AREA In Conversation by AtelierforResilientEnvironmentalArchitecture

AREA

ATELIER FOR RESILIENT ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

IN CONVERSATION

Karolina Backman Ryan McGaï¬&#x20AC;ney Isabella van der Griend Charlotte Uiterwaal

Editors: Karolina Backman Ryan McGaďŹ&#x20AC;ney Isabella van der Griend Charlotte Uiterwaal Contributors: Ambrose Gillick Bo Tang Dan Lewis Greg Keefe James Mitchell Kate Raworth Maurice Mitchell Delft University of Technology Faculty of Architecture & The Built Environment Complex Projects Julianalaan 134 2628BL Delft The Netherlands

FOREWORD

Atelier for Resilient Environmental Architecture is an architectural studio based in the chair of Complex Projects at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. The aim of the studio is to research, connect, and design in the field of architecture and the built environment, to create a resilient world which we can inhabit. This book comprises of a series of interviews conducted between 2017 & 2018, centred around the theme of sustainable resiliency in the built environment. The purpose of this was to provide a wider understanding of this theme and collate our findings in this book. By doing this we hope to connect key thinkers, designers, researchers, and practitioners across disciplines to begin to create a holistic understanding of how we can plan for the resilience of future architecture in the built environment. The interviews in this book express the conversations and opinions of this studio and of the interviewees with whom we had the opportunity of discussion. Therefore, as a body of research this book does not draw to conclusions, however, aims to provide a platform for thought and further discussion on the topic of sustainable resiliency by providing a selection of viewpoints on which this theme can be approached.

CONTENT

Kate Raworth Doughnut Economics

p08

Dan Lewis Planning Resilience

p18

Greg KeeďŹ&#x20AC;e Sustained Living

p28

Bo Tang & Maurice Mitchell Architecture of Rapid Change & Scarce Resources

p42

James Mitchell Building Community

p54

Ambrose Gillick Synthetic Vernacular

p68

“... It’s all about coming together to solve a shared challenge... ”

DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS

KATE RAWORTH

OXFORD UNIVERSITY ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE INSTITUTE

KATE RAWORTH DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS BIOGRAPHY AREA 10

Kate Raworth is an acclaimed author and economist focused on exploring the economic mindset needed to address the 21st century’s social and ecological challenges, and is the creator of the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries. Her internationally acclaimed idea of Doughnut Economics has been widely influential amongst sustainable development thinkers, progressive businesses and political activists, and she has presented it to audiences ranging from the UN General Assembly to the Occupy movement. Her book, Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist was first published in the UK and US in April 2017 and has now been translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese. Currently Kate is a Senior Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, where she teaches on the Masters in Environmental Change and Management. She is also a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Prior to this Kate’s career has taken her from working with microentrepreneurs in the villages of Zanzibar to co-authoring the Human Development Report for UNDP in New York, followed by a decade as Senior Researcher at Oxfam where the Doughnut was first formalised in 2012.

IN CONVERSATION DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS ATELIER FOR RESILIENT ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

KATE RAWORTH

Well, as you might know, the inside of the doughnut consist of twelve social goals necessary for human wellbeing, and the outside of nine planetary boundaries that we have to live within the limits oﬀ, for the continuation of our ecosystems. The inside of the Doughnut is all crowd sourced from the SDG’s (UN’s Sustainable Development Goals). The earlier version of the Doughnut was on the table when the SDG’s were discussed and actually influenced them, and since, the SDG’s have influenced the outcome of the final Doughnut because I saw the SDG’s as the most legitimate statement of globally agreed social priorities. Why I didn’t stick to the environmental SDG’s for the outer circle is because the planetary boundaries (derived from Rockström et. al 2009) hold a higher standard, a more scientific standard, than the SDG’s. Actually, during the initial process of negotiation for Rio +20, United Nation’s Conference on Sustainable Development (2012), the concept of planetary boundaries and the idea of a need to live within limits of resource extraction and the limits of our ecosystems, was on the table. But, as I understand, as the conference came closer, more and more senior ministries in Brazil got involved, and when the ministry of finance got involved they said; ‘What are these planetary boundaries? They’re a limit to our economic development – take them out’. So the concept of planetary boundaries was removed because it clashed with this deep sense of economic development. It’s the deep paradigm challenge of the limits to the capacity of the earth and unbound economic growth. So knowing that, I choose to stick to the science rather than what is politically comfortable for countries when developing the Doughnut.

What is the diﬀerence between your Doughnut and the SDG’s? And, do you think the UN’s SDG’s are a valuable measure to achieve the safe and just space of the Doughnut or are they missing the interrelated complexity of the Doughnut framework? KR

I often ask myself; what is the difference between the SDG’s and the Dougnut?. From my point of view, I think the SDG’s are a really good thing that they exist. When I was a student in the 1990’s, this was before even the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s), the world rankings of countries was made by banks and only based on economic growth. Then we got the MDG’s and now we have the SDG’s. I’m very glad we live in a world where such globally agreed goals exists, even though we know the world isn’t steered by them, or guided by them, but even that that aspiration publicly exist I think is really important. So, it is great that the SDG’s exists. However, they weaken the importance of the planetary boundaries, which is why I used them instead which is a difference. But also, by drawing the components in a circle you get a sense of interdependence. And, by having an inner and outer circle you also get the sense of the tension that exist between the planetary and the social boundaries. The SDG’s, as they were first drawn, are just like little Lego blocks; you can stack them as you want, you can pick your favourites, and you often get invited to pick your SDG. It allows for situations such as; ‘I work on water, I work on gender’, when we actually need to look at the challenge of achieving them together. That’s where the tension lies. Then lastly, in the SDG’s there is embedded growth. SDG nr 8 is a target to ‘sustain a rate of growth’, which should be at least 7% in low-income countries. That’s a very big difference for me. I intentionally took out what kind of economical system is compatible for the framework. Instead, I wanted to turn that into a question rather than have it as an assumption; If the goal is to meet the needs of all, what kind of economics is compatible with this?

IN CONVERSATION 11

Tell us about the components of the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries.

AREA

This allows us to ask the question about endless growth, and we need to ask the question of endless growth in high-income countries, which the SDG’s intentionally avoid. So those are the main diﬀerences. AREA

AREA

In our framework that is trying to apply the Doughnut to the built environment, we have done extensive research on the built environment’s impact on the planetary and social boundaries from which we have concluded four topics with eight goals that needs to be achieved to support the ‘safe space for humanity’ in your Doughnut. However, to measure these goals we have found it very diﬃcult to quantify the social aspects and sometimes even the environmental aspects, because the goals depend very much on the specific context. How do you suggest approaching the issue of quantifying goals within the Doughnut? KR

Looking into capability theory is one way of doing it. The tension in the capability approach, which I very much agree with, is the distinguishing between capabilities and functionings; what you can do and what you should do. Capabilities are considered invisible and can’t be measured, whereas functionings are considered visible and can be. Looking at capabilities works with the Doughnut because of the inherited tension between the planetary and social boundaries which will inevitably be diﬀerent depending on context. So defining goals as ‘enabling the ability to do x,y,z in a specific context’ becomes more important than defining them according to ‘you must have x and y of something, particularly when trying to strike a balance between the social and planetary boundaries. AREA

How do you think the Doughnut can be applied in architecture? KR

When I think about urban situations I think, ok, the Doughnut is a starting point, the visualisation of it and the holistic image it creates can immediately change

the way we think about things in the urban space. But then, also going beyond the doughnut itself, I would like to go into what I talk about in my book as regenerative and distributive design. The regenerative being working with, and within, the cycles of the living world and the planetary boundaries; design for a circular economy, and the distributive being the social side; how can we pre-distribute the sources of wealth creation so that, rather than trying to redistribute income in an unequal society, trying to pre-distribute ownership of the wealth creation assets so that wealth is already pre-distributed to become more equal. So, if I was working in a ‘Doughnut City’ team, I would be thinking of how to bring these two principles of design to bear in how we think of designing the city. AREA

In our architectural studies in The Netherlands, we focus a lot on designing within the planetary boundaries and the concepts of regenerative and circular design. However, one of the reasons why we find your Doughnut a very interesting framework is because of this simultaneous focus on the social boundaries which we are not as familiar with through our education. Can you give us an example of how you see distributive design being implemented in an urban setting? KR

So, for distributive design I think about what the sources of wealth creation are, and that we need to create economies and cities that are distributive by design of these sources. The distributive network of the 20th century, when talking about distribution in economics, was about distributing income. We assumed there was a certain inequality in the way income was generated and then we applied redistributive taxes and policies, and the whole 20th century debate was focused on how high the taxation of the rich should be. I think we now can go deeper than that, and it connects more to urban design when we do go deeper and it becomes about pre-distributing the sources of wealth creation so that income is generated more actively in the first place. So trying to focus on the most fundamental sources to wealth creation I have; 1) Health and Education - because the potential of wealth lies, like we talked about, in the capability and well-being

IN CONVERSATION 13

The Doughnut of Planetary and Social Boundaries

Seven Ways To Think: 1. Change the goal

20th Century Economics:

21st Century Economics:

GDP

AREA

From: GDP To: the Doughnut

TIME

2. See the big picture

From: Self-contained market To: Embedded economy

3. Nurture human nature From Rational economic man To: Social adaptable humans

4. Get savvy with systems

PRICE

SUPPLY

From: Mechanical equilibrium To: Dynamic complexity DEMAND

QUANTITY

5. Design to distribute

INEQUALITY

From: Growth will even it up To: Distributive by design

INCOME/CAPITA

6. Create to regenerate

POLLUTION

From: Growth will clean it up To: Regenerative by design

INCOME/CAPITA

7. Be agnostic about growth

GDP

From: Growth addicted To: Growth agnostic Extract from Raworthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book

TIME

make an income in the cash based economy, but they could start doing this. The project was highly successful and the area was completely transformed and became a thriving place. So by designing money creation in the urban space you can for example create a currency that acts as a stepping on to the bottom rung of the ladder for people who are currently excluded from the economy and the society. So for an architect or an urban planner it becomes important to ask the questions of; how can you design housing that is distributively owned? What kind of urban spaces enables and support employee owned and cooperatively owned enterprises? What local industrial hubs and zoning laws etc would make this feasible? AREA

How do you imagine a 21st century city in line with your Doughnut? KR

For me, a 21st century city has these characteristics of being regenerative and distributive by design. You’ll see more community led housing then we’re used to, more locally owned cooperatives and employee owned companies that are embedded in those communities. You’ll see solar covered rooftops so that every household becomes part of creating energy for that community, and fab-labs and maker spaces that are part of those communities so that people can feel creative and feel that they are part of a more global web of design rather than being stuck in felling; ‘I’m a labourer, I work in a factory and on only one single part of the machinery’. So these examples from the real world I gave before gives me a little bit of hope that this is the reality we might be moving towards, because they’re real. I’ve started to see a much more distributive city. I think it’s a really fascinating urban design question; what kind of design choices makes this more or less likely? Of course it goes along cities’ regulations, taxes and legal constitutions, but in what ways can we design cities to enable it? You said earlier that you are taught to only design the building and the physical function of the building, but what if we can design not only the hardware of the building but also a something that is part of the software of the city? If we think of the regenerative and distributive

IN CONVERSATION 15

of the individual. 2) Energy and Communications – and I think this is crucial to urban design because for the first time in human history, the energy technologies and communications technologies are distributive by design. Think about the energy systems of the 20th century with oil-rigs and coal mines; centralized, large-scale, capital intensive projects that brought together a large amount of money and very powerful cooperation owned by many share holders. That drives certain logic of economics, return of investment and power. Then people had to buy energy from them. Now, with the solar revolution, given the technology, the energy system is decentralized and distributive by design because it can be on the roof of every house. So if you look at these energy systems from space they would look like a distributive system. The same happens with the modern communication system, the Internet is a distributive network. 3) Land and Housing – so for example there is a housing project in Leeds for low-impact living in affordable communities where the housing development is community led and everyone are paying 30% of their income in rent, no matter what their income is, so it’s affordable for all and it brings back community living. 4) The ownership of enterprise – for example employee owned companies that are locally based and can supports local creativity to grow. There is a famous project of a community fab-lab and making space in Togo which locals can use to start their own small-scale businesses or just be part of the global creative revolution. 5) Money creation – there is this area in Gent, Belgium, called Rabot which used to be a tower block community that was considered dangerous for people from the outside to visit. Most of the community was first generation immigrants from many different countries and there was no sense of community feeling in the neighbourhood and it had become a very alienated part of Gent. In this area Bernard Lietaer, who is an expert in innovative monetary systems, implemented a complimentary currency design to create a nicer environment for the inhabitants. He started by talking to the population of Rabot and found out that what they really wanted was gardens to grow their own vegetables, something many people where used to doing in their home countries where they often had land. So he found a disused industrial site and created allotments where the inhabitants could rent a plot of land with a special new currency he created. This currency was earned through certain activates such as collecting litter, planting gardens in public communal areas, and so people started working for this currency. Some of the people living in this area had refugee status and thus were not allowed to

AREA

design of this space, we think about it all together, can we create a flow of human interaction in the space?

and distributive design as the principles that help people to think about it as a whole.

AREA

Our role as an architect is not just a singular role, there’s also a responsibility of incorporating a lot of diﬀerent fields in our design process. How to you think a multidisciplinary approach is important for the Doughnut framework and how do you see it being used throughout diﬀerent disciplines?

How do you think we can encourage people across diﬀerent disciplines to collaborate more in these questions?

I think we need a lot more interdisciplinary working, and I think architecture has an inherited focus on multidisciplinary thinking by dealing with so many different things at the same time such as; how do people behave, how does different materials behave, what is the economics of the project? You have to look at it from so many different angles so there is a natural goal of bringing everything together. I also think it becomes important to have problem solving based teams, looking at how to bring multiple things together, rather than profession based work teams with only architects or economists working together. It’s all about coming together to solve a shared challenge. There’s a term I’ve learnt for the Doughnut; that it’s a boundary object. Not only in the way that it deals with the social and planetary boundaries, but more that as a concept, or as an image and idea, it allows different disciplines to approach each other’s boundaries and speak across these boundaries. I like to think of the Doughnut as a convenient table that allows people to come from their own perspectives and have a shared discussion and I think this is one of the reasons why I have been approached by so many different professions about the framework. So I do think it’s a very useful tool for that, but I see the doughnut as just a starting point. For me the more profound part of it lies in the principles of distributive and regenerative design. Now I know for you guys, design is very familiar, but for other professions it is not. Especially not for economists, which is a very important shift that needs to be made. If we can have this shared visual of the Doughnut that we can put up on the wall and fill with post-its, so that it can act as a boundary object, then people can collaborate across disciplines and it provides a valuable role for future development. And, I would like to also put up regenerative

I would, for example, set up a hackathon or a one-day workshop using the Doughnut in a specific context. You guys could for example set up a workshop with the theme ‘A Doughnut for Delft’. What would it mean to reimagine Delft through the Doughnut and regenerative and distributive design? Then invite people from different disciplines, involve everyone you can find and bring in the thoughts from all the different disciplines in to a great discussion. Similar workshops have already been set up in for example Berlin and Stockholm. Academia always suffers because students get very caught in the syllabus and the language of their particular discipline. So we need to start with looking at where we are in terms of these principles of the Doughnut from a broad perspective, and then look at what ideas and best practice is happening in the world. How can you then draw benefits from these examples and apply them to the context of your workshop area? AREA

How do you start to implement the Doughnut framework into the real world, making the transition between theory and physical things happening? KR

That’s a really big question. I think precisely by doing this; having interviews and conversations with people who see the benefits and wants to incorporate it in their own practice. My work for the next three years is to turn this in to a tool for practice. I want to build these tools for people for how to use the framework in their context and when dealing with certain challenges, enabling people in diﬀerent communities to turn it into a tool.

AREA

The point of incentives, we are incentivised in many different ways. In the market we often talk about price or money, but we are incentivised very differently in the household or the community, for example through; purpose, contribution, recognition, status etc. There’s a rich array of human motivation and I think we need to tap into that wider set of motivations. For example, think about why some people go for a long day of work and then go home to code for hours to contribute to a Wikipedia page that they don’t get paid for? There’s a greater motivation of contributing to something shared there. We have to use all of these motivations and incentives. And I think when people understand the interdependency of the human well-being on the planet, which they can through the Doughnut; they get a greater awareness and different motivation to change.

Raworth during a lecture

IN CONVERSATION 17

Can we rely on people’s moral values to change the way in which they take part in this new way of economics or do we have to introduce incentives in order to speed up this process?

â&#x20AC;&#x153;... do what you can with what you have and... understand that it will take time and to not be afraid of that.â&#x20AC;?

PLANNING RESILIENCE

DAN LEWIS

CITY RESILIENCE PROFILING PROGRAM

UN HABITAT

DAN LEWIS PLANNING RESILIENCE BIOGRAPHY AREA

Lewis, in addition to being the Chief of UN-Habitat’s Urban Risk Reduction Unit, is also head of UN-Habitat’s City Resilience Profiling Program in Barcelona (with 9 other partner cities), which has partnered with the World Bank, the C40 Climate Leadership Group and the Rockefeller Foundation, as part of a global movement on the part of the development community to implement resilience programs in both developed and developing cities around the world.

One of the chief aims of the CRPP is to bring more cohesion and understanding of urban resilience to local governments across the world, as well as developing tools for its implementation. “Right now it looks like a massive spreadsheet, which we will use to collect data from local governments and citizens about the physical, spatial, functional and organizational aspects of a place, in order to assess its strengths and vulnerabilities in relation to plausible hazards.” The City Resilience Profiling Programme (CRPP) focuses on providing national and local governments with tools for measuring and increasing resilience to multi-hazard impacts, including those associated with climate change. Working through partnerships with stakeholders including international agencies such as UNISDR, academic and research institutes, private sector actors, and NGOs, the CRPP will develop a comprehensive and integrated urban planning and management approach for profiling and monitoring the resilience of any city to all plausible hazards. The tools and guidelines developed under the Programme will be tested and refined in: Balangoda (Sri Lanka), Barcelona (Spain), Beirut (Lebanon), Dagupan (Philippines), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Lokoja (Nigeria), Portmore (Jamaica), Concepcion/Talcahuano (Chile), Tehran (Iran), and Wellington (New Zealand). These cities were selected based on the proposals submitted to UN-Habitat in response its call for proposals in November 2012, and represent a balance of geographical and economic distribution, population size, hazard profiles, and commitment to the resilience agenda.

IN CONVERSATION PLANNING RESILIENCE ATELIER FOR RESILIENT ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

DAN LEWIS

Our programs start in two or three diﬀerent ways. In every way we require that our partners, which are generally local governments prepare a fairly structured expression of interest in terms of identifying; what their challenges are and why they believe that embarking on a program to increase the resilience of the towns and cities that they represent has value. So it’s kind of an advocacy/demand response kind of a situation. In any case, whether we approach the city or the city approaches us, there’s always a requirement that there’s an articulation of commitment. We ask them in the expression of interest to make commitments in terms of interdepartmental cooperation and collaboration, and then to assign a set of permanent focal points with our program for minimal period of two years. So it is pretty demanding, but our experience and our view is that unless that exists then it’s basically a supply driven initiative trying to force its way into a structure, that in many cases is a rigid structure. That’s the death now for resilience space programming in cities. AREA

We found that a problem in resiliency programming is establishing a long-term interest in the program itself. How do you, at CRPP, promote resilience as a criterion for investment, both towards the government and to the local people? DL

Well it depends. It depends on who you talk to, you know, if you talk to the mayor that seems somewhat reluctant there are diﬀerent messages that can be inferred, implied, or directly put in front of him, or her, in relation to a question that says; how much risk, how much vulnerability, how much are you prepared to accept on behalf of the people of this city. That generally gets mayors thinking a bit more positively.

So there are different messages for different people. As I said, our program works primarily with local governments, it recognizes the role of organization in the very broadest sense. Organization, the smallest unit of organization, is an individual but there are different associations of humans. So, from a community point of view, even to a family point of view, there is organization. Corporate governance, political, these are all organizations, and they are all integral to building a resilient urban system. Therefore, the messages are different at different levels. There are different ways of generating advocacy. You can use an area based scale, you can use a spatial scale, to map all this stuff out. And there are different ways of generating advocacy and support, these types of things have different spatial scales because the array of organization is different as the scale increases. From a plot to a neighbourhood, or a plot to a community, or a block, or a neighbourhood, up to a district within a city, to a city itself, to the urban scale, to a metro scale. And, in fact in a resilience strategy you need to increase the scale beyond the urban or metro scale to look at the interplay between peri-urban to rural-urban, to a national, and in some cases, to a trans boundary, or even to an international scale. So the spatial scale is very important as a control to determine; who the organizations are, who the decision makers are, who is influencing decisions, and who is not a part of that process and who should be. These are all questions you can ask when you have some kind of a control to determine who is relevant at what spatial scale and who is not. And the messages are quite often different, not contradictory, but different. If you are functioning and working at a community scale, in a town or a city, the conditions that allow, let’s say autonomous decision making, only extend to a certain level. They only extend to maybe the community scale, but if that community is dependent on other flows and streams that come from outside that community then you have an interdependence that is a critical factor in determining continuity, for example. Like food, or whatever flows, that the community is reliant on are controlled outside the community. These are important details, let’s say, in developing or determining this kind of a continuity strategy. Unless you are talking about

IN CONVERSATION 21

How does the City Resilience Profiling Program (CRPP) start a resiliency project?

subsistence or something greater than subsistence farming where everything is more or less sustainable at that spatial scale you choose. It’s interdependence that creates uncertainty and ambiguity in concretizing any type of a continuity strategy AREA

AREA

In Himachal Pradesh, there are a lot of established policies from the government about resilience and sustainability but what we found is that there is a missing link of these policies being implemented all the way down to the local scale. How does the UN-Habitat deal with ensuring the realisation of these policies at the local scale, as well as governmental? DL

This is a point of determining this idea, this determination, we call this jurisdictional competence, but what it really means is who is making decisions. If the community members know who is making decisions, and they know who is influencing that decision that that person takes, or that entity takes, then you have a basis for negotiating at least some clarity [in regards to collective understanding of the policies]. If they don’t know at all, my experience is that the government level is well, to put it lightly, dynamic. You never know what is happening at the district level, or even at the central government level, it is always changing. This can be a real problem when you are determining this idea of continuity and prosperity at community levels for these types of things [establishing resilience]. And that’s what I mean about the interdependence, you have to know. If the community people don’t know then you already have a degree of uncertainty that jeopardizes any type of a continuity strategy. So that’s the first thing; translating that knowledge around policy, around regulation, around decision makers. Where is the desk, where is the decision taken of yes or no, and be familiar enough with that and able to navigate that to achieve whatever, and see what you are trying to achieve is a critical part of any of this stuff. This is one of the reasons why we look at this thing of using a spatial control, because as I said they are different at different scales, so understanding that system, and understanding where critical decisions are being taken, and how to influence them is essential. That is an educational thing, or a capacity thing, depending on how you look at it.

AREA

The area we’re focusing on is currently going through a rural-urban transition like many other developing regions across the globe. Do you think it is important to also look at these transitional areas, as well as already established urban areas for future urban resilience? DL

Let me share with you one of the sort of founding principles of the work we have developed with UN habitat for the last 20 years. You can achieve far more, in a far lesser period of time during periods of crisis, chaos and transition, than you can during periods of stability or stasis, if you get what I’m saying. The potential to drive change is far greater during periods of active transition, whether it’s crisis, planned transition, somewhat planned transition, it’s flux. During periods of flux you have great opportunity to make greater change in less periods of time. That’s my experience and it’s a fundamental principle in the work that we do, particularly in post disaster and post conflict work. AREA

When designing for future resilience do you think we should design for robustness or for flexibility when facing disasters and other rapid changes? DL

Both. They kind of go hand-in-hand. My suggestion would be not to focus on disasters from a risk reduction point of view, because that is generally a remedial, it’s a palliative approach to risk and vulnerabilities, or rather twisted around thinking about resiliency as a long term development target. And, essentially the buzz phrase that we use is that you ‘plan out-risk and build in resilience’. That is not something you do necessarily as a remedial exercise, it’s a future, forward looking planning and development exercise, and in that way you achieve both. So the Industry, that i am in anyway, has been for 40 years one that is looking at disaster risk reduction, or risk reduction to me; that didn’t work, that never worked. It’s patch work, its remedial, you fix one problem, then there is another problem. It’s very short thinking. Taking this other approach, changing the way you plan settlements, changing the way you develop them and changing the way you govern them over time, I think, is a

IN CONVERSATION 23

AREA 24 CRPP Collaboration Cities

far more secure pathway to resilience and sustainability. And, in that manner you get the robust, and the kind of protective agenda that you are talking about. AREA

Well, the first thing is that you need to be thinking in terms of systems. Cities, towns or villages don’t fail sectorally, they fail systemically. You need to understand the system, and understanding the system means that you need to look at what is there. From our point of view, we look at the highest possible level, at primary elements around human settlements. Every single one of them is somewhere on the planet, has a spatial component, or element where the people and the assets of the settlement are distributed geographically. That’s very important, because it allows you to look at vulnerabilities that are generated as a result of the spatial distribution of those assets and people. So, spatial is one. Obviously every human settlement has some kind of a built environment, some kind of constructed environment. Whether it’s a village with houses, a constructed wood house and a standpipe, or it’s a small town with an infrastructure as well. All of that is constructed or built environment. This represents the physical aspects. The third is organization, and I spoke to you a little bit about organizational moments ago. They all have organization, they all have someone who is making decisions one way or another at diﬀerent levels. And, all those decisions makers are limited by other decision makers outside that environment, so organization is also incredibly important. The final and fourth one is function. Every human settlement has a function. That village, whether it’s a bunch of huts that are used as hostel units for trekkers [small scale], or whether it’s Kathmandu [large scale], they all have functions, and those functions are the flows and processes and procedures that happen in all human settlements. Of course the bigger you get the more complex all of that gets, but at the apex, this is consistent at every level on the planet. This helps you

They’re actually a kind of planetary risks and hazards. Our approach is one that takes us to sort of the key principles, the concept of resilience as an absolute, as a settlement that is either resilient or not. So, an investment in climate adaptation does not make a resilient city, and neither does one that only focuses on earthquakes and landslide. You have to look at all plausible hazards, and then begin your resilience strategy planning on the basis of the impact, exposure and impact to those risks which that settlement faces. So that’s kind of the systems thinking. And that’s to me the first part. The second part is understanding that it’s not going to happen tomorrow. So when you look at the methodologies around the world for planning and protecting, and these types of things, just recall that three weeks back [September 2017] what happened in Houston, Texas. It’s happened twice before, that the flood inundation return periods when we planned those towns and cities, were grossly underestimated. In fact, three times in the last year the flood inundation scale has exceeded the five hundred year return. People have to adjust their thinking to the reality today and understand “what is this settlement going to look like in 50 years, or 100 years even?”. And, then start incrementally. It’s long term, and you need to really, really, reset the way planning and development takes place. The third thing is that we tell all of our partners; “for the moment, don’t worry about the money, do what you can, what you understand of the situation, do what you can with what you have, and don’t be daunted by the fact that a 50 year planning horizon is gonna have a price tag far exceeding your capacity. Don’t worry about that, start doing with what you’re have”. What happens, is that even small changes, even small increments, create more favourable environments. That’s also been our experience while working with cities around the world, that in fact, the more they do; the more interesting it is, the more

IN CONVERSATION 25

What do you see is the most important components for a successful resilience program, in particular for long term outcomes?

to begin to organize the system, to understand the system, and to disaggregate these four primary elements [components] into different typologies. So you look at houses, commercial buildings, infrastructure. You look at pipes and whatever, wires and different kinds of physical attributes and so on. If that allows you to comprehend what the system is, once you know the system, you can start to test that system against different threats; whether they’re economic, whether they’re social or political.

security there is, the more investment potential there is, and the money starts to come after a while.

AREA

Then the fourth thing is just basically saying the first thing all over again: prioritize, do what you can with what you have and start. But understand that it will take time and to not be afraid of that. AREA

Do you have a diﬀerent approach, a diﬀerent way to implement these resiliency components when planning for a city of 10 million compared to a town of 10.000 people? DL

Well, obviously the scale is diﬀerent, but the principles don’t change. The model that we’re using is universal, it can be applied in all these circumstances. A lot of it is heavily data driven, and in lot of towns they don’t have data, so you have to move from the ambiguity of subjective analysis to something. Particularly when you’re talking large scale development, you have to find the means to move from that sort of potentially ambiguous, subjective understanding, to one that is based more on data and based more on hard information that is validated. Even validated and verifiable subjectivity is better than opinion. Unfortunately a lot of the tools and methodologies that are out there right now are very subjective, and I don’t think that those are useful as a basis for planning for long term urban transitions. So we try to, as much as possible, generate and validate verifiable data upon which to do the analysis and come up with a planning baseline. AREA

What role do you think architects have, when designing a resilient city? DL

Talking to non architects. I don’t know much about the university [TU Delft], but the work I do with a lot of universities now, particularly in this field is focusing on transdisciplinarity as a principle, I think. You’re architects, but I’m an engineer, I was never trained to speak to anybody else than other engineers or

builders, that’s about it. And the real world isn’t like that. Understanding that this is not a design solution as much as a development solution, this is a really important principle I think for all architects. One of the really interesting discussions I had with the architecture school in RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] last year, and the Technical University of Darmstadt, is this whole concept of process design and the role of architects scatting away from the built environment and starting to think a little bit more about process design. I think this is a critical role for architects, for other disciplines as well, but particularly for architects because it’s a more real precondition to the physical design process. And, so this concept, what you’re doing now, and I think what you’re thinking about it like, is a very important thing. I think it is a new field, certainly in many universities I talk to. Not to say that people don’t understand it, but the principle of process design is not something that features/reaches high in the academic curriculum for architects, and many academic colleagues agree.

IN CONVERSATION 27

Collaboration Cities: Recent Disasters

Collaboration Cities: Resilience Strategy

“...I think we’re going to have to have a revolution... ”

SUSTAINED LIVING

GREG KEEFFE

QUEENS UNIVERSITY BELFAST

GREG KEEFE SUSTAINED LIVING BIOGRAPHY AREA 30

Greg Keeﬀe is an academic and urban designer with 25 years of experience in sustainability, energy use and its impact on the design of built form, and urban space. He is professor of sustainable architecture and director of research at Queen’s University School of Architecture, Belfast. Previously he held the prestigious Downing Chair of Sustainable Architecture at the Leeds School of Architecture. Over the past 20 years he has sought to develop a series of theoretical hypotheses about our future existence on the planet, through a series of technological and spatial interventions. Most of his work comes out of a free-thinking, open-ended discussion about how things should be. Keeﬀe has extensive experience of working closely with architects and planners to develop exciting ways of reinvigorating the city through the application of innovative sustainable technologies, informing his work on the sustainable city as synergistic super-organism. He is author of the books Means Means Means: Adventures in the Technoscape, Volume 1 and Urban Evolutionary Morphology: The Vestige of City, which develops a model of a new city, that is a cyborg created out of mutually compatible functional elements.

IN CONVERSATION SUSTAINED LIVING ATELIER FOR RESILIENT ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

GREG KEEFFE

It’s interesting isn’t it, because there was a quote from the head of the department of agriculture in the UK which says “Britain is nine meals away from anarchy”, which when you think about it there’s only ever three days’ worth of food in the country at any one time. But we’ve got so used to that just in time system haven’t we, and I think the problem is that if we become so local then you really only become a subsistence farmer, and there’s no wealth in becoming completely local but also there’s a risk of becoming hyper globalized like London and I suppose any major city around the western world is hyper globalized like London, but that has other issues doesn’t and I think it’s about getting that balance right, you can’t be 10million people in the area of London, not with current technologies or current resources, even the sole resources on that thing might never provide what you need, maybe the climate conditions, I mean in New York it’s freezing in winter, so you’re never going to be able to grow anything when it’s freezing in winter, so I suppose you’re always going to rely globally somehow, but it’s about getting the balance right, it’s about how you get the best of local and the best of global, you know I think that’s quite a challenge for urban agriculture I think urban agriculture is being sidetracked, a lot of the projects are kind of friendly for old ladies to grow carrots in window boxes, and that’s not going to solve the problems of the 8 billion world but I think then if you change it to a more hyper localized system then that means you’re going to do half your work in a local context, which is then going to be low paid work, so actually how do you balance that to completely thinking of the city as a system, we’ve unpacked all of the local production things, if you look at the medieval city or the Roman city they had things like pure finders, pure finder collected dog shit and composted it, and I know that in Manchester in the last century that Chadwick collected everyone’s urine and used it to treat cotton, so there were lots of hyper localized jobs not so

AREA

Is that something that we can do, in things like hydroponic systems, by bringing farming into the city, is that not only starting to bring resources within the city but also beginning to educate people about where it’s coming from? GK

That’s quite an interesting question, I think that seeing the impact of your choices is really important isn’t it, you know when you buy your iPhone you don’t see the impact of someone working in fox con city, 320 people touch the iPhone in the manufacturing process and you don’t know any of them. Where as I have these jeans that are made by a company in Hebden Bridge, and they’re hand

IN CONVERSATION 31

Starting of with the notion you touch on in your work regarding London, with London needing 293 Londons to support itself. How do you think we can make cities more resilient in terms of their food and resource consumption?

long ago and now you try and find a hyper localized job, and they’ve all disappeared so even things like waste gets put on a truck and sent all across the country. There was a study by some students in Detroit who put a GPS system in a pair of old trainers and put them in the trash can, and these trainers went on this absolutely incredible journey across America over two years until the battery ran out, but they went into Detroit and then to somewhere in the Rockies then to somewhere in Virginia, because people were trading trash, and then the battery ran out and no ones knows where they’ve ended up now. So the thing is, even the most stupid system about really low value products, like the trading of waste are hyper globalized, so we sell all our waste to china don’t we, the container comes over here full of iPhones, and we then fill it with waste and then ship it over to Indonesia and then we complain about the Indonesian polluting the sea with plastics, it’s not us of course, we’re really careful with it, we put it in the container and then sent it to them but they do it. You know so it’s quite interesting, we’re really good at unpacking the problem because I suppose I suppose that’s what the global city did, it brought in all the good things from the rest of the world but it unpacks all of our problems on to the rest of the world. I suppose the other thing about hyper localization is that it brings all of the problems home, I mean for example if you could see the damage that asparagus farming is doing to Peru in London you might think twice about buying some asparagus or you might want it regulated in a diﬀerent way.

AREA 32

made by people there, and I know they guy who runs the company and makes the jeans, and he hand picks the denim and all the denim is made in the UK for these jeans and so actually when you buys these you actually buy some providence that tells you that there’s not much environmental impacts in this product. But when you buy the iPhone there’s copper from the Congo in there, run buy gangs who run the mines who run slaves labour schemes and fox con city is pretty horrendous, and yet it’s nicely boxed. So I think the hyper local things is good because it brings it home, but I think the other thing is that hyper local doesn’t mean that it’s you as an individual that’s doing it all, and that’s why I quite like the super market thing I don’t want to be a farmer, I am a registered fish farmer, but I don’t want to be a farmer, I’ve no interest in farming really, I want farming to happen but I don’t want to do it myself I think that’s one of the challenges and that’s why I quite like the aquaponics system because it’s automated somehow, and that means that the people who want to do it can do it, but they don’t have to do it, because I suppose the thing about subsistence farming is that people have to do it, whereas when you have a machine based farming system you can choose whether you want to engage with it.

in an amazing way that made it really valuable, and someone had put in 500 hours to carve this thing and they got paid for the time that they put in, but instead what you get is a block of gold that has no intrinsic work in it really but it is just apparently valuable for reason which don’t really exist. There were quite a few money systems that were like that, there was an island in the Caribbean which the Spanish landed on where at the time the people had no methods and their money system was a shell that they used a piece of wood to drill a hole in, so there were people just sat around drilling holes in these shells to make money and it took ages to make the holes, and then of course at one point the Spanish turned up with a metal drill bit and so they were making hundreds of holes in these shells and suddenly just blew the economy out of the water. So I don’t know how we change that so that there’s somehow less materials and more labour and things, I suppose it’s a sort of arts and crafts Ruskin ideal or a William Morris ideal about you know how Morris wallpaper was hand made and guys carved wooden blocks and printed the paper themselves and it was a reaction to the industrialisation, but you know that’s another real challenge is that the economic challenge of post Fordism and post industrialism.

AREA

How do you think we still keep our earthshare low in developing countries, whilst still creating a good standard of living?

With most of our urban areas in the western world being essentially built, or established, does implementing sustainability in these places mean more renovation work or more renovation sustainability, and then does that become more of a brickolage sustainability?

I think it’s diﬃcult because you’re bombarded with images of success and successes that relate to things like gold plated Rolls Royce or Lamborghinis or something, so the problem is that it’s really hard to change that trajectory without it changing at some other level, so you know everyone in Africa wants a roll Royce, so how to do change that system? I suppose it’s a design issue really, I think that if luxury goods were sustainable then everyone could have them couldn’t they, the problem is that we associate luxury with un-sustainability, if it’s rare metals, you say “I bought a platinum ring” and because it’s rare it has value and I suppose that trying to find ways of making value out of other things, such as people’s time, where what we’ve done is we’ve reduced the cost of people’s time in systems, and maximised the amount of environmental impact in that system where as if you had some like a small piece of wood that was carved

That’s the million dollar question isn’t it, I’ve got a feeling that the future is going to be nothing like the past. I think we’re going to have to have a revolution, and can that revolution happen in the same building stock? And have we got enough energy to change the buildings stock that we’ve got, so if we demolish all the buildings that we have, and build a new future that’s a lot of energy use that we might not have to use, but accelerated culture is going to make the current way of working less and less sustainable and that socio spatial thing is difficult to know, but I guess people have always met, when you think about it the Agora’s are not much different from BK City is it, in an idea, they’re 2000 years apart but really the same sort of thing aren’t they, people need to meet and exchange ideas, and ideas change the world. But I think it is difficult, you look at, you know it depends on energy

IN CONVERSATION 33

Cobalt mines in Democraic Republic of Congo

AREA 34 Bike sharing in London,UK

AREA

Is that then easier to do in developing countries, for instance in India, over the next 30 years, 70 percent of India’s floor area is still to be built. Do you think there’s much more opportunity to have that revolution there? GK

We did some projects in The Gambia, and they’ve managed to leapfrog technology, they haven’t got any wired telephones, everyone’s got mobile. You can see that you can get lock ins with technology where you get stuck in things like the internal combustion engine where everyone knows it’s really crazy and stupid, where you have 2000 moving parts just to move one person its like an absolutely crazy thing, and obviously the electric car would be a much better idea but nobody puts any eﬀort into it because of the lock in with the oil production and certain very large manufacturers refusing to change. And so I think that makes an interesting thing, whether India can leapfrog the technology of the past but that thing needs real vision to see a future world and that accelerated culture might be quite diﬃcult in an old culture like India. You can see that in the Arab world where from the 2nd world war they tried to modernise it extremely quickly, where people like the Shah of Iran ended up with a massive backlash with fundamentalist Islam taking over and that ends up going back 400

years earlier from where we started the modernisation campaign, so changing management is diﬃcult. And as designers we’re always changing management, you know you think you’re doing a drawing but really what you’re doing is changing management. Because it’s trying to bring someone along that, for instance, saying this kitchen is better that kitchen that you already have but you’re going to have to change your practices a bit, and we’re doing it this way now, and you know that change management thing is really interesting. And I think that’s one of the problems with designers is that we don’t learn the soft skills very well in order to bring people along with our visions, most architectural visions have been trashed by users because apparently there wasn’t the education of the user, somehow, but actually I think it was more that they didn’t bring people along with them somehow, to buy into that vision. AREA

Do you think with that change in technology, looking at transportation, and looking at cars specifically, the UK and French Government have very recently put a ban on the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Looking at that shift from that to electric car use, electric car use by 2040 will make the energy demand surge in urban areas. Do you think we will have enough energy to power this demand in a resilient way, and should we then be looking at bio-fuel transportation, then finally if we look at biofuel transportation, does this ban on petrol and diesel car sales hinder the potential move to bio-fuel? GK

I don’t think it does, The electric car is about 4 times more times more efficient than the petrol car, the electrical car is about 23% efficient on average where as the petrol car is only about 5 or 6 % efficient. So the net energy use would be lower, it’s just that there would be more centralized energy production to provide the energy for those cars and so that’s an interesting issue as well, but what you’ve got between those cars is that if the car was a service rather than an object then you would only need around 10% of the cars so that might, I think the sharing economy is really interesting. A couple of years ago my electric drill broke, and I’ve had it for about 30 years before it broke so I didn’t buy another, I just borrowed one down the street, because I know that every household on the street has an electric drill and so I don’t need an electric drill. And when you actually unpack how much this stuff is used in your house, you could share a washing

IN CONVERSATION 35

technology if we can find ways of producing cheap energy then it won’t matter how much we waste, there’s enough sunlight that arrives in Delft in 15 minutes in July to power the city for a year, there’s plenty of energy around it’s just that we’re not very good at capturing it. So if we could invent energy capture technology then we could live in the coldest house in the world you could live in some old fashioned thing that leaks because you’ve just got free energy. And the idea of free energy is something that’s been around since the industrial revolution started and if you look at say, the energy used in bitcoin it’s like crazy, we’re not very good at saving things, we’re a lot better at producing things. I think as humans, our ecological strength is that we’re really good at maximising our use of environments, we can expand to the limits, so in a way I think the idea that we need to be really careful in the future I think is not true, I don’t think it’s about nature, I think we have to invent a happy profligate system when there is lots of abundance of stuﬀ so I think we probably have to change the energy system rather than change the built environment.

AREA 36

machine, you could share a dishwasher you could quite easily share almost everything in your house, couldn’t you, at some level. You can certainly share, every house has a secure internet connection. Every house on my street has a secure internet connection it’s crazy, in my house I can see 20 internet connections and I can’t get on any of them, and I’m paying 60 quid a month for my internet connection. And so you realize the sharing economy might be full of interesting things, and that might sort out transportation. I think the bus actually, as a piece of shared infrastructure is pretty crap to be honest, because it never goes where you want, it does start of where you are, but when things are self driving, then the car shows up to where you are, and you can take your shopping with it as well and it can do all sorts of things, and there’s actually a 10th of them on the road so you can actually ride a bike and it’s really safe because there’s hardly any cars there, it could be an amazing diﬀerence, but I think it’s our job to visualise that. AREA

We’re curious, we can see the system of the sharing economy working in Europe, but how do you imagine that would work in America, where everything is on a much larger scale? GK

It’s a really amazing problem, I remember I wrote a blog entry when I first went to Cornell, I said, when oil runs out you won’t even hear them scream in America. It’s just crazy, I was amazed, on the first day when I got to Cornell, it’s just a small town 50,000 people, and I had forgotten my iPhone, and the town centre was being redeveloped, so I went to the shop and asked if they had an iPhone and they said no you’ll have to go to Walmart so I walked to Walmart, took me an hour, to get to Walmart. And I realized that in the space that 50,000 people live in in Ithaca in America, there’s over 1 million in Manchester. And I hadn’t really understood the scale of suburban America until I had to walk it in the boiling heating, it’s enormous isn’t it. But I think the same things will work, I think the sharing economy will work but it’s always in use or energy isn’t it, and when you look at the land use and you’ve got a quarter acre plots and you’re using some of your earth share to keep a lawn, it’s looks crazy doesn’t it when there’s 7 billion in the world, and you go I’ve created this sterile thing outside of my house, for no apparent reason other than to waste Sundays mowing it. All that American space is there to be reprogrammed

because its all cultivated in a way so I suppose farming the American burbs is quite an interesting challenge for the 21st century, just completely farming the burbs, because there’s so much land there. And that’s the thing about wealth there is that a big lawn is a sign of wealth, the problem is that the first thing that everyone wants is they want a big lawn, and its actually completely useless. Then when you go to Manhattan no one has a lawn. I think America, again that lecture at Cornell, I seem to remember I said, you’ll be a member of the third world by the end of the century, and people were looking at me strange in the corridor. And because America’s so big, you have to share roads and you have to share infrastructure more than people in Europe have to, and they’re not investing in it, I find it just amazing, things like bridges were falling down because there’s no maintenance there. AREA

In relation to large scale of infrastructure, you’ve previously mentioned Manchester Water Works in your lectures, do you think that, especially in the UK, with the UK Government going through a period of austerity and not really investing in public infrastructure, can we still, from a sustainable point of view, have this large scale investment in infrastructure in the political context that we live in now? GK

I think we need a new commons don’t we, I think we need to realise what makes life sustainable, and not just prioritise them, but actually invest in them. We need wilderness, we need rainforests, we need energy, it’s not a diﬃcult problem really, like you say, setting out your diagrams, they’re not sophisticated diagrams in a way, the problem is getting to it from here, the problem is designers, we’ve designed loads of really hard cities over the years, whether it’s this table, completely unrecyclable, we don’t even know what that is, or what’s underneath it, or what it’s made of, it’s probably a mix of biological products or technical products and we all go yeah of course, and when you go buy a table for your oﬃce, you go buy a piece of this. I think the mobile phone is really interesting, I remember the first student to have a mobile phone was Craig Martins, he’s a lecturer here, and he was one of my first students in Masters, when I was first teaching, and we were sat there having a review when this noise rings round the room, and everyone’s looking round the room, Craig leans into his bag and answers the phone and says: “Hi Mum, I’m in a review, I’ll have

IN CONVERSATION 37

Greg Keeﬀe, ‘ Invisible terrace - Autonomous Living Machine’

AREA 38 North Manchester Community Market, 1950

AREA

In relation to community, and in particular with relation to community engagement architecture projects, do you think that this type of bottom up practice can make a big change in the wider context of which they take place? GK

I think we need everything don’t we? We need bottom up, you need top down, we need the middle people. We’re really the middle people aren’t we, we kind of sit in the middle and sort of make stuﬀ happen. I think that’s really interesting actually, and I think one thing that’s really changed in the west is the dissipation of community, which you’ve still got in India. I grew up in North Manchester, my mum and dad were Irish, in a place

where everyone was Irish, you couldn’t do anything on the street without someone shouting “I know your Father”, everybody knew everybody, and of course you go there now, and there’s no one Irish there now, it’s a completely international community and of course no one knows anyone. Where I live now, I’ve lived in the same house for 30 years, and I don’t know anyone who lives there anymore, and when I first moved there I knew everyone on the street. I think, how you build those communities, because they want the surveillance methods that keep an eye on the impact of those things as well as being that sharing things, which is going to be really really important, how you build those sharing things. I think that’s the thing about the move from architecture to urbanism, in urbanism it’s all about buildings sharing things, people sharing things, and architecture is about a beautiful object, and nobody shares that object. I think that change from object to context is really really important, and that social context isn’t just individual people, it’s that group thing. I think those are some of the challenges, as in, what sort of scale can you use to engage with people. Thatcher had that thing of “there’s no such thing as society”, which is families, the nuclear family, which was quite challenging, I mean my family had 6 kids, so we weren’t really the Thatcher family, the Thatcher family had 2 kids, because we were Catholic and Irish we obviously had too many children, so there’s that sort of thing where we didn’t really fit into the idea of the family. Where as in the community we were relativeley normal, and sort of successful because we had loads of kids and there’s something about Irish families being big families, so we were about as big as a family could be. It’s about how you build that, it’s how you decide how big a neighbourhood is, we all talk about football team sizes, you know 11 is quite a good size, 30 is quite a good size, 100 is quite a good size, 500 is not a bad size, but we never sit around trying to put together what size of groups we should work with. It’s quite an interesting thing because that links to those ideas about how you bring people together, you can imagine 11 people in a team, but if you had 20 people on a pitch at once, you’d have to have a very diﬀerent management system than you have with 11, 11 brings people working together in group, if you think about it you get 4 defenders, 4 midfielders, 2 attackers, don’t you, there’s sort of 4’s that get on together, so it’s like little teams of 4 then bigger teams of 11 and then the idea of the squad, and in American football you’d get all those guys on the touch line. I suppose, as architects we don’t know enough about societal structure, we actually need to concretise it, I think there are lots of challenges

IN CONVERSATION 39

to call you later”, and put the phone down again, and the conversation in the room has just ended, and I was amazed, it was the first time someone who wasn’t in the room had taken part in a review. Since then, that was only 1996, so that was 22 years ago, and now we’ve got the internet on there, I couldn’t do my job without a mobile phone, I remember Kevin Logan, he’s a partner at McCrain and Larringtons in Rotterdam, and even 6 years ago and I used to think, why doesn’t he have a phone, and he used to always say he would never have a phone, and now he’s got two. So actually what you realise is, that there were early adopters and they were inspired, they saw the benefits of the thing earlier than everyone else. I think we always end up starting off with stakeholders, I do stakeholder events on some of the projects, for instance the director of a supermarket I’ve worked with is 65 years old, and he’s not going to be an early adopter, there were no 65 year olds with the first iPhone, they were all 20 year old kids. So I think you’ve got to work with the younger generation, you’ve got to somehow get those early adopters adopting things, so you’ve got to inspire people who aren’t going to adopt, they’ll be the second or third wave of people coming through. I think you’ve got to start with the people who are going to adopt, You see that with electric cars don’t you, they know it’s not really cost effective yet, but they want to be part of the future. And that’s quite a challenge in developing countries, you can see like in San Fransisco you’ve got these hip kids and you can tell from them what the next trend is going to be, but that’s a bit more difficult in somewhere like India, it’s quite an interesting challenge as to how make that happen.

AREA 40

for architecture as in what do we need to know, because we can’t know it all. So what sort of teams of designers do we need to build to make stuﬀ happen, you actually wouldn’t mind having an ecologist, a geographer, a sociologist, a cultural theorist, and architect, a civil engineer, a building technologist, someone who knows about circularity and those sorts of things, and somehow they’ve all got these dovetales and get on. And I propose, that in Victorian times the architect was someone who would get on with everyone from the stone mason to the kings, you know they were the sort of lead consultant to something, and somehow we’ve lots that strength. I’ve worked on projects where the lead consultant has been a planning supervisor, and they don’t know anything about anything, all they’ve got is the gant chart, and they think the project is the gant chart, and that the success of the project is the time that it takes to build it, which has got nothing to do with the success of the project, because the project is going to last for 60 years, so the first year of the project isn’t the most important, it might be the next 58 years which are the most important, and they’re not going to be involved in the project in 58 years time but the architect might well be, so I think we need to re-engage with that process of not only the resources process but also in the design process.

IN CONVERSATION 41

Greg Keeï¬&#x20AC;e in a workshop for City-Zen Roadshow 2017

â&#x20AC;&#x153;...architects and the communities they are serving have a lot to learn from one another.â&#x20AC;?

ARCHITECTURE OF RAPID CHANGE & SCARCE RESOURCES

BO TANG & MAURICE MITCHELL

THE SIR JOHN CASS SCHOOL OF ART, ARCHITECTURE, & DESIGN

LONDON METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

MAURICE MITCHELL ARCHITECTURE OF RAPID CHANGE & SCARCE RESOURCES BIOGRAPHY AREA

Professor Maurice Mitchell runs Diploma Design Unit 6 and is Director of Research for Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources (ARCSR), supervising PhD and MA by Project students in the CASS School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University. He was trained and has taught at the Architectural Association. He has also taught at, the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Development Planning Unit, University College London and the Post Graduate Research School, Oxford Brookes University.

His early career included extended periods of work in the shanty towns of Ghana and as Regional Building Materials Advisor to the Southern Regional Government of Sudan. His book Culture, Cash and Housing (1992) explores the lessons learned from the experience of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in the field of building for development. He has been involved with and published on typhoon resistant construction in Vietnam. Ideas relating the building process to education are explored in The Lemonade Stand: Exploring the unfamiliar by building large scale models (1998) which highlights the importance of the culture of making within architectural education by drawing on the exploratory work produced during hands-on courses which he has run every year since 1985 at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), Wales. His Diploma studio undertakes an annual field trip in which students engage proactively with transitional communities in a rapidly changing under-resourced local situation devising imaginative responses to specific cultural and technical issues. Work undertaken by the studio in Kosovo is recorded and discussed in Rebuilding Community in Kosovo (2003). From 2002 to 2013, the studioâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s focus centred on design within marginal settlements in India (Gujarat 2002, Meerut 2003, Delhi 2004-5 and 2007-9, Agra 2006/10-13). He is author of Learning from Delhi, Dispersed Initiatives in Changing Urban Landscapes (2010), about the work of the studio in India, which won an Urban Design Group prize in 2012. The studio is now focused on the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, post-earthquake and on the refugee crisis in Europe focusing on situations in Athens, Greece and Calabria, Italy Research since 2008 around the construction of a small peri-urban primary school in Freetown, Sierra Leone has resulted in two exhibitions and a publication with the British Council: The Architecture of 3 Freetown Neighbourhoods. Documenting changing city topographies 2008-2013 (2013) which was shortlisted for the RIBA Presidentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Awards for outstanding university-based research in 2014. A paper: The Forest and the City reviewing the role of memory in urban place making in the Freetown peninsular is in preparation. Maurice is co-author with Dr Bo Tang of the book: Loose Fit City: The Contribution of Bottom Up Architecture to Urban Design and Planning, published by Routledge in 2017. He is also Director of The Water Trust (ARCSR), a UK-registered Charity which supports the research and live projects undertaken by architecture students.

BO TANG ARCHITECTURE OF RAPID CHANGE & SCARCE RESOURCES BIOGRAPHY

Since 2006, Bo has been involved in the research field of the Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources (ARCSR), coordinating and managing live projects with students in informal settlements in India, in collaboration with local NGOs, supported by The Water Trust (ARCSR). These include a sanitation upgrading project in Agra and quarry classrooms in Navi Mumbai. The first classroom building was shortlisted for the AJ Small Projects Award in 2010. A further research project in Sierra Leone has led to the construction of a new primary school in Freetown in 2011. Since 2014, she has led research in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal with her students, focused on the peri-urban topography. Bo regularly organises and curates ARCSR exhibitions in the UK and internationally, and was part of the RIBA Boyd Auger Scholarship 2008 research team, which explored art, urbanism and architecture in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bo is co-editor of Learning From Delhi (2010) – awarded an Urban Design Group prize in 2012, and The Architecture of Three Freetown Neighbourhoods (2013) – a collaboration with the British Council in Sierra Leone. She has recently co-authored a new book, Loose Fit City, with Maurice Mitchell, published by Routledge in 2017. She has written papers in various journals including Planum and the Oxford Brookes eJournal of Learning and Teaching. Bo is currently an undergraduate studio tutor and technology module leader at the Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University. She continues to further the research of ARCSR as senior research fellow and coordinator, with a new live research project in Athens, Greece, launched in 2017.

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Bo Tang studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University of East London and The Cass, London Metropolitan University, where she graduated with distinction in 2008 and won the prize for best Integrated Design Study. She completed her PhD on a full 3-year scholarship in 2014. Her research thesis is entitled ‘Negotiating Shared Spaces in Informal Peri-Urban Settlements in India’, and was one of four shortlisted for the RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding PhD Research in 2014.

AREA

IN CONVERSATION ARCHITECTURE OF RAPID CHANGE & SCARCE RESOURCES AREA:

How do you initially start a project and engage with the community you’re working with?

In our project, we’re approaching things from two scales in the development process, one from a governmental policy scale, and the other from a community scale. When working with communities what systems do you think need to be in place for development at a community scale to be initiated?

MAURICE MITCHELL:

We engage students as part of their Degree, Diploma, MA and PhD work with a particular geographical area occupied by transient communities, often part of a slum settlement on the edge of a city, perhaps a couple of square kilometres in extent, perhaps more. We ask students to survey, map and carry out cultural exercises to become familiar with the physical and cultural topography, the matters of concern to the residents and the student’s response to the situation they find. Students then develop hypothetical projects to speculate on what might be. This process is usually repeated over a number of years. Previous year’s work is exhibited back in the settlement and this provokes new questions and ideas. To start a successful live project, it is necessary to partner with an eﬀective local NGO or community group who can provide access to local residents, help frame the brief, find sites and help validate our contribution.

It is very important that architects can operate fluidly at the full range of scales from the room to the city. Top down versus bottom up collisions are normal and necessary in our line of work. In this respect, we have a problem with the word ‘system’. To us systems are technologies or procedures which work well without political, social or cultural intervention. This is hardly ever the case in our line of work. We prefer to re-introduce the ancient Greek idea of the agon: a non-violent forum where a topic can be discussed amongst people with diﬀerent agons and opinions and action agreed which will benefit the vast majority with the small minority who lose out being compensated.

BO TANG:

BT:

Over the years, we have found that projects are initiated by individuals from the community; those who express a strong need for something and are willing to push for it to happen. In Agra, the need for household toilets was raised by Meera, a lady who became somewhat of a ‘hero’ in the village, despite the lack of initial support for the idea from the general population. In Navi Mumbai, teachers in migrant quarry worker settlements expressed the need for proper classroom buildings, due to the dangerous nature of the landscape; deaths due to industrial road accidents were very common. In Sierra Leone, the school project was initiated by a woman called Rita, whose family was from Kaningo. She set up an NGO, CESO, to support the construction and day-to-day management of the school – a school which had been promised by her late brother to the children orphaned by the tragic civil war in the country. This was a promise she ultimately fulfilled in 2011 with our support when the school building was completed.

The institutions set up for each project usually involves us collaborating with a local NGO, local community and local authority, as well as local ‘professional’. This can be seen as a ‘coalition of the willing’; of cooperation and shared goals. MM:

This is an ambition to create a shared civic realm rather than reducing all transactions to those of the market place. AREA

How do we enable grassroots community projects and architecture to be replicated across the community’s urban fabric, and how do we ensure a project’s longevity and eﬀect in a community, once the architect is no longer on site?

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ATELIER FOR RESILIENT ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE:

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It is important to separate the architect’s involvement from the project itself. Projects should run alongside other projects which will each have a life and a timescale of their own. Architects will have varying degrees of involvement with projects as they progress. The longevity of the project will depend on its fit with the needs, desires and resources of the place as represented by the energy of the client which in our cases is usually a group of citizens with ‘skin in the game’ who have formed themselves into a voluntary association of some kind to monitor and guide the direction of the project; each providing their own agenda for the project with its own rules and procedures decorum and trusted relationships. Replication is usually by an intention being expressed by a neighbouring collective who have seen what is possible nearby and would like to be engaged with something similar in their neighbourhood. Some call this ‘pin prick urbanism’. BT:

It is essential that the community are involved in projects from the very start, and throughout the process, not only through ‘consultation’ but in the very act of making and building. This oﬀers a way of residents’ gaining ownership of the project and responsibility, from its inception to the ongoing maintenance that is necessary after the architect leaves. AREA:

In the region we are working in, Himachal Pradesh, we find there is a missing link between the policy of the local government, which, in our case, leans towards a structure of producing an environmental sustainability across the state, and the execution of this policy on the ground, in real terms. Have you found this in your work in Delhi and Mumbai, and how do you think we work to bridge this gap? MM:

Environmental sustainability is a concept initiated in the west, to address the west’s concerns about the planet, and imposed from above. It probably appears to those on the ground to have little relevance to their own everyday lives. So yes, we have found this mismatch on the ground in our projects. To introduce a concern for

the environment, it is necessary to demonstrate the links between the everyday problems found in the village with the pronouncements broadcast by the government after promptings by the UN and other global organisations. Even then the opportunity costs of focusing an individual’s scarce resources on environmental issues rather than committing resources to what seems to them more pressing, such as of the education of their children, is hard to justify. Leading by example, demonstrating links with everyday life, finding one or two willing participants to experiment with alternatives, and willingness of donors to oﬀer top-down subsidy, are potential methods for introducing matters of environmental concern. BT:

In Agra, where we worked with NGO CURE and the Kachhpura community, we began with a pilot household toilet scheme in 2007, which saw ten individual septic tank toilets constructed over a period of five weeks. Since then, over 200 toilets have been built, without any further involvement from ARCSR, through a revolving community credit fund. From 2009-2011, we returned to Kachhpura carry out a second phase of the project to construct a decentralised waste water treatment system, or DEWATS, to treat the main open sewage drain or nala servicing the community. The local authority, working with CURE, have since adopted this sustainable, natural sewage treatment system as a model for treating other such drains in Agra and Delhi. This is an example which also addresses the last question about ‘replicability’. AREA:

In your work with students at the CASS we noticed that you have previously adapted projects to work in diﬀerent locations and social contexts around the World, how do you believe we make these projects transferable, yet, also site-specific and rooted in their local context? MM:

This is a very good question: just as the previous question was about top-down versus bottom-up, this is the question of horizontal spread of an idea (the wide dissemination of a standardised ‘solution’ which has a real problem when it comes to trying to fit with varying complex circumstances), versus the depth of fit with a single situation from which meaning is derived (which tends to only ‘fit’ the situation from which it emerged).

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AREA

BT:

Every project is diﬀerent; the institutions involved, the site, context, availability of materials and skills, and so on. However, what can be adapted from one project to another is the methodology we use and have continued to develop over the years. AREA:

When on site and during studio field trips, what tools do you use to investigate, understand and research the context of your projects? MM:

Techniques of investigation include measured surveys at a range of scales (from ergonomic drawings of particular activities to neighbourhood scale mapping); and interviews with residents and interpretative mapping, where we identify patterns of occupation and use inductive reasoning to interpret likely changes to these patterns. We may use ‘cultural exercises’ to familiarise and engage with groups of residents of diﬀerent ages, religions, genders and persuasions. These might be anything from a cricket match, a drawing exercise with school children, or an exchange of food at mealtimes. Making the hidden decorum of these exercises explicit often tells us more about the society in which we are working than any direct interview. BT:

We also often carry out small-scale, time-limited, making exercises to provoke a response from the residents. For example, last year in Nepal, students built the layout of a new house after earthquake damage to the old house at 1:1 scale on the same site, but using only salvaged bricks

from the rubble without mortar. Constructed up to waist height over two days with the help of local residents, this modest collaborative act provoked interesting discussions, including issues regarding the boundaries of the new house with neighbouring properties. MM:

It is worth noting here that children are often the most eﬀective ambassadors and mediators of access to the communities studied. They both hold tape measures and open doors during surveys, help with access to local resources during construction and police their parents in the occupation of live projects. AREA:

During your studio project in Sierra Leone, your students used a sustainably sourced timber as a building material in their projects, what systems do you think need to be in place in a community to support the use of sustainable timber? BT:

The issue of sustainability and the potential for it here is not so much to do with the actual material used, but the notions of immediacy, of localness and being strategic. AREA:

How do you believe individual community building projects contribute to the larger urban fabric of the city or town? MM:

This question is covered in detail in our new book Loose Fit City [2017]. When community building projects create a forum or agon to create an institutional framework whereby citizens can access the infrastructural benefits of the city, then that contribution to the city is clear. BT:

For example, in our project in Navi Mumbai, a small classroom building was constructed, which was built of permanent materials in a temporary stone quarry workers’ settlement called Baban Seth. The expectation was, as with other nearby quarry settlements, that once the quarry was depleted, the settlement would disappear and

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I summarized our approach to each new location earlier and covered in more detail in the first two chapters of our book, Learning from Delhi [2010]. Our approach in transferring ideas and forms from one location to another is that of firstly capturing the precedent from the first location; then framing it within the new location and fine tuning it or harnessing this to the new situation. This process of transformation happens to both the choice of material fabric and technique of construction and the social and political take up and inhabitation of the intervention.

AREA

the workers and their families would move on. However, the location of a new permanent classroom next to the central Hindu shrine encouraged residents to begin to build with more permanent materials themselves, and for the quarry owner to do the same with provision of rented worker housing. In addition, the local Corporator for the district took notice – subsequently, Baban Seth became the first settlement along the 15 kilometre stretch of quarries which had street lighting, water taps and paved pathway infrastructure put in. As a result, a new resilient civic neighbourhood was established.

MM:

Similarly, in Savda Ghevra outside Delhi, agitation by tenants’ associations to construct neighbourhood scale sewage collection and treatment, attracted funding and provided the institutional framework for residential engagement, capacity building and further civic improvements. AREA:

How do you believe we design for adaptability in buildings over time in an Indian context, and what role does the community have in this process? MM:

As architects, we need to give more attention to the fourth dimension: time, which is usually neglected in favour of the three spatial dimensions. To look at buildings, streets and neighbourhoods which are made by different people at different times at different scales with different intentions, we need to take a ‘Loose Fit’ approach so that at any one time we have a civic entity which is more than just the sum of its parts. I think that the Indian urban context is one of the best examples of a loose fit context where such an approach flourishes and can continue to do so. As discussed in previous questions, the community’s role, through its institutional structures should provide an agonistic forum to generate a discourse around matters of concern, deliberate in order to move resolutely forwards, and make sure that benefits are distributed in a socially just manner. BT:

India has long celebrated a jugaad spirit; a sort of improvised everyday way of dealing with scarce resources, and so consideration for adaptability in buildings over

time is almost common sense or second nature to Indian communities. Therefore, architects and professionals can learn a huge amount from looking closely at the context they are designing in. Communities have a huge part to play in this process as they become and are ultimately the caretakers of these buildings, and the way that they are managed and maintained should be considered carefully addressed from the start.. AREA:

What role do you think the architect plays in community development projects? MM:

There are a range of potential roles from researcher and speculator to enabler and facilitator. Nabeel Hamdi says that we need a new profession: Development Practitioner rather than Architect. What is clear however is that to serve transient communities undergoing rapid change where resources are scarce, practitioners need a wider range of skills than those currently being taught in mainstream schools of architecture. They need to think in four not just three dimensions and be fluent at the full range of scales from the room to the city. They must be able to join in with the labourer in the foundation trench, enter into a discourse regarding construction with experienced crafts people and the professions and participate in debates in forums at neighbourhood, city and even state levels. They need to both engage and disconnect with projects at appropriate times and separate their own agendas from those of others engaged with the project. In this regard, for example, we have found it essential to separate the academic timetable of our students from any live project timetable - working in parallel rather than in series. BT:

As with the last question, architects and the communities they are serving have a lot to learn from one another. By working together in a loose fit way, and harnessing the diﬀerent skills available – imagination, ingenuity, costeﬀectiveness – relationships can be forged for long-term sustainable development projects.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;... I think if anybody is setting up a practice like this, or is wanting to do something like this, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve got to go and live there and you got to be part of it... â&#x20AC;?

BUILDING COMMUNITY

JAMES MITCHELL

ORKIDSTUDIO

JAMES MITCHELL BUILDING COMMUNITY BIOGRAPHY AREA 56

James Mitchell is a co-founder of the humanitarian architecture organisation, Orkidstudio. Founded in 2008, Orkidstudio has constructed a wide range of structures and buildings across Africa & Asia varying from small scale kitchen to larger schools and hospitals. These projects include an Orphanage in Nakuru, Kenya; shortlisted for Archdaily Building of the Year, a School in Cambodia which makes use of innovative fabric formwork in the construction of its concrete structure, and temporary disaster relief shelters made from cardboard. In 2016 James was named in Impact Design Hub’s “40 under 40” recognising young leaders designing for social good. Alongside this James has lead community and education projects with Orkidstudio in the United Kingdom, working to educate children about the fields of construction, architecture, and design. James previously was a lecturer in Humanitarian Architecture at The Glasgow School of Art.

IN CONVERSATION BUILDING COMMUNITY ATELIER FOR RESILIENT ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

JAMES MITCHELL

It’s a changing story actually. We’ve been running this studio for about ten years and we originally did projects all over the world; south-east Asia, south America and sub-saharan Africa. Those projects came to us by word of mouth and random connections with diﬀerent organisations or people. There was no particular obvious way of getting a project. But, it quickly became apparent to us that every time we went somewhere new we were resetting all of our knowledge about that area, whether from a practical perspective or, understanding of a community, or the society more widely, and that was starting to mean that we couldn’t deliver more sustained impact, or even deliver buildings, that were of the quality or eﬃciency that we wanted to. So we’re now headquartered in Nairobi [Kenya] which is where I am just now, and we now have the majority of our projects in Kenya, but also Southern Uganda and Zambia, which are projects [areas] we have a long history with anyway. Those projects have come from all sorts of places but I’d say our most successful way of getting projects, is networking. We go to a lot of conferences, and you know rather than living in the UK or somewhere like that, we live in Kenya the whole team, so we meet people, like-minded people, all the time and; word of mouth, recommendation from previous clients, that sort of thing, tends to be much better than any kind of advertising or social media and things like that. AREA

So was Nairobi then your preference of head-quarter location because of the great knowledge and familiarity you had with the area? JM

Yeah, so my co-founder was a Ugandan girl who grew up in Nairobi. Our first projects were in Uganda and later projects were in Kenya, and we always, regardless of

AREA

Orkidstudio has been significantly restructured since it started, what has been the reasons for this and how is it structured now? JM

Well we were, for all intensive purposes in the beginning, pretty much a charity in a very traditional sense, and that was kind of because we didn’t know anything better. I mean, I was 19 when I set it up and charities was the way you helped people. It sort of seemed like the only option. Also, there weren’t really any other organisations like us around at the time, apart from Architecture for Humanity who also had a charitable model, so we kind of did it without thinking; we raised money for projects, we donated the value of the construction materials,we donated our time to deliver the services, and got in volunteer groups to help as well. For a whole range of reasons we’ve gone sort of, polar opposite direction from that now. We’ve really felt that, whilst there were a lot of good stuﬀ that happened over those years, and a lot of positive outcomes, there were also a lot of disappointing or negative outcomes as well. Things like, you know, if you donate a building to somebody, and they haven’t really gone to their own

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How does Orkidstudio’s project’s come about and what is the linkage to the project locations your are working with?

where our projects were, if there was someway to root them through Nairobi, we often used it as a bit of a base or hub. So I’ve known the city fairly well for about 10 years and decided, because my network was quite good here already and my knowledge of the country, it was an obvious place to go to. But beyond that as well it’s a real hub within Africa, particularly East-Africa; a major transport hub, major kind of business centre for the continent, and the market is pretty significant. It’s also not very crowded in the design space or the construction space in terms of quality, and particularly for human centred design. So, take Kigali [Rwanda], which is a tiny city and has quite a number of practices that you could, maybe, put in he same bracket as Orkidstudio. Kenya has like none, and the market is like a hundred times the size of Kigali, so it’s been an obvious space for us, and we’re kind of surprised that we’re one of the first here.

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pocket or worked hard for it themselves, they tend to not take care of it. So we were starting to return to some of our buildings, and not all of them, but with some of them, finding that people just weren’t treating them very well, and that was very disappointing after you’ve raised a lot of money and invested in them. Also the fact that we were sort of unable to sustain our own activities. I was working in the UK and trying to sort of balance this [the studio] on the side, as for the rest of the team, and you can have a bit of fun with it, but you can’t really have any lasting or major impact and actually make a change to a community or the areas you are working in. At least not to any great extent. So we totally changed our model about two years ago now, and it was a bit of a gradual process, it wasn’t sort of overnight, but it’s been pretty operational now for the last eighteen months Now, we basically do all of our work on a ‘fee for outcome’ basis, so we’re kind of structured as a social enterprise, registered as a company in Kenya, and we have fee paying clients that pay us for all of our services. We provide a totally end-to-end service, which is completely unique, certainly in this part of the world, and compared to many other practices that you might know of, or think is similar to Orkidstudio. So, we’re similar in some ways to guys like MASS or Active Social Architecture in terms of ‘designy’ thoughts and that sort of identity, but we’re also a registered building contractor. We take on the construction of everything that we design, and not in a sort of small-scale/self-built kind of way. We’re now doing stuﬀ that’s about 5000 sqm, five stories high, that sort of thing, and that’s kind of one of the most profitable parts of our business. But why we call ourselves a social enterprise, apart from only selecting clients that are delivering a social impact themselves, is that we’re also starting to consider that; if we only take on things like schools, hospitals, and community centres, then it starts to encourage a mentality that this is somehow a separate, or niche, market within our field. You know, it’s almost saying that; well you can only deliver social impact if you are working on a building that’s gonna have social impact. We’re [instead] starting to look at; what if we do commercial buildings in terms of oﬃces, or a housing scheme, or something like that, or retail, and do it in a way that still delivers impact. That starts to actually challenge the way the wider industry operates. So, the way we are trying to deliver that, apart from our own design approach, is by creating training programs alongside our projects for women in

construction. So we’re trying to tackle issues of women’s lack of equality, or opportunity, within countries like Kenya, as well as the real lack of skilled, trustworthy and reliable workers within the construction market here. I’m not saying that men can’t demonstrate those qualities, but we feel that the women that we’re working with, and are training, are much more, sort of, naturally taped to those sort of qualities, particularly when given an opportunity when they have none. So, we’re running these training programs now, using our commercial model to basically subsidise that with the profits from that [the commercial model] as well as some funding, just for that activity. The women also pay into it a little bit as well, and with that they get industrial placement on our projects, and they also get classroom training. It’s a bit self-serving as well, because hopefully we get some brilliant construction workers out of it, but we’re aiming to take it to scale and train thousands of women and really change the construction market here. AREA

In your recent project of a hospital in Zambia the studio set up their own production of bricks which was the material used for the vaulted roofs of the building. Is the training process you’re talking about also used as a tool to introduce new materials and new ideas? JM

It’s a good questions actually, it’s kind of tricky and there’s two ways of looking at it I think. On the one hand, if our main focus is to train the women and get them to a point where they are employable beyond our projects, then there’s an argument to say that they need to learn and become adept of the most conventional techniques. Because, we might be doing vaulted roofs, fabric form concrete and stuﬀ like that, but the rest of the construction market isn’t. So, that skill might be useful for us but not necessarily to other employers. At the same time I think there is a strong argument for saying that the construction market needs to change its approach to design, and training women in more unusual techniques, basically challenging them to think more about how we build and why we build in a diﬀerent way, can have a potentially longer term and larger impact. So, I think probably the best solution, and the solution we’re pursuing, at least in the short to midterm, is that we kind of need to approach it in both ways. We’re trying to teach conventional methods, and understandings, of our sites. You can’t get away from things like; walls

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AREA

needs to be straight and plumb, and level, and stuﬀ like that, which can be done with any kind of material and technique. But, we’re also challenging them with more unusual methods and trying to make sure that they get a little bit of both there.

What are the most important elements that bring a project to either success or failure? JM

Well, for failure first of all, there are so many diﬀerent ways that a project can fail of course, but I think from a very kind of dry perspective there need to be proper management. One of the things that concerns me a lot, and I’m not preaching here because I did it myself, but there’s a sort of wave of populist culture now where there’s almost a rite of passage for every young architecture student to go out and build something in a country where it’s deregulated and you’re allowed to. And, without going into all the detail, although I’m happy to, we tripped over ourselves doing that, and probably had more damaging impact than positive as a result. A thing that somebody once said to me and I’ve kind of retained is; ‘just because something feels good doesn’t mean it is good’. And, it can often feel good with a community getting excited around you about a building, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that when you leave anything will actually change for them. And I think that, it’s not to discourage enthusiastic young students or anybody from getting out there and doing something, because ultimately I did that and it sort of worked eventually, but it’s to say that I think there needs to be a greater understanding of doing things responsibly and with regulations. And also, to go into projects understanding that a building is a pretty serious thing to put up, and architects, or any graduates, are often totally unequipped to actually do that. Now that we’re in the situation we are [Orkidstudio] and everyone’s past that stage, and we have a permanent team of professional from, sort of, in their mid twenties all the way up to their sixties, we’ve got a lot of expertise within our team. And, finally, only in the last two years do I feel that we’re putting up buildings that are serious and will still be here in fifty years time or a hundred years time, and you know, that’s important. I’m not saying that

For success, I think living somewhere where you’re part of the community. The most successful projects I’ve been involved with, or delivered, are the ones where I’ve taken the time to actually get to know the people locally, build a real relationship, and also understand that I actually don’t, and never will, know better than them about anything to do with how they should live or develop. And, so you know, basically trusting the people around you and the community. It’s that rare quality of being able to listen, which I certainly didn’t have when I was younger, not that I’m that old now, but, when I started out I thought I knew best and listened a lot, or I thought I listened, but didn’t really listen. So, I think if anybody is setting up a practice like this, or is wanting to do something like this, you got to go and live there and you got to be part of it; the political decisions that gonna aﬀect you, the economic society that’s gonna aﬀect you, and not have the safe-haven of just popping home between projects. I think that’s quite important. AREA

What do you think architects from a completely diﬀerent context can actually contribute to the knowledge exchange in projects? JM

I think that there’s a real lack of creative talent in this country. For example, the architecture schools teach in a manner that doesn’t, they’re improving, but doesn’t encourage any sort of critical thinking or investigation at all really. They just churn out these rather mundane and ill-thought buildings, and it’s quite depressing in a way. Even though the students themselves are bright, intelligent and often creative individuals, they’re just not in the right environment. We’ve now have more than 50% of our permanent staﬀ, or salary staﬀ, that are Kenyan now, which is a major factor, but we’re struggling to get Kenyans at a more senior level of any quality. We’ve taken on a lot of recent graduates or people within sort of five to ten years out of university. I think that, and I don’t want this in anyway

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AREA

the stuﬀ we built before, haha, is about to fall down, it’s still very good quality infrastructure generally, but we sort of made a bunch of mistakes along the way and I think that’s something that a lot of people sort of jump on [ignore], and sort of think is ok, and that’s something to be vary about.

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to sound too confident or arrogant, but I feel like we are one of the only, sort of, high quality design oﬀerings within the entire country that is actually based in Kenya, paying our taxes in Kenya, that sort of thing. Most of the architecture here that is in anyway celebrated has been delivered by international firms who are based entirely out of Kenya.

That’s one area that I’m excited about, obviously we’re making a difference to women at the bottom end of the economic spectrum in terms of construction and general economic development, but to also being able to act as a role model for design. Saying that, we’re currently working on a 200 unit affordable housing project here, and that sort of typology is everywhere in Nairobi know because it’s booming as a city. There’s all these affordable housing projects going up and they just make you want to cry, you know. There’s no natural light, there’s no ventilation, no one’s thought about spatial arrangement or even fire safety, or accessibility, or anything. And we’re doing this project that we hope will be kind of a benchmark, set a bit of a standard. It’s going to be pretty much the first development in Kenya of that type that will actually, hopefully, have all of those qualities. And, I think there’s a real opportunity to set a marker there and hopefully encourage the other practices, to training kenyans themselves, and I hope a lot of the kenyans that we employ will leave us one day and go and set up their own practices and start to actually expand that market, but it will take time. AREA

What are the key factors for achieving the ‘benchmark status’ of your projects that you aim for? JM

The key thing here is; how do you incentivise people to change the way they are doing things already. I think it’s a very long game because change takes a long time, and there’s always the thing called ‘the theory of innovation’ [Edward Elgar]. It’s sort of a simple graph that explains how people adapt to change. You get people who are innovative and accept new ideas, and then people slowly cotton on that this is something they should be doing, and then they do it, and then you get a majority later on. The majority of us supposedly are sheep and we like to follow once everyone else does that, or says it’s the right thing to do, so it will always take time and that won’t

change. But, the key thing is; humans are sheep at the end of the day, in a way, and they’re gonna follow an idea if they can see, and feel, and believe that it is better or diﬀerent, so me saying it before I’ve done it won’t change anybody’s opinion, or only very few. If we can get, you know, projects that are something like 200 units of housing or bigger, that’s a lot of people who’s gonna live in there, and a lot of people who’s gonna visit the people living there. We’re now trying to target bigger scale and more prominent buildings. We’re about to start working on a big Girl’s Sport Academy in the centre of Kibera slums in Nairobi. If you know anything about Kibera it’s only tin shacks on timber poles and we’re about to build this five story, sort of sparkling, sport centre in the middle of it. And, it’s going to bloody well stand out, you know what I mean, you’re going to notice that building. And, I think you kind of need projects like that, that can actually championing what you’re doing, and that are saying a bit more about what architecture can be. AREA

In a lecture from the conference ‘Clean Conscience, Dirty Hands’ in Glasgow 2014 you stated an important saying for the studio; ‘Don’t think too much before you do, and don’t do too much before you stop and think. What elements of a project do you think should be started as soon as possible and what elements are important to stop and think about? JM

Well, I think the premise of the whole concept of that really is just; rather than planning everything out on paper, and rather than everything having to be perfect, it’s ok to make mistakes, and it’s better to kind of go out and just get something started. Even if there’s maybe things that aren’t planned for, or things that could be a bit of a disaster, as long as it’s not reckless in a way that could damage people’s safety, or health, or whatever, I think the idea, really, is just to test your idea, because on paper you will never get to that point where it’s ready. If you have a project, or an idea, or a business you want to put into practice, you’re never going to get it to a point on paper where tomorrow you can open it all up and it’s all going to work perfectly well. But, equally once you start, you can’t just put your head down, you got

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very diﬀerent in the sense that Orkidstudio is a hundred percent self-suﬃcient and profitable, we don’t have any grant money pumping up our salaries or our business in any way, whereas MASS are 60-70% philanthropy funded, and only a small portion earned income. And, if you’re going to take that model [The MASS model], which also works, then in many ways their funders and their donors are more important to their survival than their clients, the people they’re trying to serve. I have my criticism of that model for those reasons. Also, all of their funders are East and West coast Americans, Silicon Valley, and that sort of thing. They need to be around them, they need to be smooshing them, doing all of that sort of things. So, there’s other reasons, very practical reasons, why it therefore make sense for them to also engage in the market where they need to be presence.

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Do you see a future where Orkidstudio would use its experience of social architecture in developing countries to enter the UK or European market with similar initiatives, for example in the manner that MASS does projects in both Africa and the US? JM

Ehm, it’s not part of our current vision, I guess, but I would never say never. It personally doesn’t interest me, which is probably an indication that it might not happen unless there’s another person in Orkidstudio that really wanted to drive that forward. But I mean, commenting on what MASS is doing, I do think there’s a lot of good about it. A bit like I was saying before; if we only take on projects for poor communities in Kenya or wherever, then it’s a kind of flagging that this is an alternative option to practice. So by practicing with the same ethos, with the same approach, even if some of the methods have to be a bit diﬀerent, in a country that might be considered more developed, then you can start to challenge that notion. So, I really applaud MASS for their approach to that, but at the same time, I think it works for them in the a way it doesn’t work for us. They’re a very diﬀerent type of practice. Guys like Michael [Murphy] and Allan [Ricks] who run MASS, love Africa, but they would never live here. And, that’s something that they’re quite up front about and acknowledge, so you know, they’ve opted to have their hub of the practice in Boston, and they require it. We’re

What is the key research you do before starting a project and how do you execute that research? JM

As I was saying in the beginning, one thing is that we’re trying to really restrict our geography. So, even though we’re working in three countries, we’re trying to focus in on particular areas of those countries. Of course the society, and the landscape and the community can change very quickly, even over a 15 minute drive or a half and hour drive, but we’re becoming increasingly more familiar, and are building up a knowledge base, an understanding of areas in more detail, that means that we’re not having to approach every project from a blank slate. We do have a certain approach [to research] , we have questions and standard data that we try to gather on every project which ranges from the pragmatic things like; climate and soil data, political climate, that sort of thing, to more social preferences and lifestyle. But, we also do our best within what’s feasible, and possible, to spend as much time with the community. Particularly before we design for them. Building before them is a bit diﬀerent because you kind of build up the relationship as you go, but before we design for them we now try to spend a bit of time there. And, it’s not months and months, but it’s certainly longer than days. We try to immerse ourselves, stay somewhere local, not at the nearest five star hotel, but somewhere a little bit more, you know, in amongst everybody. That’s also why we’re in Nairobi. Ok, you can live a little bit of a bubbled life in Nairobi if you choose to,

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to sort of get so far and reflect a little bit. I think it’s something Orkidstudio has been very good at over the years. We constantly criticise ourselves, I think we’re our biggest critics, and we’re quite happy to own up to areas that we’ve kind of totally messed up, and also then, make a change as a result. Like I was saying in the beginning of this interview, the way the organisation has changed over the years has been because of that. At some point, I mean, you can think, and you can brainstorm, and you can put stuﬀ down on paper, but you just got to get in there, jump into the deep end, and get started. Then at some point, when you’re starting to run out of air, realise, that you need to just stop a minute, take a pause, reflect on it, ask people what they think, and go again. So I think it’s just that constant, never ending process, it’s just that kind of cycle.

but a lot of the issues and the social problems, and the communities that we’re working with, are around us all the time.

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I often used to pop over, spend a week with a community, and then go back to Glasgow for designing, and it just felt really bizarre. It’s weird how in Nairobi, even though our oﬃce is quite nice, it’s definitely not in the poshest part of town, but it’s perfectly comfortable, the fact that I can get in my car and drive a couple of hours down the road to see the community just makes you feel a little bit more connected and immersed in the wider culture and political situation, even if it’s just psychological or a placebo eﬀect. AREA

Is there a general goal of all projects from the studio and what is your motivation to continue and reach those goals?? JM

I used to have motivations that were probably grounded in the now. I suppose at one point I thought that we could change things in a way that I now don’t think a lifetime can change, if that make sense, and that’s not to lessen the ambition. But, I think a big thing that I want to see change here, is the attitude towards women. Construction is a really unusual area to engage women. Even in Britain, or America, the statistics of women in the construction industry is shockingly poor. In Kenya, 6 % of the construction industry are female, and very, very, few of those are actually doing physical work on the site, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, are actually in the position of authority. They’re sort of in that basic, mundane and menial task role in the oﬃce. I think because of that, because it’s such a male dominated economy, or industry, there’s a capacity to shock people. And, I think that’s kind of needed if you’re going to make change. It’s also not just about construction. It would be amazing to see the percentage of women in the construction industry even get to 20% in Kenya, but that’s not necessarily the problem we’re trying to solve. I think it’s broader than that. The women that we’re training are learning that they have the ability to do things and can build confidence. For the hospital we were just

building in Zambia, we used to do these team meeting or celebrations every so often when we met a particular milestone. It was a two year project and in the beginning it was always the senior men that would stand up and have a senior speech. Gradually some of the younger men built a bit of confidence and decided to do the same, and eventually some of the women started to stand up. One of the youngest women on our site, this is you know, in front of about 200 people that were working on that site, stood up in front of them. She was really excited and happy because she had learnt all of these skills and had built a lot of confidence, which in many ways was to be expected, but it was amazing that she was saying it. But, then she said something, that for me summed up exactly what we’re trying to do, which was; ‘So I’ve learnt all of these amazing stuﬀ but the thing that has amazed me the most is that all the men standing here now look at me completely diﬀerently’. That for me was this sort of wider change that we’re trying to create. We also did a survey where we asked all of the men to name a person that they’d worked with that was an inspiration for them, we didn’t say ‘name a man or name a women’, we just said ‘name somebody’, and a surprising portion of them, a majority, named a woman, without any prompting, or you know, nothing fed to them at all. That was one of the first projects where we worked with the community for as long as two years, and it was starting to actually create quite tangible, more systemic change in the entire area, which was fantastic. And that’s really, I guess, the goal.

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“...a common misconception of vernacular is that it is essentially static and historic. It isn’t... Like any other human endeavour, it is fluid and very open to influence... ”

SYNTHETIC VERNACULAR

AMBROSE GILLICK

BAXENDALE DESIGN CO

AMBROSE GILLICK SYNTHETIC VERNACULAR BIOGRAPHY AREA 70

Ambrose Gillick is a Director at Baxendale Design Co., Glasgow, and a Studio Tutor and Lecturer in Architecture at The Glasgow School of Art. Ambrose is a graduate of The University of Manchester and The University of SheďŹ&#x192;eld. In 2013, he completed his PhD from The University of Manchester where his thesis paper focused on The Synthetic Vernacular - The Co-Production of Architecture. His paper, The Synthetic Vernacular, explores the work of Hunnarshala, a non profit urban developments foundation, who participated in the rebuilding of communities in the aftermath of the earthquake in Gujarat, India, in 2001. Ambrose uses three case studies by Hunnarshala in Bhuj, Gujarat, to address the idea of architectural co-production which embodied community and socio-cultural empowerment. At The Glasgow School of Art, Ambrose, is a Studio Tutor in the undergraduate architecture program where he aims to develop students design and research skills through drafting, architectural visualisation, and model making. Adjacent to his studio work, Ambrose runs a series of lectures and seminars which range from topics on Informal Architecture and Architecture and Resistance to Urban Housing and Architecture & Development. Currently Ambroseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work with Baxendale Design Co. promotes an architectural and design awareness in communities within Glasgow and throughout Europe. Their projects create community led development and building which aims to create and re-use urban nodes to enable social interaction and collaboration.

IN CONVERSATION SYNTHETIC VERNACULAR ATELIER FOR RESILIENT ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

AMBROSE GILLICK

Not really and yes entirely. I think a common misconception of vernacular is that it is essentially static and historic. It isn’t, as Amos Rappoport describes . Like any other human endeavour, it is fluid and very open to influence. It’s literally impossible for a certain type of architecture to retain distinction as such. That the modern world is more connected may accelerate this cross-fertilization, but it hasn’t caused it. See for example the influence of Islamic forms (ogee) on Gothic architecture (Flamboyant) due to trade and the Crusades (and influences back too.) Locales have always been vast.

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You need to interrogate the idea of a ‘local culture’, possibly even ‘culture’ itself. This is a fallacy, one that is tempting because it permits educated middle class people to characterize given subjugated people as x or y or z. (They of course are x, y and z.) In so doing, it becomes possible to identify narrow needs and satisfy them easily. But people are more complex than that.

I follow Peter Berger here: modernity is characterized by a real push for a materialistic answer to the human condition. Materialism, based in the physical sciences, is predicated on the assumption of discrete, study-able and stable phenomena. But life ain’t like that. But yes, lots is being lost to the juggernaut of modernity and it is sad. But it isn’t new. It’s also good insofar as indigenous cultures have to have elaborate funeral rites for children; modernity releases us from the tyranny of early death. Indigenous cultures are often patriarchal hell-holes, often grindingly poor, often disease ridden, etc. Are they worth saving? Once you recognize the essentially moral core of

Given the interconnectivity that digitalization brings with it, is our responsibility as architects to design not only sustainable means of building but also to procure buildings that provide for the needs of shelter as well as becoming machines of production of food, water, energy etc. creating buildings which individually have their own circular ecosystem, or is this something which should be brought about on a larger industrial scale, meaning that essentially we should focus on institutional reform as well as architectural reform?

As architects we need to facilitate the natural inclination and capacity of normal people to develop self-supporting models of human settlement building. I don’t think digitization has much role, no. It barely operates in the Global North – have you ever met a builder? They cut things with saws, hit them with hammers. BIM is fine, but in the end, big men with big muscles stack heavy things on top of each other and fix it there with glue or pointy things. It’s really simple. If it wasn’t, so the joke goes, we wouldn’t get builders to do it… Wikihouse is fine but it’s an essentially bourgeois conceit, seemingly predicated on this awful idea of hierarchical human needs. Such approaches fail. Yes, legislative planning and labour reform, alongside visionary practice will help.

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With the increasing, and essentially inevitable, interconnectivity of people and communities around the World, do you think there is a threat to local culture and, henceforth, the local vernacular through digitalisation and digital methods of producing and manufacturing architecture as our locals expand?

cultural production (which in a strictly anthropological reading would be seen to be the basis of socio-cultural development) I tend to believe that most westerners would reject most indigenous cultures. Or, and the west does this all the time either directly (democratization of Afghanistan?) of implicitly (aid being tied to reproductive rights, for example), would actively seek to strip out moral norms, but hope to maintain the shell of cultural aesthetics. I think the evidence suggests that this is neither reasonable nor viable.

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With digital means of design and manufacturing in architecture, do you believe that architecture through these means of production can still be deeply routed in the localized vernacular, or do we lose the feeling of local production and local procurement along the way? AG

If people are unable to live in a house, which means dwell, which means build (Heidegger) then all the digitization will fail. Most of a building’s life occurs after the architect has gone. Can a digitized building be maintained? Can leaks be fixed, etc. The problem of post war modernist tower and slab type building was (in part) this: that the residents were profoundly dis-empowered to actually dwell in the places. Once the buildings began to break, what could they do? AREA

What do you think is the best method of translating or making available open source materials to local people? AG

Libraries with books in them. And informed teachers who’ve read some books.

is basically a vast source of opinion laced with a residue of facts. Compare it, if you will to a decent encyclopedia from the 1980s – neat, clear, substantiated, short, etc. So we’re left in this weird way with more info and less reliable info. So online you stick to what you know. I honestly use about five websites to keep me informed. AREA

Methods of digital production such as Wikihouse also rely on standardized building materials, such as plywood, which is understandable due to their production method but also because of the inconsistency in quality of building materials in various regions of the globe. Does this diverge from the notion of a localised material culture of a place or do new means of using materials add new value and meaning to communities? AG

Yes and no. Adobe building is fairly well spread out globally and works in diﬀerent ways in diﬀerent places. Same with concrete. It could work, with local influence. The trick with all these things is to balance the professional and lay knowledges available. How could wikihouse be made appropriable by a family in Manilla and Greenland. (Does anybody live in Greenland?) AREA

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Do you think that, although we gain information from having extensive online, open source, resources available almost everywhere throughout the World, that we are becoming unable to process this overwhelming amount of information into understanding and knowledge? And, surely, if there is a loss of local and vernacular knowledge, even though there is extensive information and data available, we risk the production of un-contextualized buildings in the future due to the advancements in digitalization? AG

Sure. Modernism tried this before with its universalist ideology. It failed and continues to do so for the vast majority of ordinary people. (It’s fine for the rich, of course, because everything is.) See Corb in Chandigarh. Utter de-contextualized white-is- right fascist awfulness. As for the web as this resource of matchless, infinite info, not so much. It’s still very crude, perhaps by design. There is very little coherence and control. So Wikipedia

With the expansion of digital technology what does that mean for our social interaction within our communities? If we become more digitalized, do we become more insular as a society due to there being less need for mobility, as essentially we have connection to all of our needs through the digital World? AG

Do we though? Isn’t that a fallacy too? Why do we see so much eﬀort to build community? Things like artisanal, low-carbon, rich culture stuﬀ, and Death Cafes, etc. are evidence, I think that the digitization of sociality is failing. (As an aside, I think this is a symptom, not the cause of alienation. Modernity itself, according to Marx, Weber, Foucault, Arendt, etc. is essentially alienating.) AREA

Then, in relation to the previous question, how do you imagine this would diﬀer between rural/urban and western society/developing countries?

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As for the Global South, there’s less of a divide than wishfulfilling western tourists would care to imagine. AREA

Even if we, as architects, are able to produce a Synthetic Vernacular, how do we eﬀectively spread this knowledge and teach how to build adequate buildings in communities with vast majorities of people who, in many cases may be, illiterate, without the architect having to oversee each step of the process? AG

They already know how to build adequate buildings but lack the resources (money) to do it well. Building doesn’t require reading or writing. Most builders over here are illiterate too. AREA

In our towns, cities, and communities that are eﬀected by natural disasters, such as in Bhuj, there are obviously preferable and less preferable places in which to build to avoid building failure in the event of a disaster. But with the largely informal means of building in regions such as Bhuj, can we guide people to build in preferable areas? AG

Of course. Define ‘guide’ though? If you mean ‘nudge’ then that’s political and agendard, essentially a form of manipulation. If you mean impose (which is mostly what guide means in governance speak) then, yes, we can get people to build in preferable areas. The government can and will do what it wants, in bhuj or anywhere. AREA

Even in the UK we struggle to adhere to buildings that adapt to climatic disasters, we just have to look at the amount of houses affected by flash flooding in Southern England to see examples of this. In India, with less regulations than in the UK, do you think the lack of regulation poses more or

They don’t have less regulation. Indeed, they have almost exactly the same regs, adopted almost verbatim from Britain, percolating through a vastly larger and more explicitly corrupt government/ planning system. The buildings in southern England/Cumbria aren’t ill adapted, they just are built on the flood plain. They’d be perfectly decent houses on a hill top. But! I think less regulation may lead to greater innovation (I don’t like sustainable of resilient – the former is meaningless, the latter implies an inevitable need to resist anticipated (and therefore avoidable) destruction at some future point) due to the actualisation (or rather uninhibition) of organic processes of settlement development. This might in one context mean very lowgrade, cheap and spontaneous construction, like Dharavi. It might be big glass horrors a la London. I don’t know. AREA

Does your work with Baxendale, now, relate to the concept of Synthetic Vernacular? What diﬀerences do you find working with communities in India and in Europe? AG

That’s a book right there. I can’t answer this meaningfully. I’m closer to Baxendale’s stuﬀ, in a way; less clear about it in another. I think I may have dodged the inevitable in my thesis, which was probably to imply that everything is everything, yeah or some other such meaningless assertion. My engagement with Hunnarshala was as a very white, very foreign and very clumsy researcher. I was acutely aware of this, and believe, in the end, more than anything that less developed nations aren’t really gaining much from well-meaning (sometimes) cracker coming in to tell them how to do shit they’ve been doing for 000s of years. They need money and trade, the rest they’ve got covered. I have none of these hang-ups with Baxendale. It’s my culture and I know where I stand. I don’t feel guilty or gratuitous; there’s a job to be done, which I do. As yet,

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I’m not sure what the rural/ urban divide means in the Global North anymore. Practically, we’re all essentially suburban now. I think this is Venturi &amp; Scott Brown’s point.

less of a challenge to the construction of sustainable and resilient settlements and communities?

the model and output of Hunnarshala is in a continuum of what Lee did before I joined. I’d no say it was SVA, but it is co-productive. This may mean the same thing. (I think it does, anyhow..) So, yes. AREA

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During our research, we found that the areas in the World where the population is least aware of climate change are the same as the places which will be the most effected by it. Even although there is a high awareness in the UK about climate change do you think that this awareness translates into action, and, can this be seen in the communities that you have worked in with Baxendale? AG

I don’t get much of a sense anybody really cares about it. I don’t for one. I care much more about bringing in the benjamins and keeping neds away from my kids. Also, I like making sweet things. Sustainability is four-fold: human, social, economic and environmental. I think the marginal communities we work with would like a bit of the first three and a nice park with trees to run their dogs/ kids/grandkids in. The meta-narratives about ‘the world’ ‘the climate’ ‘ecocide’ ‘blah’ don’t really get a look in, other than what gets pictured in the newspaper or features in some blockbuster. AREA

For instance, in the post disaster state of Bhuj, Gujarat, after the earthquake in 2001, to what extent do you think we as architects can create a firm plan for the sustainable future development of communities, settlements, towns, and cities, in these situations, or is our role more as a catalyst to create community led regeneration? Does there need to be a balance between the diﬀerent roles that architects could play? AG

Our role may be as catalyst. I’d say that the genius of great architects has been to generate environments, from houses, to palaces to chapels to cathedrals, from pavements to urban grids, which make a content, sociable, creative society more likely to occur. Historically, this process is a community-driven one. However,

‘community’ is more complex that some bunch of plebeians with pitchforks supping ale and being real. Community is a complex of socio-cultural ties organised around a common discourse, often theistic and/ or cosmological in nature, with complex arrangements of legal, para-legal and informal agreements and norms to control and mediate tension and friction and to support and encourage growth. As such, community-led does not imply ‘no architect/ professional/ state/ business/ The Man/ etc.’ but that the architect/ professional has a relationship to the community which foregrounds the experiences and values of the community prior to the application of professional expertise. The knowledge and abilities of the expert still have an intrinsic role to good place/urban space. They just must be subservient to nonprofessional ways of knowing, being and doing.

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