Global population is now reaching what? Almost 7 billion? I wonder how we are going to feed everyone in the not distant future?

Note that the population explosion really happend only about 40-50 years ago with what they called the green revolution. More or less a revolution of huge crop yields based on diesel powered farm equipment and huge amounts of fertilizer derived from fossil fuels.

We all know that energy prices are up, directly affecting this. Add to that the biofuel boondoggle. Many have said the world will starve as Americans put ethanol into their gas tanks. There also are droughts and other environmental factors affecting crop yields.

I've mentioned carrying capacity before on other threads and was laughed off, but it's a real problem. When the "first world" stops exporting cheap food to the world what happens in many of these slums? They don't have enough airable land to support the population, nor do they have the wealth to afford the fertilizers that make the necessary high yields.

The idea I was tossing around was that in evolutionary terms the space production model of the favela is perhaps the winner. Not the top-down mega-planned, mega-radiant city.
I also don't like the addition of the adjective "romantic" to the perception shift I was trying to propose. It is far from "romantic". It's stone cold.
In the case that I've been focusing on, which is Rio, the favelas were actually the result in large parts of architectural acts of erasure and regeneration and (mis)planning. What I'm playing with is to try and perceive a project that responds not in any further top-down macro fashion, but that would present such infrastructure in a way that is suitable and respectful of the people that are the occupants of these parts of the urban fabric.
Ultimately we're talking about making sacrifices - that's where my perception change speech came from.

Oh, I don't have any solutions (and am quite dense apparently). But I do think corruption can be a measurement of a society and that as an architect this is something that would be a real challenge to address. Architecture isn't impotent.

I am re-posting this on this thread as it seems appropriate....

"I personally hope for the mega-city slum to become the new model of autonomous, non-hierarchical, plugged in local urbanism....."

I wrote that within the context of the discussion taking place about staritects and development.....


@ RoedGroed
As has been shown by the failure of a number of large re-development or just development plans for urban poor over the last few decades...

Simply wiping out these "slums" and replacing them with brand new development whether high-rise or whatever often does not serve the best interests of the actual inhabitants....

I think your right the only way to "fix" the "slums" is not by getting rid of them..Rather we need to help them continue to develop but with access to the basics of civilized life (clean water, sanitation etc)
The only real way to do this is by harnessing their unique (in the context of urban planning) approach to growth while at the same time providing plug in play infrastructure systems that are flexible and allow for growth

i agree that the issues of the slums have to be addressed on their own terms, and that traditional formal planning is likely not sufficient. the ngo that i had contact with was developing slum "transition housing" in mumbai. they built small apartments on the outskirts of the slums and helped the slum dwellers transition to the "formal" economy. what they found though was that after a period of time many of these people choice to return to the slums. the transition was too difficult, and the community within the slums too strong. i do believe there is something to the idea of transition housing (i still have a lot to learn about it and the process of "transition"), but i also believe there is something to what treekiller is saying about addressing the more immediate needs of infrastructure. i strongly believe that sanitation and access to doctors are the most pressing issues related to the slums.

roed, i'm not familiar with abramo's work. i'll have to take some time to read the paper.

"[...]present such infrastructure in a way that is suitable and respectful of the people that are the occupants of these parts of the urban fabric."

that is the real challenge, and something that i think is little understood.

also, for those advocating using the slums as a model for planning, what do you mean that? that seems awfully vague to me.

you can replace a slum with versailles and unless you solve the issues of employment, education, exploitation, overpopulation you will not have solved anything.

Slum as a planning model....

for me this means not that we start trying to replicate slums....However, it does mean perhaps replicating the informal nature of development that exists in slums. For me the big issue is not to try and replace the slums with big urban planing projects.
I don't think that is a viable solution even, given the scale of what we are talking (hundreds of millions of people across the globe at least by the next decade if not already)
What needs to be done is simply fixing what already exists. In some "slums" the residents have gone as far as putting in pipelines for waste water, doing their own electrical etc...

I think helping them get access to these basics is the key. All of this of course must be done in conversation with the residents, not in opposition to them. As is so often the case when people begin talking about clearing slums......

do you mean like no zoning so your plastics factory can be next to my villa?

slums are often settled around existing infrastructures. i created a map of slums in mumbai and the largest concentrations were almost always centered around train lines, water mains, electrical lines, etc. one of the major problems with this is you have people living as close as one meter away from moving trains. it's one of the reasons why government officials want slums cleared, but an important point in how slums are "planned."

the round of hurricanes and political conventions of the past month make me realize that our 'developed' western urbanism isn't as resilient as these informal urbanism featured above.

I recently saw a fascinating article about how Tokyo may be the most advanced magacity with roots in informal urbanism. now if I could only recall where I saw that essay. Understanding that modern tokyo emerged from the post-wwII shanty town (and that organization got frozen in the urban fabric) is quite illuminating...

why is bottom up better than top down?

ckl cause one is participatory and the other is a pushed through master plan by an "enlightened" designer...

Better to have a more contentious, longer but ultimately inclusive by-in....

good to see this thread back in the mix!

it's a good thread, tk, why not bring it back, slums aren't going away yet

nam, I just mistrust the hype for informal, that's all.
Bottom up exists outside of regulations and anything you could do as an architect so the fascination with bottom-up approaches is really only useful as a case study, but I have yet to hear of a successful intervention in any of these informal, emergent, bottom-up situations.

I understand that the slums function as a community that offers some support to its members, but the other side of the coin is that it really is just a self-organized mob in which people get trapped and have to pay their debt first if they want out. Sort of like prostitution in a way. And that is very scary to me, to imagine millions of people who don't really exist on paper as modern day slaves.

I think the slums exist only as much as an underground economy feeds them. I wonder what real options these people would have if that didn't exist.

ckl,
couldn't agree more. I am certainly not a proponent of perpetuating the informal. There is definetly a level of romantizing going one with regards to the informal of late.
However, I do think that one needs to include from the begining local, community input. As others pointed out in this thread and elsewhere, the real tick is providing the basic services (read infrastructure and legal framework) on which the informal can be upgraded..

The idea of bottom up to me doesn't mean that you just wait for the informal to transform into the formal but that rather than simply clearing the slums and replacing with high-rise blocks et al., one actually engages with the community. That to me goes almost a step beyond architecture, plannign and into politics and activism. Giving voice and tools to the most disadvantaged/and non-represented...

One middle path is through a moderated/facilitated public design process as Nam said.

This approach has been deployed rather successfully in several cities for bringing infrastructure and public services into informal settlements. Transparency and openness are critical - yes, there will be some folks displaced - as long as there is clear public improvements (and not private gains), most will acquiesce and accept.

The top down folks DO establish the general criteria and parameters (since they bring the $$$) and the bottom up folks get to define how they want to implement the solution through a consensus building process. Of course, once the number of families that will be displaced is know, the highest priority is developing the replacement housing as close as possible to their original neighborhood prior to starting the main scope of work.

I would like to point out that often there is probably more formality in a slum than in a subdivision.

Here's a good example

In this particular slum, transportation nodes seemed to have formed pretty logically. Alleys run in parallel to on another terminating at the water side or at bigger streets. There's a denoted and obvious communal zone on the edges of the canal.

What is even more interesting is that the only real spot of "disorganization" on the bottom right corner of this slum... is actually a result of a small hill. If you open up the terrain map, the change in the patterning of the slum is reflective of the change in the typography.

The other thing that is mildly striking about these kinds of slums is that most of the buildings are flush either on the front or on the back. While there probably isn't a formal rule for this known to them, it's an impressive feat.

I suppose you can call them informal because there is no planning board but their execution says there's something more formal and less organic goign on here than we would like to imagine. Perhaps, people label these things organic because they're crafted by the citizens who live within them?

Although, I dislike to label something "organic" or "inorganic" because they both are delineations of property rights and the ideology of property rights. And with that, property rights are something that's relatively intangible across much of the world.

The only last thing I would add is that most people who tend to make up slums are typically people not "trained" to live in urban environments. It takes a certain give-and-take relationship to adapt to a heavily urbanized area. Since most of the people who make up these slums are of a rural background-- typically living in large family groups-- they probably don't have a strong sense of the formalities present in urban living.

What would be a counterpoint to this would be the walled slums of China but there is both formality and an inorganic quality to those slums.

But I would say that top down and bottom up can be equally effective in different places-- Cite de Sol in Haiti is an area that's constantly proved that those people are no longer capable of any organization whether it be informal or formal. Some of the slums in India, however, contrast this because these areas are relatively 'healthy' and relatively 'happy.'

That's an interesting thing, the notion of specificity in what we refer generically as "slums", a term with a limited usefulness.

One of the things I observed about researching a lot of Indian slums is the repetition in construction material used.

If we look at more affluent areas of Mumbai like Pali hill... none of the construction materials used in the slums are present here. Part of the microeconomics of slums is salvage and, it is presumed, that most of the construction materials are also scavenged.

So where is the scavenged material coming from if most of the construction going on in Mumbai looks like this?



Methinks there's a lot more going on with the construction of these slums or shanty towns that what is to believed.

The proliferation of them and their increasing growth mildly signals that the residents of these towns are being provided with some form of raw materials and that there is an actual construction trade going on.

The amount of CGI (Corrugated Galvanized Iron) and corrugated plastic sheeting used in these places would have to be mass produced on an industrial level to meet the facilitation of these slums.

And that finally suggests, if you there's an actual production economy focused on producing slums... why isn't anyone criticizing the supply chain?

H&R- 'informal' refers to the lack of services and infrastructure in contrast to the 'formalized' infrastructure of the rest of the city - even when the informal city is many times the size/population of the formal district (think Lagos or Rio).

But I'm using them in terms of implemented form [designed] and spontaneous form ["organic"].

I was just pointing out that these seemingly spontaneous urban arrangements do have a formality to them.

By your definition, most of the US is an informal slum-- unestablished and unincorporated suburbs have very limited infrastructure (basic electricity, basic uncurbed roads, primitive ditches, no sewage systems (septic) and limited telecommunications. I mean, sure, it's not Lagos but compared to the immediate developed areas around these suburbs... they'd be 'slums.'

One big difference between an American 'suburb' and a Mumbai slum-- in terms of formality-- is that the Mumbai slums has the advantage of proximity. IT might not exist in their own neighborhoods but they are within walking distance of urban cores, the flow of capital and other specialized infrastructure.

To me, that delineation of formal and informal is closer to developed and undeveloped. And some of these slums, in that sense, are more developed than the average American town.

Rural development is a separate topic - there are no US metropolitan regions that lack running water, sanitary sewers, electricity, or telephone. Maybe the outskirts of Wasilla AK, but not in the lower 38 beyond NOLA and a few small encampments in Sacramento. See Kunstler for the potential of suburbia turning into a slum as foreclosed mcmansions start sheltering squatters (that is a thread worth searching for). Maybe Houston is an example of 'informal' development since they lack all zoning codes...

two points,
Informal can refer to either lack of services, lack of legal ownership, or even non-planned growth. What matters is the specifics, especially with regards to agency of action. Such conditions allow/force/require for survival ah-hoc or at least black (as in market, economy, services) that are not part of formalized society.

Secondly I recently heard a speaker at a conference point out that if one looks at the who was doing the formal, Modern building (scrapers, villas etc) in Brazil, the basic materials and technic(s) are not only the same as those used, but are also generally being built (in the favelas) by those same workers who are building (working in the construction industry, pouring the Modernist slabs) the skyline of modern Rio, Sao Paolo etc. SO the fact that the materials

There are in fact metropolitan areas that lack sanitary sewers. Only about 40% of the US is on sewer. I was comparing developing countries pockets of urban fringe "slums" to the developed world's urban fringe suburbs.

In some ways, the only difference between a metropolitan suburb and slum is that the linear scale has been dilated to a non-human scale by modern transportation.

I'm was pointing out that the term "slum" and terms "informal" and "formal" can have widely different meanings. And in a sense, some of these "slums" have more amenities than a developed "suburb." Some of them may not have it on or within their households but there's quite a few who do have communal facilities.

Some of the slums in Mumbai have full school systems, markets, libraries, gyms, bars, nightclubs, shops, offices and more. A lot of suburban towns under 10,000 might be lucky to have two or three of these things.

There's also intermittent set-ups in urban areas that necessarily don't have very much of what your definition of formal is... truck stops, RV lots, trailer parks et cetera.

The reason as to why I'm bringing this up is that there are several laws in several of the countries you mention (India and Brazil specifically) that claim that legally all residents of slums are entitled to electricity and running water.

If that ever gets implemented, who knows? But that definition of "formal" is getting flimsy because generally most of these slums are built or around infrastructure.

I am reminded of a presentation I saw on African shanty towns where people re-purposed all types of "waste". It's hard to see in the image at the top of this page (save it, and zoom in), but the wallpaper is made from food packaging (the paper that was formerly wrapped around tins), and the door identified not by a number, but a Nike symbol. All sorts of other examples of what the presenter called"branded poverty" were given, such as interior walls made from 5litre vegetable oil tins (the branding on the tins providing colour and repetition). The creativity was phenomenal, I felt humbled.

*bump*

Kowloon Walled City


Photograph: Greg Girard & Ian Lambot, the Kowloon Walled City, 1989 from their book City of Darkness

An extreme example of no zoning/code enforcement. Before the government tore the Walled City down to make a park in 1994, this 7-acre assemblage of over 350 buildings had 35,000 residents - making this the most densely settled place on earth.

My wife grew up just outside the walled city. From what I gather, it was something of an overwhelming pool of poverty, drugs, crime and gang rulership.

Hong Kong in general, and especially the Kowloon side, is incredible densely populated, but this place was unbelievable.

yes, this was so densely built that one didn't only use alleys for circulation, but you would meander vertically as well through the built mass in order to get from point A to point B.

*bump*
in the News, there is a 45-story building (the 'Tower of David') in Caracas with 2500 squatters!