to water; energy for cooking, heating, and lighting; sanitation and washing facilities; food storage; and waste disposal, and so on);
• affordable housing costs such that the attainment of other basic needs is not threatened;
• habitability in the sense of adequate space, physical safety, and protection from cold, damp, heat, rain, wind, structural hazards, and disease vectors;
• sufficient accessibility that disadvantaged or vulnerable groups are not left without shelter appropriate to their particular needs;
• a physical location allowing affordable access to employment options, health care services, schools, child-care centers, and other social facilities and avoiding risks from pollution sources;
• appropriate construction and materials for the expression of cultural identity;283
compliance with safety standards aimed at minimizing damage from future disasters.284
Brookings Institute pg. 130

However, words like "adequate" and "sufficient" and "affordable" and "appropriate" provide no metric for judging the quality of the housing. Standards for what defines these subjective terms varies by countries. Each country and region has their own standard of living. Therefore, while regulations are set globally, they enforced, especially with regards to metrics, at a more local/regional scale. The global standards become the minimum that must be improved upon. 

"In practice, this means that competent authorities in displacement settings should strive to meet relevant minimum standards (in the form of national safety or habitability rules and international guidelines), both by continually seek to provide better housing alternatives and by following timelines for improving, upgrading, or replacing the least adequate forms of shelter."

When regulations are enforced at the local level, it often means countries are relying on their laws set up for ordinary operation. However, such domestic frameworks rarely anticipate internal displacement and are typically not sufficient on their own for the development of a response to the shelter needs of IDPs.  

Typical models of settlement include "self-settle," "host-families," and "dispersed." The Brookings Institute suggest that a separate government agency be created to provide targeted oversight and guidance. 
Minimum essential elements of state regulation: At a minimum, competent authorities should do the following:

1. Recognize the right to basic shelter and adequate housing for IDPs.
2. Designate a governmental agency responsible for addressing shelter and housing needs of displaced
persons.
3. Seek and accept support from the international community if needs cannot be sufficiently satisfied
at the domestic level.
4. Establish procedures to identify and prioritize beneficiaries of basic shelter and adequate housing
on the basis of need and particular vulnerability.
5. Remove legal obstacles as contained, for example, in building and similar codes, for the construction
of transitional shelters or the rebuilding of houses in return or relocation areas.
6. Create specific guarantees to protect IDPs against forced evictions when general guarantees are
insufficient.
Brookings Institute, pg. 132

Collective centers (i.e. areas of concentrated displacement) tend to be the most problematic. Several options have been used locally to improve these conditions. 
Collective centers of public purpose will regain their primary function of social institutions (hospitals, schools, etc.); 
Collective centers which have commercial value will be vacated for private investment. Monetary compensations, which will be given to IDPs in exchange for vacating the places they are currently occupying for residence, shall be relevant and adequate to market prices; 
The collective centers that are suitable for living and have a specific importance, will be transferred to IDPs, if they so desire, for self-privatization (price for the privatization should be determined by considering the social condition of each IDP).
Transfer of residences into private ownership will be especially encouraged, though this option shall not take place automatically. Participation and contribution of IDPs in this process is a precondition for their purchasing of flats.”
Brookings Institute, pg. 142. 

THE BIRTH OF THE PROJECT

An attempt to recreate the effect of depth prior to the Renaissance invention of graphic perspective.

 

The project is the final product of an architect's work. The realm in which the architect operates comprises, to put it simply, the conception of ideas, and the creation of documentation with enough information to translate these ideas into the physical world. The final built form is, however, rarely produced by architects. It is done by builders, carpenters, electricians, and a wide array of different professionals. Buildings are created with the information provided by the architect, through the use different representational devices. Or, as written by Alberto Pérez-Gómez in "Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge" (1997) "the architect has made the mediating artifacts that make significant buildings possible". There lies the importance of architectural representation: it is the tool for architects to communicate their intentions and ideas.

According to Pérez-Gómez, it is rare to find examples of architectural drawings prior to the renaissance. Gothic architecture, for instance, was produced mainly by constructive practices applied directly on site. There was no project for a final whole building, only construction methods that were a direct translation of the constructive tradition of the people involved in that particular building's construction. It was only during the renaissance, that architecture began to be conceived by the use of two-dimensional, orthogonal drawings.

Filippo Brunelleschi was the first to attempt to systemize the composition of graphical perspective, based on the classical studies of optics. Because of this achievement, he is usually attributed as the creator of perspective. Even though many attempts were being made since Ancient Greece. The foreshortening effect of objects related to their distance to the viewer had been long observed and discussed. It is easy to find many examples of paintings made during the Middle Ages, trying to depicting this optical effect of depth. These attempts are, however, clearly unsystematized.
Because of this, one can say that it was only since renaissance, that the architectural practice as we know today took its shape. I believe that from this point on, a building began to not only be planned before its construction, through the use of drawing and perspective, but also to be informed and conceived after them, as a reflex of the way architecture was being thought. The ability of precisely depicting perspective gave the architects the possibility of thinking and testing architecture in three dimensions, allowing for the exploration of architectural composition.

ARCHITECTURE AS CHAOS

Dragonfly Building

Before starting a project, it’s almost mandatory for the ‘general research’ of the site to be done. Many hours are spent producing beautiful drawings, maps, diagrams, texts in order to understand the place. Issues in society, economics, environment, politics, history, infrastructure, etc. are here addressed. This process is especially important when the project is done by someone who doesn’t know much about the site, city, or country. But in either case the final aim is to discover some interesting issue to focus for a more thorough research.

When the topic of the research is defined, more work is produced under that spectrum. For instance, a specific situation on the economics of a country is explored in maps, revealing a new problem not yet addressed. From this issue emerges the concept of the project. Therefore, a project is done from the generic superficial study covering a large number of matters of a project to the very specific issue that called the attention of the architect.

For international architects, it’s almost impossible not to go through that methodology — one needs to understand a place before interfering on it. However, our studies of a place are very likely to leak some important information neglected or unseen. In addition, the reduction to one spectrum can lead to bizarre perspectives of the problem —spatial problem— and even more bizarre solutions. Sustainability is one of the most misleading issues of architecture today. As Juan Herreros recently addressed in a lecture at Columbia University: the discussions of the topic are either too devoted or too skeptical. The projects are usually the same: when too devoted, they often ignore all the other issues; when skeptical, sustainability is ignored. This is architecture of reduction. In order to communicate one project, it’s reduced to one issue, leaving the others to the side or not even mentioning them at all.

The reduction of each one means chaos for the whole discipline. Architecture is embracing to much to its field. There are the ones who add philosophy, biology, literature, economics, etc. In the end, architects do the work of other fields but not having the same knowledge they have, believing we are able to respond to everything with design. In academia or as experiments in practice it could lead to advances in both fields. However, in practice architecture has to deal with all the issues related to space, it is complex and chaotic for architects to have all the answers. In this case, the solutions we propose have to open space for other professionals to work on. The final product is the result of a collective work, complex and chaotic.

TROGLOPHILE CITY

At every metro station, people ascend to the surface, emerging into the light of the city. The train keeps on going through darkness as the city pumps flows of energy through the network. The maneuver yard terminal dissolves this fiction as immobile trains rests on the city.

The subsurface or subterranean realm has long been distinguished from the surface, or epigean realm. If borrowed from Biology, a large number of terms have been employed to classify the subterranean realm, such as stygian, hypogean and endogean. Here, the key distinguishing feature of the two realms is that of light. While the surface realm is photic, the subterranean realm is aphotic.

Light here is not only light.

If we insist on the biological analogies, we could separate species in general as: species limited to live in the surface, named edaphobionts; species limited to subterranean habitats are called troglobionts; and facultative species which have populations both on the surface and in subterranean habitats, are given the names stygophiles and troglophiles.

The morphology of subterranean species exemplifies a kind of convergent evolution, basically driven by the selective forces of resource scarcity, environmental uniformity and yet again darkness. As humans (surface dwellers), why go underground?

Hezbollah tunnels were first encountered during the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and are said to be equipped with medical facilities, dormitories, kitchens, toilets, water and heating systems that guarantees life underground for months. The Cave Temple on Elephanta island in Mumbai is more than a setting for divine manifestations, as it is an image of the heavenly mountain residence of Shiva and, on a higher level of association, of the structure of the universe itself. The technique of rock-cut architectural style from an existing mountain can’t be seen as a mere esthetic preference, but the only acceptable way of achieving the desired result.

The most apparent subterranean example in contemporary cities can be found in mass transportation, more specifically in metro systems. However, the metro network of a city, as one integral entity, was never the object of study of architects.

If we deal with the physical integrality of a metro network as an architectural object, what could we extract? A good exercise is to isolate the entire metro system of New York and move it above Central Park and amongst the skyscrapers. Its perception might shift from a mere transport tool into a crucial metropolitan object to be taken in consideration.

EVOLUTION

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrier_Reef

Mumbai, while facing numerous problems, is expected to be the biggest overpopulated global city in the near future. But, what was the starting problem with Mumbai and with all the other cities that suffer from overpopulation and poverty?

Looking back to history before British came to Mumbai, there were undeveloped fishing villages. Due to the important geographical position of Mumbai, British decided to develop economically the city. The biggest artificial project that they did was to connect the original seven islands of Mumbai into one big region. The project (Hornby Vellard Project) started on 1782 and it continued for a century. They connect the islands with landfill (land reclamation) and they razed 22 hilltops that existed in order to use their debris in the creation of this new land as result they stop the natural flow of the water, which lead nowadays in the numerous floods.

 Moreover after British abandoned Mumbai on the beginning of 20^th century, they left behind the most develop city of the country. As a result after the WWII the population begun to grow, this raised the real estate prices. People from suburbs moved to Mumbai in order to live a better life, but they end up living in the slums. As years pass by the density in the slums increased dramatically, consequently government is not able to deal with the population.

If Mumbai continues to extend as expected future of people will be questionable. The need for a change is obvious. The overpopulation in parallel with the destruction of natural environment has lead in many problems. They treated nature with hardness and now nature is paying back. This is one of the biggest reasons that nowadays cities have to deal with the natural environment. They used to cover rivers and lakes, to extend the natural land artificially in the sea, to destroy mountains and to cut trees consequently nowadays they face numerous floods. The numerous diseases that they face are also a result of their violence in the environment. Nature is more powerful than human activities. For sure the future urban planning of the city should respect the physical conditions that exist. If they had left the seven islands as they were naturally, everything would be differently.

My research is going to reinvent the method that formulated Mumbai from the first place, as it is obvious that this was the starting problem. A question that is going to play an important role in my research is: if the city were going to grow physically, how Mumbai would be? 

POLITICAL ECONOMY, SOCIETY, AND [PUBLIC] SPACE

Diagram showing total area of malls in each zone in the Mumbai Metropolitan Area.
information derived from Analytical Study of Organized Retail Outlets in Mumbai Metro Division

When it comes to public space and the political, there is no space more contested than the bazaar or the marketplace. It opens up a possibility of social life through negotiations and speech and carries imminent potentials of violence and consequently the synthesis of conflicts. Postmodernism brought with it a new model of a marketplace and public space and that is the shopping mall; a pristine civic infrastructure that caters for a certain class in India and is in stark contrast with the former markets charged with gender, political, and religious sensitivities. These power struggles that reflect society’s realities are diluted, superficially pacified, and placed under the control of the global economy of consumerism of luxury goods. A global colonization that has replaced the former Western colonies, making them seem bleakly trivial. In Making the Crowd Beautiful, Gerald Stanley Lee writes “making beautiful crowds and making beautiful buildings became bound up in the same process”. The crowd here seems to connote a modern force, a force that should be aesthetically homogenized into abstract patterns and controlled. He elaborates on this point stating “All the same time this human engineering organized the behavior of the crowd, preventing the apparent breakdown of social order; it also represented the crowd as expanded and animated by modern progress”.

Returning to India, in Habitations of Modernity, Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses the bazaars and marketplaces in India according to Western perceptions. He observes the words used to describe these public spaces “a place of heat and dust”, “crowds, dirt, and disease”, “blind to the unwholesome aspects of their public spaces”.  This was the language used by both the imperialist officials and the modernist nationalists, and the crowd here no longer connotes a modernist phenomenon but a threat to the public health and hygiene. Chakrabarty explains “while this way of seeing is no longer exclusively European, its main bearers in nineteenth century India were, no doubt, the Europeans themselves, whose modernist categories “private” and “public” were constantly challenged by the ways in which Indians used open space” (Chakrbarty p.66). Nationalists including Gandhi and Chaudhuri deplored “the absence of a citizen culture”. He then explains how “unlike the modern marketplace, the bazaar (the outside) is geared to the production of social life” where “the physical organization of shops in the bazaar encourages, as Anthony King has observed, “visual” and “verbal” inquiry and helps convert the former into the latter” (Chakrabarty p.73).

Today, the Dharavi slums in Mumbai can be seen as remnants of the bazaars described. In a New York Times article titled In One Slum, Misery, Politics, and Hope, Jim Yardley describes the daily happenings “inside, carpenters are assembling furniture on the ground floor. One floor up, men are busily cutting and stitching blue jeans. Upstairs from them, workers are crouched over sewing machines, making blouses. And at the top, still more workers are fashioning men’s suits and wedding apparel. One crumbling shanty. Four businesses.” This slum has been described as the parallel economy with” an annual economic output of $600 million to more than $1 billion” (Yardley). But Dharavi not only acts as a bazaar and a vibrant space of production but also a form of ‘school’ where people learn crafts, business, and develop survival skills. In the same article Yardley reports “Mohammad Mustaqueem, 57, arrived as a 13-year-old boy. He slept outside, in one of the narrow alleyways, and remembers being showered with garbage as people tossed it out in the morning. Today, Mr. Mustaqueem has 300 employees in 12 different garment workshops in Dharavi, with an annual turnover of about $2.5 million a year. He owns property in Dharavi worth $20 million.” Despite the thriving success of these informal markets, malls too are highly popular and frequented by locals.

According to a recent study titled Analytical Study of Organized Retail Outlets in Mumbai Metro Division, “[Mumbai] has a total organized retail stock of 8.72 million sq.ft. and will witness 11.26 million sq.ft. of new retail development over the next three years.” Furthermore, “The city is home to some of the most prominent and successful malls in the country and the retail rentals are amongst the most expensive in the world.” The study then looks at different parts of Mumbai, linking the location and area of the mall and its success to the social status of its immediate inhabitants; the Western suburbs having the highest area of organized retail.

However these malls, interrupt the emergence of the ‘Biopolitical City’ described by Hardt and Negri in the Commonwealth as the ‘space of the economic production and the space of the city [that] tends to overlap’(Hardt & Negri p.251). Appadurai so eloquently describes this phenomenon, in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, calling it ‘production fetishism’ where the ‘illusion [is] created by contemporary transnational production loci that masks trans-local capital […] faraway workers […] in the idiom and spectacle of local […] this generates alienation twice intensified for its social sense is now compounded by a complicated spatial dynamic that is increasingly global, thus, ‘the consumer [is] transformed through commodity flows into a sign or a chooser as opposed to an actor’(Appadurai, p.42)

MALARIA AND THE CASE OF ARCHITECTURE

http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2012-news/Read-CDT-focus-on-research

As United Nation predict, the fast growing urbanization in Mumbai will result in numerous challenges among which are the widespread of poverty and unemployment, poor public health and poor civic and educational standards for a large section of the population. Moreover according to David Harvey as a city doubles its size it also experience a fifteen percent (15%) per capita increase in violent, crimes, traffic and AIDS cases. How Mumbai is going to deal with the numerous diseases and the extreme pollution levels in the future?

Malaria is a vector-borne disease that infects human body through mosquitos. It is a widespread disease in India as million of people suffer every year from it and many die. The humid environment in India in the monsoon months is the perfect weather condition for mosquitos and so for malaria. Moreover, heart attack, tuberculosis, cancer, kidney failure, HIV and malaria cause the most common deaths in Mumbai. Last but not least, demographics result shown that the average life span is sixty (60) years old and seventeen (17) percent of the global deaths occur in Mumbai. Malaria is expected to expand in the future, due to the upcoming climate change which will increase the amount of rainfall in India. Appropriate urban planning could reduce in some extent the numerous diseases and pollutions in Mumbai.

Water pollution levels are extremely high. The water infrastructure that transfers the fresh water, the pollution in the sea, the lakes and the rivers pollution, combine with the monsoon floods and the unhealthy way of life of the citizen’s leads to the cause of malaria and many other water diseases. According to statistics eighty percent (80%) of the diseases are caused by water borne pathogens that are found inside the polluted water.

Considering the number of people infected by Malaria and the polluted waters, this project will examine the possibilities of architectural design to improve the hygiene levels of human organism. What are the role and the limits of architecture in these situations?

Specifically, in Mumbai appropriate architectural design could reduce in high amount the diseases and especially the water-borne ones. My research concerns the urbanization growth in the city of Mumbai and deals with the upcoming overpopulation and the reinvention of the living system. The starting point of this research will be to analyze what was the cause of the problem and in continue to examine and re-design the future global city of Mumbai.

THE FOURTH DIMENSION

The issue of site in architecture is also an issue of dimensions, not only the three spatial dimensions but also time. The first dimension is hardly ever explored alone, it needs the second dimension to start informing about the physical conditions of the site, such as building rules, accesses etc.; the third dimension adds information about the topography, cityscape, spatial interactions with neighbors; the fourth, time, is more commonly referred to the history of the place. In this sense, architecture is a future speculation of a physical condition, to be changed by humans.

Site analyses are useful to enable the architect to propose a solution that responds to the problems inherited to the site. The further the analysis expands in terms of scales (spatial and temporal) the less precise is the answer, in other words, it becomes generic.There must be, however, a balance in the use of precedents from all the different scales. If it may be generic, it can also fall into a repetitive condition when the scale is too narrow.

When Brasilia was designed by Lucio Costa, some of the main references cited by the author transit throughout a wide spectrum of scales. The shape of the city was curved to meet the topography and approximate the future residents to the man-made lake Paranoa. The curvy roads of the superquadras —the residential scale of the city— were based on the same curvy streets of the colonial cities of the Brazilian hinterland. While the limit of six floors to the buildings in the same superquadras were a clear reference to European cities.

What the project may have lacked was to explore the fourth dimension towards the future. The city was envisioned in its complete form, when cities are in constant process of expansion or refraction, very rarely static. It may even sound naïve for an architect to think of the future in a static way, yet that is what architecture is about, the tendency is to speculate the future based on current trends. Brasilia was designed for cars, but today the supremacy of the automobile is being questioned.

In the same city and during the same period, Oscar Niemeyer, also the architect of the main buildings in Brasilia, designs the main building for the University of Brasilia, the Institute of Central Sciences, its final shape, though, was unknown. A long set of arcades would be the frame for further additions based on the needs of each department or school in that building. The argument behind it was that the diversity of functions and the dynamicity of an academic environment should dictate the ever changing form, hence expressing the inventiviness of the academia.

Anthropic spaces are the result of collective actions throughout time. Once Architecture is understood as the design of spaces, then it’s implicit that the discipline should be the result of a collective interest. 

PERCEPTION AND PLEASURE

Tomas Saraceno, Cloud City 2012

In my research, physical context is deeply related to what people perceive of the build environment. But what is perception?

In neurological terms [1], to perceive is to recognize something or an experience through a process initiated by one or more of our senses. The combination of the five senses (not only vision) is what enables us to build experiences of our environment which in turn become "percepts". Percepts are not only the result of the combinations of these stimuli recorded in our brains, but they have another dimension which includes our past experiences and memory. 

There are two different types of perception: the unconscious which is immediate and the conscious that can take several seconds. When a percept is formed, it has no meaning until it is recognized (by using memories of past experiences). Creating a memory begins with forming a perception, which happens in 3 stages: awareness, attention and recognition. One can only recognize what he knows, and if one finds himself in an unknown position, the body initiated a spontaneous (below the conscious level) alarming state until a meaning is formed for the percept (one understands what is happening). 

An interesting new theory proposes that the brain is “hard-wired” for pleasure. In other words, the brain encourages us to seek information by rewarding us with a sensation of pleasure (liberation of endorphin). All the human knowledge is based on the act of seeking. Whenever one struggles to comprehend a perception, the click of “you got it” increases the level of pleasure in the human body.

The human natural curiosity and the importance of people to actively “seek” understanding and meaning for their environments remembered me about the most prominent critic of the Situationists against the modernist urbanism: “ [Le Corbusier] had taken away that we have a right to expect from truly impressive architecture – disorientation on a daily basis” [2].  I am interested in an architecture that establishes an ambiguous relationship with its context, one that encourages people to become consciously aware of the space they are in (and their condition in it) by exploring the attention that our “alarm state” generates.

_____

[1] The information for this post was extracted from the books The Architect’s Brain (2008) and Architecture and the Brain (2005) by John Eberhardt, founder of the ANFA (Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture).  

[2] Wigley, M. Constant’s New Babylon: The hyper Architecture of Desire,1998.  

[random note] An interesting recent study by Semir Zaki (2005) suggests that rather than perceiving the world as a unitary event, there are several "microconsciouness", each specialized in one different aspect of perception and with different time gaps among them. In other words, for the case of vision, instead of having only one image formed in the retinas and interpreted by the brain, the order of things perceived are: location, color, form, motion (as much as 80 miliseconds before) and orientation.