URBAN CONTEXT

Learning Objectives

1. To gain a preliminary understanding of the complex linkages between urban development, informal urbanisation and their nested social, spatial and political ramifications.

2. To identify the main historical and contemporary approaches of the different disciplines (built environment professions, and design specifically) within the process of scalar intervention in urban transformations.

CHALLENGING PRACTICE: MODULE HANDBOOK

Urban poverty: socio- spatial dimensions

Across the globe, urban poverty and its spatial manifestations are intrinsically linked to the social production of cities. These factors cannot be addressed without engaging with local and global economic trends, and their embedded sociopolitical contexts. According to the renowned 2003 UN report, The Challenge of Slums, “urban populations have increased explosively in the past 50 years, and will continue to do so for at least the next 30 years as the number of people born in cities increase, and as people continue to be displaced from rural areas that are almost at capacity” (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2003, p.xxxi). At the time of The Challenge of Slums report, rapid urbanisation was seen as a predominately Global South issue. However, international development discourse has since moved on to reflect a universal set of challenges for ensuring global sustainability - most recently illustrated by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include a specific goal (Goal 11) for achieving sustainable cities. (United Nations, 2015)

Subsequent to the SDGs in 2015, United Nations member states agreed the next 20-year international agenda for urban development –the New Urban Agenda (Habitat III) – a universal agreement highlighting the importance of supporting more sustainable and equal cities. (UN-Habitat, 2016) However, today, economic competition is one of the chief forces driving urbanisation and its extraordinarily unbalanced growth, leading to increasingly unequal cities. (Beard, Mahendra and Westphal, 2016) As a result of the increasing pressure on land, and the growing range of contestations that complement it, cities in both the global ‘North’ and ‘South’ can be increasingly viewed as critical arenas where contrasting forces and agendas compete for spatial and environmental resources, and economic opportunities.1 As Susan Fainstein highlights, decisions concerning land management, infrastructures, and the location of facilities are often warped by considerations of their economic, as opposed to their social, impacts. (Fainstein, 2010) Urban development projects are largely expected to generate business opportunities and to create profitable conditions for private investments, while often ignoring the needs of, and exacerbating the disadvantages suffered by, the politically and economically weak. The development of cities across the globe illustrates how easily this inequality has been designed into the fabric of cities, persisting for decades if not centuries.

Against this background, the unremitting expansion of ‘slum’, ‘squatter’ or ‘informal’ housing settlements across the Global South, and the increasing scarcity of affordable housing in the Global North, are among the key challenges facing the disciplines of architecture, urban design, and planning. Informal settlements are “urban assemblages that operate outside the formal control of the state”. (Dovey and Rahajo, 2010, p.79) They are the most apparent outcome of multi-scalar, intertwined dynamics2 including the global phenomena of uneven geographical development,3 localised logics of political domination and structural exclusion, and the unequal distribution of resources and recognition.4 [Link to module 3. Social Exclusion and 7. Informal Settlements]

The main challenges facing lower-income urban dwellers living in these sites are commonly broken down into three major components: (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2003)

1. Land. Informal settlements face two critical issues. Firstly, many informal settlements have been located in central-city locations that over time increase in value and become desirable sites for formal development by governments. [Link to module: 9. Inner Cities] Secondly, informal settlements are frequently built on high- risk, marginal land that is formally considered unsuitable for development, and/or prone to hazards such as pollution, flooding or landslides.6 [Link to module 5. Disasters and Climate Change] Moreover, low-income urban households generally cannot gain access to secure land tenure. Their unstable residential status implies that they may continuously face threats of eviction, or find it difficult to secure work and credit/finance mechanisms.

2. Housing. For residents, the limits imposed by overcrowding and the poor structural quality of housing parallel those of the lack of safe and secure land. On the one hand, poor quality housing denies the right to an “adequate standard of living”, as set forth by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ((UDHR) United Nations, 1948). On the other, it may limit further opportunities, such as the freedom to develop income-generating activities, or to gain a residential address, which often denies, among other things, access to voting rights and, ultimately, citizenship [Link to module 3. Social Exclusion].

3. Infrastructure and amenities. As they are officially defined as ‘illegal’, ‘extra-legal’ or ‘squatter’, informal settlements are largely excluded from state provisions of infrastructural services (water, sanitation) and facilities (ranging from transport to childcare). Even where low-income residents live in more formal settlements, city planning rarely seeks to connect them to basic infrastructure. The subsequent private distribution of services can be considered to be among the causes of prolonged poverty: costs related to water, sanitation, schools, health care, and transport being additional burdens on the lives of low-income urban residents.

Design and planning for urban development

Over the past fifty years, a variety of intervention strategies have been formulated to deal with the physical and spatial components of urban poverty, and their relations to informal urbanisation processes. Conceptual understandings have also mutated, as views of informal housing practices have gradually evolved from “abnormal or illegal” to “strategies socially necessary for the poor to survive” (Ramirez, 2010, p.138). Inhabitants have become appreciated as the key “positive force”5 in the process of ameliorating their own living environments [Link to module 2. Theoretical Frameworks].

Such societal transformations, with non-linear courses most evidently reflected in the coexisting/ conflicting ways of naming informal settlements8 , are connected to changing interpretations of both ‘development’ and built environment interventions within the urban development process.7 In general terms, notions of ‘urban development’ have shifted from the 1950s phase of ‘modernisation’ and centralised planning, involving “the parallel provision of everything including sites and services” (Hamdi, 2010, p.10), to a later phase of “urban management, and the targeting of effort directly on poverty reduction as an objective on its own right” (Hamdi, 2010, p.14). At the same time, the role and scope of built environment interventions have also been subjected to continuous re-formulations.9 Largely emerging from a radical rejection of modernist planning in the 1960s and 1970s, the relatively recent appearance of “informal urbanisation as an object of analysis and as a field of action” (Fiori and Brandão, 2009, p.185) has furthered a comprehensive critique of designbased strategies of transformation. This process has resulted in a deep questioning of the extent to which the occasional physical ‘improvement’ of settlements, and the provision of services, can positively influence the lives of lower-income urban dwellers in the longer term.

The challenges of realising significant built interventions in the context of ‘informal settlements’ remain innumerable. However, it can be argued that drifting away from solely formal and technical preoccupations, and prioritising critical engagement with the social dynamics that are embedded in the production of urban space, are the first steps to pursuing more equitable forms of spatial change in contemporary urban environments. Meaningful engagement with communities and the complex social and political contexts they exist within can co-create interventions that give voice and form to the needs and aspirations of residents, whilst supporting their capacity to modify their own spaces of living. In both physical and socio-political terms, this process gives access to wider rights and improved livelihoods in the city.

This implies that a critical re-positioning of specialised expertise is required across all professions of the built environment; and of professional non-profit organisations such as ASF in particular. Among others, Jeremy Till suggests the concept of ‘Spatial Agency’ as a way to address an expanded definition of architecture, where design and planning experts “are not professionals in the protective sense of the word, or indeed care about this alleged status, but instead engage with the world as expert citizens, working with others, the citizen experts, on equal terms.” (Awan, Schneider and Till, 2011, p.32) The ‘spatial agent’ defined by Till “is one who affects change through the empowerment of others, allowing them to engage in their spatial environments in ways previously unknown or unavailable to them, opening up new freedoms and potentials as a result of a reconfigured social space.” (Awan, Schneider and Till, 2011, p.32)

This shift in the role of ‘experts’ – suggesting that designers and planners are part of a wider network of individuals and groups who are equally involved in the production of urban space – requires the inclusion of new understandings and operational means in the training and education of built environment professionals [Link to module 10. Ethics in Built Environment Practice]. Seen in this light, the following texts start to tease the boundaries of traditional professionalism, vis-à-vis the challenges posed by operating within the so-called field of

‘urban development’. There is a primary need for furthering more reflective attitudes toward practice [Link to module 2. Theoretical Frameworks], as well as more in-depth understandings of the historical and material dialectics shaping the city [Link to module 8. Heritage and 9. Inner City Areas]. At the same time, there is an urge to experiment with networked approaches that can overcome the incompleteness and limitations of individual, single-disciplinary ‘authors’ of projects, and help place professional contributions within larger social and political settings [Link to module 13. Partnerships]. Finally, a radical shift from well-established biases in the practice of all design-related disciplines is required, based on the development of participatory approaches to architecture, urban design, and planning. This seeks to establish an inclusion first approach to the design of cities, and therefore requires critical investigation into more socially responsive forms of intervention [Link to module 11. Participation].