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...

Slum Porn Urban Misery As Catchy Imagery

2016-06-14T09:14:00-04:00

While architects and urbanists should definitely try to learn from the complex urban conditions behind these cases, this optimism surrounding their presentation is a tad naive. From Manila to Kumasi, these are all precarious places where life is exceptionally harsh, short and insecure.

"At the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, Urban Think Tank presented Gran Horizonte, a ‘pop-up restaurant’ mimicking life in the infamous squatted Torre de David-skyscraper in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. This skyscraper was abandoned halfway through construction and subsequently occupied by thousands of ordinary Venezuelans who transformed it into a ‘vertical barrio’. Urban Think Tank has conducted extensive research on the building and has called it ‘a laboratory for the study of the informal’. To present their findings, they made an installation-slash-restaurant that looked like it was directly transferred from the tower, using similar building materials and aesthetics as the informal interventions. Since the Venice show, this remarkable story of an outright architectural failure and a people’s struggle for their ‘right to the city’ has gained a serious amount of attention, to the point that it has become somewhat of an architectural cliché. Despite winning a Golden Lion a...

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:

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.