Sep '06 - Dec '09
As I watch inches of snow fall in Boston my mind wanders to Tijuana, Nicaragua, and even Lagos.
I am beginning to more carefully tune my arguments, trying to learn from specific precedents as well as taking a closer look at work I have done in the past. Of my personal work I am specially looking at the NICAestudio, my first semester in the GSD, and the Vicenza studio project I did as an undergrad in UF. I am working on precedents and positioning within the contemporary discourse via my blog (where I sketch possible ideas) and my final paper.
The following are among my latest blog updates:
-Learning from Lagos
-Architecture as Bailout
-Frames and Infill
Out of all this soup of things, the diagram above has come back as key to my thinking. As I describe, this diagram I produced during the NICAestudio. The diagram was meant to say that the new housing in informal settings needed to be embedded with commercial and social activities and then critically set within the landscape as a mediating, physical, economic, and social condition.
This diagram can probably best described by a quote from the 'Lagos handbook' that the Koolhaas GSD thesis students produced (which may or may not be a draft for this?):
"In 1991 Mabogunje himself delivered a paper at a World bank conference titled "A New Paradigm for Urban Development" that proposed that the lines between the informal and formal sectors the greatest potential for new urbanisms. Calling for "institutional radicalization" the very figure of old-guard African urbanism suggested that temporary fusion between informal processes and "mature" institutions might be read as a blue print for progressive urban strategies." that + landscape (ecology?) as a mediating condition.
6 Comments
good luck!
can wait to see your project. Rem is a bit naive I think, because in places of need, self-organization is crucial to survive.
in regards to the concept of the "informal" it is very different as you move through the globe, I recommend a great book on the subject;
Unrban Informality; Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia. Ed.Ananya Roy and Nezar Alsayyad
good luck
Thanks Barry and Generico.
Very poignant ruminations QR. I look forward to the continued developments. btw, this is all really based on "the other path" by hernando de soto which outlined processes for embracing and utilizing black market infrastructures....
i'm sure you've read it, but i can't help but think of it given the references....
Very poignant ruminations QR. I look forward to the continued developments. btw, this is all really based on "the other path" by hernando de soto which outlined processes for embracing and utilizing black market infrastructures....
i'm sure you've read it, but i can't help but think of it given the references....
q, i love your work - all of it, even back to UF - can really see the maturity as you have moved along.
i am trying to understand, because you are infinitely better read than i, but your frames and infill, and the description above, it seems to distill down to one simple theme; it takes a village. in that i mean, and i have been thinking about this a lot lately, how can we create "villages" where doctors, artists, tradespeople, etc, co-exist in suburban/rural/urban conditions and not be relegated to the peripheries - either physically or otherwise? in these times how can zoning and codes either move from a prescriptive and to a performance based criteria?
i keep thinking that the way communities can keep from a further decline in property values, is to engage local governments; buying foreclosed or simply "taking" the properties and creating community amenities, that serve to become part of the "village." i don't know if that is what you were thinking, but when i read the above, that's what came to mind.
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