Archinect - News

The challenges of urban planning in Kabul: formalizing the informal

2019-05-13T14:37:00-04:00

Barely built for a million people, Kabul, now has close to five million residents with the majority – 80% – still living in informal, unplanned areas [...]. More than one million properties still need to be officially registered, according to City for All, a government urban planning initiative. [...] But while decades of war have destroyed much of the capital, an urban revolution is growing, creating small pockets of peace.

The Guardian's Stefanie Glinski writes about the efforts residents and the local government in the rapidly growing Afghan capital are taking to cope with the overwhelming urbanization, turn informal settlements into formal ones, set urban planning goals, and rediscover architectural heritage and craftsmanship that has defined the region for centuries.

"I don’t want our children to forget about our historical background," the article quotes an Afghan master carpenter. "Both regime changes and war destroyed our country. As Kabul is growing, many modern buildings are put up carelessly. We can’t forget about our architectural history and its beauty."

Studying a Brazilian favela via VR

2018-01-18T16:00:00-05:00

[...] Penn State landscape architecture professor Timothy Baird and architecture professor José Duarte taught a new studio that engaged students in the study of one Brazilian favela via virtual reality (VR) technology. The studio, which paired architecture students with landscape architecture students, posited VR as a proxy for expensive site visits. “Developing countries can’t always afford consultants because of the distance and difficulty to travel,” says Baird [...]

"Duarte, who has studied informal settlements across the globe, believes in their power to model emergent patterns of more sustainable resource consumption in the developing world, and in the ability for contemporary technology to decode how they work," the Landscape Architecture Magazine writes and quotes Duarte saying: "They are not a problem. They are a solution with many problems."

Urban India: Informal Housing, Inadequate Property Rights

2017-03-03T09:56:00-05:00

The rapid pace of urbanization in developing countries places increasing levels of stress on cities. As thousands of people move into urban areas each year, the availability of affordable housing emerges as a key challenge. In India, 412 million people live in urban areas. Depending on the source, anywhere between 33 and 47 percent of those (equivalent to 26-37 million households) live in informal housing, which often lacks access to basic services like roads, water, and sanitation. To make matters worse, most of those households do not have any formal property rights, thus jeopardizing their ability to live and invest in the land they currently occupy.

As architects, we often use “informality” to describe everything outside of the formal city. Informality is the gray area occupied by the slum, the favela, or the barrio. Our failure to segment informality into distinct categories results in design solutions that barely scratch the surface of urban complexity. Designing for informalit...

The end of Shenzhen’s Baishizhou 'urban village'

2016-09-22T15:37:00-04:00

“Village” may not seem like the right term for a cluster of tenement-style walkups that can house more than 100,000 people. Chengzhongcun hang onto the name partly because of the familiarity evoked by the traditions and small-scale businesses that thrive among their migrant populations, and partly because when modern Shenzhen began growing, these places really were just villages in the middle of the city.

Giant "calligraffiti" mural unites community in Cairo slum

2016-04-07T13:32:00-04:00

Amid Cairo's brick buildings and heaping piles of trash is a sprawling work of art, which, at first, looks messy and incoherent. But when you stand on the nearby hillside and read the spray-painted Arabic "calligraffiti," as its creator Tunisian-French artist eL Seed calls it, the message reads loud and clear: "If one wants to see the light of the sun, he must wipe his eyes." [...] in total secrecy from the Egyptian government due to the country's strict laws forbidding artistic expression.

All images by the artist, eL Seed. For more images click here.

More Cairo-related stories in the Archinect news:

"Latin America is where modernist Utopia went to die." – A closer look at the changing urban landscape of Caracas

2015-11-25T17:24:00-05:00

‘El mejor anuncio de la historia’, or ‘the best ad in history’ is a picture taken in February 2008, which neatly encapsulates several aspects of the city’s urban landscape: the formal, the informal and the promotional. '[...]Around and in between the super bloques a carpet of slums has grown, an organism that now seems to bind the blocks together in some symbiotic relationship. These are the kind of hybrid forms that are developing in Latin American cities [...]’

Related in the Archinect news:

Mumbai's Dharavi 'slum': Opportunities & challenges

2015-05-18T14:45:00-04:00

The slum, of course, is the hottest button in urbanism. Beneath the cliché that half the world’s population lives in cities — and that urban populations will double by 2050 — is the fact that only bottom-up informal settlements, or slums, can absorb several billion new residents in the timeframe. [...] URBZ is notable in that it offers a third way at looking at Dharavi — as both a failure and a better path to success than stillborn smart cities or other attempts at top-down instant urbanism.

Curbing violence through better architecture

2015-04-01T13:50:00-04:00

Alastair Graham hopes Violence Prevention Through Urban Upgrading, an initiative of the government of Cape Town, South Africa, will end better. He calls the effort, which has been revamping areas around train stations since 2006, part of “a package of potential solutions … either improving safety, or improving socioeconomic situation, or improving quality of life.” The project is aimed at curbing violence by augmenting the public spaces in which violent crime frequently occurs [...].

ISIS Threatens Southern Tunisian Towns Including the Star Wars Set for Tatooine

2015-03-25T14:50:00-04:00

Tataouine, the town in Tunisia where George Lucas filmed parts of Star Wars, has become embroiled in the country’s unrest with Isis. The town’s simple domed structures became iconic after they were used for Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine, and die-hard fans often make pilgrimages to them. But the town has become increasingly unsafe, as it is a waypoint for Isis fighters travelling to and from training bases in Libya, 60 miles to the east.

The article doesn't note that the design of the set is based off the architecture of the adjacent Berber-speaking village of Matmata. Tourists are driven in old Land Rovers by guides across the sweeping dunes of the Northern Sahara to the more famous set, which isn't actually inhabited, but is named after the nearby city/region of Tataouine. I visited the site in 2011 – less as a Star Wars enthusiast and more as a student, then engaged in research on the revolution. At the time, the area was considered a bit dangerous but for slightly different reasons: borders in the Sahara are much more porous than they appear on a map, and armed militants from Libya had been sighted in the region. Now that those forces have pledged allegiance to ISIL, the permeability of Tunisia's borders becomes an even graver issue.

Matmata is a rather sleepy town containing incredibly beautiful and unique architecture. That being said, with the exception of the bar adapted for use in the first Star Wars, none o...

Polish Architect Investigates "Shadow Architecture" of the Informal

2014-12-22T13:07:00-05:00

Aleksandra Wasilkowska, the vice-president of the Polish Architectural Association in Warsaw, doesn’t care much for skyscrapers... Street stalls, collapsible tables, carts, and makeshift homeless shelters are but a few typologies of what [she] calls “shadow architecture” — the urban phenomena that follow the rise of an informal shadow economy. Its key figures include street peddlers and traders...not urban planners or corporate designers