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."

A new urbanism in the Global South

2017-08-16T15:43:00-04:00

But what is the repertoire of concepts, ideas and visions that inform the work of urban planners in the Global South — in Asia, Latin America and Africa? Are they still under the spell of their colonial and postcolonial masters? Or have they developed their own ideas and their own yardsticks, commensurate with the respective culture of their country and region?

"This insight leads to the most important quality of sustainable urban planning in countries of the Global South," urban planning expert Einhard Schmidt-Kallert writes in his commentary piece on Citiscope, arguing that "Planners need to develop urban planning visions that take into consideration the needs of all citizens, of the urban middle class as well as those of the urban poor in informal settlements. Those visions need to translate these needs into a comprehensive concept plan for an entire city, thus overcoming fragmentation and segregation."

Samuel Bravo wins 2017 Wheelwright Prize

2017-06-02T15:35:00-04:00

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design awarded its coveted 2017 Wheelwright Prize to Chilean architect Samuel Bravo for his proposal “Projectless: Architecture of Informal Settlements”. Bravo will travel to dozens of sites in South America, Asia, and Africa to ultimately develop strategies that integrate vernacular, collective practices with the modern architectural project.

In his Wheelwright proposal, Samuel Bravo focuses on traditional architectures and informal settlements, revisiting the topic of “architecture without architects”, as described by Bernard Rudofsky in the 1964 Museum of Modern Art exhibition.

An alumnus of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Bravo leads his own practice and has realized multiple projects throughout South America. Here are a few of his previous collaborative works:

ANI NII SHÖBO, Acayali, Perú. 2009. Architects: Samuel Bravo and Sandra Iturriaga. Photo: Juan Balazs. Courtesy of Harvard GSD.

NII JUINTI SCHOOL, Ucayali, Perú. 2014. Architects: Sandra Iturriaga, Samuel Bravo. Photo credit: Samuel Bravo. Courtesy of Harvard GSD.

HOUSE IN CHILOE, Chiloe Island. Chile, 2016–2017. Architect and photo credit: Samuel Bravo. Courtesy of Harvard GSD.

After making it as a finalist in the 2016 cycle, Bravo was named the 2017 Wheelwright winner out of four finalists — the other three being Lucia Cella, Andjela Karabašević, and ...

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...