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ANTHONY OLIVER-SMITH – The anthropologist on displacement and resettlement in today’s world 26

LEILANI FARHA – The UN special rapporteur on the right to housing promotes making housing a human right 56

THE DIFFICULT PATH TO GREEN REBUILDING – How to enhance locals’ and Syrian refugees’ quality of life with community-based design of green spaces in Jordan

ISBN 978-3-7667-2465-6

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T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O F L A N D S CA P E A R C H I T E CT U R E A N D URB A N DE S I G N

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Contents

THE BIG PICTURE

CURATED PRODUCTS

Page 8

Page 102

OPINION

REFERENCE

Page 10

Page 106

TALE NT VS. MASTERMIND

E DITOR’S PICK

Page 12

Page 108

METROPOLIS EXPLAINED

Page 14 IN CONVERSATION WITH LEILANI FARHA

Page 56

OUTCASTS AND INTRUDERS

THE URBAN TANGLE OF THE OLYMPICS

Photographer Nick Brandt criticises the displacement of animals due to human encroachment Page 18

Mega-events and their two faces: From urban beautification right up to eviction Page 60

DISPLACEMENT IS A PROCESS OF UPROOTING, HOWEVER IT HAPPENED

THE HOUSING OF THE POOREST

The anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith shares insights from his decades of research Page 26

Not every upgrade is an improvement: Slum upgrading in Kibera, Nairobi Page 66

FROM THE EDGES

JUXTAPOSING PERMANENT AND TEMPORARY LANDSCAPES

THE DIFFICULT PATH TO GREEN REBUILDING

Page 113

How can the planning theories of Garrett Eckbo give advice to an earthquake-affected region in Italy?

Page 32

Fostering cohesion between Jordanians and Syrian refugees with cooperative green infrastructure projects Page 72 THE LOOK OF A STRANGER

The strategies of place-making of Myanmar refugees in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Page 78

RESETTLING GRANTHAM

INSTIGATING INTEGRATION

A flood disaster led to a groundbreaking recovery plan for a new development in an Australian town Page 42

Manchester, Genoa, Leipzig and Bremen: How do these four European cities deal with migration?

Page 84

NO PLACE TO FALL TO

INVASIVE PLANTS – BOON OR BANE?

Los Angeles skid row’s discrepancy between placement and displacement Page 50

Native plant species are considered a common good.

But can invasive species benefit ecosystems, too?

Page 90

LEILANI FARHA

MOVING SOUTHWARD

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing on the global housing crisis and possible ways out Page 56

An imaginary travelogue of Rom's displacement to Africa Page 94

DISPLACEME NT: FACTS & FIGURES

CONTRIBUTORS

Illustration by Elisabeth Moch Page 58

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Page 110 ESCAPE PLAN

Page 112

Page 114 IMPRINT

THE DIFFICULT PATH OF GREEN REBUILDING

Page 72

Photos: Julie Weltzien; Janice D'Avila

NO CALM AFTER THE STORM

Learning from Typhoon Haiyan: Community engagement as a disaster management tool in the Philippines Page 38

BACKFLIP

Displacement

“Displacement is a process of uprooting, however it happened.�

The anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith shares insights from his decades of research on disasters, displacement and resettlement with topos. Displacement can be better understood if a differentiation is made between it and migration, and if there is a distinction between ways of coping with it or adapting to it.

MARK KAMMERBAUER

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topos: Environmental disasters, climate change, armed conflicts or development: What are the most important drivers of displacement?

ANTHONY OLIVER-SMITH: Well, you know, if you look at it over time, it depends on how deep you want to go into history. It varies from year to year. If you look at Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) data over the past years, it fluctuates. Armed conflicts flare up and generate huge numbers of refugees, and then you get environmental disasters that lead to huge amounts of displaced people. It’s a process. I think that most migrations are a mix of push-pull. And I make a distinction between displacement and migration. Displacement is a process of uprooting, however it happened. When you talk about drivers, the question of the acuteness of the drivers is really important, because some people choose to stay and adapt or basically change in a way that allows them to adapt. Displacement per se is that process, the uprooting process, it’s not really the migration. So, whether it is environmental disasters or climate change or conflicts or development, again, it is a question of what the degree of coercion is that is being applied, which is a function of exposure and vulnerability and what’s going on at present in history. For example, the huge displacement of Syrian refugees shot the numbers way up, whereas the numbers for disasters came down a bit. Every one of them is significantly associated with displacement. And so, it varies from year to year. topos: How can we distinguish displacement from other forms of mobility and forced migration?

OLIVER-SMITH: That’s an issue. I guess it’s really significant to me, because one of the things that I’m seeing quite currently, and have been for a while, is that displacement is almost being used as a synonym for migration. What I want to make clear and what I try to make clear in my work is that displacement is a process that precedes certain forms of mobility. In other words, a process that leads to mobility. In itself, it places pressures on people to become mobile. And that can be an environmental disaster, it can be climate change, it can be development. What shifts is the degree of options that people have. One of the things that troubles me with current policies – and I’m talking about climate change and displacement – is that actors rarely talk about what happens after displacement. They talk about things like coastal retreat. OK, you retreat from the coast.

To go where? What’s going to happen? It’s a little bit like disasters. Everybody focuses on the disaster moment, rarely on the long-term processes that led to it.

In the climate change discourse, everybody is focused on the displacement process that will come about, due to sea level rise for example. But there is much less attention to what happens afterwards! This is something that the displacement and resettlement community, which is largely development-oriented, finds really irritating, because they focus much more on resettlement and what happens to people who have been displaced. topos: Are these differences in acknowledging the consequences of displacement and resettlement due to particular disciplines and research questions?

OLIVER-SMITH: That’s true. But the policy emphasis is on the issue of displacement, and how we are going to retreat, and how many people are going to be impacted. And all that is, of course, important. But the damaging and dramatic impacts on individuals and communities by a displacement and subsequent

resettlement process are not gaining as much attention as it should. And why is that? Part of it is again a focus on the short-term, immediate impacts rather than following what is a long-term process. Long-term field research engages a particular set of methodologies that are challenging and expensive, in many cases qualitative, narrative-based and to some degree disciplinarily specific. For example, here in Florida, we have 2000 plus miles of coastline, and 80 percent of the population lives about within 5 miles of the coast. And so they say, sea level rise and storm surges are going to require people to move, to go somewhere else. It’s assumed at some point that all of that is about individual choice, as if people weren’t part of communities. And the shredding and the destruction of those communities are not taken into account, which may be an ideological characteristic of the United States. If you look at the legislation pertaining to displacement and resettlement in the US, we are utterly unprepared legislatively and policywise in terms of whole communities being displaced. And I do not know if that is the case for the EU countries, but it’s fairly typical throughout the world. topos: It seems to me there is an emphasis on suggesting that protection is provided by state actors or institutions?

OLIVER-SMITH: That’s true. If you look at the climate change literature on displacement from the legal angle, it’s all about protection from the process of displacement and migration. It really does not address the fact that the whole resettlement process itself is riven by risks! What are the rights of people in resettlement projects, what kinds of protections are afforded to them in the resettlement process? In the policy world today, the whole social dimension – particularly in the aftermath, that is, after displacement – is only just beginning to be framed. topos: Aside from these aspects, why is the cultural dimension of displacement so important?

OLIVER-SMITH: Well, from two angles. One, the uprooting process that is the displacement extracts or tears people away from the kind of bedrock understanding of reality that they have. In effect, human cognition and culture is based on the idea that you have a reasonable degree of security of prediction of what’s going to happen. On the micro-level, I don’t take a step before I know there is hard ground where I am going to put my foot. So, expand that to the larger, sort of existential dimension of what uprooting does. The metaphor we use is: It pulls the rug out from under your feet. But in the case of displacement, it pulls the land, it pulls the earth away from under your feet; the context in which you are able to make some degree of sense out of reality, have some sense of predictability. What allows me to know if I take a step, there will be something under my foot, that I won’t step off the edge of something or into something terrible? Basically, culture. Culture is at least a partial assurance that life is predictable, that it will follow a certain defined pattern through time and space. We all know deep down that the assurance is fictional, but we behave as though it isn’t. The sense that things follow culturally defined patterns allows us to behave, to act. When that assurance is damaged by circumstances, a disaster, a displacement, it can erode the idea that there is a logic to life that can guide behavior.

So the idea is that displacement has a way of tearing people out of a system in which they make sense of the world. And making sense of the world means being able to predict a little bit about it. Everybody knows we don’t have one

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No Calm after To this day, the residents of the City of Tacloban in the Philippines are trying to find ways to live a normal life after Typhoon Haiyan hit the country in 2013 – harder than any other typhoon ever before. To this day, research is conducted to draw lessons from the local post-disaster management to use the lessons learnt to cope with effects of environmental disasters wordwide. One of the most important findings is: community engagement and social cohesion are needed to recover.

THERESA AUDREY O. ESTEBAN

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Photo: Theresa Audrey O. Esteban

Tacloban City was hit hardest by Haiyan in terms of damages and casualties. Houses of local families were damaged or totally destroyed by the storm surge.

What happened to the people of Tacloban who lost their homes after the storm surge? One year after the typhoon, many families remained displaced.

Resettling In 2011 a flood disaster in the Australian state of Queensland led to loss of life and catastrophic damage. The rural town of Grantham was hit particularly hard. The state government initiated an unprecedented recovery and resettlement plan for a new development located in the vicinity of the existing town. Which recovery pathways did impacted residents choose, and what motivated them to do so?

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Photo: picture alliance / dpa / Dean Lewins

MARK KAMMERBAUER

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Grantham, with 148 homes destroyed or damaged beyond repair, was the community that experienced the greatest degree of loss and devastation after the Lockyer Valley region was inundated during the 2011 Queensland floods.

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Displacement

No Place Los Angeles’ skid row is a world of its own and, on top of that, an ambiguous one. It's a place where homeless and vulnerable people find – at least – a place to stay. But it’s a fact that they are displaced in an area that is eschewed by others. However, affordable housing in L.A. is a scarce good and gentrification does not stop even for the home of the poorest. Is this the beginning of the displacement of the displaced?

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Photo: picture alliance/REUTERS / PATRICK T. FALLON

MARK VALLIANATOS

Tents and tarps erected by homeless people are shown along sidewalks and streets in the skid row area of downtown Los Angeles, California, U.S., 28 June 2019.

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“Housing is the link between one’s dignity and one’s ability to survive in our world.”

Housing is in a global crisis. Adequate and affordable housing is a rare good – in the Western world, and in even more urgent ways in developing countries. What are the reasons that particularly cities all over the world are becoming increasingly unlivable and unaffordable? Do citizens and societies have to bear the evictions, the displacement and inaccessibility that come with the financialization of the housing market? Or is there a chance to reverse this trend?

We had the opportunity to talk to Leilani Farha, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, about the global housing crisis and possible ways out.

INTERVIEW: ANJA KOLLER

topos: In what sense is housing one of the most urgent global issues nowadays?

LEILANI FARHA: The way I feel the urgency is that everywhere I go housing and its affordability or one’s ability to access decent housing are a huge problem.

Whether I’m sitting in a café in New York and speak with a person serving there or whether I’m at a market somewhere in Africa: when I start talking about housing, for most ordinary people it is a stress. It’s not just in my line of work. Ask your Uber driver, ask the person working in a hotel, ask the waiter in a restaurant, ask a man on the street somewhere in Africa running a small business… It’s the nature of housing that makes it such an important issue. Housing is the link between one’s dignity and one’s ability to survive in our world, i.e. to have employment, to have good health and to be safe and secure. So much springs from housing. topos: So, housing is an issue that challenges people across the board, except for a minority of privileged people – it affects ordinary residents in the vast majority of cities in the world, and especially the poor, the homeless and refugees…

FARHA: That’s right. And I think there is something interesting I’m currently learning about housing: it is a deeply private thing. When people suffer because their housing situation is deficient, they are embarrassed. When I meet parents with children, they are so embarrassed that they cannot provide decent housing for their children. There are few situations where people feel their dignity at stake in the same way as when someone steps forward and says: I live on the pavement. And this injustice is unacceptable. topos: In your opinion housing is so essential to every person that it should be regarded as a human right… That is what you are fighting for, correct?

FARHA: It’s not just my claim. Housing as a human right exists in international human rights law, and governments around the world have signed and ratified it.

It means simply the right to live somewhere in peace and with security and dignity. Of course, there is a bigger definition that is more specific than that as well. It includes that you should have security of tenure, that you shouldn’t be afraid of being evicted. Clearly, housing should be affordable. And affordability has to be defined based on household income and resources, not based on what the market can bear. In so many cities now you see that governments claim they’re creating “affordable” housing but then they use the market as the measure. topos: What does this mean?

FARHA: Politicians and governments say: “This is affordable because it is only 80 per cent of the market rent or of what the market could bear”. But this may be far

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from realistically affordable.. If people’s income is lower than that, they are not able to afford 80 per cent of the market rent obviously. topos: Leilani, in the documentary film Push, the Danish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten sheds light on the housing crisis: he follows you with his camera as you’re travelling the globe, trying to understand who’s being pushed out of cities and why. In the film sociologist Saskia Sassen says that gentrification is not the problem when it comes to the housing crisis. What is the problem? And: how did it come so far that properties do not any longer exist for living but for investment?

FARHA: The problem is the financialization of housing. And there are two historical markers that enabled this to happen. In the 70’s and 80’s we really saw neoliberalism take hold, including in the housing sector – and that meant and continues to mean – a decrease in the amount of protections for tenants, a rolling back of protective legal measures like rent control, ensuring the security of tenants, etc.…

We have seen governments withdraw from the provision of social housing. They stopped building in many cases, stopped funding the construction of social and affordable housing. I make a differentiation between social housing and affordable housing, because social housing is understood as state-provided for those who are most vulnerable, who really cannot afford to pay much rent at all, whereas affordable housing is meant for people who are not the poorest but may be still low-income and unable to afford market rents. At the same time during that era of neoliberalism the market was flung open. The result has been a very unregulated situation, including in the housing sector. Governments have propped up the market and enabled this phase of free-flow and little to no regulation to happen. And that is what we saw up until the 2000s. topos: And the second marker?

FARHA: It’s the global financial crisis of 2008 to 2010. It was much about an overleveraged housing market, but what really happened was that big financial actors saw a huge opportunity before them because there was a lot of cheap debt out there, a lot of foreclosed mortgages. And so, a new business model emerged, developed by these big financial actors, as e.g. private equity firms, pension and asset management firms. They started to buy up this bad debt in the form of singlefamily homes and apartment buildings and then rented those units back out to the public and increased costs. And this has really taken hold as a business model. topos: What is the situation now?

FARHA: The financial actors scoop up affordable housing everywhere they can, do

VITA LEILANI FARHA is the United Nations

Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing. She is a human rights lawyer by training and the current executive director of the NGO "Canada Without Poverty". Leilani has used her platform to start "The Shift", a global movement to reclaim the right to housing as a universal human right.

topos:…which you bring together through your global movement “The Shift”….

FARHA: Yes, at “The Shift” cities are leading the way, but it is supposed to be multisectoral. I’ve been approached by development organizations, which is really surprising as they normally do not get involved in initiatives fighting for the right to housing. A number of international human rights institutions have expressed interest. And architects, as well. They, too, have an important role to play in all of this.

Photo: Janice D'Avila

topos: What role can they play in this debate?

FARHA: Architects have the ear of developers, of governments and of city planners.

They are right in the midst of the housing debate. If they start articulating their visions as ones that are consistent with the human right to housing, the debate over this human right will take a step forward. I give you an example: New York, the High Line, the elevated linear park created on a former railroad spur. I met with the Friends of the High Line. One of the fellows told me that a lot of people feel that the High Line is not a success. minor renovations, and then evict tenants or provoke their eviction by increasing rents and moving in a different class of people. We’re seeing this in the area of student accommodation, i.e. in New York and the whole U.S., which is really alarming – and even when it comes to temporary housing for the poorest. Their homes are being bought up by these private equity firms and rents are increasing. This produces higher levels of instability and insecurity. People are being driven out of their homes. They then cannot find another affordable place to live in the city, which forces them to have to look elsewhere for a place to stay, outside of the city. This is really pushing people out of their communities.

topos: Why not?

FARHA: It’s because the architects and planners asked the wrong question, namely: “What can we do with these lands?” They should have asked: “What does the community need?” The High Line is right beside a low-income social housing area, predominantly lived in by African American and Hispanic people. None of these citizens visit the High Line, they don’t benefit from it. What happened instead?

What sprung up all around the High Line? All these unaffordable skyscrapers designed by reputed architects… None of these projects gave money to the High Line and they don’t give money back to the community.

topos: So, what can cities and national governments do to stop this dwindling spiral? A city or a state must protect its residents and population from being evicted and displaced because of prohibitive housing prices. They cannot ignore the fact that houses and apartments are regarded as ventures.

I think that governments do have a responsibility here for the past as well as the future: They encouraged this to happen, and they may keep it from continuing to happen. They encouraged it through a variety of measures. There are very advantageous tax laws and tax systems that benefit the big financial actors by allowing the use of housing as an asset, think of real estate investment trusts for example.

Just think of it as a financial tool that is used to purchase large numbers of apartments. Around the world, real estate investment trusts are privileged by highly advantageous tax positions in national tax regimes. Basically, they are not taxed. And such tax systems need to be dismantled.

topos: So, the creators failed to design a park for the adjacent community....

FARHA: Let me put it this way: if those architects and planners had used a community-led model, i.e. had involved the community, had taken care that the High Line would be accessible to the local community, that the units had to be affordable, that there had to be social housing, it would have been a different story.

topos: What other measures can states implement to fight the housing crisis?

FARHA: They need to start looking at regulating these big financial actors and investors in housing whose business models push people out of the cities – whether it is Airbnb or other short-term rental platforms, whether it is the big private equity firms that buy thousands of units at once. Measures could be considered like a cap on the number of units a single owner can own, a cap on the amount of profit anyone can make buying and selling as well as renting out housing. These are considered radical and bold measures, but maybe we are in a place right now where we need exactly that. What I’ve been calling for is that states should be adopting housing strategies and those strategies should be based in human rights obligations, which means focusing on the most vulnerable populations, which means going beyond the usual scope for housing strategies or policies – not just focusing on the existing building stock but looking at the financial aspects, at the financial players.

The strategies have to engage different sectors…

topos: A benefit for tourists and for a new, financially strong neighborhood can be a matter of inaccessibility and even displacement for others…. What about housing and urban development in developing countries?

FARHA: Many people living in informal settlements in developing countries lack the most basic services like water, sanitation, and security of tenure. At the same time, we know that an upgrading of slums and informal settlements is taking place, and this has to happen as it is required under the sustainable development goals.

But what is worrying about slum upgrading is that people will be evicted, that the slums will be upgraded, and the people will not be able to move back to their settlements and won’t be able to afford what is put in their place. Another concern I have is the model that is taking hold around the provision of affordable housing.

That model is one of home ownership and it is based on an economic model that benefits banks and governments and not necessarily people. topos: What can be done? Maybe “The Shift” can give an answer....

FARHA: Home is so much more than four walls and a roof. The right to housing means that governments must ensure that everyone – particularly the most disadvantaged groups – has access to housing that is adequate. This is what I’m fighting for. The goal I strive for with “The Shift” is to tell governments and financial actors that we too have a vision for housing, and it is a different vision than the one of financialization. It’s a vision where housing is returned and restored to its foundation in human rights.

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70.8

percent of refugees worldwide originate in just five countries: Syrian Arab Republic (6.7 million), Afghanistan (2.7 million), South Sudan (2.3 million), Myanmar (1.1 million), Somalia (0.9 million).

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Altogether, more than

A record number of million people are currently displaced due to conflict, persecution and war.

place ment million people worldwide are at risk of rising sea levels.

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million people to migrate internally within their home countries by 2050.

Climate change could force over

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Illustration by Elisabeth Moch

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degrees Fahrenheit. Parts of the Middle East and North Africa will suffer heat waves so intense that they could become uninhabitable.

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In June 2018 temperatures in Iran and Pakistan soared above

people were displaced by the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

70,000

About

Displacement

The urban Tangle

ADAM TALBOT

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Photo: Ricardo Funari / BrazilPhotos / Alamy Stock Foto

Mega-events like the Olympics can boost a city’s economy. They generate impetus for urban transformation that can improve the life of many. But there is also a story of displacement, as progress and the changing face of the city may also imply forced eviction. It happens everywhere in the world, comes with glitter and glamour and often leaves scorched earth behind it. Let’s take a closer look at Rio de Janeiro and the 2016 Olympics.

Under construction: 2,889 people were forcibly removed for the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) network in Rio de Janeiro.

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The Housing Kibera, Nairobi, one of Africa’s largest informal settlements, has undergone an enormous slum upgrading programme, initiated by the Government of Kenya and the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT). It aimed to redevelop the urban infrastructure and improve the lives of the slum dwellers. But such an urban transformation unfortunately comes along with forced evictions. Did the programme succeed in providing a better place to live for the poor? Our author is quite unsure about it.

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Photo: picture alliance/AA / Recep Canik

CONSTANT CAP

Tin shacks in Kibera, an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. People live in difficult conditions due to lack of water, electricity, and hygiene. Could slum upgrading be an answer to these poor conditions?

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