Atlantis Magazine 29.2 Contested Domains by ATLANTIS

ATLANTIS MAGAZINE FOR URBANISM & LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

territor[e]alities

#29.2 February 2019

Contested Domains

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COMMITTEES 2018

FROM THE BOARD

ATLANTIS VOL # 29

We could not be as visible as we are without the great effort of a lot of active students. With the help of them we can organise excursions, lectures, workshops, drinks and events. The Polis board wants to thank all the people involved for their great efforts and positive input!

Dear Polis Members,

In keeping with the latest advances in our disciplines’ discourse and building upon last year’s theme of “Action/Reaction: Exploring Challenges in Practice”, we are now shifting our focus to the ‘object’. The object, though, is understood not as a ‘thing’, but rather as a ‘field’: the area where actions and actors come together in a unity and, in essence, is created by and through that unity. An abstract and absolute space is constructed and transformed through activities, actions and practices that give it shape, content and meaning into a ‘territory’. Is this ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’, small or big? Does it conform with pre-existing conceptual and concrete borders? Do they pertain solely to human activities or to the untamable natural forces? Or both? These questions are, of course, relative. The important issue is that we are talking about the kind of processes that form the very notion which guides us in our understanding, approach and intervention.

We are always looking for enthusiastic people to join. Interested in one of the Polis committees? Do not hesitate to contact us at our Polis office (01.west.350) or by e-mail: contact@polistudelft.nl

URBAN AND LANDSCAPE WEEK ATLANTIS EDUCATION PR COMMITTEE BIG TRIP & SMALL TRIP

POLIS BOARD Anna Myllymäki - Chairman Sebastian Gschanes - Vice Chairman Ninad Sansare- Secretary Mark Slierings - Treasurer Adithya Athreya Rao - Public Relations Sindhuja Janakiraman - Atlantis

JOIN US Not yet a member of Polis? For only €12.50 a year as a student of TU Delft, €30 for individual professional membership, or €80 for organizations you can join our network! You will receive our Atlantis Magazine (for free) four times a year, a monthly newsletter and access to all events organized by Polis. E-mail contact@polistudelft.nl to find out more.

Looking back at the achievements made by Polis in 2018, we feel extremely happy and excited to what the new year has in store for us. With that, the Polis Board is proud to present the second issue of ‘territor(e) alities’ with exciting set of articles to read from around the world. The recent trip to Valencia and Barcelona organized by the Big Trip committee in collaboration with Argus, was a huge success by taking students from architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism. It gave them an opportunity to interact and understand the local context of politics and spatial planning. From having a busy set of weeks, the UL Week team now moves on to compiling contents from the event into a publication, so watch out! The Education Committee is constantly striving to bring positive changes to the curriculum and in creating alternative ways to get efficient feedback from students. PR Committee, the one to tie all the committee through promotion and designing great visuals continue to connect Polis with the rest of the world. Finally, we stand at a point of transition where the current Polis team hands over the baton to the new team who will be taking over the board and committees in the upcoming quarter. We had a great time this past year and can heartfully tell we’ve grown into a family. The Polis Board thanks the team members, board of advisors, sponsors, patrons and our beloved student members, we couldn’t have done it without you. We wish the new board and team all the very best. To join one of our committees on this exciting journey, send us an email for more information or feel free to join us for a quick chat or coffee at our Polis Office! Warm Regards from the Polis Board 2018, Anna Myllymäki, Sebastian Gschanes, Adithya Athreya Rao, Mark Slierings, Ninad Sansare and Sindhuja Janakiraman

Hence the word: “territor(e)alities”. This year, “Atlantis | Magazine for Urbanism and Landscape Architecture” will try to explore the concept of spatiality, focusing on the network of processes that give rise to places: what actions and which networks of them makes a piece of land, however small or big, appear and act (or, at least, according to our view of it) as one. Territories are understood as spaces that are conceptually constructed by an agglomeration of practices (or, even, a single dominating action) and, in effect, become concrete and real. We will be zooming in and zooming out, we will be isolating and unifying, all for an investigation of the content and meaning of Urbanism and Landscape Architecture in the 21st century and beyond. Interested in contributing? Email us at: atlantismagazinetudelft@gmail.com

Editorial Following “Constructed Geographies”, this issue continues on our journey through the terrain of ‘territories’ and their respective ‘realities’. With the aid of the title “Contested Domains”, Issue 29.2 attempts to dive deeper into the internal logics of human-driven narratives and actions that engender territorial geographies, either from within established norms or through phenomena inprogress. The overarching and underlying theme over, through and under the articles collected here, lies on the notion of ‘contest’. Contest here is approached as encompassing a multitude of different worldviews, approaches, interests and power-relations that act as determining factors in the creation of places. From the outset, this is seen through the specific conditions associated with informal settlements (particularly those of the Global South), where the idea of ‘top-down’ planning is challenged. To challenge, though, an established norm means to endeavour to uncover the various mechanisms that are at play in the establishment of such conditions. Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa and India serve as the primary setting for such an undertaking. These same territories, though, are, at the same time, home to the exact opposite: highly planned and pre-regulated communities, detached and/or isolated from their respective environments. On a different note, the very phenomenon of ‘notbelonging’, another aspect of the variegated realm of human settling, becomes visible through the example of Hungary, where the issue becomes neither the spontaneity or the rigid planning of urbanization, but the appreciation of human existence as such and, thus, an instance of the ways this is realized. Similarly, not only the basic human condition of sheltering, but, also, a very particular form of labour that operates within the urbanized landscape in rather precarious and complex conditions is here addressed: sex work in the post-metropolitan city of Athens. While there, an even deeper web of the relations driving urbanization is approached: that between developers, building regulations, designers and users. Staying on the user-oriented side of urbanization, two different cases of border conditions are highlighted: cross-border markets in Hispaniola, and agriculture in villages of returning refugees on the Thai-Myanmar Border. Finally, the issue of different interests and power relations is further showcased though the case of mineral extraction in Venezuela, where economy and industry are pitted against indigenous people and the environment. Staying true to our commitment at showcasing the work produced by the students of the Master’s programmes in Urbanism and Landscape Architecture at TUDelft, this issue presents theoretical and design projects completed in the first educational quarter of the academic year 218-2019. Finally, aiming to broaden the scope of the informative nature of our magazine, this issue marks a bigger involvement in presenting valuable news and interesting data to our readers through the expansion of our “News” and the introduction of our “Infographics” columns.

Editors-in-Chief Sarantis Georgiou (content) Felipe Gonzalez (layout) Polis Board Representative Sindhuja Janakiraman

00 Atlantis News by Sindhuja Janakiraman ............................................................... 6

Contents

01 Atlantis Infographics by Sarantis Georgiou and Ingrid Staps ............................. 12 02 Informal Settlements Contested Infrastructures: Is it possible to reconcile

people and infrastructure? by Erich Wolff .................................................................... 14 03 Kowloon Walled City: Hong Kong’s Heterotopian Territory by Gregory

Bracken .............................................................................................................................. 18 Interview

04 New Towns: Practice & research by Sindhuja Janakiraman and Kavya Kalyan

with Rachel Keeton and Mona Doctor ........................................................................... 22

p.32

05 You Can't Live Here by Melinda Marján ................................................................ 26 06 Rigid Mechanisms of South Africa by Dóra Hegyi and Sindhuja

Janakiraman ...................................................................................................................... 28

07 Contested Informal City by Ignacio Cardona........................................................ 32

08 Max-Capacity Landscapes: Village Intensification, and Capacity Building for

Returning Refugees on the Thai-Myanmar Border by Pik Lam Theodora Ho.......... 36

p.18

09 Sex Work and the City: Territorial formations beyond red light districts by

Michaela Litsardaki ........................................................................................................... 40 10 Graffiti and Architecture by Catalina Rey in cooperation with David Caralt 44 11 Contested Architecture and Performative Urbanities: Utilizing videogames

as a mediator between designers and users by Zoe Diakaki and Christos Melios.. 48 12 Territories of here and there: Infra/supra-structures for multi-temporal

transmigratory practices at the Hispaniola border by Alejandra Quezada ............ 50 13 The Extractive Havoc: Environmental, social and economic byproducts of

resource extraction in Venezuela by Ricardo Avella ................................................... 56

p.40

p.50

MSc 1 2018-19

Q1 Urbanism and Landscape Architecture - TU Delft

14 Socio-spatial Segregation: Casablanca by Oumkaltoum Boudouaya................ 60 15 Hilversum in Between by Stefano Agliati ............................................................... 62

16 Deventer: Hybridization of contained ecosystems by Nicole Garcia Vogt ....... 63 17 Feel the Earth by Jiawei Zhao .................................................................................. 64 18 A Post-Industrial Garden by Georgia Gkratsou .................................................... 65

ATLANTIS 29.2

Territory as a Project | Parliament of the North Sea. One-day Symposium and Exhibition original text by

Sarantis Georgiou MSc Urbanism TUdelft

As part of the educational programme of the inter-departmental Graduation Studio "Transitional Territories 2018-2019 | North Sea: Landscapes of Coexistence | Altered Nature and the Architecture of Extremes”, operating under the Delta Urbanism Interdisciplinary Research Programme the Department of Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built

Environment of TUDelft, the students and professors involved in the curriculum curated and presented the 2nd “One-day Symposium and Exhibition on Extreme Ecologies, Urbanization and Forms of Life”. Convened by dr.arch. Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin, ir. Filippo LaFleur and ir. Geert van der Meulen and curated by the prospective graduates of the studio,

NEWS February 2019 the Symposium aimed at showcasing the work produced by the students on a radical reading of the territory of the North Sea, as well as at being a stepping stone in the ongoing discussion on climate change, ecology, infrastructure and urbanization. Focused on the territory of the North Sea and the countries that border it, the 2018-2019 edition of the 3-year long research studio employed a lens described by the concepts of ‘altered nature’ and ‘extremes’. At the age of unprecedented uncertainty, climatic, environmental and ecological variability and urbanization and territorialization of the planet, architecture, urbanism, landscape architecture, hydrological engineering and spatial planning cannot continue to operate in vacuum or under false pretenses of stability. Following such contemporary conditions, the studio approached the case-study territory from the point of view of its image after the crossing of thresholds and tipping points: how would the North Sea look, operate and perform under extreme climate variability, extreme socio-economic, political and cultural change, extreme changes in its ecologies and environmental conditions as well as, ultimately, extreme human appropriation? To address this issue, the students, under the guidance of the professors involved, created a number of speculative, projective and scenario-based cartographic materials that portrayed an ‘altered’ atlas of the territory in question and, together with that, a visual analysis of the effects that each of the aforementioned elements might have on the image and performance of the site. The aim was to elaborate a narrative of a potential future of the North Sea to use as a guiding element in the development of the individual Graduation Master’s Thesis Projects of the students. The notions employed throughout the research process emphasized the relation between land and water, time as a determinant of being and infrastructure as a form of territorialization and creation of meaning and performative appropriation. The underlying ideas and spatial programmes that emerged were exhibited in the form of three (3) mediums: a written manifesto, a physical model and three (3) images. The work performed by the students engendered not only a new narrative for the territory, but a

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new collective of instances for a radical vision presented through a parliamentary process. The instances ranged from tangible interventions to overarching spatial programmes and their visual representation was done through mapping, collages and indicative descriptive drawings. The exhibition itself was only one aspect of the general evaluation of the work. Prof.ir. Dirk Sijmons (H+N+S Landscape Architects / TU Delft), prof.ir. Frits

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Palmboom (Palmbout Urban Landscapes / TU Delft) and dr.arch. Hamed Khosravi (Architectural Association, School of Architecture) were the invited critics that assisted the students in grounding their proposals. The Symposium culminated with a lecture by Luis Callejas, founder of LCLA Office and an Associate Professor at Oslo School of Architecture and a keynote lecture by Lars Lerup, Harry K. and Albert K.

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ATLANTIS 29.2 Smith professor of Architecture and Dean emeritus Rice School of Architecture and professor emeritus University California at Berkeley. Luis Callejas showcased the research and design work currently under way at the Oslo School of Architecture, as well as personal projects. The underlying principle of his work lies in the understanding of the landscape as a means through which to approach architecture. Exemplified in the work on island landscapes, Callejas argued for the appropriation of territorial narratives to evaluate the effects of architectural interventions and, therefore, to investigate the overall territorialization of architecture. Finally, Lars Lerup argued for the significance of assemblage thinking in architecture, urban design and spatial planning, as the most adequate tool through which to overcome the failure of ‘blueprinting’ and the unnecessary imposition of egoistical and potentially catastrophic anthropocentric visions. Instead, he suggests that for professionals engaged in the design and planning of space and its performance, what is important is to identify the various combinations and overlaps of actors, programmes and physical qualities that operate through various timeframes and spatial scales, yet influence the architectonic, urban and territorial project in its entirety.

1. The Symosium took place at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of TUDelft, on December 7th, 2018. 2. The Graduation Studio and the Symposium operate under the framework of “Delft Deltas, Infrastructure & Mobility Iniciative” (DIMI) and the Research Project “NEXT-EXTREMES: Constructed Natures” with dr.arch. Taneha K. Bacchin acting as the project leader and ir. Filippo LaFleur as the principal investigator. 3. Transitional Territories Graduation Studio 2018-2019 Studio Leader: dr.arch. Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin Guest Professor: prof.ir. Dirk Sijmons Researchers: ir. Filippo LaFleur ir. Geert van der Meulen

Instructors/ Mentors: Architecture & Urbanism dr.arch. Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin Architecture arch. Stefano Milani dr.arch. Nicola Marzot Urbanism dr. Fransje Hooimeijer dr. Diego Carmona Sepulveda dr.arch. Luisa Calabrese Landscape Architecture dr. Daniele Cannatella Building Technology ir. Sjap Holst 1-7. Stills from the exhibition. Source: Francisco Mosalve and Siyuan Liu (2018).

February 2019

From South by South to Global Urban Lab @ TU Delft

Global Urban Lab

original text by

Diego Moya Ortiz MSc Urbanism TUDelft

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NEWS

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During the month of November 2018, a group of students from Masters in Urbanism and EMU,TU Delft, joined the South by South initiative, which originated by the effort of students of urbanism, urban design and planning programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University College of London and Harvard University. The South by South stems from the need to have a platform for research and practice in the global South, in the evolving context of decolonization of academic’s discourse. Since2016, the platform has involved different postgraduates’ students working in research and projects in Asia, Latin America and Africa, in a pechakucha manner periodically. To inaugurate the initiative at BK, on November 27, 2018 we organized an open call event where Belen Desmaison, the winner of Water Prize of the World Architecture Festival also participated with “Self-sustaining Amazonian Cities” (CASA), a project of participatory and socially resilient urbanism in Iquitos, department of Loreto, Peru. The event was attended by students and faculty members of TU Delft and became an opportunity to learn about the initiative and its objectives. Fortunately, this also allowed us to contact the Global Urban Lab of TU Delft, an initiative working for around two years on

several activities related to the dissemination of knowledge and research in the global south. The Global Urban Lab consists of researchers and doctoral candidates of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (Urbanism/OTB/MBE/ Architecture), conducting activities such as seminars, online courses and publications. The collaboration between both initiatives, finally converged in a common agenda. In this way we decided to join forces through the Global Urban Lab, to constitute a platform of common work and research that includes students of master and post master, doctoral candidates and academic researchers, in order to position alternative perspectives from the south in the global territorial discussion.

manner. The agenda of Global Urban Lab of TU Delft, seeks to pursue four main goals:

Through Global Urban Lab we present ourselves today as a strategic group aimed to activate a productive network of researchers and practitioners working towards equity, urban development, and plural landscapes in underrepresented geographies of the Global South. Next to hosting discussions, lectures and events, the Global Urban Lab predominantly wants to connect and build knowledge: serving as a platform throughout all faculties, schools, departments and institutes for researchers and practitioners to meet, learn and collaborate in a truly transdisciplinary

Finally, the Global Urban Lab makes an open call to all who are interested in participating in this initiative. We hope that with these first steps, we can consolidate a real platform of critical work regarding the problems of the South, taking the value of the diverse views of a group of international students, researchers and academics at TU Delft.

Create an international and trans-disciplinary network of researchers, practitioners and students interested in the Global South. Establish a permanent inter-faculty working group at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Generate a permanent product for the University summarizing the work, activities and initiatives on the Global South Engage the work outside the Academia, through communities, organizations and Institutions.

For more information please write to us: contact@globalurbanlab.org

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ATLANTIS 29.2

African Perspectives +12 African Perspectives on inclusive, fair and sustainable urbanization, an international conference at TU Delft original text by Rachel Keeton

Urbanism PhD candidate A+BE, TU Delft

Anteneh Tola

Architecture PhD candidate

Roberto Rocco

Assistant professor at the Chair of Spatial Planning and Strategy, Urbanism

From 27-29 March the Faculty of A+BE will organize ‘African Perspectives +12’. The conference follows 12 years after the original ‘African Perspectives’ conference at TU Delft. Delft

This article places the upcoming African Perspectives conference within a short historical perspective. We aim to clarify the trajectory that has led up to the 2019 African Perspectives conference, as well as the main objectives of the African Initiative at TU Delft. In December 2007 I was an MSc student in architecture at TU Delft. Walking through the halls of the old Architecture faculty, I was suddenly confronted with a small group of Malian builders constructing an adobe façade in the world-renowned Songhaï style. Inside van den Broek and Bakkema’s soaring modernist tower, these men were building an elegant archway, smoothing mud around curved corners with expert hands. This scene has stayed with me as a moment of confrontation between two very different architectural styles, but it was only one small part of the 2007 African Perspectives conference. The conference was organized by Archi-Afrika and hosted at the Architecture faculty. For two days,

professionals, academics and students presented, debated, and interrogated different processes related to African architecture and urbanism. The 2007 conference was followed by ‘African Perspectives 2009 – The African City CENTRE: (re)sourced’ in Pretoria/ Tshwane, South Africa. Another African Perspectives in Casablanca, Morocco followed two years later, with a final conference in Lagos, Nigeria in 2014. In March 2019, we will build on this extensive history, as well as the original objectives of the African Perspectives conferences: 1) to bring together major stakeholders to map out a common agenda for African Architecture and create a forum for its sustainable development 2) to provide the opportunity for African experts in Architecture to share locally developed knowledge and expertise with each other and the broader international community 3) to establish a network of African experts 1 on sustainable building and built 10

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NEWS February 2019

The results of this PrepCon in January 2018 surprised us. Much of the discussion seemed to move towards questions about how education can better prepare practitioners for work in various African contexts. The debate was approached from different perspectives by both academics and professionals: how to improve education, and what capacities are needed for contemporary architects and urbanists? Following the results of the PrepCon, we organized an ‘Africa Day’ on 20 November 2018 at the Faculty of A+BE. We envisioned this event as an open discussion on sustainable, fair, and inclusive futures for African cities, and it proved to be just that. Throughout the morning, we heard from Ore Fika (IHS), a specialist on urban land and housing development, and students and staff from the Faculty of A+BE who have worked (or are working) in African countries. The discussions following the presentations showed a need for more discussion on the specific questions and challenges facing (design) researchers working in African contexts.

Over the next two months, our focus will shift to the upcoming conference from 27-29 March 2019. We have invited keynote speakers from Kenya, South Africa, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ghana, and Ethiopia, and presenters from around the world. The two-day program begins with ‘morning dialogues’, or keynote lectures from two perspectives, with a moderated open discussion. The afternoons will be split into different tracks, complimented by special events such as a mud-block building workshop, a special screening by the International Film Festival Rotterdam, book presentations, and exhibitions. The conference tracks and track leaders are: 1) Decolonizing architectural education for practitioners in Africa: Creating capacity for research, education and practice (Yemi Kacoutie + Meryam Ajari). 2) Planned urbanisation in Africa: New cities, towns, and urban extensions (Ore Fika and Rachel Keeton) 3) Informal urbanisation: How Africa is addressing its slums (Roberto Rocco) 4) Rural building solutions in Africa (Michiel Smits)

As the most recent in a long lineage of conference on ‘African Perspectives’, the 2019 conference promises to be another ‘open discussion’ with specialists, students and others. As the African Initiative at TU Delft, however, we are just getting started. We hope this conference will be a catalyst for more active engagement and exchange with colleagues and institutions in Africa, and that it will inform research at the Faculty of A+BE in years to come. We are looking forward to an event that provides the space and time to reflect critically on the issues, questions, contentions, and frictions that inform our work. We hope you will join us.

The conference is free to TU Delft students and faculty. Please register online.

environments for future cooperation on research and development initiatives on the continent As an organizing team taking on this project for the first time, we chose to develop the content of the 2019 African Perspectives conference together with experts from across the continent. At one of our earliest meetings, we questioned the implications of holding a conference on African architecture and urbanism in the Netherlands. Why not in Africa? So to kick-start our initiative, we invited expert speakers from Rwanda (Christian Benimana, MASS Design Group), Ghana (DK Osseo Asare, Low Design Office), Senegal (Jean-Charles Tall, Collège Universitaire d’Architecture de Dakar), Ethiopia (Meskerem Tamiru, President of the Ethiopian Association of Architects, and Rahel Shawl, Raas Architects, among others), and elsewhere to join us in Addis Ababa for a two-day discussion on the most urgent issues associated with rapid urban transformation in Africa.

5) Climate adaptation and resilience for building in Africa (Andy van den Dobbelsteen) 6) Methods and Theories for reading and understanding African cities (Anteneh Tola + Nelson Mota)

https://africanperspectivesbk.org

References Archi-Afrika (2014) ‘Past AP Conferences’. https://africanperspectivesconference.wordpress.com/past-ap-conferences/, accessed on 1 February 2019. Rocco, R. and Keeton, R. (2018) African Perspectives PrepCon Executive Report. Delft: Delft University of Technology. Available online: https://issuu.com/robertorocco/docs/african_perspectives_prepcon_2018

1,2,3. Africa Day, November 2018. Source: Author 4. PrepCon in Addis in 2018. Source: Author

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ATLANTIS 29.2

Micronations and limited recognition states by

Sarantis Georgiou MSc Urbanism TUDelft

and

Ingrid Staps MSc Urbanism TUDelft

a nation ought to have in order to be recognized as such. The constitutive theory asserts that for a nation to be defined as a person under international law it has to be recognized as such by at least one other nation. Oppenheim and Roxburgh (2005) state that “International Law does not say that a State is not in existence as long as it isn't recognised, but it takes no notice of it

What makes a nation (as a physical manifestation of an intangible entity)? How is sovereignty defined, established and exercised? What does the term ‘selfdetermination’ entail when it refers to a piece of land and the jurisdiction deployed through it via a population and its various structures? Associated with the process of the emergence of the modern ‘nation-state’, such questions dominate the discourse and policy shaping administrative world maps for two centuries. However, rather than entering the discussion through the much murkier terrain of the notions as such, this brief article aims at elaborating a bit on the process of the establishment of a nation state through the use of two examples: micronations and states with limited recognition. International law employs two instruments to define national sovereignty: the constitutive theory and the declarative theory of statehood. Both theories are associated with international congresses or conferences. The constitutive theory was established within the “Congress of Vienna” which was held in the titular Austrian city from November 1814 to June 1815 amongst ambassadors of European countries and the declarative theory was utilized in the “Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States”, a treaty signed on December 26, 1933 during the Seventh International Conference of American States held in Montevideo, Uruguay. While the former determined the conditions under which a state can be defined as a person in international law, the latter further defined various characteristics

before its recognition. Through recognition only and exclusively a State becomes an International Person and a subject of International Law”. Contrary to that, the declarative theory provides a set of criteria a state must comply with to be able to be recognized as such. More specifically, 1. a defined territory, 2. a permanent population, 3. a government and 4. a capacity to enter into

infographics February 2019 relations with other states (Lauterpacht, 2013). The difference between the two is that the constitutive theory demands that a state be recognized by at least one other state, whereas the latter does not. The implications of the declarative theory are that inter-state relations between either not recognized nations or between recognized and not recognized nations can occur, but they are not obliged to follow the regulations of international law. However, in practice, these all mean that statehood is directly determined by the recognition of a major country and, more specifically, one of the countries that constitute the United Nations Security Council, as it falls down, ultimately, to the United Nations as the

de facto organization through which state recognition is effective. Therefore, recognition of nation state sovereignty may not be universal and unanimous, resulting in a list of nations that claim independence and authority over a territory and a population, but are only recognized as such from a small number of other nations while the United Nations as a whole deny their individuality. Furthermore, the fact that recognition is not required under the declarative theory combined with the principle of self-determination have led to the emergence of ‘self-proclaimed’ sovereign nation states throughout the planes (and even beyond). •

References 1. Oppenheim, L., & Roxburgh, R. (2005). International law: A treatise. Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange. 2. Lauterpacht, H. (2013). Recognition in international law. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 1. Micronations and Limited recognitions states. Sources: Handicott, B., & Blair, B. (2007). Lonely Planet blue list: The best in travel 2007. Melbourne: Lonely Planet., Oppenheim, L., & Roxburgh, R. (2005). International law: A treatise. Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange., Lauterpacht, H. (2013). Recognition in international law. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Transnistria Republic of Kosovo

Republic of South Ossetia Republic of Abkhazia

Republic of Armenia

North Korea

Republic of Artsakh

Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus Republic of Cyprus State of Palestine

People’s Republic of China

South Korea

State of Israel

Republic of China

Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic

Republic of Somaliland

UN member states not recognised by at least on UN member state UN observer states not recognised by at least one UN member state States that are neither UN member or observer, recognised by at least one UN member state States that are neither UN member or observer, recognised only by other non-UN member states

States that are neither UN member or observer, not recognised by any other state

INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS CONTESTED INFRASTRUCTURES Is it possible to reconcile people and infrastructure? by

Erich Wolff

PhD candidate & teaching associate Monash University, Melbourne

Ranging from transport to water supply, the provision of basic services to communities living in vulnerable conditions, particularly in the Global South, has been progressing slowly. Infrastructure-provision still seems to operate according to top-down approaches – being conducted by developers and governments while avoiding the communities’ real needs and desires. A contested domain emerges in the interfaces between informality and infrastructure-provision. Even though the technical aspects of infrastructure may represent a challenge for incremental approaches, this text argues that architects, urban planners and designers have an important role in terms of learning and incorporating the self-built networks into service-provision approaches. Could infrastructure-provision be merged with existing local dynamics? Could this approach represent an alternative to the conflicts caused by the imposition of functionalist infrastructural systems to informal settlements?

Definitions and Biases For the past years, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UNHabitat) has been intensely committed to developing approaches to improve the living conditions in informal settlements globally. In this context, efforts were directed towards reaching a common definition for the concept of “informality”. The current definition (United Nations, 2015) defends that a particular residential area is considered informal when it simultaneously deals with: (i) the insecurity of tenure, (ii) the deprivation of basic services and city infrastructure and (iii) the incompatibility with regulation and planning frameworks. This definition has been contested since then. Even though establishing a common understanding is essential to facilitate communication between stakeholders and allow knowledge to be shared, it is unsurprising the fact that generic definitions attract widespread criticism. Standards intended for academics, policymakers or practitioners inevitably restrict their capacity to address certain nuances of

reality and may not be suitable for all contexts. More specifically, beyond other contextual and conceptual discussions, the argument here developed was motivated by the second item in the definition: informal settlements are, according to UN-Habitat words, areas with limited access to basic services and city infrastructure. What does this definition imply? It is beyond doubt that vulnerable communities under conditions of informality are commonly deprived of most public services and this situation represents a major threat to inhabitants and their surrounding built environment. Does it make sense, however, to presume that the most effective way to improve living conditions in informal settlements is unavoidably to deploy conventional topdown “big pipes” infrastructural services? Contested Infrastructures The definition of informal settlements according to the UN-Habitat acknowledges that communities under informal conditions have deficient access to basic services and, consequently, suggest that they require infrastructural upgrades. 14

Upgrading projects, however, often follow technocratic logics and, as a consequence, commonly create conflicts that unveil the disruptive nature of current infrastructureprovision approaches (Gouverneur, 2014). Constrained by costs and technical requirements, the approach used in many projects that aim to provide infrastructures for informal settlements inevitably leads to the complete replacement of self-made service networks by foreign engineered infrastructures. The recurrence of this phenomenon in upgrading projects reveals an almost unquestionable monopoly of functionalist principles in the field of infrastructure-provision nowadays. Could there be an alternative to this approach? Human interactions with infrastructures were probably for the first time not considered as deterministic when Turner published his first studies in housing. Crafting the sites-and-services perspective, he defended an indisputable need of allowing inhabitants to take over their surrounding built environment (Turner, 1976). In opposition to modernist planning frameworks such as the urban plan of Brasilia, he positioned himself by stating

that housing should be made by people and consequently the industry of house provision should not be seen as optimisable nor standardised. Instead, he defended that incremental approaches were the future of housing-provision. His work, however, did not directly challenge the technical frameworks of top-down infrastructureprovision, since infrastructural services were still considered the rigid essential constraints that shaped the built environment. Building upon the approach started by Turner and many others that followed him, informal settlements need to be reconsidered from a new perspective that addresses the current challenges faced by urbanism and architecture. While it is important to oppose architectural perspectives that romanticise informality (Ballegooijen & Rocco, 2013), it is also essential to proceed investigations on informal settlements and their dynamics. Communities need to be considered from a perspective focused on human needs and incremental service availability. Providing infrastructure oriented by local processes is clearly not an easy task. Developing such approach requires additional efforts in projects that are already notably complex and particularly sensitive - as most infrastructure-provision interventions are. Detailing solutions, therefore, is beyond the scope of this text, since examples of alternative practices exist but must be properly contextualised. It is possible, however, to suggest guidelines that can inform a new approach for infrastructure, one that is grounded in reality and oriented by existing dynamics. This lens will be used in the next section to discuss new perspectives to reshape serviceprovision for upgrading approaches. The Alternative: Informal Infrastructures Embedded in the context of intense urbanisation currently experienced in global cities, the limitations of conventional infrastructural services in urban areas are aggravated and become major problems. Thinkers seem to agree that the unpredictable processes that currently forge urban areas pose severe limitations to conventional infrastructure. For example, existing water supply, drainage and sewage systems available in big cities are poorly prepared to support population growth and respond to economic and climatic change (Wong & Brown, 2013). When facing migration waves and climate transitions that constrain water supply and urban space, for instance, the frameworks for serviceprovision need not only to be redesigned but also reimagined in terms of premises, objectives and practices.

1 15

atlantis Particularly when it comes to informal settlements, the main motivation for the reinvention of infrastructure-provision is the constantly-evolving modus operandi of those areas. When unsupported by government, communities generally develop access to basic human needs by creating spontaneous service networks. Ranging from improvised internet or electrical connections, to ad-hoc access routes, to rain water collection or transport sharing networks, those systems play an undisputable role in supporting inhabitant’s livelihoods. Some of those systems are exemplified in the images. As communities secure investments and craft better organisation mechanisms, self-made services usually improve. When governmental support is achieved, however, those spontaneous networked systems tend to be completely replaced by conventional engineered systems. As an example, drawing conclusions from his extensive experience in the Government of Venezuela, David Gouverneur describes this process (Gouverneur, 2014). In his work, he identifies how infrastructure-provision often refuses to acknowledge local dynamics. Alternatively, design practices should consider existing transformative processes and apply transitional strategies rather than disruptive ones, particularly when working with informal conditions. In this context, this text defends that the development of solutions for informal settlements must be guided by informal logics oriented by open, soft and adaptive systems. From an open perspective, aiming to create immutable finished design solutions disregarding reappropriation practices and context is not only undesirable but

impossible. The misconception that infrastructure is independent or that it can control human dynamics is induced by functionalist thinking. It is unavoidably incompatible with informal settings. The comprehensive work of Habraken on social housing exposed how the idea of open design could inform design practices in residential settings (Habraken, 1972). Similar ideas have led to the widely recognised work of Elemental in providing houses that contain the basic infrastructural systems and allow inhabitants to incrementally take over design according to their needs and possibilities. In less controlled settings, the highly polemic documentation of Torre David also suggested that a structural framework provided enough opportunities for the open development of communities (Navarro, 2015). While those examples may be controversial in their approaches to informality for a number of reasons, they contribute to shed light into how open design principles might operate. Conceiving open infrastructures means that the designer, planner and policymaker should consider that human agency over the infrastructure, to a minor or major extent, is constant and unavoidable. Therefore, the practice of design must be integrated into the constantly evolving human dynamics in informal settings. The soft perspective suggests that opportunities offered by living systems point out to new ways to integrate serviceprovision with ecology and resilience in changing environments. The importance of ecological services to communities unsupported by official public services indicates that ecological thinking may

atlantis play an important role in improving living conditions within informal settlements. Dealing with informality and ecology simultaneously is not a new strategy. The idea of approaching informality as an ally of ecology is usually based on feeble idealisations of the aesthetics and lifestyles in informality (Grubbauer, 2017). For this reason, they usually fail miserably. Conversely, the approach here proposed suggests that using ecological systems as supports for infrastructure in informal settlements should be underpinned by the ecological understanding of systems and ecological services. Some strategies on how to engineer living systems as tools to deal with uncertainty have been tested in the last decades. The concept of Oystertechture, while highly experimental and speculative when first proposed, provided a good example of how this approach could be used (Bergdoll, 2011). Many other examples in landscape architecture have attempted similar ideas, the contest of Downsview Park in Toronto is worth mentioning for its ground-breaking contributions to ecological thinking in landscape ecological design. Beyond static conservationism, aesthetical “green” biases and vague sustainability concerns, professionals should engage with existing living dynamics to support ecological-oriented upgrading processes. For this reason, soft systems can be understood as an approach towards uncertainty, deeply aligned with many practices of contemporary landscape architecture and landscape ecology. The adaptive perspective considers that infrastructure-provision must learn how to cope with changing physical

environments from existing spontaneous processes. Evidence suggests that when occupying unregulated terrain, communities commonly develop a plethora of mechanisms to cope with fire, flood and landslide hazard, for example. While those mechanisms have limited capacity and commonly fail - usually with great harm to communities - adaptation-driven solutions embedded in the built environment of informal settlements cannot be ignored by upgrading projects. An eminent example of this phenomenon is the case study observed by Simone in Johannesburg in which human actions were, possibly for the first time, documented as substitutes for conventional infrastructural services (Simone, 2004). Those solutions may not be adequate in the long term but they clearly exemplify how the dynamics within communities operate when adaptation is needed. Effectiveness and service quality are generally insufficient by traditional metrics but the networks tend to improve as communities develop. This situation exemplifies that infrastructures for informal contexts should ensure service provision and enhance reliability while allowing adaptation. Projects equipped with similar logics may greatly benefit in terms of resilience and sustainability by reshaping existing processes rather than by imposing foreign ones. Conclusions It is important to highlight that this text does not intend to minimise the importance of securing the access of inhabitants of informal settlements to formal infrastructural services. In the

current social and governmental contexts, public provision of services is an essential step to improve living conditions and emancipate whole communities from poverty. However, a reinvention of the ways through which infrastructures have been provided is essential for the development of cities in times of unprecedented informal urbanisation. Could new frameworks allow infrastructure to behave informally, according to open, adaptive and soft dynamics? Could infrastructure-provision be informed by local logics? Reviewing the original definition by UN-Habitat that motivated this text, it is absolutely important to acknowledge that informal settlements do not have access to conventional infrastructural services. Communities, however, often develop alternative ways of having access to services that are as important as formal infrastructures to support inhabitants' livelihoods. Meanwhile, current infrastructure-provision standards frequently disregard complex networks of supportive services that emerge from informal territorialisation processes. Selfbuilt dynamics entail immense knowledge and, therefore, must be investigated and incorporated in urban and architectural professional practices. Massive demolition works and aggressive resettlement policies are still seen unfortunately as the easiest solution to deal with unregulated settlements by many governments. However, the development of new solutions - especially considering the opportunities offered by in situ incremental upgrading and green infrastructures approaches - cannot be postponed anymore. Considering that communities frequently rely on the construction of social bonds,

reclamation of spaces, reappropriation of resources and use of ecosystem services to fulfil their needs, the use of open, soft and adaptive approaches seem to be particularly promising under informal conditions.• Erich Wolff conducts research focused on the development of infrastructures for conditions of uncertainty. His interests bridge the knowledge of civil engineering, architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture and include applying risk management, ecological thinking and water sensitive design to infrastructure frameworks. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Architecture at Monash University (Australia) and is a member of the Monash Informal Cities Lab. He would like to acknowledge the support given by the Department of Architecture and the Monash Informal Cities Lab team.

References 1. Ballegooijen, J. V., & Rocco, R. (2013). The Ideologies of Informality: informal urbanisation in the architectural and planning discourses. Third World Quarterly, 34(10), 1794–1810. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.20 13.851890 2. Bergdoll, B. (2011). Rising currents : projects for New York’s waterfront. New York : London: Museum of Modern Art : Distributed in the United States and Canada by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers ; Distributed outside the United States and Canada by Thames & Hudson. 3. Gouverneur, D. (2014). Planning and Design for Future Informal Settlements: Shaping the Self-Constructed City. Routledge. 4. Grubbauer, M. (2017). In search of authenticity: Architectures of social engagement, modes of public recognition and the fetish of the vernacular. City, 21(6), 789–799. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017 .1412200 5. Habraken, N. J. (1972). Supports : An alternative to mass housing. London: Architectural Press. 6. Navarro, D. (2015). La Obsolescencia como Oportunidad para una Infraestrutura Social: Torre David. Revista Proyecto, Progreso, Arquitectura, (13), 90–105G. 7. Simone, A. (2004). People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture, 23. 8. Turner, J. F. C. (1976). Housing by people : towards autonomy in building environments. London: Marion Boyars. 9. United Nations. (2015). Habitat III Issue Paper (Informal Settlements No. 22) (p. 8). New York. Retrieved from https://unhabitat.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/04/Habitat-III-Issue-Paper-22_ Informal-Settlements.pdf 10. Wong, T., & Brown, R. (2013). Integrated Urban Water Planning - Realising Water Sensitive Cities. In Resilient Sustainable Cities : A Future. Florence: Taylor and Francis. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/ lib/monash/detail.action?docID=1596878 modification’, Hydrological Sciences Bulletin. doi: 10.1080/02626668109490902. 1, 2, 3. "Infrastructural systems and local agency: Can reappropriation be considered in infrastructure design?", Vila Planalto, Brasilia, BR (November 2018) Source: Author

atlantis Grahame Shane. What the paper will show is that despite operating outside the rules of British colonial law in Hong Kong, the Walled City did in fact have its own rules: it operated as a self-regulating, self-sufficient city and could, in fact, be argued to be one of the most self-determining cities even built. Kowloon Walled City China has the world’s longest continuous civilization, one that has never had a Dark Ages. But it did have a low point in the nineteenth century when it was forced to open up to Western trade. This opening was spearheaded by the British, who wanted to import goods (the most lucrative being opium) and they waged two wars to do so. The Treaty of Nanking (1842), which ended the First Opium War, ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain in perpetuity. This was the first in a series of ‘unequal treaties’ which saw China gradually lose control of its coastal and riverine cities. China did regain sovereignty over its ‘treaty ports’ in 1943; then the Communists took over in 1949. Hong Kong, however, remained a British colony and indeed benefited from the fact that its regional rival Shanghai was now trapped behind the ‘bamboo curtain’.

Kowloon Walled City Hong Kong’s Heterotopian Territory by

Dr. Ir. Gregory Bracken

Assistant Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy, Urbanism Department TU Delft

Michel Foucault introduced the concept of the heterotopia in 1967. He described it as a space that is ‘other’ to its surroundings. This otherness was a way of allowing activities that would not otherwise be permitted, with the result that urban space was less prone to contestation. Kowloon Walled City was a self-governing enclave in the British crown colony of Hong Kong. It consisted of 2.6 hectares but was home to more than 30,000 people and was arguably the closest thing to a self-regulating, self-sufficient, self-determining city even built. This paper will apply the theory of

the heterotopia to Kowloon Walled City to show how it functioned as a space of ‘otherness’ for colonial-era Hong Kong. Drawing on theories by David Grahame Shane, the paper will look at the social and political context that led to the City’s existence. It will also show how the Walled City’s underground culture and informal practices of appropriation were (reluctantly) tolerated by the colonial authorities. Finally, it will explain how once plans were made for Hong Kong to be handed back to China (plan: 1984; handover: 1997), Kowloon Walled City ceased to operate as a heterotopia (because it had outlived its usefulness as a space of controlled contestation) and was quietly demolished. Introduction A ramshackle cluster of haphazardly built multi-storey buildings leaning against one another for support (fig. 2). Built without 18

permits, built without streets, built even without water or electricity, and having (it seems) no rules, yet it was an enclave that was home to more than 30,000 people. Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong was indeed an anomaly. Considered a dangerous nuisance by the British colonial authorities (who saw it as a den of vice, iniquity, and gang violence) yet it was tolerated by them. Why?

But nestling deep within this British imperial enclave was the old Walled City of Kowloon. It started out as a normal Chinese city but when the British acquired their 99-year lease on the New Territories in 1898 the Walled City found itself a tiny Chinese-administered enclave in the heart of a vastly expanded British territory. The British thought they could soon extend their influence over the enclave, as they had done with the rest of the Kowloon Peninsula, but the Chinese insisted on their rights to the Walled City, even if they could not access it,

because it annoyed the British. Technically part of China, the British could not attempt to take it over without risking an international incident, so it was left alone: a tiny outpost of Chinese law isolated in a sea of British colonial administration. (The city walls were removed by the Japanese during their World War II occupation of Hong Kong (1941-1945); they used them to build a causeway for the runway at the now closed Kai Tak Airport nearby.) Consisting of a slightly skewed rectangle of 2.6 hectares located between Tung Tsau Tsuen, Tsun Tsing, Carpenter, and Junction Roads (fig. 3), the Walled City was in fact subject to no law. British jurisdiction could not obtain here but neither could Chinese (for the simple reason that they were too far away to implement anything), so gradually the enclave began to form its own laws. It built itself up until every plot (except for the central yamen, or administrative centre) consisted of twelve- to fourteenstorey buildings. It had no streets to speak of, merely narrow twisting laneways that were strewn with rubbish and where it was sometimes difficult to stand upright because of water pipes and electric wiring illegally culling from the surrounding mains (fig. 4). Any light that filtered down was dim and murky. It was also known as a hotbed of crime and illegal activity – triads operated here, running brothels and opium dens – but it was also home to legitimate business, some of which would not have obtained permits for their activities in Hong Kong, places such as dogmeat restaurants, or even dentists who did not have the requisite

British qualifications. But there were plenty of straightforward economic activities as well, in fact the enclave was home to some of the colony’s most prosperous factories. Despite the crime and occasional gang violence, for the 33,000 people who lived in Kowloon Walled City it was a place they could call home unmolested by any government, capitalist or communist (and many of those who flooded into the Walled City, causing it to boom from the 1950s onwards, were fleeing Communist China). So why did it disappear? In 1984 the Thatcher-Deng agreement on the future of Hong Kong stipulated that the colony would be handed back to China in 1997 (this included the crown colony, which was Britain’s in perpetuity, along with the New Territories, which had to be handed back, since they were on a 99-year lease due to expire). The territory became a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China in 1997, and will remain so for fifty years. The Hong Kong Government then announced on 14 January 1987 that it was going to clear Kowloon Walled City, which it promptly surveyed. Inhabitants who had legitimate claims to homes and/ or businesses were compensated and moved out. The entire enclave was closed down in July 1992 and demolished the following April. Now a park, only the yamen has been left standing. The Heterotopia So how did it work? And what made it a heterotopia? First of all, we need to look 2

This paper will look at how (and why) Kowloon Walled City came into existence. It will look at what life was like for the people who inhabited this ‘city of darkness’ (Girard and Lambot 1993). It will make use of Michel Foucault’s theory of the heterotopia to explain why this illegal enclave worked. It will do this by first of all explaining the beguiling but slippery concept of the heterotopia itself, and then by applying it to the enclave of Kowloon 1 Walled City using the theories of David 19

atlantis at what a ‘heterotopia’ actually is. Michel Foucault introduced the concept in a lecture in March 1967 (this was then published as an article in October 1984 in the French journal Architecture/Mouvement/ Continuité). Foucault described the heterotopia as a space that is ‘other’ to its surroundings. The word is in fact a medical term describing a benign type of tissue growth that co-exists with original tissue (it is also used in the fields of biology, botany, molecular biology, and zoology). According to Foucault, heterotopias are ‘a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live’ (Foucault 1984: 4). Foucault contrasted them with utopias (a genre that has a long tradition in Western literature) because whereas a utopia is a site with no real place, the heterotopia is a place that does exist. He saw the heterotopia as constituting ‘something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia’ (Foucault 1984: 3), he also saw them as spaces that were ‘absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about’ (Foucault 1984: 4). This difference was a way of allowing activities that would not otherwise be permitted, with the result that urban space was less prone to contestation, because it had conduits to ease what might otherwise become too great a pressure on the surrounding urban system, which is exactly what happened in Kowloon Walled City. Foucault outlined six types of heterotopia: 1) those that can assume a wide variety of form but are not universal; 2) that can change function over time; 3) that can juxtapose different and incompatible spaces in a single real place; 4) that are linked to slices of time; 5) that always presuppose a system of opening and closing; and 6) that are a space of illusion more real that the surrounding reality. Foucault also

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helpfully identified particular examples of heterotopias, for example, places where processes of change and hybridisation are facilitated in a city or society: places like hospitals, schools, and prisons; places where competent professionals could seek to cure the ill, educate the ignorant, and reform the criminal. For Foucault every heterotopia has two sides: 1) compensatory, where codes and disciplines are enforced, and 2) illusory, where traces of utopian goals can be found. In heterotopias of crisis, the compensatory and illusory sides can mix without difficulty, creating a blended, hybrid logic that is, according to David Grahame Shane, foreign to Modernity. In his book Recombinant Urbanism (2005), Shane examines the role heterotopias play in stabilising a city. He sees them as specialised patches that act as test beds of change. Spatial patches, they can bottle up this change, allowing urban actors to conduct ‘concrete utopian experiments without endangering the established disequilibrium of the larger system’ (Shane 2005: 10). Shane’s understanding of the urbanisation process is premised on three basic components: 1) the armature, 2) the enclave, and 3) the heterotopia. These three he sees as being the basic components of any city; components that are constantly ‘combined and recombined in different cultures, places, and periods’ (Shane 2005: 13). Building on Fritjof Capra’s use of the term ‘autopoiesis’ – a system’s capacity to repair itself or to regenerate form (which comes from 1970s’ systems theory) – Shane tells us that information flow is crucial to autopoiesis (as it is to the maintenance of any system’s structural identity over time), and that information flows back into a system via looping mechanisms to maintain balance. Heterotopias, in an autopoietic way, contain feedback mechanisms that

monitor and adjust the ever-shifting balance between the disparate tendencies of centring and sorting. These feedback mechanisms can be understood in terms of actors who monitor their situation in order to be able to interact with other actors, in sometimes quite complex and even indirect ways. A heterotopia, according to Shane, ‘mixes the stasis of the enclave with the flow of an armature, and in which the balance between these two systems is constantly changing. Its function is to help maintain the city’s stability as a self-organizing system’ (Shane 2005: 231). The heterotopia is ‘an exceptional space, a miniature city or subcity that forms an important part of the larger city’ (Shane 2005: 232). For Shane, the main source of confusion about the heterotopia is its role in facilitating and monitoring change, with much of the confusion stemming from the fact that they are such complex enclaves. They ‘provide shifting sites of reflection and distance within the system that increase the city’s capacity to change or adapt over time’ (Shane 2005: 232). They are essential, as places of exclusion, for the consistent (and logical) organising of human settlement within a given order; dominant urban actors therefore also make use of heterotopias because by them they are able to keep their preferred order as pure and consistent as possible. And while the form of the heterotopia can be varied and change over time, Shane is quick to point out that ‘the systemic reasons for their existence have not’ (Shane 2005: 231). He also states that all social systems declare certain objects, things, relationships, and people taboo, and that things or people which are taboo but which cannot be eliminated from society (because they are either necessary or ineradicable) must be segregated (Shane 2005: 232).

Conclusion The specifics of Hong Kong’s colonial history led to the formation of the heterotopia of Kowloon Walled City. It was an exceptionally dense development, even by Hong Kong standards, and even though it fell outside the jurisdiction of both the British and the Chinese, it was in fact an efficient, self-organising urban enclave. It acted as a place of difference (or otherness) to its colonial surroundings. This aided those surroundings to deal with issues they might not otherwise have been able to (e.g. floods of illegal immigrants, or unqualified professionals, or simply catering for a desire to eat dogmeat). Yet because of those surroundings, and the clear boundaries between them and the heterotopia itself, it was able to retain a cohesion it might not otherwise have had. This enabled it to achieve the ‘autopoiesis’ mentioned by David Grahame Shane. However, it was not destined to survive. Its cohesion was lost once the decision to hand the whole of Hong Kong back to China was taken in 1984. It was closed down in 1992

and demolished the following year. The Chinese, once they learned they would now be responsible for this enclave (which they had been, officially, all along) decided it was not something they wanted to deal with and so allowed the British tear it down without a murmur. Kowloon Walled City survived, for a time, by depending on, and being compressed by, the laws of the surrounding colonial territory, as soon as those circumstances changed, the compressed heterotopia, the city within a city, became a redundant symbol of a past regime and was quietly demolished. To lament the passing of a heterotopia is to miss the point. Heterotopias come into being at particular times and in particular places to fulfil certain functions, once the conditions they are in opposition to alter then they lose their reason for being. •

Shane sees the city acting as a self-centring device interconnected by an ecology of armatures (e.g. linear organising devices such as transportation or communication networks); he sees heterotopias acting as a type of hybrid space embedded within the larger system, and playing a key role in stabilising the city model and catalysing transitions from one type of model to another. These armatures, enclaves, and heterotopias constantly combine and recombine in different cultures, places, and periods. Shane argues that the heterotopic system is crucial to Modernity because its goal is to rationalise society using architectural means. And in order to facilitate this process, urban actors build miniature cities, with multiple cells and codes that differ from those of the host city in ways that allow internal controls and interactions that would be forbidden outside.

References 1.Bracken, Gregory (2009), Thinking Shanghai: A Foucauldian Interrogation of the Postsocialist Metropolis available at: https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/ uuid%3A2bceb450-3023-46bb-8a55-9425f4712000 (last accessed: 12 December 2018). 2.Foucault, Michel (1984 [1967]), ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ (‘Des Espace Autres’ in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité – translated by Jay Miskowiec) available at: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf (last accessed: 12 December 2018). 3.Girard, Greg and Lambot, Ian (1993), City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City (Pewsey: Watermark Publications). 4.Shane, David Grahame (2005), Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons).

1. Kowloon Walled City aerial view Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_ City (last accessed 17 December 2018). 2. Kowloon Walled City exterior Source: Girard and Lambot. 3. Kowloon Walled City map Source: Girard and Lambot. 4. Kowloon Walled City laneway Source: Girard and Lambot.

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NEW TOWNS

practice & research interview by

Sindhuja Janakiraman MSc Landscape architecture, TU Delft

with

Rachel Keeton

New Towns are no new concept; however, its contemporary processes and outcomes are very different from its predecessors and are moving towards an unprecedented future. There is a limited engagement in terms of practice and research in this field. Therefore, this article consists of two interviews of professionals working on New Towns across Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The complexity of the concept can be understood through these interviews, where years of experience on the matter is shared.

PhD candidate TU Delft

Can you share your work experience in International New Town Institute (INTI)?

Rachel Keeton is currently a PhD candidate in TU Delft working on Making the

I started at INTI right after I graduated from TU Delft as an architect in 2008. It was a great opportunity for me because I was asked to write a book on New Towns in Asia. I tried to step up to the challenge by spending three years conducting research in different countries in Asia and the Middle East. Based on that research, I wrote the book, Rising in the East: Contemporary New Towns in Asia (SUN 2011). After that, we saw that part of the money that produced these hundreds of New Towns in Asia was moving towards Africa.

worked as a researcher and program manager at the International New Town Institute,

How are the New Towns in Africa and your work there? As a program manager at INTI, I helped start the Nairobi New Towns program which led to student exchanges between the Netherlands with the Technical

Adaptive City: Planning and Design Principles for New Towns in Africa. In the past, she

understand what's going on, but of course each case is different. There were, however, a few trends we could identify and one of them was that there has been a shift from state-led New Town planning (19601980) to what is now primarily private development (2000 – 2018). We also see an increase in international (or multinational) initiators, developers, and planning and design offices. The biggest private real estate developer in Africa at the moment is Rendeavour; they're currently developing seven or eight New Towns across Africa. What's been interesting is that over the last five years we have developed a good relationship with them. It’s quite unusual for academia and practice to be able to talk openly about ongoing development, but this relationship has really opened our eyes to the complexity of making New Towns. The more you know, the harder it becomes to point a finger anywhere, because every part of the process is so complex. What is the relationship of these informal settlements with the ‘exclusive city’ and are there efforts taken by the State to provide incentives to private developers in extending basic services to them? As one example, in Angola there’s a musseque across the street from a planned city (Kilamba). If you look at the Google Earth images, you see a road that is incredibly divisive but when you go there it feels different because there are people from the New Town who go do their grocery shopping in the musseque and people from the musseque go to work in the New Town. There is an economic and social exchange. We see this with almost all New Towns in Africa: unregulated settlements grow in tandem at the edges of the planned area. In these so-called ‘low-cost / high-risk’ settlements, however, they have no access to ‘public’ urban services. Our conclusion is that these services should be accessible to everyone.

Any best case example? There are not so many good examples right now especially in Africa. But there is one called BuraNEST in Ethiopia. They have taken an existing farming community that has dispersed clans living in between farmland. The community needs a core to be able to have commercial activities and trade, education, and a critical mass to develop and have different employment opportunities. They set out these principles on energy, ecology, education, and exchange. Because the community has practiced subsistence farming for three thousand years, they use traditional techniques and harvesting is done only once a year. They brought in agricultural experts who taught the farmers how to triple their harvest and as a result their incomes have also tripled. They currently sell their goods in a market town about 15kms away, but if they can eventually have a market in the New Town that reduces the need to travel. So what’s interesting about this strategy is that it looks at who these people are and what they need, while a lot of other contemporary New Towns look at ‘how can we make a profit’. However, BuraNEST is not a perfect example, as it took 10 years to get here, and the process is very slow. What are the similarities and differences between New Towns in these two continents? They are incredibly different. The research I was doing in Asia and the Middle East was looking at exceptional cases. People were building 'eco-cities', 'smart cities', 'economic cities', especially in the Middle East to further diversify their economies. In Africa, current New Town development leans more towards decentralization. Everywhere

doing a range of work across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She and co-editor Michelle Provoost will be presenting the book To Build a City in Africa: A History and a Manual at the upcoming African Perspectives conference held at TU Delft on March 27th-29th.

University of Kenya (TUK). The results of that research pointed to the fact that the government had announced six satellite cities but nothing seemed to be happening, just big talk by the government to invite foreign investment. We visited different sites that were just savanna, sometimes with fences around. What we also saw happening was that once these sites were 22

pinpointed either by the government or private developers, informal communities would start to grow around the perimeter because people saw land values increasing. It became a speculative game on the one hand. For the book, we compiled a database of about 150 African New Towns planned since 1960, and studied twelve different African New Towns relatively in depth to

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there are different kinds of challenges and different opportunities. How does your work relate to the future of New Towns and few takeaways? What's interesting about New Towns is that they are designed as a vision from a single moment in time. If you think about futuristic films from the 1970s, you see they get a few things right, but mostly it’s a glitzed-up version of the 1970s. It’s the same with New Towns. No one can predict the future. Having one idea of the way it ‘should be’ and the way it ‘will be’ causes a lot of problems because you don’t have the flexibility to respond to change over time. That's also something my work is looking at, how to build in more adaptability and also monitor and evaluate as the New Town is growing and changing. The biggest takeaway for students and people who want to work on New Towns is that it usually takes almost half a century to become a vibrant city. It’s difficult for us as humans to take this long approach because we want to see things done. Another takeaway would be, ‘it’s complicated’. With this research, I sometimes feel like the more I know about it, the less I know about it. It’s easy to be hyper-critical but it’s not really fair.• Notes 1. Local term for informal settlements 2. Bura is the name of the location and NEST stands for New Ethiopian Sustainable Town 1. Image of Ato Birhan Abegaz and his family in BuraNEST, Ethiopia; Source: Rachel Keeton 2. Kilamba, Angola; Source: Rachel Keeton 2017

atlantis the act of building one’s own home, while growing and surpassing each challenge that comes along the way. A lot of experiments are being done here with waste, organic products, educating children about what it means to use plastic, and so on. One such attempt has been to introduce locally made electric bicycles as a means to commute within the town, at a charge of 900 rupees (12 euros) a month 1

How does your own practice at Studio Naqshbandi relate to the vision of Auroville?

interview by Kavya Kalyan MSc Urbanism, TU Delft

with

Mona Doctor Pingel

Architect, Studio Naqshbandi Auroville, India

Auroville, an international city for human unity, near Pondicherry, India, is one of the few modern towns that was not founded along a river or a trade route, nor did it have an attractive context; it was built on a barren wasteland. Delegates from 124 nations came together in 1968 with earth from their home countries, to inaugurate the town and set forth the vision of its founder Mirra Alfassa, or ‘The Mother ’, of Integral Yoga – where matter and spirit, the individual and the collective meet in a living laboratory for an evolving human being. Mona Doctor- Pingel is a resident of Auroville, since 1990, who set up her own architectural practice, Studio Naqshbandi, in 1995. She is also a researcher and has had 2 years of experience at L’Avenir d’ Auroville (the official Planning and Development Group).

Could you tell us about working in the Planning and Development Group of Auroville, and its achievements and challenges with respect to realising this town? I worked in the Planning and Development Group from 2010 to 2012. The team does not consist only of planners, but in fact comprises of people from all walks of life – committed citizens concerned about the growth and development of Auroville. The decisions made by the planning body are driven by the goals of the Auroville charter, which puts forth the ideals of the society that have to be maintained. The charter is an important driving force for the development of the city. The Auroville Charter states:

"1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But, to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the divine consciousness. 2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages. 3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations. 4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity." (Mirra Alfassa, 1968) The inception of the plan of Auroville came from a sketch made by The Mother, 24

dividing Auroville into four zones (Residential, industrial, international and cultural) which was then translated into The Galaxy Plan by architect Roger Anger and blessed by The Mother. This plan 1 forsees a population of 50000 inhabitants in a 5 sq km area supported by a green belt around it of 15 sq km. However, since there are approximately 3000 residents currently from 51 different nations, there are as many interpretations of the charter and the plan. While on one hand there is a strong alignment towards the direct implementation of the plan as approved by The Mother, on the other hand there is a belief that the Galaxy plan is a concept that has to be built upon, while also considering its implications on the existing context. For example, the original plan includes high-rise residential buildings, which contradicts the desire that most people who come to Auroville have, of wanting to stay close to the ground, in direct connection with the natural environment. Another challenge in realising this dream has been acquiring the land for it, since we only bought the land that the owners were willing to sell (instead of going for direct aquistion as is the case in most new townships) and a large portion of it remains to be bought. There is also water shortage in the area and the neighbouring villages are growing faster than Auroville itself – around 15000 residents, which poses other challenges to the growth of the town. Moreover 5 of these villages fall directly within the Galaxy Master Plan area of Auroville.

When I get asked this question about what kind of architecture we follow, I always say we practice ‘Auroville architecture’. While every project has a different approach, there are some basic principles that we follow – respecting the context, the culture and the climate. We use mainly local craftsmen and technologies, as opposed to employing workers from other parts of the country, owing to the fact that Auroville has created a culture where people are proud of their skills and the work they do. We also make sure that our projects are energy efficient, recycle wastewater and respond to the immediate context. We work on different types of projects ranging from residences and institutions to factories and larger mixed use communities. While there is an absence of planning rules and regulations in Auroville, we must make sure there is a harmonious relationship with the neighbouring residents. I am also involved in research on energy efficiency and strategies for passive design, and in the process of creating a Building Directory for Auroville by mapping every building by year, location, footprint, characteristics, etc. It is interesting to note that a majority of the houses are built by the owners themselves, rather than architects, so there is a culture of selfreliance amongst the residents.

Auroville aims to be a universal town where people, irrespective of gender or origin, are able to live in peace. How does it integrate the local communities from the villages surrounding it? The residents of the town and the local communities influence each other. Initially, owing to the mix of people from different countries, and along with it a western sense of "helping", a lot of money was spent in educating the locals. However, today, these villages are richer than Auroville. Despite our divergent ways of thinking and being, there is more that unites than divides those that reside on and around the Auroville plateau. It is a complex relationship especially due to Auroville’s idealism to go for a cash-less society, pollution-free traffic, etc. Many from the local community are official residents of Auroville. This could be because free land (although no one can claim it, since Auroville belongs to Humanity as a whole), food and education that residents of Auroville are provided, could be seen as a means to advance economically. Auroville, being an international community that gives each one the freedom to find their own path, could appear to have a culture that is ‘western’, although that may not be intended. There is a delicate balance being created here, between the sensitivity of the local communities and the vulnerability of the foreign occupants. It is difficult for people to live between two worlds – while everybody is trying to fit in! What are the future aspirations for the community of Auroville? Auroville has been given the freedom to plan everything, but it cannot be done with the mind. A leap of faith is required and a new way has to be found. There is a fear that people may take advantage of the loose system, and being a small community,

Having said that, Auroville is a society that is empowering and supportive of change, with every ‘Aurovillian’ fully committed to making this change. Some believe that there is a change in consciousness that comes with

Auroville offers everything but anonymity. It would be hard to predict the future of Auroville since we do not know what the new population is going to be and the kind of skills the new residents will have, due to the lack of data and governmental policies that attract people, as in the case of most new towns. In that sense Auroville has always grown organically, as the need arose, which could be a problem or a blessing. With the government planning to build a 4-lane highway through its green belt, things could change a lot for Auroville and make the successful efforts at refforestation over the last 50 years futile. At the same time, the Indian government has been very supportive, even financially. There is now a recognition that Auroville has answers to a lot of problems, which comes from a great amount of idealism within the community and that is why it is one of the few surviving experiments from those which started in the late 60s of the last century. That is the best thing about India – where, since many centuries, experimentation of any sort of spirituality or religion are considered of high value and every such attempt is allowed to have their own space and rules, making it truly secular. • References The Auroville Charter: A new vision of power and promise for people choosing another way of life. (n.d.). Retrieved February 17, 2019, from https://www.auroville.org/ contents/1 1. Galaxy Plan of Auroville. Source: Retrieved from https://www.auroville.org/contents/691 2. Aerial View of Matri Mandir - the centre of Auroville. Source: Fred Cebron, Curriculum, 2 December 2017, Retrived from http://www. curriculum-magazine.com/auroville-carrieson-to-save-the-world/ 3. Studio Naqshbandi. Source: Retrieved from: https://www.auroville.org/contents/739

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YOU CAN'T LIVE

found to be habitually living on the streets three times in nighty days by the police, the officers have the right to force them to do public work and if they refuse to do so, they are sent to court (Article 22.).

2018). From time to time the employees of these places let in much more people to save them from extreme weather conditions such as extreme cold nights but this phenomenon is not sustainable.

The police applied on-site warning 193 times and launched infringement proceedings 5 times all over the country in the first ten days after the new law came into force (V. Munk, 28.10.2018).

Where to go then?

Why refuse to move to shelters?

What is a public space? A public space is a state-owned area or place that it is open,

accessible and can be used for its intended purpose by all citizens regardless of their ethnicity, gender, age or social economic level. Regulating the use of certain public spaces is a common practice all around the world, but what happens when a social group (in this case, homeless people) becomes highly affected by the rules? On the day of 15. October 2018 a new law went into effect in Hungary with zero tolerance on living or rough sleeping in public places.

How did we get here? We have all seen public parks being closed for the night, benches with separators or other forms of design that made it impossible to lay down on them and many other tricks to ensure no homeless people occupy a public area. The practice of zerotolerance for rough sleepers is well known in the United States of America and was introduced in several western European countries in the early 2000s, but it had such a negative feedback, most of these countries loosened the regulations. Now with a change in the constitution, Hungary passed the law that bans homeless people from all public spaces all around the country.

The criminalization of homeless people started in 2010 by the government when Fidesz-KDMP got into power. In the same year the mayor of one of Budapest’s districts marked “homeless free zones” and many similar acts came after this point. A law came into force in the year of 2013 addressed, the district governments had the rights to mark designating public areas in the capital city, Budapest, that were nominated to be vicinity of cultural, or other important sites, where rough sleeping was forbidden (K. Fox, 15, 10,2018). In case homeless people were found in these areas, the police had the rights to order them to move into a homeless shelter. If they refused 26

Melinda Marján

MSc Landscape Architecture TU Delft

This seems to be a logical question for an outsider who has never been to a homeless shelter and experienced the circumstances of such a place. We could think a shelter, where people have the opportunity to be in a warm room, sleep on a bed and have possibility to use the hygiene facilities, get a warm meal is much better than staying on the streets, especially during the cold winter when the temperature occasionally goes under -10℃ at night. Still, homeless people see these places as a hazard. If they are able to get into a shelter, the conditions are not sufficient: the resting areas are dirty and crowded, people are not able to get all the services they would need in one shelter and many get robbed, insulted during their stay by other occupants of the shelters (R. Noack, 17.10. 2018). Homeless people believe it is safer to stay out of these shelters and the employees, volunteers agree with some of their concerns. Another issue is that the amount of space and beds available is inadequate. According to the experts, the estimated number of homeless ppulation in Hungary is about 20,000, while the number of places in the shelters is only 10,000 (A. Jazeera, 15.10.

These already vulnerable people have fallen into an impossible trap. They cannot live on the streets or other public spaces, as the police has the rights to order them to move. They can’t or won’t go to homeless shelters as they are often dangerous and full and they cannot rent a place for themselves to live in. Still, a large number of homeless people seemingly disappeared shortly after the law came into force. Volunteers and employees of non-profit organisations, working with homeless people reported, they move to less frequented areas, where the officers go on patrol less often (D. McLaughlin, 17.10. 2018). They chose public spaces where they cannot be seen like forests, riversides, abandoned industrial areas, buildings or unused parks. Occupying these areas might come in handy when they need to disappear from the eyes of the law, but this way they cannot be found by the helping hands either. They are not able to make use of the services the state and non-profit organisations offer and the ambulance cannot reach them in case of need. It is clear, Fidesz-KDMP, the ruling party of Hungary created an appearance solution for a serious issue with an ill law to clean the public places from one particular social group. By forcing the homeless people to leave these areas and move into shelters while not providing sufficient and enough

accommodation or possibility to have decent jobs so they could rent their own room, these people are left alone, with no place to be. They are excluded from public places while they are still part of the public. A real, working solution would be not to criminalise people who have no other option than to live on the streets, but to provide sufficient accommodation and programs to reintegrate them into society. •

References 1. Al Jazeera. (2018, October 15). Rough sleeping outlawed in Hungary as new law comes into force. Retrieved from https:// www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/rough-sleeping-outlawedhungary-law-force-181015045613103.html 2. Fox, K. (2018, October 15). Hungary's constitution makes street homelessness a crime. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn. com/2018/10/15/europe/hungary-criminalizes-homelessness-intl/index.html 3. McLaughlin, D. (2018, October 27). Hungary's rough sleepers go into hiding as homelessness made illegal. Retrieved from https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/ hungary-s-rough-sleepers-go-into-hiding-as-homelessness-madeillegal-1.3677005 4. Noack, R. (2018, October 17). Hungary bans homeless people from living in public spaces, in law described as 'cruel' by the U.N. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost. com/world/2018/10/17/hungary-bans-homeless-peopleliving-public-spaces-law-described-cruel-by-un/?utm_ term=.175d433ae5cc 5. Munk, V. (2018, October 28). Gábor hajléktalan, és törvényesen szeretne létezni. Retrieved from https://index.hu/ belfold/2018/10/27/mit_tehet_a_hajlektalan_ember_ha_a_ torveny_szerint_szeretne_elni/

1. Homeless living under an overpass in the center of Budapest. Source: Author 2. A homeless person habitually living in an underground station. Source: Author

to do so, the officers were to give them a fine. If the homeless person committed the offense three times in six months, the police had the rights to oblige the offender to participate in public work programs, in case this order was denied, the offender was sent to court. This provision resulted the disappearance of many homeless from the frequent areas of the city. Counter to the repealed rule, the new law is much stricter, and is called “inhuman” by many social organisations. As from the 15th of October 2018 police have the authority to remove rough sleepers from all public spaces and destroy their belongings. In case a person commits the offence and is

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Rigid Mechanisms

both meant something totally different for the white minority as it did to persons of color. While the wealthy kept focusing on game protection areas, for obvious reasons residents of segregated townships on the edge of the city couldn’t care less about wildlife, as they had to face countless further issues in their daily lives and living environments: flooding, fire hazard, proximate noxious facilities such as polluting industries and sewage plants, just to mention a few (Khan, 2002).

of South Africa by

Dóra Hegyi MSc Urbanism TU Delft

Environment 2: Land… and much more than that

The article is divided into two sections. The first describes the history and evolution of the environmental justice movement in South Africa. The second explains the manifestations of historical planning in the City of Cape Town.

Sindhuja Janakiraman

Part I Environmental discourses of the 20th century

population growth soon induced various environmental issues. -Poverty was institutionalized through a number of laws: Africans were allowed to hold only a restricted range of positions and barely had the opportunity to participate in discussions regarding nature conservation.

Environment 1: Lands of the privileged In our time the broad ideology of environmentalism is generally interpreted as a noble one. In South Africa the establishment of wildlife protection and landscape conversation areas dates back to the late nineteenth century. However, the definition of environmentalism in this context gained a completely different connotation in the following hundred years (McDonald, 2004). Back in time members of South African game protection associations were mainly described as the ‘affluent gentlemen’: the

white elite from upper and middle classes. Moreover, according to their ideology the protection of natural areas was supposed to be achieved by means of two major acts: the forceful eviction of African residents from these ‘protected’ areas and their exclusion from subsistence hunting on their traditional lands (Carruthers, 1995). Consequently, ‘nature’ became the property of the wealthy, while ‘environment’ was narrowed down to the land of the privileged minority. Excluding persons of color from the mainstream environmental movement became more and more evident in the twentieth century. Their marginalization has been realized on several levels: -During the apartheid era between 1948 and 1994 Africans were spatially segregated and confined to rural and peripheral areas where the lack of basic infrastructure and

MSc Landscape Architecture TU Delft

-It became accepted by law to reserve certain areas for a particular race, regardless of the facilities and amenities of the land.

Radical political changes were required to initiate the transition towards a more integrated and less preservationist-based definition of ‘environment’. The first years of the 1990s and the official end of the apartheid era in 1994 were such milestones in the history of South Africa. The gradual integration of environmental issues in the civil right discussions was a crucial process towards a more inclusive environmental movement. When the constraining regulations of the apartheid were abolished, the previously oppressed groups soon started to become actively involved in environmental discussions as they finally got the chance to let their voices be heard. In the 1990s - similarly to the transition process that took place in the 1980s in the United States – persons of color started to raise their concerns about environmental eliticism.

Such restrictions and regulations ensured that soon environmental issues and goals

As a result of this process, environment was redefined to incorporate a much broader

-Due to the Bantu Education Act implemented in 1953, Africans got only limited access to education, which restrained millions from being informed and taught about environmental behaviour.

context which can include the working and living environment of everybody regardless of their race, gender, class etc. The term started to broaden and define much more than nature as sociocultural aspects became gaining more and more ground. Consequently, a range of different ideological positions emerged in this period: in many environmental discussions anthropogenic views were soon articulated in addition to wildlife, while others preferred to keep the focus on nature conservation. Important to note, the emergence of the environmental justice movement accompanied by these various approaches was not about simplifying a complex issue and looking for immediate solutions. On the contrary, it haas often further complicated the situation and induced conflicts which were not able to come forward under oppressive regimes. Still, revealing these conflicting environmental interests - often resulting in wicked problems - is indispensable to transition towards a more holistic and inclusive approach and find common ground in the future (Khan, 2002). “The protection and preservation of the natural environment has to become a priority to save the poor from becoming poorer. I hope we pay heed to serious issues facing us in our country… because when injustice prevails, the consequences affect both people and the environment. Environmental justice is integral to peace and prosperity.” (EJNF, 1998).

While a rich theoretical background is available in the field of environmental justice, the question of how it can be implemented in practice remains a challenge in many cases. Without any doubt, there has been a significant progress in providing the people of South Africa with basic services since the early 1990s. However, the legacy of the apartheid era is still clearly visible in forms of poverty, inequity and high levels of unemployment. Evidently, the challenges have been identified and the country has taken the first step on a long way towards shifting deep-rooted, unsustainable paradigms. References 1. Carruthers, J. (1995). The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. 2. EJNF - Environmental Justice Networking Forum (1998). Voices from the Ground: People, Poverty, and Environment in South Africa. Dorpspruit: EJNF 3. Khan, F. (2002). The roots of environmental racism and the rise of environmental justice in the 1990s. Environmental Justice in South Africa, 15-48. 4. McDonald, D. A. (2004). Environmental Justice in South Africa: Juta and Company Ltd.5. 6. Melosi, M. (1995). “Equity, Eco-racism and Environmental History.” Environmental History Review 19 (3).

1. Aerial View of Cape Town. Source: Dóra Hegyi (2018). 2 Ikhaya Community Garden showcasing indigenous plants in the frontyard of a primary school in Khayelitsha. Source: Dóra Hegyi (2018).

“…by linking environmental and civil rights issues, challenged the dominant perception of conservation as a white middle-class, leisure issue, and provided the catalyst for the emergence of the environmental justice movement” (Melosi, 1995).

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Part II Peripheral evolution of disasters

2011). These threats to biodiversity are mostly dependent on the social groups situated in those areas. For example, the renosterveld vegetation is less endangered than strandeveld, as the latter is situated in deprived black or colored townships where they are stripped for medicinal purposes by the local communities or burnt for safety. Many conservation techniques do not acknowledge the local practices and relationships.

Case of Cape town Falling under the apartheid mechanism, cities like Cape town entail past qualities and patterns dictating its development until today. The current urban fabric of the city is an agglomeration of garden suburbs and townships surrounded by a mindblowing landscape. The picture that comes to one’s mind hearing the words slum, poverty or disaster is usually a degrading settlement situated on, or adjacent to a vulnerable natural environment. Adding to this scenario, decades of systematic racial segregation results in townships.

Begun as a temporary settlement at the mountain valley, the city now has grown into a mega city of 2461 km².The garden suburbs and township settlements are strategically located based on the landscape typology, deciding who gets to settle where and have access to what. The townships were always built in the periphery and as the city grew these settlements moved further away from the city centre excluding them from the urban fabric. The increasing population and the desperate need for housing created informal settlements within these townships devoid of access to basic services. By overlaying the natural and urban systems of the city, the wealthy neighborhoods are situated on fertile lands and the historic centre, while the poorer communities are located on sensitive ecosystems of sand dunes, rivers and wetlands which is the Cape Flats region (fig. 1). These variations of development on landscapes show the need to have localized engagement in planning decisions.

Cape town’s recent water crisis in 2018 brought forth the severity of inequality, questioning the usual living norms of people in townships in comparion to the rest of the city’s experience during the disaster. High urban fragmentation and social segregation makes it harder to respond to such calamities, further moving away from the idealistic development of balancing between environment, equity and economy. This is due to the lack of integrated planning and failure to acknowledge deeprooted historical phenomena with respect to the city’s social and natural geography. While there are many other causal factors, these are the two key drivers of the urban development in the post-apartheid city of Cape town, creating vulnerable territories of inequity and ecological decline.

Townships vs the city

To address this complex situations, it is necessary to unearth different layers, to come to a comprehensive understanding, and to inform better plans and strategies for the city and townships. Therefore, this article describes both human and natural processes that has shaped the city and some key findings of their interaction.

The sandy nature of the Cape Flats region, often seen as a poor and difficult terrain

to develop, was of least interest for the rich, making room for public housing and township developments. One of the main characteristics of sandy soil is withholding water both on surface and below ground level, in the form of wetlands and aquifers. The Cape Flats Aquifer produces a high amount of groundwater, grabbing enough attention of the city during the drought period to tap it. Full-fledged effort to use the aquifer for the city’s water supply is ongoing, but the pollution in the water caused by settlements make it unfit to use, at least for the moment. This is mainly due to the local community’s interaction with their natural surroundings. While the city tries to find different means to grab water, in the same locality there are communities with no access to water or limited supply, raising the question of equity. These townships are either coloured or black, having different social and cultural identities. They often disassociate themselves from the city’s projects in their localities as they are not involved in the process. They disregard these projects being too ‘’white’’, therefore triggering local upheavals. It can be better understood through the case of Khayelitsha (fig. 2), one of the largest black townships in the city. Situated on sand dunes and wetlands, the cultural connotations of open spaces developed within the township are much different than the spaces created by the city. The black community sees bird watching as a rather ‘white’ sport which has no relation to them while their cultural connections to the river and wetlands are cattle grazing, religious proceedings, medicinal use of the vegetation, social gathering, etc. But the

public projects in their locality as a measure to upgrade lack context. This often lead to protests by the communities categorizing it as ‘vandalism’ by the city. Contestation to rightful space, land and basic services situate these communities in a constant battle with the city. Conclusion Taking the lens of water, landscape and townships, the complexity playing out at all scales in Cape town can be understood. Reading the natural and human systems indicates how historical planning can lead to contested territories and landscapes thus becoming the underlying guide to dictate social segregation. A socio-ecological way of analysis on a local scale becomes key to gain understanding to inform socially cohesive and environmentally just interventions. It goes without saying that these patterns are visible in most cities in South Africa and globally, urgently seeking for an integrated and comprehensive engagement in the era of climate change.•

References 1. Rebelo, A. G. et al. (2011) ‘Impacts of urbanization in a biodiversity hotspot: Conservation challenges in Metropolitan Cape Town’, South African Journal of Botany. Elsevier B.V., 77(1), pp. 20–35. 2. Baudoin, M. A. et al. (2017) ‘Living with drought in South Africa: lessons learnt from the recent El Niño drought period’, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. Elsevier Ltd, 3.Fallon, A. (2018) ‘A Perfect Storm: The hydropolitics of Cape Town’s water crisis’, Global Water Forum, Aalto University, pp. 1–9.

Landscape and urban development Cape town is unique in its landscape shaped by forces over a million years, surrounded by the Indian ocean and the Atlantic ocean forming four predominant landscape typologies: sandstone, acidic sands, calcareous sands and clay. These soil types translate to the iconic Table Mountains in the west, Cape flats region in the centre and agricultural lands in the north. This landscape is renowned for its high richness of plant species, thus is an important component of the Cape Floristic Region (CFR) which is one of the World’s Heritage Sites and plays an important role in the overall ecological structure. The CFR belongs to the Fynbos biome which is highly concentrated within the urban matrix, posing major challenges for conservation (Rebelo et al.,

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1. Concentration of townships and informal settlements on Cape flats. Source: Sindhuja Janakiraman (2018). 2. Formal and informal housing sprawl on sand dunes in Khayelitsha township. Source: Sindhuja Janakiraman (2018).

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Contested

Working in Petare

In formal City

Ignacio Cardona

Instructor in Urban Planning and Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design Director of Arepa: Architecture Ecology, and Participation

Petare is one of the thousands of Latin American 'self-produced cities': its urban landscape is what many authors have decided to call an informal settlement. Five years ago, while I was working there on a participatory design workshop for the construction of a system of public spaces to connect the neighborhood to the broader urban built environment, I asked a group of community members: "Do you think it is possible to integrate this informal city with a broad urban built environment?". Immediately, a smart old lady confronted me: "Which informal city? I formally work part-time on a construction company, mentioned a young man. I formally bought rebars for my house in a hardware store, I can show you the invoice form, another man said ironically.". While my design team was working on strategies that help to integrate Petare, 'informal city' became a useless term that did not help my team to tackle ideas on the challenge of the integration of this clearly isolated area of the city. Those community members felt stigmatized when I referred to them as dwellers of an informal settlement. How, then, to contest that term 'informal city' that has become counterproductive? How to define these territories where, according to UN Habitat (2016), more than around a billion people population worldwide lives? For instance, in Latin America, a continent that almost shares one language, there is a variety of ways to define this still emergent urban dynamic. Among different names commonly given to these territories we can highlight 'villas miseria' (misery village) in Argentina, 'favelas' in Brazil, 'campamentos' (campsites) in Chile, 'comunas' (communes) in Colombia, 'llegaypon' (arrival) in Cuba, 'tugurios' (slums) in Ecuador and El Salvador, 'trench towns' in Jamaica, 'asentamientos irregulares' (irregular settlements) in Mexico, 'barrios brujas' (witch neighborhood) in Panama, 'asentamientos' (poor settlements) in Paraguay, 'pueblos jĂłvenes' (young town) in Peru, 'barriadas' (poor neighborhood) in Puerto Rico, 'barrios' (poor neighborhood) in and Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Venezuela; also or 'rancherios' (poor houses agglomeration) in Venezuela. Among scholars, it is frequent to encounter some euphemisms used to stigmatize these (Canclini, 2012) such as slums, squatters, shanty towns, marginal masses, popular or even irregular settlements (Auyero, 2000; Castells, 1983; Davis, 2007; Gilbert, 2012; Nun, 2001; Quijano ObregĂłn, 1974; Roy & AlSayyad, 2004; Tokman, 1978), terms who often ignore the fact that those urban territories are linked, albeit unequally, to the logic of existing urban development

(Perlman, 1976). Among them, the 'informal city' has become the most frequent expression used by scholars, designers, and policy-makers. Certainly, these territories are in need of the agency of scholars, designers, and policy-makers because regardless of the terminology used to define them, they emerge plenty of spatial disadvantages. In Petare, we can highlight: weak connectivity, and lack of programming diversity. First, the weak connectivity of the urban built environment undermines the capacity of citizens to move across the city. For instance, commuting in Petare often entails going up and/or down an average of 40 floors per day (Cardona, 2012). As regard their lack of diversity in urban uses and programming, Petare has less than 0.24 square meters of public facilities and/or public space per inhabitant (Cardona, 2012) even though national regulations require the existence of more than 11.5 (Ministerio de Desarrollo Urbano, 1985). This lack of diversity in the neighborhood forces citizens to travel long distances to serve themselves. Spatial disadvantages undermine the citizens' capacity to integrate into the urban life. The definition of these territories seems an important step to understand their dynamic in order to facilitate the design of strategies to address spatial segregation How informality works? Historically, a series of factors has generated territories like Petare in Latin America. They can be summarized in the rapid growth of Latin American cities during the 20th century that ended-up spatializing processes of inequality that had been developing since colonial periods (Almandoz, 2009; Gonzalez-Casas, 2009). The causes and consequences of this process of spatial segregation lie in the citizens' access to exchange dynamics. When human agglomerations increase, different types of urban exchange, especially products and services, end up being the main activity that supports the relationship between citizens within the urban built environment (Mumford, 1937; NuĂąo, 2010). Through this process, the phenomenon of informality appears, which is defined as an economic operation between the apparatus of those exchange process, and its own incorporation into the regulatory frameworks agreed by the society (Feige, 1990; Garcia-Bolivar, 2006; Portes, Castells, & Benton, 1989). To state it clearly, those citizens who do not insert themselves into the dynamics of the formal economy - either through employment or through entrepreneurship - end up developing informal exchange activities. In 1971, but published in 1973, Keith 33

Hart first made a distinction between the formal and informal sector, based on the recognition of types of employment such as wage-earning or self-employment. In this framework, informality is explained through the chronic imbalance between income from wage employment and selfemployment, where the desire of migrants to improve their living standards through regulatory frameworks is unsatisfied and, as a result, informal activities, particularly self-employment, become a buffer against unemployment (Hart, 1973). But while that dualistic view of the phenomenon occurred in theoretical terms, there was fluidity between formal and informal economies in the street1 (Feige, 1990). Urban employment has diversified over the years. A worker can move from one type of job to another from one day to another, even from one hour a day to the other. For example, a carpenter can work for a construction company in the morning and work as an informal peddler during the afternoon. Nowadays, the employee has multiple employment statuses simultaneously including independence as well subordination to employers (Palomino, 2000). Given this complexity, the modern labor force is especially flexible in the urban built environment: between the formal and the informal, it involves both conflicts and opportunities. Informality generates processes of exploitation where the citizens ought to multiply their labor activities to satisfy the lack of formal opportunities (Gilbert, 2012). This is especially true when institutions and administrative machines lack the resources, legitimacy or interest in defining normative frameworks to appropriately govern channels of circulation, which is when informal - and sometimes illegal - activities come to the fore (Simone, 2006). But the diversification of the economy through this dynamism between formal and informal economies opens space for development of new potentialities for innovation (Gilbert, 2012). In this innovative dynamic, production through informal processes has ended up contributing substantially to the economic growth and the development of cities in Latin America (Ferreyra, 2018; UN Habitat, 2016b). For example, in Venezuela, the sum of all homes built by both the private and the public sector totals half of those built by this entrepreneurial process arising from the informal economy (Silva, 2015), a condition that is repeated across almost all Latin American cities. It was this economic dynamic framed in the construction of the city that ended up generating this territory whose terminology is in contestation, spaces such as Petare, which is often called by academics as informal cities.

atlantis that help us to introduce new networks of urban integration while taking advantage of the participatory dynamic of self-produced urbanization. • Notes

1. Feige (1990) establishes a broad taxonomy of what he called “underground economies” including “illegal activities” produced by those activities pursued in violation of legal status through the production of prohibited goods and services, “unreported activities” that evade the institutionally established fiscal rules as codified in the tax codes, the “unrecorded activities” referred to those activities that should be recorded in national accounting systems but is not, and the strictly “informal economy: that comprises those activities that circumvent the costs and are excluded from the benefits and rights incorporated in the laws and administrative rules.

References

How cities like Petare emerge? Summarizing, in response to necessities arising from the imbalance in the supply of employment generated by informality, disadvantaged citizens end up self-building their own environment. But how does this urban development process work? While many occupants come together to start the process of self-production that produces cities like Petare, a particular set of hidden rules facilitates the urbanization process. This process of collective creation that we call 'emergence' has been repeated across the whole Latin American region: a consistent urban dynamic that explain the similarities between different self-produced cities across the region. Walking across Petare, one encounters incredibly similar urban landscapes with Favela Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro or Comuna 13 in Medellin. When Janice Perlman (2010) describes the experience of four decades living in, what she calls, "the edge of Rio de Janeiro", I feel like be reading about Petare. She explains that after many years visiting these settlements, she has been able to detect that certain categories that generate inequality have been consistently loosing strength - issues like segregation by race or gender. However, people continue to be stigmatized for living in a favela. Very similar to what we managed to detect in Petare. And Petare´s urban landscape is also very similar to the descriptions of a highly fragmented territory in the self-produced

settlements of Medellin written by Alonso Salazar (1990) in his famous book “No Nacimos Pa’ Semilla.” Although Medellin acts as an inspiring recent experience of urban upgrading, the keys for a complete integration of these territories are still to be defined. Because the construction of self-produced cities ends up being extremely similar between one territory and another, it is convenient to try to understand the logics of ordering behind this urbanization process. The understanding of the urban dynamics behind self-produced cities would help designers and planners to develop strategies to improve their urban disadvantages while taking advantage of their strengths which are based on this collective process of urbanization from emerging urbanization processes. In this context, 'emergence' occurs where there was no prior planning, but as an effective system of communication that enabled systems to act spontaneously and to self-organize in response to need (Capra, 2002; Hamdi, 2004, 2010). Emergent urbanization commonly occurs through complex systems of agreement among citizens and among citizens and institutions, which, obviously, include informal negotiations, but also formal agreements between different actors like including the formal procurement of construction materials in addition to the gradual provision of formal services by state agencies. Although the informal economy plays a fundamental role especially in the beginning of the urban development of the 34

self-produced city, other actors and formal processes are inserted from the start and gradually generate an urban ecosystem that would, incorrectly, be called 'informal': a city that fluidly and flexibly combines different formal/informal dynamics. Some considerations on how to intervene cities like Petare We have concluded that their definition of cities like Petare as 'informal cities' neglects the complex dynamics of exchange between different stakeholders, including the state and the market, dynamics that fluidly include both formal and informal processes. Moreover, the notion of 'informal city' could open a space for design interventions whose strategies rely just on the formalization of self-produced cities with interventions that resemble the same type of city that planners and designers have been developing for decades, instead of generating intervention strategies supported by site-specific urban identity. This approach could neglect well-known instances of innovative urban development originating in communities who have been building their own environments for many years, not an insignificant urbanization process. Not in vain, the reknowned Venezuelan sociologist Tulio Hernández (2008) explains that self-produced cities have been the most successful urban enterprise of the country, providing housing to the majority of the population that has been refused by both private and public urban development.

However, it is important to avoid the rendering of self-produced cities as a rosy picture. The same old lady that contested me about defining Petare as an informal city is demanding of me - an architect - ideas that produce design strategies to integrate it to the broad urban built environment. She was completely aware of the deficiencies of the city she has helped to build because living in self-produced cities means going through hardship, especially related to lack of connectivity and services. Evidently, the emergent participatory process that has been developed to build Petare across throughout the last three hundred years has been insufficient to transform the city into an environment that facilitates the integration of the citizens to the opportunities that, supposedly, the city provides. But techno-managerial design strategies that intend to formalize Petare, also, seem to be insufficient, because they neglect the enormous creative possibilities of the understanding of the self-production as an innovative emergent methodology of urbanization. For years, the state has been working in providing urban solutions to upgrade so-called informal settlements but they have been spontaneously growing faster than any plan. Hopefully a new process of contesting informal cities, that is, the understanding of creative emergent strategies of urbanization that fluidly incorporates both formal and informal processes, could provide glimpses into the production of new design strategies

1. Almandoz, A. (2009). Urbanization and Urbanism in Latin America: From Haussmann to CIAM. In A. Almandoz (Ed.) (pp. 13–44). London ; New York : New York. 2. Auyero, J. (2000). The hyper- shantytown: Neo-liberal violence(s) in the Argentine slum. Ethnography, 1(1), 93–116. https://doi.org/10.1177/14661380022230651 3. Canclini, N. G. (2012). ¿Donde nos ponemos? In A. Goldstein (Ed.), Vivir en la tierra: asentamientos en Latinoamérica (1. ed.). Capital Federal [i.e. Buenos Aires]: Edhasa. 4. Capra, F. (2002). The hidden connections: integrating the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions of life into a science of sustainability (1st ed.). New York: Doubleday. 5. Cardona, I. (2012). Research for Sport Park Mesuca. Honorable mention in international competition. Urban development and social inclusion. Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF). Retrieved September 4, 2018, from https://issuu.com/areparq/ docs/pdcm_caf_2012 6. Castells, M. (1983). The Social Basis of Urban Populism: Squatters and the State in Latin America. In M. Castells (Ed.). Berkeley. 7. Davis, M. (2007). Planet of slums (Paperback ed.). London ; New York. 8. Feige, E. L. (1990). Defining and estimating underground and informal economies: The new institutional economics approach. World Development, 18(7), 989–1002. https://doi. org/10.1016/0305-750X(90)90081-8 9. Ferreyra, M. M. (2018). Raising the bar for productive cities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. 10. Garcia-Bolivar, O. (2006). Informal Economy: Is It a Problem, a Solution or Both? The Perspective of the Informal Business. Bepress Legal Series. Retrieved from http://law. bepress.com/expresso/eps/1065 11. Gilbert, A. (2012). In the Absence of Ghettos in Latin American Cities. In R. Hutchison & B. D. Haynes (Eds.) (pp. 191–224). Boulder, CO. 12. Gonzalez-Casas, L. (2009). Caracas: Territory, Architecture and Urban Space. In A. Almandoz (Ed.) (pp. 214–240). London ; New York : New York: Routledge. 13. Hamdi, N. (2004). Small change : about the art of practice and the limits of planning in cities. London ; Sterling, VA. 14. Hamdi, N. (2010). Placemaker’s Guide to Building Community, The. 15. Hart, K. (1973). Informal Income Opportunities and

Urban Employment in Ghana. The Journal of Modern African Studies; J.Mod.Afr.Stud., 11(1), 61–89. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0022278X00008089 16. Hernandez, T. (2008, May 23). Entrevista sobre barrios en Caracas [Personal interview]. 17. Ministerio de Desarrollo Urbano. (1985). Resolución 151 - Normas para Equipamiento Urbano. Pub. L. No. 32.289, Gaceta Oficial de la República de Venezuela. 18. Mumford, L. (1937). What is a city? Architectural Record, 82, 59–62. 19. Nun, J. (2001). Marginalidad y exclusión social (1. ed.). Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. 20. Nuño, J. (2010). ¿Por qué existen ciudades? In C. Aria & T. Hernandez (Eds.). Caracas. 21. Palomino, H. (2000). Articulaciones entre formalidad e informalidad en la industria de la construcción. In J. Carpio, E. Klein, I. Novacovsky, & G. M. Serrano (Eds.) (1a. ed.). Buenos Aires : Santiago de Chile. 22. Perlman, J. E. (1976). The myth of marginality : urban poverty and politics in Rio de Janeiro. Berkeley: University of California Press. 23. Perlman, J. E. (2010). Favela: four decades of living on the edge in Rio de Janeiro. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. 24. Portes, A., Castells, M., & Benton, L. A. (1989). The Informal economy : studies in advanced and less developed countries. Baltimore, Md. 25. Quijano Obregón, A. (1974). The marginal pole of the economy and the marginalized labour force. Economy and Society, 3(4), 393–428. https://doi. org/10.1080/03085147400000019 26. Roy, A., & AlSayyad, N. (2004). Urban informality : transnational perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham, Md. : Berkeley, Calif.: Lexington Books ; Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California at Berkeley. 27. Salazar, A. (1990). No nacimos pa’ semilla : la cultura de las bandas juveniles de Medellín (1. ed.). Medellín] : Bogotá, Colombia: Corporación Región ; CINEP. 28. Silva, E. (2015). CABA: Cartografía de los barrios de Caracas 1966-2014. Caracas, Venezuela, ©2015: Fundación Espacio. 29. Simone, A. (2006). Pirate Towns: Reworking Social and Symbolic Infrastructures in Johannesburg and Douala. Urban Studies, 43(2), 357–370. https://doi. org/10.1080/00420980500146974 30.Tokman, V. E. (1978). Las relaciones entre los sectores formal e informal. CEPAL Review, 5, 103–141. 31. UN-Habitat. (2016a). Slum Almanac 2015-2016: Tracking Improvement in the Lives of Slum Dwellers. Nairobi, Kenya: Participatory Slum Upgrading Program. Retrieved from https://unhabitat.org/slum-almanac-2015-2016/ 32. UN-Habitat. (2016b). World Cities Report 2016: Urbanization and Development, Emerging Futures. Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Retrieved from http://wcr.unhabitat.org/main-report/

1. Top view of Petare. Fuerza Petare. @donaldobarros. Source: Donaldo Barros, 2015 (licensed by author). 2. Caracas, Venezuela (Petare on the right). d-.-b @donaldobarros. Source: Donaldo Barros, 2015 (licensed by author). 3. Sports Park Mesuca in Petare. Arepa Arquitectura, 2015. Source: Enrico Pugliese, 2014. 4. Petare at night. Luz, simplesmente. @donaldobarros Source: Donaldo Barros, 2019 (licensed by author).

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MAX-CAPACITY LANDSCAPES Village Intensification, and Capacity Building for Returning Refugees on the Thai-Myanmar Border by

Pik Lam Theodora Ho

MSc Landscape Architecture, TU Delft

Abstract The Karen minorities in Myanmar have been facing serious suppression under the attack of the military government. Thousands of villagers are seeking refugee at the Thai border in the past 30 years. The Thai government is unwilling to take care of the refugees for long. Since the 2011 democratic reform of Myanmar under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi, there is much optimism in the possibility of repatriation. The following thesis is a critique to the existing repatriation plan, as well as further studies on the possibilities on the issues on settlement, agriculture and economy. With the aid of Geographical Information System (GIS), a suitability

map is calculated for human settlement and agricultural land. The capacity of land is calculated under different economic systems, as a guide for economic transformation of future townships as repatriation of refugees goes on. Historical Background of Myanmese Refugees in Thailand Under the attack of the military government since the 1980s, there have been displacement of villagers internally in Myanmar or fleeing to Thailand. In the region of Tanintharyi, the Karen people fled to the border at Kanchanaburi and settled at the refugee camp in Tham Hin, which was established in 1997.

Refugees in Tham Hin are provided with basic necessities and healthcare services. However, the living environment and hygiene is severely poor due to overcrowding and they are only allowed to live in temporary structures. Refugees had no choice but to settle in poor conditions such as bounded accessible area, insufficient water and food supply, insubstantial healthcare and limited to none job opportunity. It was only until 2006 that resettlement to foreign countries became possible. NGOs such as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and The Border Consortium (TBC) have begun resettlement programmes to a third country in order to relieve the pressure in Tham Hin. Incline of resources extraction

projects leads to further suppression of ethnic minority. These have caused more threats to the living and natural environment and are the emerging causes for hesitation to return to Tanintharyi. These threats are also posing challenges to the repatriated ethnic minorities for establishing physical, social and cultural livelihood in the future.

These factors include proximity to water or flow accumulation, distance to existing roads, existing land cover, slope gradient and elevations. Within the suitable region, the land has a certain capacity to accommodate a group of population. Thus, the next step is to identify the threshold of land capacity under intensifying agricultural production.

Maximising Land Capacity for Returning Refugees

Four major ecological intensification process are identified to maximise the output of production, income and nutrition. Firstly, by decreasing the fallow period of shifting agriculture, which is a traditional and sustainable Myanmese farming technique involving slashing and burning of existing farmland and leaving it fallow for a few years for soil and nutrients restoration.

The project identifies village intensification as one of the strategies to adapt for growing population settlement along the Tanintharyi river. With the aid of GIS, a suitability map for agricultural farmland and human settlement is translated from the mapping of physical land conditions.

1. Regional map of the Tanintharyi area of Myanmar and Tham Hin refugee camp in Thailand. Source: Author. 2. Political development of Myanmar and histories of Myanmese refugees. Source: Author. 3. Agricultural land intensification. Source: Author.

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Secondly, by expanding and maximising the suitable land for cultivation; thirdly, by intercropping two mutually beneficial species with different growing phase in order to maximise cultivation period; and lastly, by optimising the plantation density especially for cash crop production. With the application of the above four ecological intensification techniques, the same size of land would be able to accommodate a larger amount of population.

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By introducing cash crop plantation instead of self-sufficient agriculture, the same piece of farmland could even earn USD$195,381 per year according to current market rate. In the extreme case of turning all cultivating land to cash crop plantation, the same size of 1043 acre of land could produce USD$418,410 per year. The generated income can accommodate 3486 households. These figures, although all being estimated in their ideal situation,

could be a reference for the future economic transformation from merely agriculture to cash crop production, and even further to small businesses in order to accommodate a larger population. In order to estimate the land capacity of Tanintharyi, a village near Ban Chaung river (Site B) is being analysed to observe the relationship between the existing agricultural pattern and population. In the current situation, villagers generally live on shifting agriculture with 5-7 years

fallow period, and 360 households can be fed with 320 acres of farmland. Juxtaposing this figure to Tanintharyi (Site A), the 174 acres of cultivating farmland can feed 195 households. By reducing fallow period to 3 years, the land could accommodate a double of the current population. Located at the sub-tropical and hilly region, the site has a huge market potential for value adding cash crops such as eucalyptus for rubber production, bamboo for building

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materials, and oil palm for oil extraction. Figure 5 has summarised the speculation of agricultural transformation in the future 30 years and the respective proportion of different agricultural systems.

of natural resources such as wood and bamboo. Secondly, villagers should begin to set up farmland and small scale cash crop plantation once settled for self-sustaining food supply.

Myanmarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s existing and future condition when considering an appropriate plan for refugeesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; repatriation. The problem of refugees usually involve the social, political and economical parties.

Capacity Building for Returning Refugees

Refugees are acquired with basic knowledge for agriculture and plantation currently at Tham Hin, which would be important skills to ensure their future food security. Thirdly, more intensive cultivation period would be introduced together with more advanced farming techniques such as application of machines and chemical fertilisers, in order to increase the production capacity of farmland. Also, villagers could set up largescale value adding cash crop plantation and seek for foreign investors for long term and stable income. In order to maximise the space for cash crop plantations, new cultivating area could be set up on steep slopes by transforming degraded woodland to contour plantation by cutting and filling, as well as optimising the planting distance to the greatest profit. With these skills, refugees would be empowered with greater confidence to repatriate back to their homeland.

As landscape architects, we position ourselves differently from politicians and policy makers, making use of land resources as our most valuable asset to understand and mediate such complex problem with design.

Apart from preparing the land for refugee repatriation, the refugees, on the other hand, should be equipped with the skills to make a living on their own after being protected at refugee camps for over 30 years. At the moment, NGOs including The Border Consortium (TBC) are teaching refugees various skills like planting and building houses. However, these measures are deemed insufficient to provide refugees with self-sustaining abilities. One important technique is to empower returning refugees with the abilities to transform from one agricultural system towards more intensified systems as elaborated above. From the future speculation in Figure 5, 6 transformations are illustrated into details in order to equip returning refugees with the useful skills. First of all, the pioneer group of returning refugees should be taught to set up their own settlement village at the suitable areas making use

In the light of dramatic changes of landscape, it is important to compile development factors from different perspectives with regards to

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4. Maximum population per agricultural programme. Source: Author. 5. Future speculation of the site and intensification projection. Source: Author. 6. Detail illustration of agricultural transformation process. Source: Author.

References 1. The Border Consortium. (TBC). (2014). The Border Consortium Programme Report. Bangkok, Thailand. 2. The Border Consortium. (TBC). (2015). The Border Consortium Programme Report. Bangkok,Thailand. 3. The Border Consortium. (TBC). (2014). Protection and Security Concerns in South East Burma. Bangkok, Thailand. 4. UNHCR. (2016). Stories from Myanmar Refugees. HpaAn, Myanmar: UNHRC. Retrieved from http://data.unhcr. org/thailand/storyline.php

atlantis economic and social crisis.

Sex Work and the City Territorial formations beyond red light districts by

Michaela Litsardaki

Architect Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly, Greece Sex workers' rights advocate

Introduction The term ‘sex work’ and ‘sex worker’ describes the subject and the work it performs in the wider context of the sex industry regardless of its own sexuality or gender identity and expression. In this definition, included are both those who offer direct sexual services (for example, prostitutes, call girls, etc.) and those involved in a more indirect and distant manner (e.g. strippers and pornographic actors). This categorization can prove helpful to better understand these differences, which, partly, construct the hierarchy among different approaches of sex work, in terms of the cost and the type of the provided services, the workplace, the number of clients but mainly the exposure to risk and violence. Although sex work and people involved in it have always drawn wide media attention and academic research in the fields of sex/gender, psychology, sociology studies, etc., not many scholars have focused on the geographies of sex work and its spatial distribution. As such, even though it has been noted that sex work characteristically occurs in particular spaces, little attempt has been made to examine the nature of these spaces and the dynamics of their territorialization.

Elaboration Driven by the theories of Michel Foucault (1984) on “heterotopias” and Michel de Certeau (1990) on the intricacies of resistance, it could be assumed that sex work is a means of imposing social order and produce ‘other’ spaces which mirror and yet upset what is outside. Phil Hubbard (1999, 195) has tried to appropriate the concept of heterotopia as an ‘opposite’ description of sites associated with sex work. Specifically, he mentions that “this concept is useful as it captures the sense in which these spaces are not simply spaces on (and of) the margins, but are anomalous, blurred spaces which play an ambiguous role between the moral centre and the immoral margins”. Tim Cresswell

(1996), following de Certeau’s arguments has concluded that intentionally acting ‘out of place’ is to refuse to play by the rules, meaning that while the ‘powerful’ in any given context may classify, survey and control space, the ‘weak’ can only divert, manipulate and subvert these spaces, but not produce their own. In this sense, he implies that practices of resistance cannot be separated from practices of domination and must be entwined in some way with such actions as exclusion or segregation. Besides this theoretical background, it is quite important to examine other factors that have participated in the formation of sex workers’ public territories. Thus, having as a case study the city of Athens allows the exploration of a complex and paradoxical pattern of sex work during a period of

One factor that should be taken into consideration is the shift of sexuality over the years resulting in a mutual shift in the spatiality of sex work. During the previous century, sex work was prevailed under the quest for marital love, which was in the form of sexual exhumation of the man, corresponding to the socially prevalent orthodox ethics of sexual intercourse. In this sense, brothels and red-light districts were to be found around places of dominant masculinity such as military camps and ports. Not until the end of 1970’s did the premarital sexual contacts, such as those that never led to marriage, through occasional or even long-lasting relationships, begin to become more and more socially acceptable and clients turned to the search for sex workers who would satisfy ‘sophisticated’ sexual desires. The value system that was revised at the time, rejected sexual intercourse as minimal and/ or decongestant, and claimed and proposed ways of organizing sexuality in terms of sexual desire (Lazos, 1996). Accordingly, in Athens, the geographies of sex work started to change and vary throughout the urban tissue as the city expanded. At first, the abolition of “Vourla”, a state-regulated brothel that operated for about 60 years (since 1873) in the outskirts of Piraeus, had as a result the relocation of sex work activity in an area close to the port called “Troumpa”. Troumpa offered a great variety of entertainment, most of which was related to sex work industry like burlesque shows, live music and certainly brothels. Although being famous as a core of illegal activity, it was at the same time quite popular of its activities on offer, especially through films of the time, which illustrated and

consolidated the societal phantasies on sex workers’ profiles. In 1967, because of an attempt of gentrification orchestrated by the Greek military junta (1967–1974), all the brothels in this area were forced to shut down (Belavilas, 2010) and sex work was relocated in Syggrou Avenue and the bars of the main coastal road of Athens, called Poseidonos Str. Sex workers then spread to most of the night entertainment zones, either formerly disguised or not. In the early 1980s, numerous brothels were set up in old and abandoned houses in Metaxourgio, specifically around Iasonos Street (Kiousis, 2014). The sex work developed collaterally in a cause-effect relationship, during the suburbanization of Athens. Thus, in Metaxourgio, two opposing flows of people appeared, the first concerning previous inhabitants who left the central regions towards the suburbs while the second referred to immigrants and sex workers (mostly female), who entered the abandoned and cheap real-estate, creating their own heterotopias. Another factor that presumably contributed to the aforementioned movement was the fact that in the surrounding area, especially on the streets of Sophocleous, Athinas and Agios Konstantinos, street sex work had already been activated. In order to conceptualise the paradoxes of the post-modern sex work geographies of Athens it is necessary to look through the regulatory legislation, which has always interwoven public health with morality issues. This dual relationship continues to affect the state's attitude towards sex work, which lies under the need to preserve moral behaviour, as defined by social and religious norms, and to prevent and diminish the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The current legal framework in Greece

The outcome of these provisions however, as it is widely demonstrated in the sex work map of Athens (fig. 3) is that the law has failed to be enforced in many levels. In an attempt to record the territories of sex work in Athens, different typologies and sites were explored by field observations made in most of the areas from December 2017 to May 2018 together with informal interviews conducted with sex workers (Litsardaki, 2018). The different sites consist of brothels, studios, massage parlors, porn cinemas, strip clubs, hotels-by-the-hour as well as street segments. At this point it should be highlighted that when referring to territories of sex work, any kind of invisible network or community is excluded since they do not leave a spatial footprint on the public realm. Hence, call girls or sex workers who act in private sight were not taken into consideration. Brothels and studios are the main enclosed cores of sex work that are visible and accessible to the public (in most cases). Basically, the differences between these two premises lies on the fact that studios are aiming to higher-income clientele, therefore, when not in the vicinity of brothels, they are randomly located in the urban fabric. Nowadays, brothels are concentrated mainly at Metaxourgeio area, on Fylis Street and on Liosion Street. These ‘red light districts’ of Athens do not share a common model of spatial organization. At Metaxourgeio, which is quite popular for its entertainment and crafts/industrial zone, the brothels are located around Iasonos Street (which has been pedestrianized) and are housed in old neoclassical buildings of one or two floors. Fylis Street, used to be a middle-class neighborhood, which continues to be a high-dense residential area. However, there is a big number of brothels

concerning sex work is mostly based on the law 2734/1999. In spite of the obscure criteria, which tend to violate the human and work rights of sex workers (especially the ones that refer to the marital status and the age limit of help staff), the spatial specifications required for licensed sex work spaces stresses the attempt of the state to incommode and even make impossible to work legally within the urban tissue. More specifically, brothels are not allowed to be located in a 200m ratio away from churches, schools, kindergartens, nursing homes and hospitals, youth centers, sports centers, boarding schools, libraries and charities, as well as squares and playgrounds. Moreover, it is forbidden for sex work premises to be installed in buildings declared as official cultural and architectural monuments or having two different licenses concerning two different premises in the same building. At the same time, the existing legal framework does not allow sex work to be performed on the streets or in hotels.

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occupying ground-floors or basements of buildings dated form the period of the Athenian Modernism, coexisting with the residents who do not seem discouraged by the presence of sex work. A notable fact is that every Wednesday an open-air street market is held just in front of the brothels’ entrances not causing any disturbances. Finally, in Liosia, which is a central road axis, there are some brothels on the

the anonymity and the coverage. It is no coincidence, therefore, that massage parlors are located in cut-off areas not directly related to sex work, where people with higher incomes and greater need for anonymity are to be found. A typical example is the expensive and once aristocratic Kolonaki area.

frontages to the road, while most of them are to be found close and perpendicular to the railway tracks. Massage parlors are a special category of indoor sex work since they offer massage at high prices but they also provide sex services. Sex work in such places is selective and may refer to regular clients only. The high prices can be justified by

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9 1

1 Vourla 2 Troumpa 3 4 5 6

Metaxourgio Fylis Liosion Kolonaki

7 8 9 10 11 12

Patission Str.

Poseidonos Av. Syggrou Av. Kavalas Av. Omonoia

Pedion Areos Park

The spaces of sex work mentioned above concern mostly female (both cis and transgendered) employees, who work in the “safety” offered by each premise. However, there is a large number of sex workers that operate in open-air public spaces, such as roads and squares, called ‘patches’. Each patch has its own spatial characteristics and is consisted of sex workers who share common social labels e.g. migrants, trans women etc. Although, these identities develop separately from the sex work itself, they seem to have a huge impact concerning the range of offered services and prices. Hence, a kind of hierarchy is formed which can be understood or recognized through the selected geographical space of work. Typical street sex work patches are Patission Street and the Avenues Poseidonos, Syggrou and Kavalas where sex workers are distributed in a linear scheme. Unlike female sex workers, men have a smaller spatial footprint in the urban fabric and tend to have a circular organization of high density. This occurs, primarily, due to the strong stigmatization of their homosexual clients and the fact that many male sex workers prefer, for the same reason, to reach out to their clients via impersonal media like the internet (in the cyber realm a wide range of sex advertisements, web sites and apps are offered). A more complex phenomenon occurs in territories where both women (cis and trans) and men are employed (see Note). In these territories, sex workers may be part of more than one socially marginalized group like immigrants, refugees, homeless people, Roma and drug users. This phenomenon calls for a further analysis through the analytical framework of intersectionality because it also effects the type of clientele these sex workers have. In accordance with their own social status, they have clients with lower income and they tend to be more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. At the same time, they have difficulty in accessing health and prevention services, and are therefore at greater risk of infection with sexually transmitted diseases. In Athens, these territories have been created in the city center, especially in Omonoia square and its surroundings as well as in Pedion Areos Park. Omonoia’s sex work scene runs on a non-stop basis, especially during the day, which is quite paradoxical,

because of the proximity of the police station and authorities. Phil Hubbard (1999) argues that the geographies of sex work can only be understood in relation to wider moral judgements about the acceptability of sex work in total since ‘these places’ serve to construct and reconstruct popular understandings of the symbolic limits of sexual desire. As such, the several hotels-bythe-hour which accommodate and provide indoor space for sex work were taken into account. Seldom are they found away from Omonoia or Syggrou Av. and Poseidonos Av. and it is common for sex workers to have already agreed with the hoteliers to give them a percentage of their earnings. Some of them live in these hotels, as well. Apart from those who work on the sidewalk, this type of hotels also benefits those who work in sex through ads or online platforms. It is fair to say that this kind of facilities operate like informal and liberal brothels where you have no restriction whatsoever except those of paying a fare to use the space. Porn cinemas operate in a similar way. However, it is within these heterotopic spaces where male sex work has flourished and over the years extinguished the female one. As a result, the links between sex work and these places as well as other sites of sex industry e.g. strip clubs, are undeniable. Conclusion In conclusion, sex work in a post-modern metropolis like Athens seems to intersect and assert space beyond moral and legal boundaries resulting in complex territories which ignore their own surroundings. The dynamics of the contemporary sex work industry can only be understood in relation to the geographies of late capitalist cities, imbued as they are with complex spatialities of power, desire and disgust. Geographies of sex work are more fragmented and fluid that might be anticipated, cutting across the public and the private, the legal and the illegal and the moral and the immoral. As such, the spaces of sex work form a paradoxical geography, in which one person’s space of exclusion has become another’s space of inclusion, albeit one which acknowledges the difference between moral and immoral expressions of heterosexuality. • 43

References 1. Belavilas, N. (2010, October). The architecture of dictatorship: Troumpa [Web log post]. Retrieved April 20, 2018, from historytheory6blog.files.wordpress. com/2016/05/trouba_n_ belavilas_2010.pdf 2. Certeau, M. D. (1990). L’invention du quotidien, I :Arts de faire (L. Giard, Ed.). Paris: Gallimard. Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place: Geography, ideology, and transgression. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. 3. Foucault, M. (1984). Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5, 46-49. Hubbard, P. (1999). Sex and the city: geographies of prostitution in the urban West. Farnham: Ashgate Pub Ltd. 4. Kiousis, G. (2014, November 2). Prostitutes now and ever. Kyriakatiki Eleftherotypia, pp. 48-49. 5. Lazos, G. (1996). Sexuality as a value in modern Greece (published PhD thesis). Athens. Panteion University 6. Litsardaki, M. L. (2018). Red Umbrella Athens (Published diploma thesis). Volos. University of Thessaly. Note The sexual identity of sex workers is not a part and point of analysis of this article. However, it should be clarified that male sex workers, whose customers are of the same gender, are often identified as heterosexual.

1, 2. Papadopoulos, M. (n.d.). [Photograph found in The Attendants]. Retrieved June 23, 2016, from http://theattendantsproject.com/ 3. Spatial footprint of sex work in Athens. Source: Author. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. T. K. (2018, January 10). Retrieved April 21, 2018, from https:// www.athensvoice.gr/life/urban-culture/ athens/411776_amarties-stin-odo-fylis

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Graffiti. About its origins

MSc Landscape Architecture TU Delft

Visual expressions as a form of human communication are a phenomenon that dates back to the beginning of humanity. The foundations of graffiti began when the primitive man became aware of his surroundings and generated the need to graphically reflect his reality in order to leave a record of his thoughts, customs and experiences. It was the result of a primitive impulse to manifest his thoughts on his surrounding surfaces as a form of marking the world. Many times, made with sharp objects, men left a mark on the walls, a record of a print – often ephemeral - of his anonymous transit through the world.

Catalina Rey

in cooperation with David Caralt

Thesis Guide and Architect

In that sense, for Brassaï, a Hungarian photographer, painter and writer, the expression on the walls is the most primitive representation of art, which is why he considers that the modern discovery of graffiti as a form of expression that inspired many artists to "go back" to the walls: "Art has returned to the origins, to the arts of all times, to the archaic arts, to the instinctive gestures, to the primordial signs.” (Brassaï, quoted in De Gouvion Saint-Cyr, 2008, p. 22) With the development of human settlements and urban systems, the inhabitants started to use their own city as a canvas for the manifestation of their ideas. These inscriptions made on the walls of the first urban systems were generated by the visceral instinct to injure the walls, to create revealing messages of the daily life of its inhabitants and to manifest the capacities of human abstraction. Those representations, known as graffiti, have transformed the urban walls as an

ideal surface for the expression of social, cultural and political tensions. In that sense, graffiti are usually understood as referential framework of marginality, dissidence and delinquency. Historically, graffiti have had a sense of clandestinity and spontaneity: they require a certain speed in order for them to be elaborated. Initially, as these were generated as a kind of carving in the walls, they were indications to stop and create a cathartic process with the city itself. As this process takes time, citizens were forced to express their thoughts with the most absolute abstraction, coming to represent a face simply with a circumference and two incisions as eyes. Graffiti. About its analysis Graffiti represents more than just a painting on the wall; for Brassaï, it corresponded to emanations from the dream world, a true essence of reality. The architect and painter Hundertwasser considered the action of graffiti as something so natural, that it admitted its existence as a constituent element of life and housing:

"When we allow nature to repaint the walls (...) then they will be human and we can start a new life.” (Hundertwasser, 1981, quoted in Figueroa, 2005, p. 14)

GRAFFITI and ARCHITECTURE 1

Case Study: Graffiti as form of appropriation of Architecture in the 1 Neighborhood unit of Lorenzo Arenas of Concepción, Chile 2013. 44

atlantis However, in today's society we understand these manifestations as a marginal art due to their condition of clandestinity and anonymity; it is not common to see who performs them, but they appear every day, they are there and they are part of the urban landscape and our everyday life. This "marginal character" is related to the appropriation of interstitial spaces and cracks in the urban fabric, of empty and forgotten places where the memory of cities is concentrated. Additionally, graffiti are linked to an environmental protest, where citizens see their own city as the most immediate canvas to expose their discontents in front of the society: the walls become the space for political demonstrations, protest, social inequality, or simply exclamations of everyday citizens.

Graffiti. About the appropriation of architecture Understanding graffiti as a way of thinking about the city, which is exposed to be seen and which uses urban walls as a support, these types of representations reflect the urban feeling and are a form of appropriation of the city. For Epstein (2007), the walls are spaces of expression that sustain the history, ideology and identities of the cities, being a way of appropriating concretely the public space and participating in the social dialogue. The mere presence of the man who frequents a place continuously generates architecture and space; when walking, the human being performs an act of stepping on the Earth, denaturing it, changing its essence. Hence the importance of “leaving a mark“, where the essence of inhabitance consists in “personifying", in making

atlantis spaces their own. And it is at this point when graffiti becomes relevant, as it is a manifestation of this sense of belonging; it generates identity and gives meaning to an urban context that is not always familiar to citizens. Graffiti. About Latin America and the social neighborhood Lorenzo Arenas. In Latin America, graphic expression through walls took relevance in the 60's and 70's, with the Mexican mural movement that drove the visceral expression of the materialization of thoughts and ideas as a form of protest against the undemocratic regimes that were ruling in the Latin American countries. Lacking freedom of expression and forced to remain in hiding, citizens called for a general strike against famine, social injustices, political repression and to express discontent with the existing socio-political system.

The Lorenzo Arenas sector was designed in the early 1940s by the popular Social Security Housing Fund in the midst of the spread of the aesthetic ideals of the modern movement. It is considered as the beginning of the "neighborhood unit" typology as social housing in the city of Concepción, where the blocks of medium height form common nuclei and patios encourage the community to gather. Within the Lorenzo Arenas neighborhood unit there is some uniformity with respect to the spatial location of graffiti, since most of them are located on the exterior surfaces of the buildings, exposing themselves to the public space of the Avenue May 21st. Here, graffiti are located in the less important facades for the composition of the neighborhood. However, these facades can be considered the most relevant ones in terms of urban configuration since they are the ones facing the busiest street.

As for their relationship with architecture, graffiti respect the physical and perceptual limits that architecture provides them with, in some cases even appropriating elements like windows to incorporate them into themselves This relationship arises from the people’s need to appropriate the place. Graffiti is generated by the impulse to reshape the space according to our own identity in a generic city. It represents the necessity for a “possession of something public” using the buildings as its most immediate canvas in order to enrich a space that belongs to no one, but at the same time belongs to everyone.•

References 1. De Gouvion Saint-Cyr, A. (2008). Una búsqueda insólita. Graffiti: Brassai. Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid. 2. Epstein, A. (2007). Los graffitis de Montevideo, Apuntes para una antropología de las paredes. Extracted on 26 August 2013 from: http://www.unesco.org.uy/shs/fileadmin/templates/shs/archivos/anuario2007/articulo_13.pdf 3. Pérez, L., and Fuentes, P. (2012). Concepción, Barrios que contruyeron la Ciudad Moderna. Concepción, Chile.

1. Appropriation of architectural elements (staircase). Source: Author's personal file 2. Graffiti location within the Lorenzo Arenas neighborhood unit. Source: Adapted from Pérez & Fuentes (2012). 3. Appropriation of architectural elements (windows). Source: Author's personal file. 4. Graphic information based in abstract and organic language. Source: Author's personal file. 5. Expression of discontent with the existing socio-political system. Source: Author's personal file.

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Contested Architecture and Performative Urbanities

The videogame

Utilizing videogames as a mediator between designers and users by

Zoe Diakaki & Christos Mellios Architects

The city In the decades that followed WWII, Greece experienced an exponential growth. People witnessed an unprecedented urban development that was led by the private sector while it lacked the appropriate civic governance and regulating policies. This process resulted in a very dense and homogenous urban environment populated almost exclusively by instances of the same building typology aka the

still fail to acknowledge it” states Rem Koolhaas. The city has become a set of mono-functional components, replicating an out dated version of it while all potential has been diminished. No one can disagree with Rainer Maria Rilke saying that there’s nothing that confines us more in an illusion other than repetition. Our contemporary perception of space is constructed by repetitive sequences and manages to justify itself as undoubtedly normal, a succession of familiar events taking place within well defined territories.

“polykatoikia”. Standardization conflicted with the high percentage of self-ownership, as home owners felt “entitled” to adjust their space according to their own aesthetic or functional aspirations, in most cases disregarding existing regulations or taking advantage of gray areas. However, Greek cities reach an ostensible equilibrium by accepting the informal as a counterbalancing force. Informality functions as an emergency valve to relieve extra stress caused in the system by the inadequacy in spatial planning and design. In a way the practice of architecture itself becomes a contested domain where users and designers fight over their right to define space.

In that sense we can no longer solely rely on designers’ expertise nor on users’ intelligence. There is an immediate need to restructure these roles. The environment around us has been shaped by artificial constructions compromised by what is possible in technological terms, but, also, on what is 'thinkable'. A new tactical mode of operation has to be employed, a form of action that lies within that gaps and slips of conventional thinking and eventually do away with centralities, hierarchic relationships and exclusivities.

The system 2

In a system where the fouled up coexists with the normal, there is an increasing need for designers and users to establish a new relationship and expand their current responsibilities. It is important to note that none of the above groups is able to perceive space freed from imposed identities, memory and remnants of history. “Every day we exhaust our past, but we

Infrastructure

Transitional Space Standard configuration of the space

Space with more than one uses

Transcendence of private

Protocols

Relation with the Public Space

Free configuration of space

Private space on the boundaries with the public space

Private clusters

Hub

The 'videogame' is introduced as a vehicle capable of renegotiating our relative positions and the limits of our perception. The subject enters the virtual realm and becomes a player, navigating their avatar through an overlay of bizarre aesthetics, textual information and contradicting phenomena. It is a world built with the sole purpose to mock traditional thinking and subvert conventions. The player is asked to create his own narrative by participating in a series of events that constantly undermine the notion of 'the normal state'. Unfamiliarity is used as a device to provoke a 'what if' question, while each event attempts to elicit players into a form of a detached, suspicious inquiry. Interactivity is a key aspect in that process. In a sense that interaction is a (physical) need of the subjects, that elaborates their thinking and the deepest comprehension of their stimuli. That stimulus always revolves around the identification of an event in a specific place as normal or abnormal. Both meanings are automatically constructed as polar opposites as soon as one of them is formally declared. What is essential in this gesture is where the boundary line is located and which properties are assigned to each side.

alternative reading of space is attempted. Glimpsing at Rem Koolhaas’ Generic City starts an inquiry towards the “apotheosis of the multiple choice concept”. Beyond subversion and unfamiliarity lies a vision of urbanity with porous boundaries, soft edges and alternating frequencies. There lies the experience of our urban environments more like being adrift in an archipelago rather than inhabiting insular places. Ultimately the videogame demonstrates the conflict between the known, identified and inscribed-with-meaningful-actions space and its potentialities. Going back to understanding urbanity as a complex system, videogames can be stretched infinitely to describe any physical or imaginary form in order to produce new innovative conceptualizations and equally engage all actors.•

Interactivity does not only apply to players. The whole in-game action become a spectacle. If we were to make an analogy with theatre, designers would double as scriptwriters and scenographers and players as actors and directors. While the second group performs the first one spectates. That new set of roles becomes the cognitive device that allows us to envisage new forms of collaboration. As players perform their part they are also encouraged to deviate, in other words improvise. Their effort to understand the notional boundaries of their roles, broadens their understanding, thus educates them. But as their decisions start to form a new kind map, they begin to reveal their true identity much like Bertol Brecht’s actors. The videogame, as the narrative progresses, allows us to re-imagine ourselves, others, how we engage with our immediate environments and exchange information. Slightly paraphrasing Gualeni’s term we propose a shelf-reflexive videogame as “a means of materializing critical thought and/or satirical perspectives ...” on the ways a place is inhabited. Back to the city

en -g

erat

y p r i va t

n stan

pro dard

e - public

toc

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toc

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pro

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Architecture has always been a formal act of inscribing physical or imagined boundaries. The way contemporary Greek cities have developed has resulted in an understanding of space through binary conditions. Urban becomes a collection of nodes associated with pre-choreographed routines and scripted behaviors. Here, an

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References 1. Gualeni, S. (2016). Self-reflexive videogames : observations and corollaries on virtual worlds as philosophical artifacts. G|A|M|E - The Italian Journal of Game Studies, 1(5). 2. Koolhass, R. (1998). The Generic City. New York: The Monacelli Press.

1. Athens Goudi District. Source: Yiorgis Gerolumpos (http://art.yerolymbos.com/art/ athens-spread/) 2. Polykatoikia as a System: A physical model that analyses the topology of the building and highlights multiple trajectories of the inhabitants based on conformity. Source: Authors. 3. Polynesia: The Polykatoikia as a potential archipelago of places. An effort to think beyond artificial boundaries, formal identities and the notion of insular spaces. Source: Authors.

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Territories of

here

there

and

Infra/supra-structures for multi-temporal transmigratory

Alejandra Quezada

practices at the Hispaniola border

What spatial responses can create a counter narrative of migration in Hispaniola? As an opportunity to evaluate the relations between the spatio-temporal realm and the Haitian-Dominican border, the graduation project to complete the MSc in Urbanism from TU Delft, explores the spatial connotations of transmigratory practices on this territory and creates design methods to negotiate multiple functions, itinerancy and planned/unplanned activities. The design proposal reshapes a strategic border checkpoint into a common social and economic space by introducing a matrix of multifunctional infrastructure, roving program and adaptable urban design frameworks. Hispaniola and the Border The migration debate has not escaped the Haitian-Dominican context. The complex socio-political history, the different languages (Creole and French vs. Spanish) and the asymmetry of economies (GDP of 71,5 billions USD in contrast to 8 billions) are reasons to explain the migration pattern and its polarizing narrative on this Caribbean island. Along with that, centuries colonialism, invasions and oppressive governments, have given these countries a shared layered history, tainted with continuous distrust on the other side. After 2013, the debate has increased its tension due to the court ruling restricting rights to individuals born on Dominican land of Haitian origin, retroactive to 1929. The national and international pressure resulting from this legislative decision exacerbated the anti-Haitian sentiment and the conflicts between the two countries. One of the biggest arguments is the economic cost that migrants impose on the scarce Dominican social services. However,

Architect and Urbanist

Haitian migrants contribute with 5.4% of the Dominican GDP, yet only benefit with 2,9% of Dominican social expenses, and due to their migratory condition, do not have access to government welfare systems. Many of these working migrants, 49% of them (ONE, 2013), make enormous efforts to support relatives in natal Haiti via financial remittances. These represents 11% of all remittances sent to Haiti and more recently, have helped Haitians living in extreme poverty after the earthquake. With this entrance of foreign exchange, families have been able to access health and education in Haiti (World Bank, 2012). Locally, throughout the Hispaniola border, weekly binational markets demonstrate the intricate socioecological entanglements of frontier territories and with that, the interdependencies of both countries sharing the island. These markets find their origins in local initiatives where residents crossed the unsupervised line to purchase goods on the other side. Years later, after the embargo on Haiti in 1991, this trend evolved into ‘binational fairs’, taking place twice a week on the Dominican side. It initiated a strong economic exchange that is continuously expanding with a predatory relation to the local environment, yet it constitutes the main source of income for border dwellers. Concomitantly, these fairs are evidence of deep-rooted tensions overlapping with opportunities of contact and cooperation to address the ecological challenges of the border. The perception of this territory differs from Haitians and Dominicans. For Haitians the border is an attraction; the proximity to the frontier allows access to health and education services, to exercise commerce, purchase food, obtain jobs or harvest agricultural land. For Dominicans the construct is different: the border is a 50

dangerous area (Mejía, 2015). Is either a transit point for goods or a far, nonaccessible region defined by poverty in its extreme forms. According to the diagnosis of PNUMA (2013) the border is a ‘poor and isolated’ region. However, even with the vulnerabilities of the border, the socio-economic differences are palpable. The Dominican side still presents more services and opportunities, which creates asymmetries. Such condition, argues Dilla (2015), is the reason why the relation between these two disparate countries emerges in the first place. He states, only under sufficient degree of inequality, border cities engage in intense stable interrelations.

are used to grant identity, citizenship and access to rights, thus penalizing and expelling those outside the homogenous group (Appadurai, 2015). Moreover, the nation-state is a relatively new construct promoted by dominant classes, which uses ideas of collective memories to validate loyalties towards a territory (Glick, Basch & Szanton, 1995). Migration rarely implies a clean new slate, is a twofold process of engaging with a new territory and keeping ties with the old one. According to Glick et al.(1995), migration is a transnational practice. Migrants are in reality transmigrants , they do not simply leave home and try to incorporate into a new country, they are ’rooted’ in their new destination but also maintain links with their place of origin. For the authors, transmigrants are ‘immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to one or more nation-state ’ (p.46). Transmigratory practices are manifested in constant exchange of means and frequent travel thanks to the increasing reduction in the friction of distance. This is then, a repetitive action and for Lefebvre (2004), repetition is part of rhythm; the one cannot exist without the other. Rhythm is seminal

to grasp the notions of time repetition, which defines territories and their sociospatial dynamics. On the island, they are different frequencies of travel for migrants (See Figure 1). Between Santo Domingo and Port-auPrince, entrepreneurs constantly travel for economic purposes or visit family. At the border, is evident the multiple variations of transmigration: commuters crossing the border every day or weekly to school and cultivate land. Also, more stable movements create translocal settlements along the border. These translocal units are also inserted in other cities in the island, mainly on Dominican territory. Their movement and associate practices create new types of spatial configurations that respond to the nature of movement and permanence of transnational lifestyles. To illustrate, the binational markets at the border represent self-organized spaces in constant transformation supporting transmigration and global networks. Between Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo As an exercise to localize transmigratory practices, I selected Malpasse and the corridor where is embedded. The site is a strategic node, connecting Port-au-

Framing Migration

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According to the conversations held with locals, on Mondays and Thursdays, there is a 50-75% increment on visitors and activities, creating an overlap of practices. This defines the itinerant nature of Malpasse while at the same time, hinders its operability. On these days, Malpasse transforms from an insufficient customs centre to an informal open market. This is complemented with logistic, transport and security. On those occasions, the weekly and the daily overlap. The changes in use indicate the programmatic nature of the site and demonstrate the multiple temporalities dominating the narrative of Malpasse. Every day, between the Dominican border gate and the allocation of Haitian border patrol, called Tierra de Nadie [No Man’s Land, there is a daily street market. Monday and Thursday, the Dominican border is open and there is a free zone of economic exchange. Apart from these activities daily commuters, kids and elderly cross the border to access services. Other transmigrants cross this point in their travels, with different frequencies, yearly or monthly, creating a constant and itinerant nature of the rhythms on site. Different activities take priority during the week. Beyond national military security, logistics and transport are constant practices that present higher intensity on market days while migration and customs controls, operate every day and coincide with other activities.

Inhabitants of the border cross the line on different temporal frameworks. These commuters, from kids to seniors, cross to the Dominican Republic to satisfy their daily needs (PNUMA, 2013; Mejía, 2015). Everyday, kids wait until the border gates open at 08:00 to go to school. Man and women cross it on their route to work, while other cross it on the weekends to avoid the daily military apparatus of the border. This pattern reveals the character of the border; migrants are in constant movement, they come and go with multiple frequencies and participate in two communities. Another instance of this temporal nature, are the binational markets. These weekly socioeconomic events open twice a week and create a free space of trade and exchange.

Migration is a practice that transgresses and challenges borders and territories. Global migration, trade and cultural interrelations are far from new phenomena (Smith, 2001). With increasing migration, the nation-state is in crisis, the traditional narrative of sovereignty is based on ethnic coherence attained with common origin or soil, which

Prince and Santo Domingo, hosting the most important border logistic checkpoint and one of the largest binational markets on the territory. This site exemplifies the trend along the corridor: the direction of the movement is mainly directed to the Dominican side. The site itself operates as customs facility, migration control, military security checkpoint, street market and public transport station. For instance, the binational fairs combine the model of ‘cash and carry’ and retail vending on the street (See Figure 2).

The major spatial realization from the field trip is the interdependence of mobile and fixed physical elements, since the different temporalities of Malpasse affect the spatial configurations on site. To illustrate, the daily street market on the Haitian side, and thus mobile vendors, generate a higher density of temporal occupation in space but also creates opportunities for recreational facilities and public transport stops. On the Dominican part of the border, where binational markets are held, the occupation of space differs. Containers for instance, indicate a semi-temporal notion. Next to these fixed elements, mobile vendors identify physical affordances that allow them to appropriate space and engage in their commercial and transmigratory

atlantis practices. Wooden posts allow them to set their vending spot. Containers are not only storage units, they also serve to display items, to create temporary shade units and demarcate space. The program of Malpasse influences the predominant spatial configurations for each day. As a result, mobile spatial configurations are in constant change and the relations between fixed and mobile are in frequent dialogue and negotiation (See Figure 3).

socio-spatial dynamics. The absence of regional mechanisms such as transportation systems or cross-border institutions, and infrastructure, the lack of amenities and facilities and the time differences between each country, limit the ability of local inhabitants to develop transfrontier lifestyles.

uncertainty to the site. To approach Malpasse, my response employs material and programmatic interventions across scales and temporal frameworks with the aim of validating multi-temporal practices, fostering bi-directional movement and developing spatial configurations that respond to uncertainties (See Figure 4).

The Infrastructural, The Itinerant and The Mobile-fixed Dialectic

The analysis also demonstrated the differences on each side of the border in terms of density and typologies of vending and in regards of function and program as well as the resulting hostility the place promotes. The combination of uses negatively disrupts the spatial configuration, which generates pejorative

The complexities of Malpasse find evidence in the vulnerable infrastructural services, limited comfort, dry- climate and security pressures, in combination with social exchange and border cooperation opportunities. In addition, is positioned next to Azuéi Lake, which has increased in area over the last decade, adding climate

For Velikov & Thün (2017a;b), infrastructure is a modern concept referring to any apparatus associated with the production of territory, is the leading technical advance, diligently structuring and restructuring geopolitical relations. The agency of infrastructure is material, institutional, relational and symbolic, while also being a utilitarian device for societies and used in strategic and political purposes. Moreover, it enables spatial arrangements for less violent relations on and to the habitat. The itinerancy of these border markets finds similarities in the thinking of the Misiones Pedagógicas, held in rural Spain between 1931 and 1937. Otero Verzier (2017) analyses this ambulant institution, which consisted on a group on young men, art replicas, movies, books and a truck to create weekly installations around rural communities in Spain. Albeit its limitations, she argues, that these events created new political spaces and exposed the potentials of open and diffuse urban spatialities. Their modest appearance does not diminish their infiltration logic; is capable of transforming the assumptions of public space and give agency to the inhabitants in the transit of such institutions. From the analysis of Malpasse and its multiple spatial configurations is evident the interdependency between fixed structures and mobile practices. Building on such realization, the work of Franck & Stevens (2007) about public space informs the direction of this design exercise. These authors argue that space becomes ‘loose’ as a result of diverse activities, appropriation and the inhabitant’s recognition of the physical affordances a space enables, acknowledging its inherent risks and opportunities. These spatial settings should accommodate planned and unplanned activities. The physicality of a loose space is defined by fixed elements serving multiple purposes. Steps, fences or columns encourage people to behave in multiple ways. However, the excess of openness hinders the possibilities of appropriation if there is a requirement for additional elements. Furthermore, spatial looseness should be understood in dialectic terms with tight and restricted configurations. The tensions from this dynamism introduce the constant negotiation of spatial transformations. Open-ended is also used to describe flexible open spaces with

affordances for spontaneity (Fernando, 2007). In his analysis, diverse functions on the streets, multiple spatial and aesthetic qualities as well as adaptability of use, create a complex landscape indicative of open-endedness. The aforementioned categories of intervention are closely intertwined and facilitate any spatial approximation to the site. Infrastructure creates the framework for planned and unplanned, is the apparatus that foster itinerant practices. This is also reinforced with mobile and fixed conceptions of space since it allows multiple uses. Itinerant programs demand structures with a flexible nature, which is satisfied with mobile and fixed spaces for appropriation. In addition, the programmatic layer introduces the notion of public space for local culture. These categories of intervention can also be understood through scale and under different temporalities. Production on Border Territories Since the role of the site affects the insular territory, I defined the approach from the insular to the site resolution. First, is to reinforce dependencies with the Haitian territory and bolster bidirectional

movement across the border. To materialize such task, I propose an accessibility route that connects communities of the Hoya de Enriquillo/Cul-de-Sac Basin, where Malpasse is located. In terms of transport, the absence of governance institutions and infrastructure for freight transportation is often a motive for conflict and strikes between transport workers of both countries (Scheker, 2012). Public transport at the border is a point of divergence; transport routes are only allowed until the border gate; local communication stops at the area of Malpasse. This entails a regional and local cross-border public transport routes and a boat transport system to introduce more actors to the lake, instead of its current use for charcoal trade, therefore integrating ecological, economic and social systems. This action facilitates access to the proposed itinerant program of the border. Expanding and creating activities complementary to the border market is the instrument of this project to promote bidirectionality. This implies creating frequent events on the Haitian side of the border to balance the current trend. Such program exhibits different temporalities: weekly, quarterly, bi-annually and yearly with practices related to the transnational nature of the area.

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A Frontier Space of Multiple Temporalities After evaluating the current spatial conditions of the site and through the perspective of infrastructural thinking, program and the dialectic of mobile and fixed spatial practices, the creation of the border space relies on these categories of intervention. The infrastructural physically translate to the definition of the frontier space, drawing the new boundaries of the common space. The programmatic is seen in the changes in use of space and materialized in open spaces for the unplanned, stages for events and physical structures for affordances. The mobile and the fixed takes shape in the built elements that define rigid and loose space. Buildings and containers host specific activities and their position creates spaces for vending and spontaneous activities. The spatial reorganization of the design project considers the existing operations of the site and the importance for the region. It also incorporates recreational and environmental functions to promote border territory and binational exchange. Based on the notions of territory and infrastructure described earlier, the project

atlantis challenges the existing understanding of a border. Instead of intensifying the security infrastructural apparatus with extra militarization and detention facilities -as the growing trend on the Dominican side-, the design for Malpasse identifies the narrative of the site and the impact in the context to consolidate its functional relations. The infrastructural thinking behind the new frontier territory integrates multimodal transport and migratory facilities as physical elements that shape the new free space. The approximation of the design redefines the line into a pedestrian promenade on the lake. This gesture seeks to transform the assumptions of the rigid border and create a common space. At the same time, reintroduces the water condition to the site. In regards to the program, the proposal equalizes the rhythms of use of both sides to maximize the generation of one space. It expands the temporal nature of the site and throughout the week different practices have priority. The cash and carry market days keep their schedule, Monday and Thursday and the rest of the weekdays are given to intense logistics, migratory and security demands. Due to the absence of recreational and cultural facilities on the border territory, weekends in Malpasse take the role of an open public space for social experiences in Spanish and Haitian Creole. Apart from the weekly temporal system, this design project recognizes the roving program of the border territory, such as ecotourism and production binational fair or sports and cultural festivals. The strengthening of these events represents socio-economic potentialities for the area. This informs the decision of providing physical structures, plazas and stages to accommodate regional events.

these activities. Weekly, the site undergoes multiple iterations. On market days, the flexible structures enable changes of use, thus vendors activate and redefine the space and on weekends the public space is the most prominent area (See Figure 6). Final Remarks This academic exercise demonstrates the role of the spatial realm in creating other narratives for migration if design recognizes the knowledge of the site and its users. The context of Hispaniola and the relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic are complex and go beyond the traditional story of animosity of border countries with the addition of being positioned in the ‘Global South’. This often implies

Due to the dialectic nature of fixed and mobile spatial configurations on site, the proposal is composed by vertical structures delimiting spaces for appropriation and creating physical affordances. Such structures are able to adapt to multiple uses and actors in accordance to the temporality or program of the day. The allocation of columns imitates the dimension of predominant containers to maintain the scale of Malpasse. Their arrangements allow multiple configurations with multiple degrees of open or enclosed spaces. This enables a myriad of functions thus creating a complex landscape, common in diverse open spaces that favour plurality (See Figure 5). The proposal of this site is not only explained in categories of intervention, but in the temporal changes in space. Daily, the site focuses on binational trade, commercial and population flows. The customs centre, the migration offices, multimodal transport stop are the spatial setting for

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atlantis a solution mindset materialized with engineering interventions that overlook the cultural, social and spatial dynamics on site. I found in the temporal dimension a refuge to address a complex territory, validate the observations and reframe the notions of border crossings. This perspective gave me the tools to engage with the spatiotemporal and explore documentation and communication techniques that challenge the traditional spatial representation. The spatial biography was seminal to explain the nuances on site and the dialectics of the border that inform the approach. The categories on intervention emerge from being cognizant of the spatial and temporal forces shaping Malpasse. These two dimensions are closely intertwined; the unplanned can only exist with fixed

structures that enable them. These ought to be flexible, framing and leave physical space for cyclical and changing transformations. The spatiotemporal also serves to understand the potentialities of the site and realize the dynamism of the spatial practice.•

References 1. Appadurai,A. (2015). Traumatic Exit, Identity Narratives, and the Ethics of Hospitality. In Casanovas Blanco,Ll., Galán,I., Carrasco,C., Navarrete Llopis,A. & Otero Verzier,M. (Eds), After Belonging: The objects, spaces and Territories of the Ways We Stay in transit (p.34-40). Oslo Architecture Triennale. Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich. 2. Dilla, H. (2015). Los complejos urbanos transfronterizos en América Latina. E studios fronterizos, 16(31), 15-38. Retrieved from http://www.scielo. org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S018769612015000100002&ln g=es&tlng=es. 3. Fernando, N. (2007). Open-ended Space: Urban streets in different cultural contexts. In Franck,K.A. & Stevens, Q. (Eds.), L oose Space: Possibility and Diversity in urban life (pp.54-72). Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 4. Franck, K.A. & Stevens, Q. (2007). Tying Down Loose Space. In Franck,K.A. & Stevens, Q. (Eds.), L oose Space: Possibility and Diversity in urban life (pp.1-34). Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 5. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L. & Szanton,C. (1995). From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration. Anthropological Quarterly. 68(1), 48-63. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317464 6. Lefebvre, H. (2004) Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life . (S. Helden & G. Moore, Trans.). Continuum, London. 7. Mejía, M. (2015, May 29). E special: La vida en la frontera . Diario Libre. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/diariolibre/docs/reportaje 8. Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas. (2013). Primera encuesta nacional de inmigrantes en la República dominicana ENI-2012: Informe General. Santo Domingo: ONE. Retrieved from http://media.onu.org.do/ONU_DO_ web/596/sala_prensa_publicaciones/ docs/0565341001372885891.pdf 9. Oswalt, P., Misselwitz, P. & Overmeyer, K. (2007). Tying Down Loose Space. In Franck,K.A. & Stevens, Q. (Eds.), Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in urban life (pp.271-280). Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 10.Otero Verzier, M. (2017). Arquitecturas para la democracia o máquinas de propaganda . In CIRCO 228. Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Medio Ambiente. (2013). Haití-República Dominicana: Desafíos ambientales en la zona fronteriza. Retrieved from https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/ handle/20.500.11822/17680/ UNEP_Haiti-DomRep_border_zone_ SP.pdf ?sequence=3&isAllowed=y 11. Raxwortthy, J. & Blood, J. (2004). Introduction. In Raxwortthy, J. & Blood, J.(Eds.),The Mesh Book: Landscape/Infrastructure (pp.10-17). Melbourne: RMIT Publishing

12. Sawyer, C. (2004). Territorial Infrastructure. In Raxwortthy, J. & Blood, J.(Eds.),T he Mesh Book: Landscape/Infrastructure (pp.266-277). Melbourne: RMIT Publishing 13. Scheker, E. (2012). Estudio De La Problemática De Transporte Transfronterizo En Jimaní . 14. Smith, M. (2001). Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers 15. Velikov, K & Thün, G. (2017 a). The Production of Territory. In Ilka & Andreas Ruby (Ed.), I nfrastructure Space . Berlin: Rubby Press 16. Velikov, K & Thün, G. (2017 b). Territorial Infrastructures: Recognizing Politico-Environmental Ecologies. In Ilka & Andreas Ruby (Ed.), Infrastructure Space . (pp.194208). Berlin: Rubby Press 17. World Bank (2012). H aití, República Dominicana: Más que la Suma de las Partes. Washington, DC: World Bank. Retrieved from http:// d o c u m e n t s .wo r l d b a n k . o r g /c u ra t e d /p t / 3 2 0 6 41 4 6 8 0 2 81 4 4 981 / pdf/716640WP0SPANISH00PUBL IC00HAITI0RD.pdf

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1. Diagram of transmigratory actors and their rhythms of travel on the island. Source: Author. 2. Map of Malpasse. Source: Author. 3. Evaluating fixed and spatial configurations on market days and regular days. Source: Author. 4. Matrix of the approach to the intervention and the influence across scales. Source: Author. 5. Design exploration of the model for vending spaces and binational exchange areas and details of iterations. Source: Author. 6. Spatiotemporal Composition for Malpasse [Days of Binational Market: Monday and Thursday] / Weekdays [Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday] and Weekends. Source: Author.

In addition, illegal mining has paved the road to an outbreak of malaria in Venezuela. The number of cases reported by the World Health Organization has increased by 375% between 2000 and 2015, a situation that has particularly worsened in the past five years (Grillet et al. 2018). An interesting time frame if we consider that it overlaps with the highest prices on gold in the history of commodities exchange (fig.2). It is not a coincidence that more than 80% of the malaria cases in Venezuela are concentrated in the Guayana Region, especially in the municipalities where illegal extraction has thrived. Deforested areas have higher temperatures than the average rainforest, warming the polluted waters of the tailing ponds and creating a fertile environment for mosquitoes to deposit their eggs. Since gold miners are nomadic people because of the nature of their work, they spread the disease throughout the towns and cities of the region after having being bitten at the mine.

The Extractive Havoc Environmental, social and economic byproducts of resource extraction in Venezuela

the Amazon River basin, with hundreds of illegal mining points sprouting in Brazil, Ecuador, Perú and Bolivia, it has gotten out of control in the Venezuela Guayana (RAISG, 2018). This trend can be linked to the collapse of the national economy and to the devaluation of the local currency: to have some gold is as good as having American dollars, and this has become a very powerful driver for this informal type of extraction.

Ricardo Avella

European Post-Master's in Urbanism (EMU) TU Delft

A country that depends exclusively on natural resources faces a wide range of risks, and one of them is that it becomes extremely vulnerable to the fluctuations of the global market. The astronomical rise in the prices of various metals over the past two decades –iron, aluminum and especially gold, to name a few– has a direct connection to China’s growth and demand, and is putting great pressures on resource-rich countries all over the world (fig. 2). Venezuela, a nation that has largely depended on oil since the 1920s and with vast mineral ore deposits in the Guayana Region, has certainly not been the exception. But the combination of this ‘commodities boom’ with other factors such as the national economic crisis, or the concession of mines to allies of the totalitarian regime in exchange for loans and royalties, is having farreaching consequences in the Venezuelan Guayana. In this article –the second of a series of essays on this peripheral region of Venezuela– I will explore some of the environmental, social and economic byproducts of the extractive economy.

Land Use Changes and the Loss of Biodiversity The surface of rainforest that has been lost in the Guayana Region can be historically associated to the extractive activity of the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana – a state-owned corporation better known as CVG–, and to the infrastructures it has built over four decades to support the steel and aluminum industries. Since its creation the CVG changed the land use of vast extensions of forest in a planned way, making cost-benefit analyses and linking these transformations to the development 56

of the national economy. The extraction of iron ore and bauxite, the planning of Ciudad Guayana, the six hydroelectric dams along the Caroní River, and the construction of railways, roads, and docks for the processing industries, have been the main contributors to the loss of biodiversity south of the Orinoco River. But in recent years, and in close connection to the meteoric rise of gold prices in the London bullion market, there has been an escalating of illegal mining operations throughout the region. Although this Gold Rush is a widespread phenomenon all over

In the Guayana Region, iron ore and bauxite can only be found in mineral veins that are very site-specific. The certainty of having large deposits in a certain location has made their extraction a profitable business for the CVG, allowing the construction of the necessary infrastructures and fostering the creation of several processing industries. We could say that although this type of industrial extraction has deforested and fragmented habitats of rich biodiversity, it is site-specific and non-expansive in its nature. But artisanal gold mining is a completely different story. In Guayana, rocks and minerals have been weathered down over millions of years, scattering small particles of gold dust on the riverbeds of the Orinoco River basin. Some areas can have higher concentrations of gold, and veins may also be found below the surface, but rarely in quantities that will allow for the creation of a permanent industrial platform. For this reason, gold prospecting has usually been performed by small groups of artisanal miners in a nomadic fashion, cutting-down large

surfaces of rainforest to find some gold. Once the resources have been depleted in one place, miners simply move their camp to repeat this process somewhere else, leaving destruction and pollution behind (fig. 1; fig. 3). Tailing Ponds, Water Pollution, and the Outbreak of Malaria However, deforestation is only the first part of the process. To separate gold from other low-grade minerals, miners need to crush the ore and sift it with a solution of cyanide or mercury; and once the extraction site is abandoned, tailing ponds are left behind as a byproduct. The poisonous chemicals are usually mixed with the waters of these tailings, posing huge environmental risks in the area but also further downstream, since the polluted waters infiltrate the ground and sometimes spill the pollutants when heavy rain occurs. The dispersed nature of illegal gold mining makes these local actions a regional and international problem, because they affect an important part of the Essequibo River Basin that flows into Guyana, a part of the Amazon River Basin that flows into Brazil, and the coastal ecosystems of the eastern Caribbean islands (fig. 4). The pollution of entire watersheds with mercury is already having devastating effects for the indigenous peoples that have always depended on fishing for their subsistence, poisoning and killing many throughout the region and forcing entire communities to change their diets (Red ARA, 2013). 57

Violence, Land Dispossession, and Neo-Slavery The indigenous peoples of Venezuela have become a minority of a little more than 700.000 inhabitants –around 3% of the population of the country. Although only a quarter of those first peoples live in the Venezuelan Guayana, it remains the most culturally diverse region in the country because of the existence of 23 different indigenous groups spread throughout the territory (Mansutti Rodríguez, 2016). They have been living here long before the arrival of Europeans, but the demand of resources from China and the subsequent rise of mineral commodity prices are threatening their ways of living, simply because of the existence of resources beneath the land they occupy (fig. 5). This only adds to the long list of cause-effect relations of deterritorialization that are taking place at a planetary scale, in the context of cultural and economic globalization. However, in truth, this is only one part of the problem. In 1829 Simón Bolívar promulgated the Quito Decree, where he safeguarded the state ownership over mining within the territory of the newly founded nation of Gran Colombia –of which Venezuela was a part by that time (Arráiz Lucca, 2016; Martz, 1987). This principle stated, very clearly, that all mines and all natural resources belonged to the Republic. The decree consolidated the same colonial principles of the previous mining legislation issued by the Spanish crown in 1783 –the Ordenanzas de Minas de Nueva España–, which declared that all mines were property of the royalty, regardless of the ownership rights of the land. Therefore, Bolívar’s decree gave continuity to a colonial piece

atlantis economy –one that will impose on them a new relation towards nature.

of legislation that separated surface rights from subsurface rights. And even though the mining legislation has been modified several times throughout Venezuela history, especially after the discovery of oil, this fundamental principle has remained untouched. As Pierre Bélanger puts forward, even though this fracture can be understood just as a legal instrument, “the territorial repercussions of this simplified divide edify the disembodiment of the ground from what is below ground, and enmeshes the bureaucratic partitioning of water from land” (Bélanger, 2018). This divide has contributed to an escalation of conflict in the region, in which illegal gold mining and other ‘less illegal’ forms of extraction supported by the central government –such as the Orinoco Mining Arc– are putting great pressures on the sites where indigenous peoples have organized their lives for centuries. The rise of gold 6

prices has become a powerful driver for illegal miners, usually armed and more than ready to use the most primitive forms of violence to control resource-rich areas, even if they are occupied by indigenous groups. And the central government, legally sheltered by the principle described above, also believes that it has the lawful right to displace entire communities with the aid of the National Guard to prepare the ground for more organized forms of extraction. In any case, when analyzing the effects of the violence that is exerted over these under-represented communities, it does not matter if mining activities are legal or illegal because the consequences are the same. Forced relocations, transculturation of groups with different worldviews, new forms of slavery and exploitation, and the instauration of vicious cycles of dependence, are only but a few of the social byproducts brought by the extractive economy. 7

Traditionally, the indigenous peoples that live in the Venezuelan Guayana have always viewed gold from a religious perspective, never as a commodity to be sold or exchanged within the logic of the market. It was either an offer to the gods or a punishment, a golden curse (Vitti, 2018). The groups that offered it to their gods used to extract very small quantities from the riverbeds, separating the golden dust from the other sediments with extreme care and without the aid of chemical compounds. In addition, these self-sustaining communities have always depended on the ecosystem services provided by the natural system to support their needs and to maintain their way of life (fig. 6). Illegal gold mining destroys this possibility once it arrives at a certain location, leaving the indigenous peoples that used to depend on the forest with only two options: either they abandon the village and search for a new place to live, or they stay and depend on this new

The communities that are forced to relocate their villages will never have the certainty that this aggression will not take place again in the future. And in any case, if they decide to settle further downstream within the same catchment, the water and the fish they will consume will be polluted with cyanide and mercury (fig. 4). The communities that decide –or are forced– to remain in their villages are subject to more direct forms of violence. The destruction of the environment that used to provide their needs, and the imposition of a logic that sees nature as an object, force the indigenous peoples to sell their workforce in a market-driven economy. Renewed forms of slavery are born in this context, since local communities are forced to work for the armed miners in the way they consider more suitable: men are usually used as ‘pack mules’ (Vitti, 2016), and women are pushed to grow food, cook meals, or forced into prostitution (Moncada Acosta, 2017). As Macarena Gómez-Barris has stated, the extractive economy is reducing, constraining and converting the lives of these indigenous groups to a commodity (Gómez-Barris, 2017), instigating the extinction of their cultures. Transformation of Local Economies The consequences of the rise of illegal gold mining can also be seen outside the tropical forest. In a country with a contracted economy and the highest inflation in the world (the IMF forecasts an inflation rate of 10.000.000% for 2019) (IMF, 2018), a gram of gold provides an excellent way to survive the economic crisis. In any case, it will always be more profitable than having Bolívares –the devaluated local currency. There is a parallel economy in some parts of the Guayana Region, where gold is used as a currency to make the most trivial transactions of everyday life. In remote settlements like El Paují or Santa Elena de Uairén, the monthly cost of internet can be paid with a gram of gold. For the same price you can also buy a bottle of rum, but in a mine it can cost three times more. These are merely some examples, since there are many other services and goods that can also be paid with this mineral. The combination of the economic crisis and the rise of illegal gold mining has also led to the destruction of the formal economy. Artisanal mining has always been the main source of employment in peripheral towns like Tumeremo, El Dorado or Las Claritas, among many others. However, in recent years a number of settlements that have traditionally relied on other activities are now very dependent on extraction. In an interview made by the author to Rafael

Saavedra, councilor of Upata and an active member of The Radical Cause –a workingclass political party with strong roots in the mining industries of Guayana–, the economy of his hometown has dramatically changed. Upata is a mid-sized city known for its agricultural production, its logging companies, and for livestock raising. But according to Saavedra, many businesses have closed in the past few years to shift towards informal and illegal services related to the prospecting of gold. Signs reading “we buy gold” can be found on the storefronts of former shops, creating a network of informal gold-buying houses where miners go to cash their findings. And most of those who were left unemployed are now forced to work in the open-pits; either as miners, cooks, or simply as informal vendors of goods (fig. 7). Millions of dollars pass through these gold buying houses every year without taxation; and what is even worse, entire communities are being condemned to a dark future as they become dependent on the extractive economy while other forms of employment disappear. The ability of coming generations to meet their needs is being severely compromised in this resource-rich region in many ways: from an economic standpoint, nothing stays and nothing is created; from an environmental perspective, only destruction is left behind; and from a social point of view, dependence on extraction is perpetuating the poverty cycle. We must shape a different future for Guayana, but to do so it is critical to push away “from a paradigm of mere resistance into the more layered terrain of potential, moving within and beyond the extractive zone” (Gómez-Barris, 2017).• References 1. Deneault, A. (2018). ‘At the financial heart of the mining industry’, in: Bélanger, P. (Ed.). Extraction Empire: Undermining the systems, states, & scales of Canada’s global resource empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2. Watkins, M. (2018). ‘Unsettling the mining frontier’, in: Bélanger, P. (Ed.). Extraction Empire: Undermining the systems, states, & scales of Canada’s global resource empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 3. Bélanger, P. (Ed.) (2018). Extraction Empire: Undermining the systems, states, & scales of Canada’s global resource empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 4. Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The extractive zone: Social ecologies and decolonial perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press. 5. Oliveira-Miranda, M., Morón-Zambrano, V. (2018). ‘Deforestación y fragmentación de hábitat: amenazas de la minería’. Explora, 1(1), 93-106. 6. Grillet, M.E., Moreno, J. & El Souki, M. (2018). ‘Minería y malaria en Venezuela’. Explora, 1(1), 136140. 7. Vitti, M. (2018). ‘Pueblos indígenas: los grandes 59

perdedores del ZDEN-AMO’. Explora, 1(1), 141-155. 8. Vitti, M. (2016, September 15). ‘Los Sanema: indígenas que cargan a sus espaldas la depredación del Caura’. Retrieved from: http://elestimulo.com/blog/los-sanemalos-indigenas-que-cargan-a-sus-espaldas-la-depredaciondel-caura/ 9. Mansutti Rodríguez, A. (2016). ‘Pueblos indígenas y diversidad cultural en Guayana, Venezuela’, in: Balza Guanipa, R. (Ed.) Población y Ambiente (Tomo II). Montalbán, Caracas: Universidad Católica Andrés Bello. 10. Red ARA (2013). La contaminación por mercurio en la Guayana venezolana: Una propuesta de diálogo para la acción. Retrieved from the Red ARA website: red-aravenezuela.blogspot.com 11. RAISG & InfoAmazonia (2018, December 10). Looted Amazon. Retrieved from: https://saqueada. amazoniasocioambiental.org/ 12. Martz, J.D. (1987). Politics and Petroleum in Ecuador. Piscataway, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. 13. Arráiz Lucca, R. (2016). El petróleo en Venezuela: Una historia global. Caracas: Editorial Alfa. 14. Moncada Acosta, A. (2017). ‘Oro, sexo y poder: violencia contra las mujeres indígenas en los contextos mineros de la frontera amazónica Colombo-Venezolana’. Textos e Debates, 1(31), 43-53. 15. International Monetary Fund (2018, October). Inflation rate, average consumer prices. Retrieved from: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PCPIPCH@ WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD/VEN 1. Deforestation and pollution of watersheds in the Venezuelan Guayana. Mercury and cyanide are mixed with the waters of the tailing ponds, a characteristic byproduct of open-air mining. Photograph taken by Charles Brewer-Carías. Source: Explora Magazine, 1. 2. Drivers and trends associated to the rise of illegal gold mining. Source: author, with data from FRED and the WHO. 3. A comparison over time, using satellite photos, that illustrates the spatial impact of extraction in Las Claritas, the country’s illegal gold mining hotspot. Source: Author, with imagery from Google Earth. 4. Mining and water pollution in the Venezuelan Guayana. More than 1899 points of illegal mining exist throughout the region, according to a research recently published by RAISG in 2018. The pollution of a watershed at a specific location also has an impact further downstream. Source: Author. 5. Mining and indigenous peoples in the Venezuelan Guayana. The extraction of natural resources is creating great pressures to more than 23 indigenous groups that add-up to more than 200.000 inhabitants throughout the territory. Source: Author. 6. The Warao people live in the Orinoco Delta, and their way of life has a close connection to water. The pollution created by the extractive economy further upstream has a direct impact on their health, even if they are kilometers away from the mining site. Source: Author. 7. The destruction of the formal economy and the existence of a parallel one where gold is used as a currency, is pushing many to engage with extraction. Source: Retrieved from: https://www.arcominerodelorinoco.com/ capitulo-03/

atlantis

Socio-spatial Segregation MSc - Theory

Casablanca Introduction The choice of this subject is related to my motivation to pursue my studies in Urbanism. Coming from a developing country suffering from diverse urban pathologies, I wanted to learn about Urbanism as a discipline to understand these problems and to contribute to the process of making these cities better places to live in. The reason I am writing this essay is to test what I learned during this quarter and to try to reflect on it by applying it to a familiar context. Segregation has been a norm in the historical development of cities. However, until lately, it has gained importance for urban theory makers due to its global spread. This essay will discuss socio-spatial segregation, its historic evolution and how this concept was developed during the years. In order to explore the relevance of this approach, I will try to connect it with Casablanca, a city I used to live in where socio-spatial segregation was palpable in everyday life.

Q1 - Theory and History of Urbanism Msc Urbanism - TU Delft 2018

Understanding socio-spatial segregation Segregation in large cities seems to be one of the major social and spatial problems that contemporary societies are facing. Hamnet defines this concept as a means to explain “the growing division in society between the haves and have-nots; the socially included and the excluded, and a shrinking of size of the middle groups” (Hamnet, 1998 p15). The notion of segregation is, by definition, socio-spatial. Insofar, the exclusion of a certain group cannot be achieved on a spatial ground unless it was carried out socially. In other words, segregation is both social and spatial and one cannot be without the other. The duality between social and spatial can be drawn back to the definition of the city by Vaughan and Hillier where they described the city as two things: “a large collection of buildings linked by space, and a complex system of human activity linked by interaction” (Vaughan & Hillier 2007 p205). Nowadays, segregation is widely discussed among various disciplines as being a result of globalisation, decolonisation and often linked to poverty and injustice. However, segregation in cities is not a new phenomenon. It has existed since prehistoric times. Beginning with the Han Dynasty in 206 BC, Chinese cities were the earliest fully walled cities. These walls did not only serve for protection, but also for classifying and controlling ‘townsfolk’ (Marcuse, 2002).

Oumkaltoum Boudouaya MSc Urbanism TU Delft

After researching how socio-spatial segregation was explained with urban theories, it seems that Chicago school in the twentieth century is the first urban theory that started dealing with the subject more clearly (Caner & Bölen 2013). The first concept of Chicago school, human ecology, illustrates segregation through the following: concentric zones by Burgess in 1920, sectoral patterns by Hoyt in the 1930s and multiple nuclei by Harris and Ullman in the 1940s. The concentric zone hypothesis depicted the importance of growth from the centre, then the city expanded in concentric rings with different land uses. The important notions to keep in mind concerning this approach is that it is based on competition between different groups of the city and their levels of dominance. However this approach received lot of criticism; according to Wirth -a theorist from the Chicago School- the creation of biological analogies as explained by Burgess, is less important than the social and cultural dimensions(Caner & Bölen 2013). As Duncan points out in his analysis Segregation Indexes “The concept of ‘segregation’ in the literature of human ecology is complex and somewhat fuzzy, i.e., the concept involves a number of

analytically distinguishable elements, none of which is yet capable of completely operational description. Yet it is a concept rich in theoretical suggestiveness and of unquestionable heuristic value.” This approach was followed by an empirical approach proposed by Shevky and Bell in 1955 called The Social area Analysis. The importance of this approach regarding segregation is that it highlights the interdependency between a certain spatial location and the social aspects: “Shevky and Bell turned the focus of study from zones and sectors in the city to nuclei or population clusters within the city” (Caner & Bölen 2013). The third and last approach of Chicago School is the Factorial ecology approach. Basically, it is an extension of the previous social analysis while covering more variables. “By far the major finding of factorial ecology studies has been that residential differentiation in the great majority of cities of the developed, industrial world have been dominated by a socio-economic status dimension, with a second dimension characterized by family status/life cycle characteristics and a third dimension relating to segregation and ethnic status”( Knox & Pinch, 2010 p72). The criticism towards this approach is that it is insufficient because it did not account for economic, technological, demographic and social change(Knox and Pinch, 2010). Neo-Marxist however believes that social class is the real social division; other different divisions are not considered. LA school acknowledges social polarization in urban communities among various ethnicities and ways of life and also new divided spaces of inter-ethnic struggle. The city is seen as privatized and political space; strengthened with doors, boundaries and dividers characterizing the enclaves of restricting gatherings. As a conclusion to this part, we can observe that urban theories treating and explaining segregation do not have a global characteristic. Each specific context emanate its own explanation and it is possible that this reflection will not be applicable in other contexts (Caner & Bölen 2013). Socio-spatial segregation in Casablanca The forces that contribute to socio-spatial segregation are many and vary from place to place. It is considered to be a major social city pathology that often results in far from equal living conditions and access to services and labour markets. In Casablanca, the economic capital of Morocco and the most populated city of the kingdom, segregation dates back to the beginning of the colonial era. Casablanca was colonised

by France and they refused to cohabit with locals inside the inner city center -the Medina- while they also refused to let Moroccans live in the new built area. Basically, a new urban form appeared as a juxtaposition of two disparate cities. If the juxtaposition of these two ‘societies’ was presented as a reflection of the cohabitation of two civilizations, it does not mean that it was perceived as such from the beginning, at least not by the Moroccans. The fact that the ‘indigenous’ city was poorly seen and placed at the bottom of the social ladder was one of the reasons why it was not an example of cohabitation as it was advertised. Moreover, this perception was concretised by the development of new ‘moroccan neighbourhoods’ in the outskirts of the new city. This brief history of urban revolution expresses the progress of segregation between nationalities towards a socio-spatial segregation (Chouiki1997). Nowadays, if you visit the city, you will perceive a different but strong duality of two different ‘societies’; the most elegant prosperous neighbourhoods in Africa limiting the most precarious dwellings in very poor economic social situations. Dynamic neighbourhoods with modern activities opposed to slums in very deteriorated infrastructure lacking access to basic services, whose function is only ‘to shelter’ an increasingly growing population. The proliferation of spontaneous habitat was the result of an unprecedented urban growth of the city in the last decades. The government lead several resorption operations but nothing seems to work. The economic crisis, accentuated by population growth, the high rate of unemployment and the lack of thorough urban studies, explains the growth of this type habitat, thus, segregation. Certainly, it is not possible to come up with solutions to all these problems. However, it seems to be imperative to dig deeper into the ‘urban’ causes of sociospatial segregation in such a rich context as the metropolitan Casablanca. Various works and research that treats problems concerning segregation are so focused on the scope of poverty and injustice. Even if this dimension can be considered as the major cause, it cannot explain nor treat the complexity of this phenomena. No deep research has been established that takes under consideration both the spatial and social aspect of the problem (maybe it exists but not as an open source that I have access to). The existing solutions consist of attempts by the government, whose primary response tends to be a top-down approach of public housing projects to eradicate slums by resettling the inhabitants of these unhealthy places and recovering land. In my opinion, this is the creation of a new form of segregation somewhere else and can never be a proper solution. 61

If I think about what I learned from the theoretical input and try to apply it in this context, I can affirm that an analysis of the urban space spatial configuration by exploiting the space syntax method could lead to a more accurate interpretation of this socio-spatial segregation and to assimilate to which degree the spatial configuration plays a role in this segregation. Conclusion When segregation is being analysed as a social process interfering with space, it gives it an extra dimension, making it more than just a simple characteristic of the contemporary city and reveals the special strategic political dimension behind it. Thus, segregation is developed at the intersection of social policies and space, its global character is nourished by its economic ideological dimensions. Concerning Casablanca, I believe that a thorough study of urban form and space syntax analysis will help provide accurate data to prevent the disconnected patterns. If we want to improve this dilapidated situation, performing such research is as a first step is imperative and aiming towards diversity and connection. •

References 1. CHOUIKI MUSTAPHA. (1997) La ségrégation sociospatiale à Casablanca. In: L'Homme et la société, N. 125, 1997. Assignations identitaires et différenciation sociale. pp. 85-105. 2. GIZEM CANER and FULIN BÖLEN (2013) Implications of Socio-spatial Segregation in Urban Theories, Planlama 2013;23(3). pp. 153-161(10) 3. HAMNET CHRIS (1998) Social polarisation, economic restructuring and welfare state regimes. Urban segregation and the welfare state. pp. 15 4. HILLIER BILL and VAUGHAN LAURA (2007) The Spatial Syntax of Urban Segregation. Progress in Planning Volume 67, Issue 3, April 2007, pp. 205-294 5. JOSE JULIO LIMA (2001) Socio-spatial segregation and urban form: Belém at the end of 1990s. Geoforum 32. pp. 493-507 (15) 6. PAUL KNOX AND STEVEN PINCH (2010) Urban Social Geography An Introduction. Sixth edition published by Pearson Education Limited. pp. 72 7. MARCUSE PETER. (2002). The Partitioned City in Urban History. In, Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (Eds.), Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space. pp. 11-34. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. 8. SOJA EDWARD The Socio-Spatial Dialectic. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Jun., 1980), pp.207-225 9. VAUGHAN LAURA and SONIA ARBACI (2011) The challenges of understanding urban segregation. Built Environment, Volume 37, Number 2, pp. 128-138(11)

1. Photo by Bruno Maltor. Source: Author.

How can two major streets shift How can the city edge be the transition zone between from a boundary to a border? the Dudok "village" to the outer landscape?

Hilversum in between The Netherlands are characterized by a fundamental contrast between land and water (fig. 3). Hilversum lies on the edge of this duality. Today we can still see the effects of this mythical relationship between land and water in the different patterns of urbanization that characterize the Randstad, a continuous city, and the continental Netherlands, a collection of scattered singularities. Thousands of years ago, prehistoric populations ventured this far on the search for fertile land, and settled on the low chain stretching from Wageningen, through Hilversum, to Naarden, the latest outpost before the marshes. They settled at the bottom of the low valleys of het Gooi, where water gathered in ponds. Those ponds eventually became the present city/towns of het Gooi. A metamorphosis happened in the local overlapping of water and land that gave birth to urban settlements.

How can the villas sprawl be linked to the city through its historical main street?

Hybridization of contained ecosystems

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Water and Land

Artificial and Natural While providing the landscape for the Erfgooiers farmers, a cultural identity now disappeared, het Gooi started to become the Garden City of the Netherlands. Spread expensive villas housing paired with a diffuse car accessibility, made this area famous for its rich inhabitants. At the same time, its stable land has been the foundation of several industries, most of which belonging to the media sector. This brought diverse strata of population, who now want their share in the national identity of this territory.

How can the city centre merge its cityand townscapes into a single image? How can the neighbourhood Kerkelanden be the spatial shift between the water of Vechtstreek and the hills of het Gooi?

Deventer

Q1 - City Portraits Studio Msc Urbanism - TU Delft 2018

Stefano Agliati MSc Urbanism TU Delft

town-like buildings. Such demolitions were so strongly felt that the population declined from more than 100.000 inhabitants in 1963 to less than 80.000 in 1990. At the same time, though the former village grew, most of the new areas are either garden suburbs, filled with green and low density housing, or are intentionally designed as townscapes. Metamorphosis (fig. 1) When the transition (the in between) becomes a gray wall in the middle of black and white, what we need is to merge ground and figure, unifying them and making one complementary to the other. We need metamorphosis, not ruptures, for metamorphosis maintain the in between within themselves, whereas ruptures expel it in a gray junkspace, waiting for us to connect it.•

The municipality of Deventer is located in the southern part of the province of Overijssel, where it borders with the province of Gelderland. Its strategic location on a high sand land on the west side of the river Ijssel lead to the development of a rich history that goes back 1250 years. The present morphology of Deventer is organized in contained clusters, where each cluster has different characteristics, patterns and typologies. From a morphological perspective, transport infrastructure arteries opening to the countryside capsule these constellations and point in the direction of the decreasing biotic-dominated environment. Only water arteries are acting as soft borders to the continuous growth.

Space and Place Het Gooi lies on the contradiction of being a concentration of singularities, detached from each other, but closely connected to the Randstad. Hilversum is the heart of the contradiction itself, since it is the main, and better connected centrality of het Gooi. A discontinuous urban development in time, paired with a big number of streets and crossroads (partly due to sheep grazing patterns) generated a city with neighborhoods divided by such paths. Though accessibility, in terms of pedestrian crossings, in Hilversum is rarely an issue, such streets have become a symbolical division among neighborhoods identities. Hilversum is therefore between space and place. It is a singular space in het Gooi territory, and the continuous space of its own districts.

If we address our epoch as anthropogenic our core contemporary concern should be focused on the damaging footprint humans have left on this planet and how to alleviate it to assure our existence. The purpose of starting a research about Deventer’s ecological system was partly driven by the personal concern on the ongoing destruction of our ecosystems worldwide and understanding the recent statements of the IPCC report (2018). After a quick revision of the development of Ecological Urbanism the benefits of the current shift towards a socio-natural hybridity (White, Rudy, Gareau 2016) inspired the investigation on the city of Deventer. On the other hand it was also catalyzed by Deventer’s very diverse natural conditions for the Netherlands, since it is part of the territory above sea level, and which lead to diverse habitat conditions.

From a regional scale, the duality in the landscape is noticeable, as it consists primordially of two types of landscapes: river landscape (west) and sand landscape (east). This first duality also conditioned the municipality’s soil, which on one side is determined by sand (dry) and on the

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other by clay soil (wet). Consequently we have an open and a half-closed landscape, with grassland, rivers and on the other hand deciduous forests. The topography is determined by the Sallandse Hills coming from the east to the west, making the areas near the Ijssel the lowest points of the municipality that tend to flood in rainy months like July.

Nicole Garcia Vogt MSc Urbanism TU Delft

Through the understanding of these dualities, an organization of the fabric in terms of four ecosystems emerges: the urban, forest, river land and grassland ecosystem (fig. 1). These ecosystems are composed and influenced by subsystems that relate to the atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere such as water, climate, biodiversity, functions, air quality, energy, and social & economical aspects (fig. 3). By making a distinction between mass and void (elements of the open space) of Deventer and relating it to the activities of its inhabitants (fauna and flora included), it is noticeable that most activities are bonded to the town center. In terms of mass, most urbanized areas still respect zoning, and public and private buildings are unequally spread out through the tissue. The dominant void of Deventer’s municipality is not fully taken advantage of; it is missing attractive nodes and activities. Most inhabitants are attracted to the borderline between the biotic dominant and abiotic area (town/countryside) as more diverse dynamics are offered there. All these unbalanced relations between abiotic/biotic elements and activities shown in its form, evolution and typologies, within ecosystem types, elements and the dynamics of void and mass present a limitation for a resilient ecological development. By interrelating functions of abiotic and biotic features Deventer could achieve a socionatural hybridization (Fig. 2).•

References 1. Garcia Vogt, N. (2018) Atlas of Deventer: Hybridization of Contained Ecosystems. [Portfolio] Research & Design Studio: Analysis and Design of Urban Form. TU Delft: 2nd November. 2. White, D., Rudy, A. & Gareau, B. J. (2016) Environments, Natures, And Social Theory: Towards a Critical Hybridity. London: Palgrave.

City and Village In Hilversum, several demolitions in the '70s disrupted much of the city centre, creating a clashing juxtaposition of glass offices and brick

Q1 - City Portraits Studio Msc Urbanism - TU Delft 2018

1. Portrait. Source: Author. 2. Cultural landscapes. Source: Author. 3. National territories. Source: Author.

1. Four ecosystems. Source: Author. 2. Hybridization of contained ecosystems. Sources: Author. 3. Portrait (parts). Source: Author.

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Feel the Earth In the quarry overall planning, the concept is to trace back the old days when the gravel pit was excavated. This enables the visitors to feel the geology and the earth of the quarry. The designed route starts with the long former trunk trace, which is a narrow hollow way formed by the trees on both sides. By walking into this Tunnel space, the visitor will develop a sense of hope: what will this quarry be like? With this prelude and expectation, the visitors continue walking along the trace until they suddenly step into the central quarry, an overall vision of the whole surrounding

A post-industrial garden landscape. The visitor's emotions transit from tension to excitement by the visual perception changed from the limited to the whole vision. By passing through the lake, visitors start to explore the main quarry garden, which is the most essential part (Main Landscape Sight). After visiting the quarry garden, visitors, will experience a sequence of open and enclosed spaces (Secondary Landscape Sight) until the end. These spatial rhythms and movements can stimulate the visitor’s interest to explore the quarry landscape design by different visual perceptions in their routes.•

MSc Studio Projects

Q1 - Villa Urbana Studio Msc Landscape Architecture - TU Delft 2018

Jiawei Zhao

Georgia Gkratsou

MSc Landscape Architecture TU Delft

The elements of the gravel pit that made the most striking impression were the forest areas and the morphology of the ground. More specifically, it was observed that the masses of high vegetation looming over the ponds of the pit hide a variety of space qualities that could intrigue people to visit the site. Minimal changes are made on the terrain to give the impression of an artificial morphology by creating strict geometric forms. On top of that, a new material is added in each of these ‘points’ (implants of corten steel), used to indicate their newly appointed significance and use (foci, vistas, changes of direction etc.). Some of these ‘points’ are rather evident, while others are discreet and subtle, hidden inside the forest. These become visible from the centre of the pit only by glimpses of the different material filtered by the canopy of the forest. Alternatively, they are elements of surprise, gradually discovered during the exploration of the site (fig.1). The composition scheme of Meertensgroeve consists of a number of layers that superimpose each other. The first layer is the terrain of the gravel pit, the reminder of its industrial past that is the base for all the other interventions. Following that, both the artificially made ‘points’ as well as the ‘untouched’ areas comprise the

MSc Landscape Architecture TU Delft

second layer of the composition. In order to connect all these elements and create the desirable spatial and visual connections, a third layer, consisting of routings that combine the existing paths with new routes is created. Last but not least, the vegetation of the forest is the layer that attributes the third dimension in the spatial composition by creating various space qualities, such as clearings, filtered views and dense, mysterious spaces (fig. 2). The natural processes taking place and their aesthetic value were left untouched by the intervention. Another means of preserving the biodiversity of the site is the creation of a network of gullies that direct rainwater from the steep slopes of the pit to the ponds. Both the information center and the cabin are situated on the higher terraces, hidden inside the dense canopy of the existing forest, so as to have a view of the site. The buildings are simple volumes connected by a glass corridor that penetrates the ground thus creating a sheltered space which functions as the cabinet of curiosities. While its glass façade provides a view to the gravel pit, its inner ‘wall’ displays the different soil types found in the area along with an array of objects/’curiosities’ that express the spirit of the site. After a certain point,

the corridor is only accessed by volunteers, since it leads to the private space of the cabin. In conclusion, the idea of embracing the industrial past of the site, as well as its natural processes is present in this project. The approach of minimal intervention is expressed by the small ‘injections’ of new material made in the points of interest, whereas the respect for the natural processes is manifested by the preservation of the natural habitats both in the forest and the ponds.• References 1. VAN DER VELDE, Rene. 2018. "Transformation in Composition." A+BE | Architecture and the Built Environment, June: 1-350. <https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/index.php/ abe/article/view/2396>.

1. Garden plan. Source: Author. 2. Section. Source: Author. 3. Section. Source: Author. 4. Movement sequences (detail). Source: Author. 5. Masterplan. Source: Author.

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ATLANTIS Magazine by Polis | Platform for Urbanism and Landscape Architecture Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft Volume 29, Issue 2, February 2018 Editors-in-Chief Felipe Gonzalez, Sarantis Georgiou Public relations Melinda Marjan Polis Board Representative Sindhuja Janakiraman Editorial Team Dhushyanth Ravi, Dora Hegyi, Ingrid Staps, Kavya Kalyan, Kavya Suresh, Laura Lijdsman, Leonardo Cannizzo, Lucas Hoeller, Melinda Marjan, Oumkaltoum Boudouaya, Stefano Agliati, Tapasya Mukkamala

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