Archinect - News

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...

Halfway there? The limits to Aravena's social housing

2016-06-14T12:52:00-04:00

"In most cities in Latin America, most of the building over last 50 years—depending on the city—40, 50, 60, 70 percent has been through incremental construction.” [...] The majority of Aravena’s social housing work has also rested on the unique conditions and high level of investment from Chile’s social housing program. [...] Isn’t asking the poor to shoulder more of the housing burden an inherently unfair proposition?

More discussion of Aravena's practice and impact can be found here:

What Makoko can teach about "organic" urban development

2016-02-25T14:53:00-05:00

'Why can’t communities simply be communities and develop in the organic way that we allow other communities to develop?'...'They are inspirational in that people have developed them themselves, without government and real estate types pushing them around. Without a doubt, they still have problems. But they are stabilising themselves and, over time, knitting themselves into the fabric of their cities. This is a true marvel of global urbanism.'

World's first Slum Museum is coming to Mumbai

2016-01-12T13:39:00-05:00

Mumbai’s gigantic slums are one of the city’s most prominent—and problematic—features. Dharavi, located in the heart of Mumbai, is home to upwards of 1.5 million people, giving it the distinction of being one of the largest slums in all of Asia. [...] it will also be home to what organizers are calling the first slum museum. [...] The museum itself will be a small, flexible mobile structure, which will make it easy for it to be pulled through the slum’s streets on a bike or small vehicle.

"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:

Red Road towers, built to combat Glasgow's slums in the 1960s, now slated for demolition

2015-08-19T13:13:00-04:00

They were once the tallest residential structures in Europe and a beacon of hope for residents of Glasgow’s slums. Now ... the remaining structures of the Red Road flats will, at last, be demolished. [...] Built in the 1960s on Glasgow’s north-eastern edge, the flats were intended to house almost 5,000 people as part of an effort to ease overcrowding and combat slum conditions. But in the decades that followed, they were plagued by a range of problems, social and structural.

More news from Glasgow:

Housing mobility vs. America's growing slum problem

2015-08-14T15:15:00-04:00

If America decides to take on its growing slum problem, people will need to think hard about how to do so. Mobility programs are proven to work for the families who move, but what happens to the neighborhoods that people leave? Can affordable-housing projects in low-income areas also help poor families succeed, or are they doomed to fail their residents, no matter how nice they are, because of where they are located?

Related on Archinect:

The many lives of Johannesburg’s notorious Ponte tower

2015-06-19T17:48:00-04:00

The Ponte saga is a classic South African story. Once a Jacuzzi-filled playground for the segregated white elite in the apartheid era, then falling into chaos in the 1990s as the wealthy fled to the suburbs, then the object of failed luxury-condo schemes, the tower is now undergoing a renaissance as an icon of Johannesburg’s urban revitalization. [...] The hollow core began to fill with garbage and rubble – several stories high.

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.

Without Housing Reform, is a "Tower of David" Coming to Your City?

2015-04-09T18:12:00-04:00

Justin McGuirk’s Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture should be required reading for anyone looking for ways out of the bleak social inequality we’re stuck in. There were 40 million more slum dwellers worldwide in 2012 than there were in 2010, according to the UN. Private markets clearly can’t provide universal housing in any way approaching efficiency, and governments are often hostile to the poor.

In his book, McGuirk analyzes numerous de facto housing solutions for overcrowded cities, including the infamous "Torre David" in Caracas, an abandoned high-rise which became an iconic squatter's structure partly because of government ineptitude and indifference.

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 [...].

The sudden rise & fall of Oregon's second largest city

2015-02-24T14:14:00-05:00

The mere utterance of Vanport was known to send shivers down the spines of "well-bred" Portlanders. Not because of any ghost story, or any calamitous disaster—that would come later—but because of raw, unabashed racism. Built in 110 days in 1942, Vanport was always meant to be a temporary housing project, a superficial solution to Portland’s wartime housing shortage. [...] In a few short years, Vanport went from being thought of as a wartime example of American innovation to a crime-laden slum.

h/t CityLab

Hanoi: is it possible to grow a city without slums?

2014-08-11T13:28:00-04:00

Hanoi has faced the same population pressures as other Asian cities. But thanks to vague and informal conventions, the state has been able to avoid extreme levels of disservice, even to the most impoverished new urban areas. And the construction of homes themselves has remained at least loosely connected to the regulations of the more formal suburbs. Together these factors have prevented the formation of slums as they are typically defined. But how has this come about?

Inside the famous Phnom Penh cinema that has become a living nightmare

2014-07-28T15:19:00-04:00

The Hemakcheat was once one of Cambodia’s most beloved cinemas and Meas Sopheap one of its star dancers. Today it is a notorious slum, and Meas one of hundreds who shelter there. [...] Hundreds of men, women and children shelter here, many on the ground-floor auditorium where they are shrouded in permanent darkness among hundreds of bats that screech and flap their wings constantly. [...] More waste falls from makeshift floors constructed above. The rotten stench of sewage is overpowering.

Slums, Siza and squatting: ICYMI Weekly News Round-Up for July 21, 2014

2014-07-28T14:45:00-04:00

In Case You Missed It, a look back at the major happenings from last week's News.

Friday, July 25

Families Removed From 'Tower of David' Skyscraper Slum: Venezuelans initially began living in the abandoned office towers in 2007, due to the country's burgeoning financial crisis. They are now being evicted by Caracas city officials, citing safety concerns in the 45-floor building.
Row over Olympic cauldron design settled out of court: Olympic officials settled with designers from Atopia, who claimed the cauldron design relied heavily on their ideas without citation. While Atopia's influence has been recognized, design of the cauldron is still credited to Thomas Heatherwick.

Thursday, July 24

Álvaro Siza donates his architectural archives to institutions in Portugal and Canada: The archive will be divided up between the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal), the Fundação Gulbenkian in Lisbon and the Fundação de Serralves in Porto.
Can a Frank Gehry design help change the dynamic of Wat...

Families Removed From 'Tower of David' Skyscraper Slum

2014-07-25T12:43:00-04:00

Andreína Contreras, a 26-year-old mother of two, lived until this week in the “Tower of David,” in Caracas, Venezuela, which has been described as the world’s tallest slum, because it is situated in an abandoned skyscraper. She is among an estimated 1,150 families living in the tower who are to be removed and relocated permanently this week, seven years after the officially named Torre Confinanzas was first occupied as a result of Venezuela’s financial crisis...

Venezuelan Government Evicts Residents From World's Tallest Slum

2014-07-22T13:54:00-04:00

Venezuelan soldiers and officials began moving hundreds of families on Tuesday out of a half-built 45-story skyscraper that dominates the Caracas skyline and is thought to be the world's tallest slum. Residents from the "Tower of David” were going to new homes in the town of Cua, south of Caracas [...]. President Nicolas Maduro's government has not yet said what it will do with the tower, but one local newspaper reported Chinese banks were buying it to restore to its original purpose.

Previously:

A Tale Of Two Cities: Mixing The Urban Poor Into A Rich Urban Life

2014-07-01T13:19:00-04:00

Skyscrapers and shanties, gleaming malls and rundown markets, palatial houses and the piss-poor guys who build them: Those are the divides in cities like Mumbai, Nairobi and Manila. Rich and poor do not much mingle. But a movement is afoot to change that. It aims to integrate the poor into the urban bloodstream, instead of shunting them from sight. For this "inclusive cities" movement, urban renewal doesn't require razing slums and markets.

Townships in South Africa: can design help solve the housing crisis?

2014-05-14T13:45:00-04:00

On the World Design Capital (WDC) website, Cape Town presents some remarkable shack design projects aimed to solve a nationwide slum problem. Yet even with more than 200 informal settlements and 600,000 residents waiting for formal housing, the Western Cape has been slow to implement the 'transformative design' it celebrates. [...] The backlog hit 2.1m units in 2013 and at least 1.9 million people (more than 10% of all households) live in shacks or other makeshift dwellings.

The Growing Middle Class of Brazil’s Slums

2014-05-06T13:26:00-04:00

Brazil’s burgeoning middle class have an important place in the country’s slums. This finding is part of a survey released by the newly created Instituto Data Favela which established that, in 2013, 65% of the country’s slum-dwellers belonged to the middle class. In 2003, this proportion was 33%. [...] “But we are not only interested in the middle class,” he argues, “We want to benefit all community residents through sustainable and comprehensive development, achieved through economic avenues.”

The world's tallest slum: Rare look at an illegal ghetto in the sky

2013-08-27T15:00:00-04:00

Welcome to the world’s tallest slum: poverty-ridden Venezuela’s Tower of David. Squatters took over this very unfinished 45-story skyscraper in the early 1990s, and they’ve been there ever since. The tower was originally intended to be a symbol of Caracas’ bright financial future, complete with a rooftop helipad, but construction stopped because of a banking crisis and the sudden death of the tower’s namesake, David Brillembourg.

Once Unsafe, Rio's Shantytowns See Rapid Gentrification

2013-06-07T12:56:00-04:00

A new boutique hotel perched on top of one of Rio's previously most dangerous favelas is about to open. And yes, there is a jazz club and yoga, too. These are new services catering to a new kind of favela resident. "It's actually very conveniently located for my work," says Natalie Shoup, a 22-year-old American who lives in a favela called Babilonia, or Babylon. "This has a good amount of transportation to every part of the city. It's nice. It worked out really well."

On the other hand: Remaking Rio: turning an urban dystopia into an Olympic playground (The Verge)

Previously on Archinect:

In Lagos the poorest are paying the price of progress

2013-03-05T14:00:00-05:00

The Lagos state commissioner for housing, Adedeji Olatubosun Jeje, provided a different version of events. “It’s a regeneration of a slum,” he said. “We gave enough notification. The government intends to develop 1,008 housing units. What we removed was just shanties.

Adam Nossiter covers recent slum clearance efforts led by the governor of Lagos, Babatunde Fashola. As Lagos aims to become a premier business center, the city’s poor and homeless are becoming the government’s enemy. Last week, parts of Badia East (with perhaps 10,000 residents) were demolished while last summer the floating neighborhood of Makoko (which was home to perhaps 30,000). In total activists estimate upwards of a million people have been forcibly ejected from their homes over the last 15 years.

Medellin's Outdoor Escalator Part of Plan to Remake City

2013-01-02T13:07:00-05:00

The Colombian city of Medellín was once the murder capital of the world and ground zero for Pablo Escobar’s cocaine cartel. But Medellín has lately emerged as a hotspot for urban planning and innovative mass transit. The projects are part of a long-term plan to fight poverty and remake the fortunes of the city.

Another hopeful Medellín design initiative previously featured on Archinect: Student Works: INSITU Medellin

“Working with the 99%” Wins a Future Cities Prize in Venice

2012-08-31T19:13:00-04:00

Three winning projects were announced in the Future Cities, Planning for the 90 per cent competition: ateliermob (Portugal), Municipal Housing Secretariat of São Paulo (Brazil), and Interazioni Urbane (Italy). The projects are part of the exhibition Future Cities: Planning for the 90 per cent in Venice during the 13th Architecture Biennale. Ten projects were selected for the exhibition from more than 100 participants from several countries.

Portuguese practice ateliermob presents one of the three winning projects, "Working with the 99%," a case study of the progress and community work of Lisbon's self-built PRODAC neighborhood.

Click here to see more Archinect News posts related to the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

We live on that knife-edge...

2012-07-31T10:16:00-04:00

He is one of the experts commissioned by the government to produce a "master plan" to overhaul the city's infrastructure. Singapore is his role model, and he favours big projects to clear slums and build bridges, roads and out-of-town settlements.

Joe Boyle visited Dar es Salaam, Tanzania one of the world's fastest growing cities. The dramatic influx has pushed the city's population up from roughly two million two decades ago to four million today, which has led to a huge growth in "informal settlements". As well as economic division in Tanzania's lop-sided economy, between a tiny super-rich elite and a vast poor majority.

Design with the Other 90%: CITIES Opening October 15 at the United Nations

2011-10-03T20:24:57-04:00

“Design with the Other 90%: Cities,” the second in a series of themed exhibitions by Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum that demonstrate how design can address the world’s most critical issues, opens October 15 at the United Nations and runs through January 9, 2012.

The Tower of David

2011-05-02T19:26:00-04:00

In the early '90s Caracas dreamed of a shimmering downtown financial centre—now it's the tallest squat in the world

Squatting in the Sky

2011-03-01T15:13:00-05:00

The future of cities is being lived in Caracas as 2,500+ squatter occupy an unfinished 45-story tower from the 1990s.

The squatters have jury-rigged utilities up to the 28th floor - but there isn't an elevator.

The future of cities is being lived in Caracas as 2,500+ squatter occupy an unfinished 45-story tower from the 1990s.

The squatters have jury-rigged utilities up to the 28th floor - but there isn't an elevator.

NYT - check out the video!