Makeshift

ISSUE 05

INDIA’S BIG BATH

EVERYONE CAN’T WIn

Planning a megacity at the world’s largest festival

A divided Côte d’Ivoire celebrates conflicting victories

Stitching Carnival

FUN ZONE

Recife’s fashion designers dress up

Vancouver’s underground meets red tape

Celebration

51200 >

Merry making

9 780985 036737

ISBN 978-0-9850367-3-7

SPRING 2013

guest column by marian goodell

Informal economies never stop innovating. That’s why our contributors are in the world’s bazaars, foundries, and cyber cafes tracking the new industrial revolution.

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Gema Navarro Art Director Our Celebration Issue sponsoring partner is the Return on Innovation Project, which engages an active network of innovators from universities, the private sector, governments, and NGOs with a core focus on fostering solutions to problems facing the world’s most vulnerable populations. A key component to the success of these partnerships is the inclusion of creative input from the populations the ROi Project exists to serve.

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Makeshift is printed by Shapco, an environmentally friendly printer in Minneapolis. Shapco uses 78 percent agri-based ink, recycles all of its paper waste and metal plates, and runs out of an eco-friendly facility. This issue is printed on SFI-certified Finch Opaque Vellum.

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“Masquerade” by Phyllis Galembo Photographer Phyllis Galembo has spent over 25 years documenting cultures of masquerade—on the cover, in Sierra Leone. Her series is documented in the book Maske.

See Observed, p. 54. galembo.com

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Special thanks to Olivia Solon, Carren Jao, and Pedro Ramirez for their generous contributions to the Communication Issue.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Raka Baraputra

A tree-climbing race in Jakarta marks Indonesia’s independence day.

The Celebration Issue p. 05—Letter from

the Editor

p. 06—Briefings p. 10—Infographic:

Recipe for Revelry

p. 12—Engineering &

Humanity Week: Celebrating Water for Life

Dispatches

Features

p. 16—Church Trains Asanda Kaka

p. 24—Glow Games Carren Jao

p. 36—India’s Big Bath John Macomber

p. 17—Minto Live Samantha Irvine

p. 26—Bones for Meat Adam Ramsey

p. 40—Everyone Can’t Win Marco Chown Oved

p. 18—Party Everywhere UB Hawthorn

p. 28—Purse Parties Bruce Wallace

p. 44—Stitching Carnival Beto Figueiroa

p. 19—Bozo, MD Ben Kaplan

p. 30—Occupied Brews

Jonathan Kalan

p. 48—Fun Zone Shmuel Marmorstein

p. 20—Landfill Harmonic Maria Gallucci p. 21—Tijuana Toy Run Erin Siegal

p. 54—Observed p. 64—Our Creative Future Marian Goodell

p. 22—Burn Out Grant Fuller

CELEBRATION 5

CONTRIBUTORS 07 13

03

06

05

01 04 18

09 14

17

16

10 12 08

15 02

01

11

Steve Daniels

New York, USA Steve is Editor-in-Chief of Makeshift, a social computing researcher at IBM, and founder of the Better World by Design conference. @steveddaniels —“Merry Making”, p. 5 02

Beto Figueiroa

Recife, Brazil Beto is an award-winning photojournalist whose exhibitions have been shown throughout Brazil and abroad in France and Cuba. flickr.com/photos/betofigueiroa —“Stitching Carnival”, p. 44 03

Grant Fuller

Chicago, USA Grant is a freelance writer and radio producer currently based in Chicago after four years reporting from West Africa and Latin America. @gfuller44 —“Burn Out”, p. 22 04

Jonathan Kalan

Marian Goodell

10

11

Samantha Irvine

MAKESHIFT

Ben Kaplan

Asanda Kaka

Cape Town, South Africa Asanda is a photographer, creative and born anthropologist from Cape Town. @asanda_kaka —“Church Trains”, p. 16

UB Hawthorn

London, UK Samantha is a former lawyer researching law, urbanism, and development at the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. samanthairvine.com —“Minto Live”, p. 17

6

09

Haifa, Israel Ben writes about artistic solutions in regions of conflict. When not in a theater, he hunts for short stories and coffee.

—“Bozo, MD”, p. 19

Toronto, Canada UB edits The Mindful Word journal of engaged living and writes about spirituality, culture, and the environment. themindfulword.org —“Party Everywhere”, p. 18 07

San Fernando, Philippines Carren is an architecture and design writer based in Manila and Los Angeles fascinated with how we live, eat, and interact. @ccjao —“Glow Games”, p. 24

Maria Gallucci

San Francisco, USA Marian is the Director of Business and Communications for Black Rock City, LLC. She developed the Burning Man Regional Network and is a founding board member of The Burning Man Project. info@burningmanproject.org —“Our Creative Future”, p. 64 06

Carren Jao

Taybeh, West Bank Jonathan is a photographer and journalist with the New York Times, BBC, and Al Jazeera, specializing in technology, innovation, and ideas in emerging markets. @kalanthinks —“Occupied Brews”, p. 30

New York, USA Maria is a reporter on US renewable energy and carbon policies and occasionally writes about Latin America on the side. @mariagallucci —“Landfill Harmonic”, p. 20 05

08

12

John Macomber

Allahabad, India John teaches Finance at Harvard Business School. He is interested in how to plan, negotiate, and pay for truly sustainable cities. @cleantechcities —“India’s Big Bath”, p. 36 13

Shmuel Marmorstein

Vancouver, Canada Shmuel is a teacher and writer who lives in Vancouver. He enjoys laughter, Scrabble, and hip hop karaoke.

—“Fun Zone”, p. 48

14

Amanda Mustard

Cairo, Egypt Amanda is a self-taught photojournalist raised on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania and based in Cairo, with a fondness for film scores, pomegranates, and tattoos. amandamustardphoto.com —“Bones for Meat”, p. 26 15

Marco Chown Oved

Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire Marco reported for the Associated Press and Radio France Internationale from Abidjan in 2010-2011. He is now a reporter with the Toronto Star. @marcooved —“Everyone Can’t Win”, p. 40

16

Adam Ramsey

Cairo, Egypt Adam is a Saudi-born British journalist based in Cairo. He focuses on political, social, and ecological topics in the Middle East. @aporamsey —“Bones for Meat”, p. 26 17

Erin Siegal

Tijuana, Mexico Erin is an investigative author and Senior Fellow at @SchusterInst and a TV and radio reporter in Tijuana and San Diego for @FronterasDesk. @erinsiegal —“Tijuana Toy Run”, p. 21 18

Bruce Wallace

New York, USA Bruce Wallace is a journalist and multimedia producer based in Brooklyn.

He’s still mulling over Lisa Brown’s suggestion to start hosting purse parties. brucedwallace.wordpress.com —“Purse Parties”, p. 28

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Merry Making I’m fortunate to have plenty of things to celebrate. I’m happy and healthy. I have great family and friends. I’m wrapping up this issue. In fact, I’m going to stop and celebrate with a beer.

Mmm. Curating this issue has shown me that everyone’s gotta celebrate. Shake loose, jump for joy, shout to the skies, and revel.

Partying lets our steam out, and rituals bring us closer together. Celebration builds community and, in turn, culture.

We saw this at all scales, starting with the interpersonal. In Haifa, therapeutic clowns distracted sick kids from medical trauma.

On Cape Town trains, informal pastors kickstarted mornings with an uplifting daily mass. And in a Pennsylvania suburb, women revived the tradition of commercial house parties—with knock-off purses in place of Tupperware containers.

But fetes also swelled and spread into massive events. Carnival processions took over entire cities, with elaborate costumes, floats, and indulgence. Throughout Egypt, professional and amateur butchers took to the streets for Eid al-Hada, the Feast of the Sacrifice, setting up makeshift abattoirs to handle the slaughter. And we took the rare pilgrimage, with 80 million others, to the Ganges for Maha Kumbh Mela. Cycling every 144 years, it’s the largest gathering in the world, and its infrastructure would make the lights of any megacity flash with envy.

Celebration is a powerful force and, thus, must be guided. Reflecting on Kumbh Mela, Harvard professor John Macomber realized

that without well-planned roads and demarcations, deep-seated tensions over resources would have thrown the event into chaos.

Former AP correspondent Marco Chown Oved found just that in Côte d’Ivoire—a bitter conflict that began with two presidential candidates rejoicing in self-proclaimed victories.

But guiding infrastructure need not be tangible. Carmen Mauk, Founder of Burners Without Borders, told us how the values of creativity and generosity that fuel the Burning Man festival have begun to heal communities beyond the temporary boundaries of their desert city.

Here at Makeshift, we have a lot to celebrate.

This theme was chosen to coincide with our first anniversary—one year of documenting informal economies and building an incredible community of makers, journalists, researchers, readers, advisors, and partners. We’ve come a long way, and we’re continuing to grow and experiment and play. Look for some big announcements in store for year two.

For this issue, we partnered with Engineering & Humanity Week, a week-long celebration of the potential of technology to transform lives around the world. Explore some of their work in this issue, and if you attend this month, say hey to Senior Editor Myles Estey, who will be repping Makeshift as a speaker. And toast with him to our collective good fortune.

As natural as celebration feels, sometimes life goes by so fast that we forget to commemorate. To savor and reflect. To share moments with the people who matter most to us. We don’t realize the full potential of our cultures and achievements if we don’t take time to appreciate them. When you finish this issue, go do whatever you do to celebrate.

Steve Daniels Editor-in-Chief

CELEBRATION 7

BRIEFINGS

$ Mark Fischer

Bus Bars thailand

Romualdo Faura

Digital Harambee kenya

Harambee, Swahili for “all pull together”, is common practice in Kenya. Major events and causes like weddings, funerals, and tuition are frequently bankrolled by crowdfunding from friends and family. Entrepreneurs Kyai Mullei and David Mark realized technology could expand the reach and ease the effort involved in conducting a campaign. But online tools like Indiegogo and GoFundMe are impractical in areas with spotty Internet connections and limited computer access. So they went the route of other Kenyan startups and built M-Changa on top of the ubiquitous mobile phone. This mobile harambee platform allows fundraiser kickoffs, status inquiries, reminders to donate, and cash withdrawal, all over SMS using a series of shortcodes to manage the campaign. It’s free to set up, but small fees of a few cents each are charged for nagging donors with reminders and withdrawing the cash. All via text, a party is born. changa.co.ke

Modern Bootleggers global

In some countries, religious and cultural practices continue age-old prohibition, creating a void for the popular tradition of intoxication. But despite severe formal restrictions, rum-runners continue their underground production, spurred on by the desire for consumption. From moonshine to bathtub gin, the global black market for booze forms a thriving, albeit mysterious, counterculture with often extreme consequences for bootleggers.

8

MAKESHIFT

Bar hopping gets a bit much sometimes. Expensive, loud, repetitive spaces that often leave you unsatisfied with your night—and stuck with a massive bill. Luckily, Bangkok’s ever-vibrant street merchants devised an alternative: bar rolling. Dotted amidst the trendier, classier bars of Sukhumvit Soi 11, a series of refurbished Volkswagen vans snuggle up against the sidewalks and offer solace from the norm. Settle in with a bucket of drinks for just 200 baht (USD 6.70) and take in the homely atmosphere. Under cozy lights and handmade decor, patrons can relax and hear each other speak. And just because deafening bass thuds don’t define your night out, the bus bars—converted with a pop top and sound system—offer plenty of fun. Many offer board games like Connect Four, low-tech means of getting to know thy neighbor that keep things shakin’ on the streetside.

Grandma Party Hotline california

When presented with a blank canvas and privacy—a la Les Internets—in comes the Grandma Party Hotline. This little gem offers a phone number with a recorded message and the space to be creative; after an elderly woman’s voice, callers are asked to leave a message. The site collects and posts the recordings, ranging from the prank-call antics of pre-teens to bizarrely perverse ramblings to clever little spiels. Weird it may be, but grannies gotta party too. grandmapartyhotline.com

United Arab Emirates The emirate of Sharjah bans alcohol entirely. Home to a contrastingly thirsty expat community, Sharjah now hosts the UAE’s largest and most profitable illegal alcohol market, a bootleg operation punishable by death.

Russia Government efforts to curb a strong tradition of alcoholism through regulation instead birthed a dangerous moonshine market: the popular counterfeit vodka ITAR-TASS is known to cause toxic hepatitis—and general drunkenness.

California In the US, artisan cocktails led to a bootlegging scandal when new laws criminalized the alteration of alcohol without a license.

California saw a temporary end to home-infused liquors despite little proven threat to consumers.

BRIEFINGS

Dogon Astronomy mali

Joss van Zetten

The annual cliff ceremony of Mali’s Dogon tribe demonstrates that modern science may not always be the best way to explain the unknown. Pairing ritual dances with astronomical formations, the Dogon people believe the invisible Dogon Star, or Sirius B, to be the source of all life.

The catch: the ceremonies were practiced long before the star’s existence was confirmed by an advanced telescope in 1970. Other cosmological beliefs recorded by anthropologists in the 1930s also turned out to be correct, and their knowledge source is still debated.

Mass Games north korea

Container Theater the netherlands

Thespians and dramaphiles in Holland have taken off-Broadway to the off-loading docks.

Spaced out in the (relatively) soundproof havens of shipping containers—yes, those long, hollow metal rectangles stacked in a shipping yard near you—each July, the Over het IJ festival presents the joy of theater in venues rarely seen on the play circuit. Limitations obviously follow artistic work in small spaces. But unlike an hours-long summer remake of Macbeth or The Mousetrap with thousands of spectators, the normally bleak containers offer a rare intimacy. Specializing in short plays, groups in the dozen range can gather and watch small casts from literal spitting distance. For just three euros (USD 4.30) per show, patrons can step in and out of the newly-purposed spaces, enjoy a pinch of drama, then move due east off the starboard bow, in search of a new creative treasure. overhetij.nl

In Pyongyang’s Rungrado May Day Stadium, 100,000 gymnasts move in unison. It’s the annual Arirang Festival, or mass games, and the Guinness Book recognizes it as the largest event of its kind.

Participants are selected from as young as five years old to train and work until retirement, performing the story of North Korea. In the show, a red sun celebrates Kim Il Sung, while a mass of red flowers symbolize the working class—a reminder of the power of collectivity.

Prison Party venezuela

Romualdo Faura

When a friend says, “Let’s go out and party!” it is rare the reply would be, “Yeah, I know a good prison.” But not unheard of. Venezuela’s prisons, like those in much of Latin America, function more like felon-run enterprises than correctional facilities. Sure, they house common underground currencies like drugs, weapons, and cigarettes, but they’re also home to bakeries, fried-chicken stalls, fashion stores, motocross courses, and bars. One Venezuelan prison, the notorious Tocorón, took things to the next level last spring with a three-day Mother’s Day bash at its in-house Discoteca Tokio. Revelers could pay cover and shake booty with incarcerated felons and their friends (what could go wrong?!). Yet, with ads running on the radio all week, thousands joined in for the party, bringing in close to a hundred grand for the gangsters at the financial reins. In return—a rose to each woman and, to some lucky raffle winners, a washing machine and a 42-inch television.

CELEBRATION 9

BRIEFINGS

Mess Fest global

Ovbal y Sego

All City Canvas mexico

allcitycanvas.com

Romualdo Faura

Last summer, for the first time, Mexico City invited creatives to transform its urban landscape into art. After all, at the All City Canvas festival, any surface is fair game. In a city known for grey concrete sprawl, repetitive suburbs, and massive infrastructure needed to support its 22 million inhabitants, space is not lacking. So organizers invited world-class artists, such as Escif from Spain and ROA from Belgium, to spice it up. Featuring colors across the palette, high-quality sketches and portraits began to drape off buildings in the diverse barrios around the city. With a notable graffiti influence, the details give nod to popular themes and memes of historical and cultural significance to Mexico. Open to anyone walking by, All City Canvas offers a rare chance to memorialize modern art—free of charge. With their marks left on Mexico City’s unique and historical walls, the All City team is gearing up for year two in a new metropolis.

While some dwell on unrealized childhood dreams of massive food fights, other adults have managed to celebrate their food-flinging fantasies. La Tomatina in Buñol, Spain, a war of rotten tomatoes, may be the most recognized food battle. But it’s not alone: communities around the world covet the beauty of hurled edibles and other mess-making in the name of tradition. In India, the Hindu festival Holi welcomes spring through a curtain of powdered color, gulaal.

At the Battle of Oranges in Ivrea, Italy, competitors commemorate legend amidst an onslaught of oranges. During Songkran—on the Lunar New Year in Thailand—the spiritual bathing of young Thais reaches full-scale water fight.

Turning the therapeutic attributes of mud on its head, Boryeong, South Korea hosts a crowd of millions who play on a variety of mud structures, mud wrestle, and even run a mud marathon. It may not be the most responsible decision, but sometimes stuff’s just gotta fly.

Make Love Not Porn

Digital Drugs

Breaking news: the Internet is full of porn. Popular as it is, critics like Cindy Gallop believe the explosion only feeds into a culture promoting a false sense of sexuality through everything from airbrushed photos to silicone ejaculations. Her response, Make Love Not Porn, is a reminder that pornography is performance, an entertaining facsimile of the real thing. The site uses a digital rental system for video clips showcasing contributors’ most intimate moments, celebrating them in their messy, emotional, real-life humanity.

Ingesting drugs tends to require entrance through the mouth, nose, or veins. Even for Stevie Nicks, the ear rarely factors in.

Enter i-dosing—or “bianural beats”—that alter one’s state of mind by listening to MP3s. Users contact an online dealer with a variety of tracks available for purchase: mechanical noises that simulate a high similar to common street drugs. Some debate their functionality, others their safety; officials in the United Arab Emirates have called for a ban. I-dosing may keep drugs and kids off the street, but old-timers may be right that music is the devil.

new york

10

MAKESHIFT

united arab emirates

BRIEFINGS

Bring Your Own Films india

Once a year since 2004, filmmakers, musicians, and artists alike have flocked to coastal temple town Puri for a variation on the tried and true “bring your own...” But it’s not booze—it’s film. The Bring Your Own Film Festival provides a community for independent artists to showcase their work over five days without competition and hierarchy. It’s fitting that it’s hosted in the top film-producing country; Bollywood and other Indian production centers churn out 1,000 films per year, many from independents.

Lovotics

Chiditarod illinois

Yohei Yamashita

Bikini Tanks japan

Open up the Party global

Like partying but hate the planning? Consider one of these new tools to crowdsource your next shindig. If you’re not wedded to traditional cash, supplies, or guests, these virtual alternatives could make your celebration bigger and better. Just ask any avatars reveling from their bedrooms to check their coats and put on pants.

Grant Fuller

Ro-bot. Par-ty. Time. At Shinjuku’s Robot Restaurant, that means bikini-clad girls jumping atop neon-shimmering tanks, making giant machines do their bidding in mock battles. So leave the black cocktail attire and witty one-liners at home. Because by all human accounts, the experience takes over. Sensory overload from explosions of LEDs and audio beats reign over Sapporos, sake, and light meals as the aforementioned protagonists do their thing on stage.

The 44-seat spectacle cost 10 billion yen (USD 107 million) to construct, so entry is relatively steep—but refreshments are cheap and lowmaintenance. The establishment knows that anyone paying attention to food under the spell of robot revelry is clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if you can’t catch the show live, you can occasionally catch the fembots parading about town and try one out for yourself. Because there ain’t no party like a robot party.

Inspired by Alaska’s epic dogsled race, the Iditarod, a thousand brave souls took to the frigid streets of Chicago in March for the annual urban equivalent, affectionately known as the Chiditarod. Teams of five donned creative costumes (think Halloween gone weird) and pushed artistically modified shopping carts while sprinting down narrow alleyway shortcuts, hopping curbs, plowing over snow banks, and playing Frogger across busy avenues. The objective? Hit up the five different bars on your crew’s custom crawl map, spend at least 25 minutes getting tipsy at each, and get to the finish line ASAP. Oh, and along the way, shopping cart sabotage (damage or outright theft) against other teams is fair game. Similar events (like the Idiotarod) are held from New York to San Francisco.

But in Chicago, it’s craziness for a cause—each team brings 55 pounds of canned goods, turning the party into a giant mobile food drive.

Zokos Zokos is a party planning tool with a Kickstarter twist: guests RSVP and kick in some cash to make the event happen.

If the goal isn’t met, nobody gets charged.

TEDx in a Box For would-be conference organizers in far-flung locales, equipment like projectors and mics can be hard to come by.

This box is a turnkey solution with all the tech. Batteries included.

Hangouts on Air Kick it webcamstyle by broadcasting your party or concert live with a Google Hangout.

With a virtually unlimited number of attendees, the carousal goes viral.

CELEBRATION 11

CELEBRATIONS COMPARED

INFOGRAPHIC

A SAMPLING OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST CELEBRATIONS

Set off some fireworks, don a costume, prepare the feast. From revisiting the past to welcoming new beginnings, celebrations are ingrained in every culture. Some remain fixed in traditions centuries-old, while others shift as they spread to new audiences and environments. But the biggest jamborees aren’t spontaneous; it takes serious planning to support large-scale, often unpredictable, carousal. Here, we pull back the curtains, past the revelers and spectators, to reveal the infrastructure that supports a celebratory swell, the boon it brings to a local economy, and the waste it leaves behind.

9M

6M

3M

FESTIVAL FLOW

Pr i Sã

oP au

lo

est erf tob Ok

Ku

Bla

ck

mb

Na

hM

za r

ela

en

de

e

80 M

2 M 1.8 M

M Re u b a s i g ra k na ’s tio Fi r n st Ina ug o f u ra t i Ob on am a

Recipe for Revelry

WHY WE CELEBRATE

CARNIVAL AROUND THE WORLD Carnival first spread from Italy to other Catholic European countries and later to colonial Americas, Africa, and Asia. Unique local traditions emerged, which have spread back to its countries of origin.

ORIGINS IN EUROPE

Historical event

SPREAD VIA COLONIALISM

Cultural appreciation

REVERSE CULTURAL INFLUENCE

Success and perseverance Known Carnival Celebrations

NEW BEGINNINGS NEW YEAR’S CELEBRATIONS 2013 * Dates vary slightly by country

NEW YEAR Jan 1 Gregorian Calendar JAN

LUNAR NEW YEAR Feb 10 East Asian Lunisolar Calendar FEB

ORTHODOX NEW YEAR Jan 14 Julian Calendar

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MAKESHIFT

MAR

THE WATER FESTIVAL April 13-15* Southeast Asian Lunisolar Calendar APR

NOWRUZ March 20-23* Iranian Calendar

MAY

AUG

ROSH HASHANAH Sept 4-10 Jewish Calendar SEP

OCT

AL-HIJRA Nov 4 Islamic Calendar

Tradition

NOV

Fun

PREPARING FOR THE WORLD’S LARGEST FESTIVAL PEOPLE BEHIND KUMBH MELA Every three years, Hindu pilgrims descend upon the holy waters of the India’s riverbanks during the 55 days of Kumbh Mela. This year is Maha Kumbh Mela, a special occasion that cycles every 144 years. With up to 30 million pilgrims expected on certain days, preparation is a monumental task. See “Kumbh Mela”, p. 36.

INFRASTRUCTURE BUILT FOR KUMBH MELA

10,000

1,000

sanitation workers

medical staff

BRIDGES

ROADS

WATER PIPES

ELECTRIC LINES 0

14 km

159 km

1000

750 km

workers & volunteers

2000

30,000 police

others (employed both within and outside the festival)

30,000

3000

volunteers 3,349 km

HOW MUCH WE CONSUME

150,000

7,100,000

250,000,000

600,000

7,500,000

tomatoes hurled

litres of beer drunk

bead necklaces thrown

firecrackers set off

goats & cows slaughtered

Tomatina Buñol, Spain

Oktoberfest Munich, Germany

Mardi Gras New Orleans, USA

Chinese New Year Parade San Francisco, USA

Eid al-Adha Pakistan nationwide

FAIR BUSINESS

AFTER THE CELEBRATION

ECONOMIC IMPACT OF MARDI GRAS 2011 ON NEW ORLEANS, USA

HOW TO REPURPOSE WHAT’S LEFT BEHIND

1.8 M 5.8 M

106 M

Public Services (minus tax revenue)

Tourist spending

Merchandise and services

Wrapping paper

Book cover

Bead necklace

Mural

Tree lights

Garden lights

5.9 M Increase in local spending

11.7 M

144 M Total Direct Investment

Event expenses by organizations

12.9 M Event expenses by individuals

Sources: Al Jazeera, BBC, Guardian, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, NPR, The Telegraph, Time Magazine, Weiss T., Wall Street Journal

CELEBRATION 13

Engineering & Humanity Week Celebrating Water for Life April 6–12, 2013 Dallas, TX

Every year in Dallas, people meet. And talk. And learn.

Fueled by the energy and synergy of Engineering & Humanity Week, those hungry to serve come to the table to learn from one another and to leave refueled to further ease a hurting world. This year, Engineering & Humanity Week focuses on the challenges of water supply, access, and distribution—particularly to meet the needs of refugees and displaced people. This year’s program will focus on the positive ripple effect that people can inspire when confronted with our current global water challenges. The following is a sample of the powerful stories among the participants.

—eandhweek.org

Trash Trekker DAVID DE ROTHSCHILD 2013 Visionary Award Winner David de Rothschild is an environmentalist, explorer, and eternal optimist. He’s the founder of the Sculpt the Future Foundation, which uses adventure and storytelling to give nature a voice.

Out in the distance off the coast of Sydney, an 18-meter catamaran resolves into focus.

As it draws nearer, its hull reveals no ordinary floatation device: 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles. Originating in San Francisco, the Plastiki had sailed nearly 13,000 kilometers across the Pacific over four months.

For expedition leader David de Rothschild, this was a form of “adventure ecology”, a way to raise awareness of environmental and social issues while driving innovative real-world solutions. “Plastic is ubiquitous; it’s everywhere,” he says, adding that the majority of the world’s waste is single-use plastic. Responding to the accumulation of plastic in our oceans in concentrations like the South Pacific Garbage Patch, he began designing what would ultimately become the Plastiki.

14

MAKESHIFT

The frame of the ship uses a new material derived from recycled PET that he and his team invented, and the bottles are held together with a novel nontoxic glue based on cashew nuts and sugar.

Both materials are being commercialized. The craft features a number of renewable energy systems, including solar panels, wind and propeller turbines, and bicycle generators. The Plastiki will be on display at Engineering & Humanity Week.

De Rothschild says he’s driven by curiosity, always pondering the next expedition. In November 2011, for example, he and a crew travelled into the heart of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest to discover the effects the controversial Belo Monte dam project had on the local community. With numerous adventures, several books, a Sundance television series, and a National Geographic documentary under his belt, David hopes to reignite a collective spirit of hope that the fate of our planet can be rewritten.

Learning on Tap

A clay pot filters water on the campus green, while a robot monitors its quality. These systems form part of an experiment called THE WATER TAP, a week-long event at Southern Methodist University as part of Engineering & Humanity Week. To help students test the designs in the shoes of refugee users, THE WATER TAP will also host an overnight experience. Sophomore Chris Carrillo, who helped organize THE WATER TAP, says experiments like this inspire students. “I see that there

Folding Water

are problems around the world where people are forced out of their homes and have to live in refugee camps for long periods of time.

Engineers have an amazing opportunity to help solve these problems through innovation, and I don’t want to wait around until I am a professional engineer to help fix them.”

Isabelle and Katherine Adams wanted to help people without water. Ages nine and seven, the Dallas sisters had taken up origami from their half-Japanese father and decided to sell paper Christmas ornaments. In a trial run at a local Starbucks, the product sold out in a day. “We were actually also folding in the car on the way to school,” Isabelle told Yahoo News. “Folding like crazy.” Now, less than two years later, they’ve raised over USD 130,000 in sales and corporate matching to fund water wells in Ethiopia and India. Setting an ambitious goal of 10 wells, they enlisted the help of community volunteers to help fold. At Engineering & Humanity Week, the grade-school philanthropists will demonstrate their craft for college students and others.

Original origami creations will be available in exchange for tax-deductible donations.

—paperforwater.org

amount of water used in manufacturing 1kg RICE

4 out of 10 people

The average person in the US uses

8,000

1,00o - 3,000

liters

liters

30 times more water

lack access to clean water or must walk to retrieve it

than the average person in Sub-saharan Africa 1kg

MIDDLE CLASS

115.3

Slum Dwellers

175.2

million liters

million liters

2006

2011

Global sales of bottled water have increased

51 percent over five years Sources: Mother Nature Network, US FDA, UNEP, UN Habitat, ONERC, WWAP, FAO, WHO

11,000

13,000 - 15,000

liters

liters

The cost of access to water for slum dwellers can be

5–10 times more than their middle class counterparts in the same city

30,000 liters

E&H WEEK 15

WAR CHILD EMMANUEL JAL 2013 Humanitarian Award Winner Emmanuel Jal is a survivor of civil war who uses art and activism to call for peace and fight violations of war, such as the employment of child soldiers and the illegal trade of arms.

Emmanuel Jal was born in Southern Sudan and spent the early years of his childhood in the midst of its long-running civil war. At the age of seven, after the death of his mother, he was recruited as a child soldier for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

He survived front-line action and escaped with 300 other “lost boys” and endured a three-month trek to safety on foot and without any supplies.

One of only a handful to survive the journey, Emma McCune, a British aid worker, managed to smuggle him to freedom in Kenya and enrolled him in school for the first time.

Some 15 years later, Jal is now a well-known recording artist, author, and advocate. He has released four studio albums, published his own biography War Child, and produced an award-winning documentary by the same

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MAKESHIFT

name. He performed at the 90th birthday concert for Nelson Mandela and the One World Concert for the Dalai Lama. Now he’ll be performing at Engineering & Humanity Week 2013.

Jal is driven to use his story and his art to campaign against the employment of child soldiers and the illegal trade of arms. Through his nonprofit Gua Africa and campaign We Want Peace, he has worked with the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Oxfam and addressed the UN Security Council, as well as the G20 and TEDGlobal conferences.

Being so public with his story hasn’t been easy for Jal. “I come from a long way,” he says. “I’ve been telling a story that’s been so painful for me.”

He says the music has been his therapy. “Where I actually see Heaven, where I can be happy, where I can be a child again is through music.”

20 liters

In June 2008, Bob and Macky Johnson talked to local church leaders in Masaka, Rwanda, where a cholera outbreak had killed over 500 people through contaminated water. The need for clean water topped everyone’s list.

Those conversations inspired them to launch 20 Liters, named for the common 20-liter jerry cans used to fetch often-contaminated water. Using slow-sand water filters and rainwater harvesting systems, even the dirt-

LIVING on onE iest water becomes potable. These simple, affordable solutions reduce the difficulty in accessing water and remove harmful bacteria from water that’s been collected from contaminated sources, such a river or pond. As of 2012, the team had provided clean water for over 14,000 people in Masaka and began expanding to four new regions in Rwanda.

—20liters.org

In 2010, four university students spent a summer in a village in Guatemala, attempting to live on one dollar a day. Ever since, they’ve devoted themselves to confronting global poverty by creating awareness and providing opportunities for 20-somethings to fight poverty. They support microfinance organizations that offer simple, reliable, and flexible financial services to the extreme poor. Partnering with Whole Planet Foundation helps insure that 100 percent of the money raised for microfinance goes directly to empowering women borrowers.

In addition, they support the Student Microfinance Movement, a resource for students to take microfinance classes, find internships, attend conferences, and build the skill sets to become successful social entrepreneurs.

—livingonone.org

Engineering & Humanity Week is challenging participants to use biomimicry—nature’s model—to develop water solutions for refugees. In an eight-hour immersion design competition, the University of Oxford’s Refugee and Forced Migration Studies team will provide the prompt, guided by advice from experts from BiomimicryTX and Southern Methodist University.

Why Engineering & Humanity?

The mission of Engineering & Humanity Week is to provide a forum for information exchange that furthers the global goals and aspirations of the Hunt Institute for Engineering & Humanity. Through the power of engineering—steeped in practical solutions, collaboration with partners, and a commitment to the principles of humanity—innovators will meet the challenges of the developing world.

Engineering & Humanity Week events, in association with Southern Methodist University (SMU), include: —Barefoot on the Green music festival ­—Student Design Competition: Biomimicry + Water + Refugees —THE WATER TAP: A Water Distribution Camp —Student Water Bottle Challenge —A View From the Field: Working in a humanitarian crisis —Living on One conversation and documentary —Water and Refugees roundtable

Facebook/Twitter @huntinstitute Email kate@eandhweek.org Website eandhweek.org Phone +1 214 768 3351

E&H WEEK 17

DISPATCH SOUTH AFRICA

01

Church Train Abstract Mobile masses invigorate Cape Town’s commuters.

Text and photos by Asanda Kaka 02

A pianist plays (01) and a steel bell rings (02) as church train service rolls along.

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MAKESHIFT

It’s 17:45 at Bellville station in the eastern suburbs of Cape Town. I stand waiting for a train, the same one I’ve been taking three days a week. I’m waiting for a church train.

The locomotive rushes into the platform, and gospel hits my ear from one of its carriages. I jog alongside as the music escapes through missing windows.

Four men stand in the entrance, jamming the doors open with their feet to let fresh air into the packed car. I have a minute to squeeze in, finding space in front of today’s song leader. She holds a homemade steel bell that

she rings in harmony with the singing, clapping, and drumming of hands against the train walls.

The song stops, and the preaching begins. The word of the day tells us to put our faith in God. Meanwhile, a lady guides a blind man with string through a small door between carriages. The man plays a keyboard strapped around his body, and the lady jingles a few coins in a metal cup. They sing in unison: “Thank you Jesus, amen.”

They plead for spare change, but the passengers stare back hard, annoyed at the interruption. Still, some donate a few rand while the rest continue to fix their

attention on the “pastor”, who continues the service. The duo shuffle on to the next carriage.

Among the congregated are gardeners, maids, office cleaners, and the unemployed; they fill these trains in search of a better life. Mobile churches have chugged along since the Apartheid era, as long as black South Africans have trekked from their dusty and isolated township homes to their more central, urban places of employment. Many leave home early and return late, seven days a week; there’s no time to attend church and no choice but to take God with them on their long rides.

Church trains fill this void across heavily religious South Africa. No formal structure guides their existence: there is no scheduled mass, no fixed location. Friendships forged in mobile worship keep the tradition alive.

Luphumzo Sokoyi is a 35-yearold receiving clerk from Delft Township, outside of Cape Town.

She’s also the car’s preacher. She started in 2011, when she and a colleague decided to bring their bibles along on their hour-long train rides from work. “We saw how people around us were sad and hopeless, and we thought public transport is a great place to use the word of God to empower and give hope to the otherwise hopeless poor of South Africa,” says Sokoyi.

There are now about 50 regulars in her church—those who take the same train five days or more a week. The rest just pass by or find themselves in the wrong carriage.

The train reaches its final destination, Cape Town station. Patrons call each other by name, bidding goodbye. Most hop onto new trains to share in other services with other trainchurch friends. And tomorrow, it will start over again.

DISPATCH AUSTRALIA

02

What was the experience like for the artists?

As an artist, you’re constantly working out a language to describe what you’re doing. The artists who worked on MINTO:LIVE made their work in public; they had people asking them what they were doing all the time. And it’s cyclical because the work is affected by how the local people interpret what you’re saying.

01

Minto Live Abstract Suburbanites take to their front lawns for a new kind of theater festival.

Text by Samantha Irvine Photos by Heidrun Lohr

In 2011, Rosie Dennis, an Australian performer, writer, and curator, brought a group of international artists to Minto, a high-crime, low-income Sydney suburb. This decision gave birth to the cultural celebration MINTO:LIVE—and shook the artists’ conceptions of theater.

Families danced through the streets, a textile designer took up residency at the post office, and schoolchildren created a watering hole for fantastical creatures. We asked Dennis what it was like to let contemporary dance, visual art, and performance loose in the streets.

Makeshift: Why Minto?

RD: Minto was built on the American model of social housing—putting people of low socioeconomic status together in poor accommodation where your indoor space is outdoors and your personal busi-

ness is everyone’s business. Minto had something like 80 percent social housing. It gets such a bad rap: all the lead stories are about shootings or drugs or things getting set on fire.

But there’s more to this suburb. I wanted to show a different side of it.

How did Minto residents feel about being involved in a contemporary art festival?

Minto had no contemporary art or theatre. We did a free show at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, and at the end of every performance, people just wanted to stand around and talk about it. One day, someone came up to me and said, “The next thing you do here, Rosie, I want to do it with you.”

Then MINTO:LIVE got picked up by the Sydney Festival.

That changed it. The festival audience, who were already arts-lovers, travelled 50 kilometers from Sydney to come to Minto—this suburb—for the shows. The audience was a great mix of people from the art world and people from the neighborhood who had never seen anything like it before. It was an unbelievably fantastic opportunity for conversations that would never happen.

Was it risky to assume that the community would participate?

For sure. Recruiting the families for Streetdance [a neighborhood portrait presented through contemporary dance] was a challenge. One day I was out knocking on doors and a Bangladeshi woman invited me in for a glass of Fanta. She asked who from the Bangladeshi community was dancing. I told her nobody was, and she said, “Give me a week, and I will find a family who will do this for you. We have to be part of this.” When things like that happen, you know it’s going to be okay.

So bridging two communities, as well as celebrating Minto?

Yeah, I always think of that as the highlight. This one woman was a marshall (we had about 40 residents helping people along the one-kilometer festival route through the streets) and had never seen any contemporary theatre before. By the opening night, she was telling people at Streetdance, “Get to the front. This is an amazing dance and you’re not going to want to miss it!” When she said that, I realized that MINTO:LIVE had done what it needed to do.

Minto residents perform on their lawn (01), while another jumps along (02).

CELEBRATION 19

DISPATCH CANADA

Party Everywhere Abstract Vancouver residents reclaim their streets, sync their stereos, and launch an unchoreographed movement.

Text by UB Hawthorn Photo by Sarah Hamilton

Tom, Gary, and the Distributed Dance Party crew flaunt Social Stereos.

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MAKESHIFT

Endless asphalt, roads, subways, and concrete towers connect the dots in any typical North American city. These are the well-worn paths of the day-to-day, leading workers to their jobs and

homes—infrastructure certainly not designed for dancing. Enter a dude with an MP3 player and FM radio transmitter, and add a few hundred boombox-toting partiers tuned in to the signal, and those same streets turn into road revelry rooted in ridiculousness.

This ridiculousness—with its own sense of purpose—is the Decentralized Dance Party (DDP), a free mobile dance event with no central location and no central audio source. Though Decentralized Dance Parties are spontaneous in nature, organizers still arrange a specific date, time, and location. What happens next is up to the crowd.

The DDP crew arrive at the site with boomboxes (though partiers are encouraged to bring their own), and the party wanders from there. Born from 20 people partying on a beach in

Vancouver, Canada in 2009, the DDP crew’s Party Safari Tours have since brought impromptu, urban-dance free-for-alls to tens of thousands across North America.

Classics from the 80s and 90s like Bon Jovi and House of Pain lay the beat for these dance-wanderers. Wearing banana costumes, three-piece suits, and superhero outfits, they bounce along bridges on mini-trampolines and spin through skateparks on office chairs.

They launch into public fountains and splash-dance, set up on streets and breakdance, partner-dance, and solo-dance. Rules are few; the more liberated and free the better.

The sense of liberation comes largely from people coming together to collectively reorient their psychogeography—that is, how people perceive the spaces they inhabit. As the party winds its way through the city’s chasms, previously well-trodden paths gain new meaning. New sights erupt into the collective party consciousness, and new ways to interact with the environment emerge.

Public space is seen with new eyes.

Decentralized Dance Partiers ask not what the streets can do for them but what they can do for the streets.

Party instigators Tom and Gary pose an open question to their community: how can the DDP reach a larger audience? How can publicspace-starved urbanites put their utilitarian asphalt and concrete to better (or more frivolous) use?

Tom and Gary have sworn to deliver Decentralized Dance Parties to every single country on the face of the Earth. No small claim, but they’re on their way. A redesign of their gear aims to put an affordable price tag on impromptu parties.

One recent development, tentatively dubbed the Social Stereo, uses open-source technologies to allow boomboxes to talk to one another, share live music, and spread the party as far as the speakers stretch. This way, parties can erupt anywhere—decentralized dance as it was meant to be. Urbanites fighting the workday doldrums in any time zone may soon be hit with a spontaneous boogie, right smack in the middle of their day-to-day.

DISPATCH ISRAEL

Bozo, MD Abstract Israeli clowns leave the circus tent for the pediatric ward to ease wartime trauma.

Text by Ben Kaplan Illustration by Ben Nadler

Amnon Raviv fights his battles with a giant sunflower on his head.

Where tensions run high and conflict is never far away, he’s ready to trip over his medical bag or start a food fight in the cafeteria. As one of many medical clowns working throughout hospitals in Israel today, Raviv, or Professor Doctor Head of the Ward, restores joy to his patients, providing a refuge and reprieve from the anxiety of illness.

Medical clowning is changing the way Israeli doctors work. Far from your birthday party bozos, these clowns are professional actors with extensive medical training, who use their artistic craft to facilitate healing. While making patients laugh and reducing their anxiety, the clowns serve as a channel of communication among doctors, patients, and families. They transform the hospital environment—at times terrifying, depressing, and stressful—into a world of fantasy and vitality, imagining play as a point along the path to health. “When you laugh,” says Raviv, “you start to look differently at the situation you’re in.”

In 2007, Raviv was working at Barzilai Medical Center in southern Israel, when a rocket exploded next to a bus full of children in nearby Sderot. The children were rushed to the hospital to await treatment for shock, and Raviv

rushed to meet them. The head doctor gestured for him to stay back, but as a clown he had “very selective hearing”. He stumbled in, scrambling for his gadgets and making faces at the kids. They quickly burst into laughter. From then on, whenever patients arrived to be treated for shock or PTSD, it was the clowns the medical staff sent in first. “In Israel,” Raviv says, “we have the unlucky opportunity of working as clowns in war.”

Since then, the clowns have fully integrated into the Israeli medical team. They now work with doctors on a multitude of procedures, from accompanying children before surgery to assisting the staff during chemotherapy and dialysis. In one technique called mirroring, a doctor will swab one arm, and the clown will swab the other. The clown provides distraction, while performing a parody that gives the patient a renewed sense of agency.

Studies have shown that techniques like this are effective.

Another trick, called freezing, encourages kids to sit still during imaging. A study at a northern Israeli hospital confirmed that, in nearly all cases, freezing eliminated the need for sedatives in kids with urinary tract infections.

Another found that preoperative clowning reduced the amount of anesthesia required in pediatric surgeries and sped up recovery.

Raviv sees more clowns working in different contexts, focusing on adults as well as children, in more wards of the hospital, and in outside rehab facilities and nursing homes. The practice has spread to infirmaries throughout Europe and North America, who are sending clowns to shadow Israelis.

“For someone with a life-threatening illness,” says Raviv, “humor is much more significant.”

He pauses. “It is hope. An inner command to live.”

CELEBRATION 21

DISPATCH PARAGUAY

wood to make violins. They have drums, guitars, cellos, and double basses; they have flutes from pie plates and coins, saxophones and trumpets from bottle caps, forks, spoons, and pieces of metal that they recycle.

It’s almost impossible to make strings from trash, so orchestras from all over the world, music schools, and shops are donating their used strings. And because they don’t have violin pegs, they created this technique that takes five pages of instruction to assemble. But it works!

01

02

Landfill Harmonic Abstract Children of a scrap-picker city perform in the Recycled Orchestra with instruments of their own.

Text by Maria Gallucci

Favio and Cola demonstrate recycled instruments (01) played by children in the Recycled Orchestra (02).

22

MAKESHIFT

Ecologist Favio Chavez first set foot in the landfill city of Cateura, Paraguay seven years ago.

Some 2,500 families scrape out a living there, fishing and selling recyclables from the trash heap.

Chavez started a music program to give kids an escape but quickly

ran out of instruments. So Nicolas “Cola” Gomez, a garbage picker, helped him find a solution: use junk to make more.

Today, the program has grown into the world-renowned Recycled Orchestra. Their creations will soon be on display at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, and the project is the subject of the upcoming documentary Landfill Harmonic. Makeshift caught up with executive producer Rodolfo Madero to talk oil-can cellos and bottlecap trumpets.

Makeshift: Who came up with the idea to make instruments?

RM: Favio came up with the idea of building instruments out of recyclable materials, and Cola, who doesn’t have any experience in music, came up with the technique.

And the quality of the instruments is amazing. They go and pick materials from the landfill or from restaurants and homes to find stuff that is usable. The kids are now participating and even building their own instruments.

What’s the process like?

They use everything that goes into a landfill—paper, cardboard, huge cans of oil, paint cans, pieces of

Tell me about the musicians.

Everyone can join the orchestra.

Right now, about 30 to 40 kids are part of this program, between eight and 19 years old. Their families go every day and pick up the trash and recycle it, and the kids do, too.

Their houses are made out of whatever they find in the landfill.

Half of the kids’ lives is dedicated to the orchestra, and half is dedicated to normal schooling.

Their parents sometimes want them to collect trash and would rather have them contributing to the day-to-day needs of the families than learn instruments.

It has changed a little bit over the last year because now the kids are playing at venues where they are getting paid.

So kids are making and playing their own instruments. They must feel proud.

Actually, until recently it was a shame for them to be playing with instruments made out of trash. But lately, with all the media attention and the concerts they’ve given abroad, now they are very proud of who they are and where they come from. It’s something that has given them the promise of a future that is not what their parents do.

Photos courtesy of The “Landfill Harmonic” Documentary Film Production

DISPATCH MEXICO

Tijuana Toy Run Abstract Bikers and gangsters unite in holiday spirit to deliver gifts to eager youngsters.

Text and photo by Erin Siegel

The first winner was escorted to the stage. He tipped his tiny head back, and a ripping wail escaped from beneath the drawn hood of his red sweatshirt. Tears soon followed.

Dozens of children gazed from behind yellow police tape as a large, skullcapped biker lifted the sobbing victor and balanced him atop the prize: a black bicycle, brand-new and decked out with the smallest of training wheels and metallic blue-and-purple streamers. He froze in distress, his legs jerking a few times to avoid the pedals.

The biker—an “Angel” from the Mexican motorcycle group Solo Ángeles—gently held the winner in place and then rolled him back to his family waiting in the crowd.

Typically, such raucous giveaways—known as “toy runs”— provoke more joy than fear for attendees. But emotions can overwhelm a kid surrounded by bikers.

The Solo Ángeles have hosted their Tijuana Toy Run for decades.

This year’s run featured four different stages where bikers stood and passed out items. The wildly popular event attracts bikers from both sides of the border in a unique ritual of giving back. Roughly 25 clubs pitched in, collecting three tractor-trailers full of toys.

No kid leaves empty-handed.

The border state of Baja California hosts various motorcycle clubs. Their memberships span from two-wheeled speed enthusi-

A Tijuana biker unites an overwhelmed toddler with a bike of his own.

asts to known gangster syndicates funded by crime—all of whom unite during the holiday season.

The giveaways tend toward the boisterous. While thousands of eager children wait in lines, often for hours, bikers throw back cans of Tecate beer wrapped in brown paper bags. They laugh, bark orders, and tell off-color jokes. Their motorcycles are adorned with tinsel and Santa hats in addition to airbrushed skulls. Giant stuffed animals, trucks, and tricked-out custom bicycles are passed out.

Toy runs like this happen around the world, from Australia to Europe to South Africa. But in Mexico, where bloody drug violence continues to linger in the public consciousness, the sight of rough-hewn guys gently handing out toys and bikes to kids offers an endearing spectacle.

At this year’s Tijuana Toy Run, an Angel with black leather boots and dark jeans stood on one of the stages erected on Avenida Revolución, passing out stuffed animals to the queue of children gathered beneath him. Music pumped from four sound systems independently blaring an awkwardly upbeat fusion of norteño, house, and pop songs.

Beside the rowdy bikers, the children seemed meek and orderly. On stage, Angels collided in a frenzy, practically tripping over heaps of gifts in their eagerness to distribute them. The Angel in the dark jeans grinned, reaching down to hand a toy to a girl standing with her family. The faded patch sewn to the front of the biker’s leather vest read, in English, “I Fuck Your Girlfriend.”

In the midst of the festivities, no one noticed.

CELEBRATION 23

DISPATCH GLOBAL

Burn Out Abstract Burners Without Borders takes Burning Man’s artistic values out of the desert and into the world.

Text by Grant Fuller Photo by Heidrun Lohr

While 35,000 idealists, artists, and dreamers were living it up at Burning Man 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.

Best known for partying in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, some “burners” left their makeshift city with heavy machinery en route to the devastated coastal towns of Mississippi, helping clear a million dollars worth of debris.

Soon after, Burners Without Borders (BWB) was born.

BWB takes the values burners celebrate—self-reliance, self-expression, radical inclusion, and gifting— out into the world. From Hurricane Sandy relief in New Jersey to screen printing with marginalized Haitian artists, their humanitarian projects tend toward the communal and, at times, eccentric. Executive Director Carmen Mauk explains.

Makeshift: Tell me about the early days of BWB. CM: Our first major project was saving the beach fire pits [in San Francisco] because we had a lot of problems with trash—beachgoers not caring for the beach. So we thought, how can we help the National Park Service solve this problem in a communal way? And we were able to eventually have artistic fire pits placed on the beach, made by the community. That project became a symbol for everything we do. We really encourage the community to figure out what they care about and help them connect with others.

24

MAKESHIFT

01

realize, “Oh, they have the same idea of community that we do.”

It’s not that different—you just need to have the courage to say, “I have something to share.” That extended hand is something every community can appreciate.

02

How does the Burning Man ethos translate to humanitarian projects?

It’s pretty much threaded throughout, but the one it really gets behind is gifting. And it’s not just about an object or a thing but really sharing our creativity. In Pisco, Peru, after they had an 8.0 earthquake in 2007, all the other groups were leaving after a year. But we decided to stay and create a volunteer cooperative based on Burning Man principles.

Everybody was welcome and we created a relationship with the community. Over six years, with a hundred Peruvians being neighbors, we had language exchanges, they taught us different things they knew how to do with instruments, fire spitting, circus juggling techniques. And then people started to

Burners clear wreckage along the coast of New Jersey following Hurricane Sandy (01,02).

How do you maintain your emphasis on creativity and fun in this kind of work?

It’s extremely difficult to work in a disaster zone where you’re surrounded by people who’ve lost everything. What we do well is we bring in the whole community. Our New Jersey crew probably didn’t take enough time off in the beginning, and they needed to inject some fun. So we did some beach cleanups, finding ways to invite the community in, so that we’re not just tearing up homes and moving on to the next one. Engaging the broader community infuses energy into a project.

Nothing takes away the pain surrounding everyone, but we can help alleviate the suffering while also making people believe that when it’s all over, we’ll have this community we’re creating now. What I find is that it makes for an incredibly creative environment where people are excited, and there’s a lot of energy because everyone feels like anything’s possible.

DISPATCH Philippines

Glow Games Abstract For the craftsmen of San Fernando, giant lanterns are a source of pride and competitive fervor.

Text by Carren Jao Photos by Raphael Kalaw

Christmas is always around the corner for the residents of San Fernando. Recognized as the yule capital of the Philippines, the city harbors a cadre of craftsmen whose lineage dates back over a century, to 1908, when Francisco Estanislao first made a giant lantern 10 feet in diameter.

Today, visitors lose themselves in a babel of color emanating from 20-foot Christmas lanterns, called parols, whose lights swirl, wriggle, and twirl, as if buoyed by the jubilant mood of the season. Thousands make the yearly trek 64 kilometers north of the capital city, Manila, to delight in the show of lights. And behind the glow: the impressive craftsmanship of analog light shows.

A giant parol is much like the human body. Like bones and sinew, a steel frame dictates its structure. The spaces within the frame form honeycomblike compartments, which are lined with cardboard and foil.

Within these cavities, as many as ten bulbs of various colors jostle for space, adding up to a minimum of 3,000 in every parol.

All bulbs must be cleaned and tested—a seven-week task. Once the bulbs are positioned in their designated compartments, each is wired—another two weeks.

A tangle of electric lines snake from each bulb to converge at the rotor, ending in metal tines that connect to a generator. The parol’s face con26

MAKESHIFT

01

ceals the wiring, dotted with colorful pieces of paper cut in a mosaic pattern inspired by the traditional batik motif prevalent in southern Philippines.

The rotor is the brain of the parol. Invented by Rodolfo David in 1957, it’s what allows the lantern to dance in endless combinations of light and color. Rotors are large metal cylinders, similar to those found in music boxes. But instead of embossed pinpoints, these rotors have a smooth surface covered in careful patterns of masking tape.

“When they first started using rotors, they just used the gallonsized can of paint for rotors,” said Ernesto Quiwa, a descendant of the pioneer maker, Estanislao; he’s the fourth generation to enter into the family trade. Nowadays, rotors have more in common with 55-gal-

lon metal cans—and the caliber of the show has grown with it.

The magic begins when the finished rotor is cranked. As the tines at the end of each bulb hit strategically cut sections of tape, the circuit is closed. Electricity flows to the bulbs, lighting as many as 50 different patterns that dance to the beat of live music.

Different rotors mean new beats and ever-changing patterns.

“The longest a parol operates is 10 minutes,” explains Arnel Flores, a relatively young lantern maker at 41 years old. “Think about it. Each light is 50 watts, and there are 10,000 bulbs on average. That’s a lot of volts, and soon, the parol gets too hot.” As many as ten different rotors are switched out for each performance to ensure cooling.

02

03

A local maker puts the final touches on his parol (01). The honeycomb lattice (02) is needed to support the final product, a dazzling kaleidoscope of color (03).

A parol’s soul undoubtedly lies in the lantern maker. Construction takes about two months and a team of ten. But months before, the concept forms in the mind of the maker. Without computers, he sketches out a complex symmetrical design that takes into account thousands of bulbs.

“While I design, I’m like a crazy person singing,” says Efren

Tiodin, a lanky 53-year-old lantern maker who started out building small, commercial lanterns at age 13. “I try to get the light patterns synched to the beat of the music.”

Such single-minded dedication is why San Fernando has become the hotbed of the craft. Each lantern is the pride of one of the nine barrios participating in the city’s yearly Giant Lantern Festival.

“When you say ‘San Fernando’, you immediately think ‘parol’,” says Tiodin. Quiwa adds that giant parols can sometimes be found in other provinces, but the lantern maker inevitably hails from San Fernando.

Like many things in the Philippines, the now-secular festival has its roots in the Spanish-era Catholic practice of lubenas during the when humble two-foot lanterns were then held aloft during street processions the nine straight nights before Christmas.

As time went on and electricity was introduced, the lanterns became larger and more grandiose.

The festival is now a more secular affair. The provincial government offers as much as USD 3,000 in subsidies to each barrio, though costs to create a truly magnificent piece can run up to USD 20,000, says Flores.

A competition determines the top three entries, which could win up to USD 3,000. The winnings are quickly funneled into the next year’s entry.

The cost is secondary, says Flores. What is more important

is the chance to win honor for the barrio. But more pragmatically, the ostentatious display of engineering genius cements San Fernando’s position in the Christmas-lantern-making industry.

Lantern makers frequently design large-scale in-store displays for supermarket chains in the Philippines. Orders for smaller lanterns come in from countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.

The skills of lantern makers are so prized that they are often called upon to design similar displays for exhibition abroad. Quiwa has showcased his work at the 1992 world’s fair in Seville, Spain and on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

With so much pride embroiled in the craft, it’s no wonder that competitive spirits run high each year.

As I toured each workshop, the finished parols were shrouded under heavy tarpaulin away from prying eyes. Each lantern maker oh-so-casually peppered me with questions of his own. How far along were the other barrios? What did I think of the other entries? Did they plan to use any new materials?

But after all that, Quiwa dismisses his pointed questions, chalking it up to friendly competition. “Among us lantern makers, who finally wins doesn’t really matter. As long as we all get to participate, it’s like our Christmas is finally complete.”

CELEBRATION 27

DISPATCH EGYPT

Bones for Meat Abstract Street-level slaughterhouses stabilize Egypt’s meat market, disrupted each year by Eid al-Adha.

Text by Adam Ramsey Photos by Amanda Mustard

The Cairene sun barely materializes over the roofs of the surrounding buildings as the festivities begin. Children laugh, running after one another, dodging the tributaries of blood that trickle into the streets. Morning prayers ring out above them. A small group of women and men, dressed in their finest clothes, observe the handiwork of one of the thousands of butchers gathered in anticipation of one of the most important Muslim holidays—Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice.

Eid al-Adha is celebrated worldwide by Muslims on the 10th day of Dhu-al-Hijja, the 12th Month of the Islamic Hijri calendar. It commemorates prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his firstborn son Ismail in obedience to a command from God. After an early Eid prayer, an animal sacrifice serves as a symbolic nod to Ibrahim’s submission—a practice followed by approximately 75 million Egyptians.

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The sudden demand of meat complicates logistics for the country. The government steps in by imposing strict controls on markets and prices—securing sufficient quantities of high-demand items and offering subsidies for lower-income residents (approximately 25 percent of Egypt’s population lives in poverty).

Despite state measures, meat prices generally rise by 10 percent during the Eid period, offering local businesses healthy margins.

Charities allow ordinary Egyptians to donate money to help secure livestock for the poorest— an annual form of meat distribution. Large-scale imports stave off shortages: 28,000 live cows were imported from Australia, along with 24,000 tons of frozen meat.

This sudden influx of sheep, goats and cows turns the streets of Cairo into a saturated mélange of humans and livestock. Cows meandering in the streets disrupt traffic and pedestrian flow. Goats huddle in ad hoc pens or stare out from behind a solitary Lada car.

All are oblivious to their fate.

This spells a boon for the city’s small butchers, who step up to meet demand. “A butcher must imagine how many animals he would normally slaughter in one month,” explains Mohamed Nada, a 49-year-old butcher in Downtown Cairo, of the pace of killing. “This is how much work he will have to do in the first day of Eid al-Adha.” So much meat is on hand that, he continued, “a butcher would not have to slaugh-

ter again for [up to] a month and a half after the Eid celebrations”.

But the butchers can’t handle the task alone. On Eid, entire neighborhoods transform into street-level butcheries. Thousands of men from all walks of life pick up knives and take up the trade for the day, either helping a local butcher or setting up their own temporary abattoir. Fathers and sons don armor that boasts more knives than your average kitchen. Assortments of specialized blades jut out of belts, boots and heavy duty pockets—immensely useful for the day’s tasks of slaughtering, skinning, and dividing up entire cows.

In one central Cairo neighborhood situated by the historic Bab Zuweila gate, those unable to fund their own meat wait patiently outside a mosque while their children loiter inside, peering curiously at the proceedings from the windows. Cows and goats, funded through donations, are led into the mosque’s gated perimeter. Here, a team of barefooted volunteers put their knives to work; no one misses out because of financial constraints.

Social class and political affiliation are put on hold during Eid al-Adha. On streets where Egyptian blood has been shed in political clashes, animal blood is now shed on tenets of sharing and charity. In a year when the transition to democracy has revealed its pitfalls, where massive rallies and bitter clashes have resulted in scores of deaths, Eid al-Adha offers respite.

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Blood runs in the streets (01) and other temporary abattoirs (02). Amateur butchers stash tools of the trade (03)

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CELEBRATION 29

DISPATCH UNITED STATES

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Purse Parties Abstract In suburban living rooms, Tupperware’s classic party plan model fuels an emerging black market.

Text by Bruce Wallace Illustration by Rebecca Pry

“Now let’s go to a little town in New Jersey where things are really poppin’!” a female voice suggests, as the camera zooms in on a suburban split-level at dusk and romantic string music swells underneath. The commercial cuts to an interior—a living room comfortably crowded with well-coiffed women of a certain age. “Yes there’s a party going on at Mrs. Betty Martin’s house. It’s a Tupperware party, and it’s really fun!” The camera pans past a tower of nesting bowls in pastel colors.

Sixty years after Tupperware Home Parties, Inc. pioneered it, the party plan sales model is alive and well, setting up in suburban living rooms around the world to move items from lingerie and blinged jeans to sex toys and homemade crucifixes. And purses—lots and lots of purses.

“I had never been to any purse parties before,” says Alyssa Lichtfuss, who started holding parties herself about a year and a half ago.

“I knew a couple of girls that sold the knockoffs, and they seemed to bring in a decent amount of money as a side job, which is what I was looking for at the time.” Lichtfuss buys the purses at cost and sells them for around USD 40 or 50 and nets about USD 150 or 200 a party.

The party’s host gets a discount on purses based on how many guests come and how much they buy.

Lichtfuss gets her purses from a company called Designer Inspirations in Southern California.

On the company’s map of nearly 100 North America consultants, her marker sits off by itself in Central Pennsylvania. Lack of nearby competition was one of the reasons Lichtfuss signed on with Designer Inspirations—one of a multitude of similar companies she found googling around.

She says another reason is that, unlike a lot of purse party companies, the purses that Designer Inspirations sells aren’t knockoffs or replicas but “inspired by” designs— similar to designer bags but “with their own flair”, as Lichtfuss puts it.

Purse parties have earned a reputation for being an avenue for hustling counterfeit goods.

An Internet scan quickly turns up hordes of knockoff purse parties (although these places clam up when contacted by a reporter) and heated chatroom discussions both pro (“I would love to have a purse party, I had one last year and had almost $3,000 in sales!!”) and con (“Do these women even know or acknowledge that these bags are not the real deal? Why not just save up [like I do] and purchase one or two pieces a year?”).

In recent years, federal agents have busted counterfeiters in Maryland, Missouri, and Nebraska who were using parties, among other methods, to sell illegal knockoffs. A 2008 case that began with a purseparty circuit in Oregon ended up nabbing 62 people and nearly USD 20 million in counterfeit bags.

Still, investigators say house parties are a blip on the radar of worldwide apparel and accessory counterfeit sales, which have an estimated annual value of around USD 24 billion. “Those are usually sellers on a smaller sale,” says Tamara Tarbutton, VP at Vaudra Ltd., a company that investigates counterfeiting for major retail brands. “They’re not large wholesalers that have warehouses. Maybe they make the occasional trip to New York or they’ve connected with somebody at a flea market and decided to use that as a way to get product for a purse party.”

Some researchers even argue that, instead of eating into designer brands’ profit margins, the imitations on offer at purse parties can work kind of like a gateway drug— bringing new customers into Louis Vuitton stores by first hooking them with lower-cost knockoffs. Renee Gosline, a marketing professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, got interested in how purse parties fit into overall brand image after a friend invited her to a neighbor’s purse party a few years ago.

She quickly discovered that the staid, upper-middle-class atmosphere of the party bore little resemblance to the images conjured up by the words “black market”. “The illegality of the behavior seemed to be sanitized by the congenial atmosphere,” Gosline wrote in a 2010 Forbes article. The experience led her to two and a half years of research. She documented how 112 purse-party goers gradually changed in the way they thought about brands they first encountered as knockoffs at parties.

Her conclusion? “The fakes hadn’t turned potential Gucci customers away from the brand.

The opposite was true.” Time after time, people who’d purchased a “Gucci” at a purse party would soon be browsing the web and strolling the streets looking for the real thing. The fakes had whetted their appetite for the real deal.

And, as was true back in the 50s when a single mom named Brownie Wise introduced the party plan sales model to a plastics company and made Tupperware a household name around the globe, some talk about today’s version in the language of girl power. “I believe women should empower one another,” says purse-party consultant Lisa Brown. She estimates she’s squeezed seven or eight Designer Inspirations parties in between two other jobs in the last year.

Brown encourages women who come to her parties to start hosting their own. Isn’t she creating competition for herself?

Yes, she says, but she also gets commission for bringing new consultants on board. Then she asks me if I have any interest.

CELEBRATION 31

DISPATCH WEST BANK

Haitam Garzozi

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Occupied Brews Abstract Palestine’s lone brewery unites conflicted cultures in an unlikely Oktoberfest celebration.

Text by Jonathan Kalan

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MAKESHIFT

The village of Taybeh, population 2,000, is a far cry from the holiest site in the West Bank. A sleepy hilltop village encircled by magnificent olive groves, Taybeh boasts just one biblical reference and a handful of crumbling historic sites—a paltry offing compared to neighboring Jerusalem, just 20 kilometers and several military checkpoints southwest.

But, for two wet and wild days every October, Taybeh Brewery becomes an unparalleled epicenter of modern religious and cultural worth. Here, thousands of lederhosen-clad, keffiyeh-wearing, and beer-loving tourists join curious Palestinians and brave Israelis for the world’s only Occupied Oktoberfest. Politics are put on a rare hold, and glasses are raised for a different, if less divine pilgrimage: beer sampling in the Holy Land.

Taybeh Brewing Company was established in 1995 by Palestinian-American Nadim Khoury. Named for the town itself—which fittingly means “delicious” in Arabic—it remains the only brewery in the Palestinian Territories and the first microbrewery in the Middle East.

Taybeh is one of the last remaining Christian-majority villages of the West Bank, but Christians aren’t the only beer lovers in town.

“The one percent of Christians left in the West Bank can’t consume a million bottles of beer each year,” Khoury says with a wry smile, “so someone must be doing a good job.”

The brewery’s single, long room is packed with giant steel barrels, twisting pipes, empty cases, and thick brown bottles. Boiling vats shoot thick plumes of steam, and slippery floors emit the sweet,

Jonathan Kalan

02

Jonathan Kalan

Brewed by a small team (03), the micro-brew bottles (02) are the first to appear in the Middle East. Taybeh pulls a unique mix to the West Bank’s only Oktoberfest celebration (01).

rich smell of malted hops. Tiny Palestinian flags are draped across the ceiling, along with banners proclaiming, “Taste the revolution.”

For more than 15 years, this little brewery has resisted political, social, and economic oppression to brew original takes on all-natural dark, amber, and golden ales. In full accordance with Reinheitsgebot, the 1516 Bavarian purity law, the beer contains nothing but malted barley, hops, yeast, and pure water from the nearby Ein Samia springs.

“Everyone thought I was out of my mind to open a brewery in a Muslim country, under occupation,” Khoury says. “But I wanted to make something for my homeland, for Palestine. We believe this is how the state of Palestine can be built—by Palestinian brands and products.”

All beer must pass through Israeli checkpoints. Though Taybeh is just a few-minute drive from Jerusalem, security laws require inspection nearly two hours away. Uprisings and protests can close borders in an instant, making planning impossible and patience necessary.

During the Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2005, the situation became so dire that owners had to haul beer to Jerusalem strapped to donkeys. It’s still the fastest way to cross checkpoints.

As if brewing and selling beer in the West Bank wasn’t enough

03

work, in 2005, Nadim Khoury’s brother David became the first democratically elected mayor of Taybeh. They decided it was time to raise Taybeh’s profile once again.

Capitalizing on Taybeh’s status as the “beer capital” of Palestine, nothing seemed more appropriate, or perhaps bold, than a beer-laden Oktoberfest celebration.

For the past eight years, Taybeh’s Oktoberfest has hosted an eclectic mix of international musical acts and local vendors selling honey, oils, soaps, embroidery, and other homemade products.

Performers have included Palestinian hip-hop group DAM (the first time the group set foot in the West Bank), a Greek Orthodox school folklore show, Brazil’s Truo Dona Zefa, and even Bavaria’s own Musikkapelle Leobendorf Band.

Rugby matches—and plenty of cold kegs—fill time between bands. It is, to say the least, a unique scene.

Lead organizer Maria Khoury, perhaps as unlikely a host to an Oktoberfest as the West Bank itself, says pulling off the celebration each

year has been “nerve-racking”.

An author of Orthodox Christian children’s books and a world-renowned human rights activist, Maria is also the wife of David Khoury, Nadim’s mayoral brother.

“It’s challenging to have a normal celebration of life when there is violence all around or the political situation is not stable,” Maria says. “It’s like walking on eggshells, planning music events months ahead not knowing how the political and social atmosphere will be.”

Yet despite the enormous occupational challenges, Taybeh’s “Occupied Oktoberfest” has become one of the most distinctive international celebrations in Palestine. Last year, over 16,000 people descended on Taybeh for the gathering.

While not everyone in the West Bank supports such liberal and libationary events, few can deny that “tasting the revolution” is a sweet way to celebrate Palestine. Just don’t expect a pub crawl any time soon.

CELEBRATION 33

Emmanuel Jal

Photo taken by Dave Watts

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Fight poverty through education. It is enlightenment, triggering creativity.

Despite his accomplishments in music, Emmanuel Jal’s greatest passion is for Gua Africa.

Besides building schools, his nonprofit provides scholarships for Sudanese war survivors in refugee camps and sponsors education for children in the most deprived slum areas in Nairobi.

Join us in supporting Gua Africa. www.gua-africa.org In April, Emmanuel will receive a Visionary Award at Engineering & Humanity Week in Dallas.

The award provides $25,000 USD. These funds will go directly to Gua Africa and will help complete Emma Academy, the secondary school in Emmanuel’s home town of Leer, South Sudan, in honor of Emma McCune.

Join us at Engineering & Humanity Week, April 6-12, 2013 www.EandHweek.org

FEATURE

Catherine Seabrook

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MAKESHIFT

Celebration A Tijuana gang member hands a child a toy. A Cairo butcher slaughters a goat. Seemingly arbitrary rituals bring people together and, when practiced enough times by enough people, form the basis of culture.

Practices like the brilliant lantern making of San Fernando craftsmen become increasingly elaborate.

Productions like Carnival, faced with the challenges of scale, become ever-more complex. All the while, celebration remains a deeply personal affair—from the Nigerian couple pasting their faces on wedding favors to the pilgrim seeking salvation among 80 million at the Ganges. Celebration is a stress-reducer, a serotoninbooster, an ingredient of joy. It has a natural momentum that excites and builds. So where there’s celebration there’s opportunity—for business and charity, for exploitation and aspiration. And in all cases, creativity.

In honor of our anniversary issue, Makeshift collaborated with a group of senior illustration students at the Rhode Island School of Design on this issue’s illustrations.

CELEBRATION 37

FEATURE INDIA

INDIA’S BIG BATH Planning a megacity at the world’s largest festival Text by John Macomber Photos by Gary Zaremba

It is the largest gathering on earth. Most Westerners understand the Maha Kumbh Mela, if they understand it at all, to be about spectacle and tradition—the naked priests and sacred baths, the ash and fire and splashing.

Most of the 80 million pilgrims—yes, 80 million—experience the Kumbh Mela as a spiritual journey, a respectful quest for learning and the cleansing of sins. Me, I’m incongruous at best and maybe misguided: I experience the Kumbh Mela as a Harvard finance professor. So my gaze follows not so much the religious undertones but the roads, bridges, electricity, and water that underpin this amazing combination of religion, salesmanship, urban design, crowd control, and focused investment.

It’s hard to be an objective, passive observer here. The Mela is loud and blinding. Acreage is divided up based on Akharas—Hindu sects who carved out their position at the Mela during centuries-old battles—each one projecting its modern message from its temporary home base. Recordings, music, prayers, and advertisements blast from competing Akharas at all hours.

Organizers erected 22,000 temporary electric poles, most beaming around the clock (imagine a parking lot between a Walmart and a Safeway at 3am). Millions of pilgrims are poor, and it’s cold and wet; firewood, trash, and the hand-dried and -carried cow chips sold everywhere leave a thick smoke hanging. I expected sanctuary and reflection, but this is all frenetic, all the time. Earplugs help.

The Kumbh Mela occurs every three years, but only every 12 in Allahabad, when Jupiter and the moon make a rare alignment. This year, however, marks the Maha Kumbh Mela—an event that happens here just once every 144 years. It is, by most counts, the largest celebration on earth. An explosion of humanity, culture, and economic opportunity that will disintegrate and lie dormant for another 12 years. And it happens here on a piece of sandy, silty land, one-third the size of Manhattan; land that lay beneath water in September and will do so again when the rains return next July.

There’s a lot to learn in this blitzkrieg of humanity. An analog, human-based SimCity plays out as a microcosm of the world’s street trade.

Sellers, vendors, builders, cooks and other temporary occupants descend here once a decade to make business decisions based on a scale of months.

This is not the slow growth of permanent street economies: this city arrives with drastic force and recedes with equal quickness.

It’s simultaneously a compressed history and accelerated future of the many massive informal cities that have sprung up over decades to house tens of millions of workers in South Asia’s informal economy—though not nearly as well equipped as the hyper-organized Mela. It is also a vision.

With its focus on effectively designed roads, properly allocated water and 38

MAKESHIFT

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electricity, a purpose-driven community, and city administrators who earn authority through effective provision of these services, the Mela is a potential learning tool. Its success serves as a conceivable model for more attractive, competitive cities that better provide resources to millions of economic pilgrims seeking prosperity in the way the Mela offers millions of Kumbh pilgrims space to seek salvation.

Groundwork I attract quite a crowd. I appear obviously American or European and move in the company of a videographer, translator, and a researcher. Yet I don’t seem to be camped out with the other journalists and academics on

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Speakers blare excitement at the entrance to an Akhara (01), while a decorated pilgrim exhales a more contemplative breath of solitude (02)—something for everyone at the Mela.

the Sangam—the place beside the multi-colored convergence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and the mythical underground Saraswati rivers that draws the pilgrims to this precise location. I’m not getting to know the religious and historical significance of the Akharas, like my colleagues from the Harvard Divinity School. I’m not measuring bacteria counts in the river or interviewing first responders in the medical tents, as tasked to my colleagues from Harvard’s Global Health Initiative. I just want to know what supports this massive congregation.

I take off down a road, pacing my steps to gauge width. Under the sand roadways, hundreds of kilometers of thin steel plates keep thousands of tires from sinking into sand and mud. The roadways are wide—maybe 15 or 20 meters, or a six-lane interstate in the paved world. Along the edge, split-rail wood fence posts pound into the sand, doubling as crowd control.

Wide roads with good fences also keep the rival Akharas apart. A good idea, perhaps, since within recorded history competing Akharas arrived at the Kumbh site with elephants, lions, weapons, and warriors to battle fiercely for the best spots close to the Sangam.

Nowadays the Akharas follow a hierarchy of location, an order of bathing, and a negotiation of acreage. Things are not so testy as in the days of the 150 kingdoms. I expected perpetual battles over land allocation, problems with roads, issues with informal settlements, and convoluted street scenes

found in Mumbai and Kolkata.

What did I find? On non-bathing days, order and even a little resignation. Note to self: roads matter.

With the opportunity to build a new layout on a blank slate, the location, width, and demarcation of roads—even when made of sand and delineated by sticks—offer great help. Roads mark zones designated for activities and passageways for tens of millions of pilgrims on main bathing days. I briefly drift back to sandbox city-building at eight years old—rake to clear some land, fingerpaint the roads, repeat.

From a nice dry bluff above the Kumbh Mela floodplain, the tents look regular as can be. An evocative, multi-layered Hindu temple below forbids pictures inside. But the real image lies 20 meters lower, as more than eight kilometers of tent city stretch out.

The Akharas each have a big façade or storefront in the center of their block—some five or six stories high, made of brightly colored canvas or nylon spread over an immense bamboo scaffold. We walk down a little lower.

CELEBRATION 39

FEATURE INDIA

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My curiosity tilts from roads to the holding ponds. Here, waste water filters down into the sand allowing residual “solids” to be extracted and removed. (Each day, groundwater for drinking is pumped up from below that same sand; one hopes 12 years of natural filtration is enough time.)

From here, the tents take on a disorderly resemblance to a blue tarp stretched along a rope. My translator, well-dressed and proper, is openly hesitant as we walk down the bank, trying to wave at children while side-stepping through the slippery muck. We ask a resident, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”—the essence of a lengthier, more delicate set of questions.

They are families of migrant sanitation workers and have traveled here for work, shoveling other people’s poop. After figuring out that our entourage is sympathetic, they ask the videographer for help with a commercial issue (they figure the person with the big camera might advocate for their plea).

They want to set up small roadside stands to sell things—something the informal market rules evidently dictate you can’t do here in Sector Four. Out of nowhere, some official types appear and shoo us away. The squatters stay put.

Downtown Mela’s chaos could not exist without formal systems. But the street layout and infrastructure is inevitably an unspoken compromise between what the government will do, what the organized economy will provide, and where 40

MAKESHIFT

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the street economy will fill in. I think about roads, bridges, electricity, buildings and buses; I look at objects more that individuals.

This pop-up city comes with a civic headquarters. Organizers, police, and health centers all set up shop. This zone regulates the Mela grounds, while some more permanent offices assist from nearby (after all, just above the plain, more than three million people live permanently in Allahabad). The main Akharas have land allocated based on number of members and a variety of complicated protocols.

new ones. And the pilgrims get to walk away from this emotional, sensual, and chaotic experience knowing that they touched something greater than just the largest convergence of human beings.

Massive crowds put the equally massive roads to use (03), navigating the immensity of the tent cities (04). A riverside locale offers a space for devotees to relax and reflect (05)—years of devotion, measured, for some, by wraps around the head (6).

Sporting fancy storefronts, this section feels like a formal downtown, defined by its built environment. To the north, on the other side of the elevated permanent-highway bridge, the grid continues, but the height and density fall off. Fancy storefronts yield to more ramshackle tea shops, cow chip sellers, small goods and supplies vendors. Organizer tents space out amidst this ephemeral iteration of suburbs, becoming fewer and fewer as the waves of tents reverberate away from the central hub. Here, people and their activities define the space around them.

Compared to most cities, the width and forethought of the street layout has inspired a version of control. The Mela found an opportunity to design an intentional institutional zone, while purposefully allowing a casual, entrepreneurial zone to evolve on its own. There is more attention to land allocation, roads, and electricity though—in fact, these seem to be overwhelmingly the largest investments in Kumbh infrastructure.

I can’t resist revisiting basic tenets of finance. Who invests? Who benefits? In most urban areas, the answer to that question is difficult to track since the many stakeholders have contradictory goals. Goals in a legacy city tend towards catchphrases: Clean air. Clean water. Jobs. GDP growth.

More corporations. Fewer corporations. Better transit. Better schools.

Cheaper electricity. Lower carbon emissions. But the Kumbh Mela is not an ordinary city. The sole objective is easy to articulate: everyone wants a successful, temporary event. The objective is a rewarding pilgrimage for tens of millions. The role of government here is to allocate land, put down roads, provide a lot of electricity, and secondarily to help with water and food. The organizers focus on three things, not on fifty.

Who invests? At the Kumbh, the administrators (funded by the Indian federal government and the Uttar Pradesh state government) lease the land, put down roads, provide electricity, and work (a lot) on security. The Akharas finance and take on physical construction and “content programming” for their devotees. Often, they feed them too.

In the end, it’s a mutually beneficial win. Governments show rare competence and generate economic activity. The Akharas and other religious organizations have a chance to reach their members and to court

Convergence You can see the line in the river today; the Yamuna is black, the Ganga is white. I’m standing up to my hips in the Mother Ganga, dipping and indeed praying with countless others. It’s powerful. There are no thoughts of roads, and there is no financial rubric with which to watch this moment. I’m not sure I was in the water long enough to wash away my five decades of sins—if that indeed is the goal.

This is the essence of the central goal: a successful Mela. We can prioritize spending because the benefit flows to all. Focusing on a few components of a larger opportunity, investing in non-government buildings and services, and, most importantly, declaring a common goal causes everyone to pull together much more than in the usual city.

This temporary metropolis, this pop-up megacity, this dusty, intermittent, messy gathering of humanity, is a success. Compared to what? Compared to any city of a lakh (100,000) or of a crore (10,000,000) of souls with divergent goals and no ability to prioritize spending. Compared to the racial, ethnic, cultural, infrastructural, and economic progress of most cities across India. I kick the sand between my shoes as I walk down the temporary roads and ponder if this noisy, bright, and smelly incarnation of a city is perhaps the most realistic blank slate of a modern day laboratory for an increasingly urbanized humanity.

CELEBRATION 41

FEATURE Côte d’Ivoire

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EVERYONE CAN’T WIn A divided Côte d’Ivoire celebrates conflicting victories Text and photos by Marco Chown Oved

I

t started with a cry of joy. When opposition candidate Alassane Ouattara was declared the winner of the 2010 presidential election in Côte d’Ivoire, his young supporters began singing and dancing right there, around the results table, in front of the gathered cameras. Briefly, it appeared this story would have a happy ending.

Word of the victory spread by frantic texts and phone calls, then via the orange and yellow taxis honking their way through pro-Ouattara neighborhoods. A luxury hotel broadcast the results in a loop over loudspeakers set up in the gardens.

But the message didn’t make it onto television or radio. International stations that dared report Ouattara’s election win were pulled off the air.

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While crowds gathered chanting the initials of their new president— “ADO, ado, ado, ado, ADO, ADO!”— the bureaucratic gears were already in motion to quell the victory and proclaim another. For incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, his own celebratory party was already mapped out.

Gbagbo had the head of the constitutional council—an old friend and cell block companion from their underground democratic movement days—invalidate hundreds of thousands of votes from regions that supported his opponent. Days later, he had himself sworn in, wrapped in the orange, white, and green of the Ivorian flag. Another wave of celebration hit the pro-Gbagbo districts.

People gathered at major intersections, dancing amid the traffic jams and pumping the incredibly catchy Gbagbo campaign song from crackly boomboxes.

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Tribal amulets (01), like protests and armed blockades (02), played their role in supporting candidates and protecting fighters.

But Ouattara’s people wouldn’t give up, and the duel of street-level revelry raged on. Their candidate also took an oath of office, inaugurating a brief period where—almost unbelievably—Côte d’Ivoire had two presidents.

Mike McGovern, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of Making War in Côte d’Ivoire, says while election results are contested in many African countries, local context determines escalation. “Celebrations serve as a flashpoint or catalyst in already-tense situations.”

He points to the 2010 election in Guinea, where a narrow loss in “a highly contested and ethnically polarized election” was quickly derided as rigged. Barely a month later, the same thing happened in Côte d’Ivoire but with a much bigger gap between candidates. Even though their claims of election fraud were less plausible, “Ivorians in some sense chose to fight, and Guineans chose not to.”

How much of this choice came down as orders from above and how much rose organically from the streets is open for debate. What’s clear is that the country was quickly divvied up along ethnic, religious, and political lines.

By and large, Christian urbanites from the south supported Gbagbo, while Muslim farmers from the north supported Ouattara. The backdrop

was a short civil war that split the country in two. Gbagbo portrayed the war as an attempt to remove him from power; Ouattara’s people saw it as a fight to gain equal rights for the impoverished northerners.

Like the red and blue states of the American electoral map, regions, cities, and even neighborhoods colored themselves Gbagbo pink or Ouattara green and dragged everything from fallen trees to burnt-out cars into the road to barricade their positions. The merrymakers put their parties on lockdown.

The Campaign Like many big events in West Africa, the first election in a decade was commemorated with a special run of wood-block print cloth, or pagne. Bought up and taken to tailors and seamstresses across the country, pagnes were soon fashioned into political everything: from wrap-skirts and shirts to elaborate three-piece suits and traditional headdresses.

The pagne, like the tailoring, came in all qualities. There were basement print-runs with cheap dyes that would run on the first wash and the highest-quality fabric, printed in Holland and specially imported. Playing on traditional African motifs, they varied in color and slogans but invariably included the mandatory headshot of the candidate, framed in an oval window as if on a banknote. Pagnes were customized for party insiders—Gbagbo’s local election committee in one town or Scrabble players for Ouattara in that one—and were worn proudly around town in the months leading up to the election.

At the time, I lived in Blokosso, a former fishing village swallowed up by Abidjan’s rapid expansion in the 1960s and 70s.

The village retained some of its traditional structure: it was CELEBRATION 43

FEATURE Côte d’Ivoire

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dominated by a single ethnicity and had an elected village chief.

Police rarely ventured in unless invited, leaving local youth to keep the peace. The village elders didn’t exactly tell people how to vote, but virtually every facade along the main thoroughfare was plastered with Gbagbo campaign posters.

Far more than Ouattara’s supporters, Gbagbo’s camp seemed cocky and assured of victory. This was reflected in their slogan, “Nothing opposes us,” and the addictive Zouglou campaign song, C’est Maïs, which featured a repetitive chorus that roughly translates to, “With Laurent Gbagbo on the scene, ahead, there’s only corn.”

Perhaps a bit archaic in an increasingly urban society, but the metaphor was clear: the opposition may look imposing, but like a field of corn, it can be cut down with ease. Gbagbo supporters reinforced the point with a sideways hand-chopping dance.

Party Turns Ugly Following the dual declarations of victory, both camps dug in. Gbagbo refused to give up the presidential palace and set up tanks, missile batteries, and machine gun nests along all approaches. After they certified his victory, the UN pledged to defend Ouattara and his fledgling presidency, sending 800 peacekeepers from Jordan, Bangladesh, Senegal, and Ghana to take up defensive positions around his campaign headquarters. Gbagbo surrounded the place with his own troops and attempted to starve out Ouattara’s government.

The siege was a boon for smugglers brave enough to keep supply chains flowing across troop lines. At one point, I accompanied a man who said he was a journalist but had the air of an intelligence operative.

We sneaked across the fairways of the adjacent golf course, dodging anti-aircraft guns pointing up from the sand traps. This “journalist” seemed to know all the signals to call out before entering the open and each precise section where the razor wire had been cut. We crossed paths with barefoot men carrying everything from alcohol to fresh dry cleaning to prostitutes for the government ministers inside. Bringing in basic goods and smuggling out valuable messages, the smugglers upped their prices after Gbagbo’s men trained mortars on the fairways.

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Later, the UN would break the siege with a daily helicopter airlift filled with food, water, and journalists. I would shuttle back and forth between the camps daily.

Trapped along with Ouattara and his government were hundreds of supporters who had flocked there after his victory. Local reggae star, Merak T, slept among them on the hotel’s sprawling lawns. Merak T did his best to keep spirits high, throwing the occasional impromptu concert and even getting Ouattara to dance for the trapped crowd on his 69th birthday. At times, his reggae seemed the only thing the politicians, their supporters, the foreign peacekeepers, and the journalists could all understand.

I’d catch the afternoon helicopter back to UN headquarters and then walk out into a pro-Gbagbo neighborhood, passing from one camp to the other in a matter of minutes. The first roadblock, only a few hundred meters from the front gate, was manned by a rag-tag bunch of local youth, loosely organized by a political group turned street militia called the Young Patriots. Because the

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UN supported Ouattara, all foreigners were assumed to be against Gbagbo. This made interactions at these roadblocks complicated.

To make matters worse, the Young Patriots had decided to make Blokosso their home base, meaning every trip home would require multiple stops at informal barricades manned by drunken teenagers. While the Young Patriots took their job of protecting their neighborhoods seriously, each roadblock was more of a party, with palm wine and millet beer flowing. Reciting a few lines of “C’est Maïs!” with a couple of hand chops generally secured passage.

Alassane Ouattara pagnes for one side (03), Laurent Gbagbo pagnes for another (04). Both sides caused hands to raise in victory (05), so much that even the billboards tried to outflank each other (06).

Dirty Little African War The conflict in Côte d’Ivoire emerged through a strange simultaneous mix of the top-down and grassroots. While it would eventually involve international powers, people in the street brought the crisis to a head as they took matters into their own hands in increasingly dreadful ways.

The post-election parties turned sinister once it became clear that there was no victory to celebrate. Civilians on both sides directed their frustration on their neighbors, carrying out pogroms and lynchings.

First, the bodies began showing up. Dumped into the lagoon or on the side of the road, they lay bloated in the sun before being taken somewhere official. Death squads of masked soldiers would arrive in pro-Ouattara neighborhoods at night and disappear with party activists. Neighborhoods constructed massive roadblocks out of wrecked cars they’d haul into position at the main intersections each evening.

Even scarier for most people was the vigilante violence. At roadblocks in Yopougon, a pro-Gbagbo neighborhood known for its great nightlife, Young Patriots took it upon themselves to rid the district of spies. Checking IDs at roadblocks, anyone with a name that sounded foreign was summarily charged and sentenced to death under “Law 125”, named for the price of the execution: 100 francs (USD .25) for gasoline and 25 francs (USD .05) for a box of matches. YouTube videos of the lynchings began showing up online.

In response, a rag-tag pro-Ouattara fighting force emerged made up of a mix of defected soldiers, farmers, and urban youth. Adopting the

moniker Invisible Commandos, they conducted raids, ambushing police and military convoys, killing soldiers and commandeering their arms.

While some of them actually came from the ranks of the Dozo hunters of the north, reputed for their wizardry and command of supernatural powers, most of them made every attempt to look the part. Carrying old single-shot rifles and piling on more necklaces than 80s rappers, the Invisible Commandos were anything but incognito in the streets. They wore pirate hats and amulets supposedly dipped in the blood of their enemies. Beside the still-smoking wrecks of two government APCs, I came across one spinning a flintlock pistol on his finger. Advancing in their jelly sandals and ill-fitting fatigues, the Invisible Commandos rose up in one neighborhood after another. Gbagbo’s soldiers either fled or were killed.

Meanwhile, Blokosso became the rallying point for the youth who wanted to join the battle on Gbagbo’s side. Trucks filled with AK-47s parked outside the church, and armed youth marched up and down the street, bottle of beer in one hand, rifle in the other. The embassies surrounding the presidential palace just up the road had been abandoned weeks earlier and were brimming with riches. Militiamen looted each ambassador’s residence in turn. Adding to the carnivalesque atmosphere, they’d saunter back down the hill wearing sequined ball gowns and carrying magnum bottles of champagne.

The deadlock would later be broken by French helicopters intervening on Ouattara’s side.

They bombarded Gbagbo’s residence and his military strongholds.

In the weeks after his arrest, new pagnes appeared commemorating Ouattara’s victory. In Blokosso, they weren’t very popular and languished in pockmarked stalls.

I asked if anyone had kept some old Gbagbo pagne, and the vendor hushed me, pulled me close, and whispered: “I know where some is and can get it for you—for a price.”

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FEATURE BRAZIL

Stitching Carnival Recife’s fashion designers dress up Text and photos by Beto Figueiroa

E

ach year at Carnival, Brazil pours into its streets. While Rio steals the global spotlight, the rest of the country puts on their own festivals larger than those found in most cities around the world. In Recife, on the coast of northeastern Brazil, performance centers on Maracatu Rural, song and dance with African roots that emerged in the early 20th century. During Carnival parades, groups as large as 200 divide into representations of characters from Afro-Brazilian history and mythology.

Preparation begins six months prior. For artisans, this means producing banners, dresses, robes, spears, hats, umbrellas, shoes, clothes, and, of course, the crowns of Caboclo de Lança, a character who draws much attention in the parade. Some performers sew their own clothes. Others go

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to shops like Piaba Gold that make garments and accessories en masse.

Brazil’s costume makers, though understated, are among the most eccentric fashion designers in the world, integrating unconventional materials like iron. They distinguish themselves through their handiwork and adoption of newer materials available in local specialized sewing supplies stores, continuously striving for higher quality and lighter weight designs. The artisans of Piaba Gold draw their inspiration from nature, abstracting the region’s flora and fauna and giving each performance group its own flair. But there are contemporary references available too for Recife’s football fans.

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FEATURE BRAZIL

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CELEBRATION 49

FEATURE CANADA

FUN ZONE Vancouver’s underground meets red tape Text by Shmuel Marmorstein

“

Hoko’s got shut down so many times because people were dancing there. There was actually a big sign in Hoko’s near the end that said, ‘No dancing by regulation.’ So the disco ball would just spin mournfully, and people would stand, but they couldn’t move.”

Caitlyn Gilroy, director of the Safe Amplification Site Society and performer in local music group Loose Tights, smiles as she explains the madness lying beneath Vancouver’s licensing laws. Hoko’s Sushi Karaoke Bar was a restaurant in the heart of Vancouver’s poverty-stricken Downtown Eastside that began putting on karaoke and all-ages shows. Its crime: operating under the wrong license. Hoko’s possessed a restaurant-primary license, and a provincial liquor inspector busted it for “allowing patron dancing” and functioning as a live music venue instead of a sit-down restaurant.

This is indeed the same Vancouver often stereotyped as a Canadian hippie magnet, known for a friendliness to weed, bizarre collectives, lax clothing laws, fringe political groups, and a lively underground culture.

But if a venue in Vancouver has tables, Gilroy explains, no dancing is allowed. And for allowing patrons to do so, Hoko’s met a familiar fate for establishments daring to mix business and pleasure: it closed.

Tales like this have become the scourge of weary Vancouver culture, art, and music fans. Entrepreneurs and artists alike find themselves routinely thwarted by draconian liquor laws, confusing zoning regulations, and the eternally rising cost of real estate—factors that combine to limit spaces for culture to flourish.

Recently closed hotspots include Red Gates, W2, and—garnering the most public outcry and dismay—the Waldorf. The Waldorf Hotel, a onetime dive bar that reinvented itself two years ago as a multi-floor restaurant, concert hall, and art gallery, shut down production in January. It held shows by name-brand Vancouver artists such as Douglas Coupland and Grimes, but high culture wasn’t its only attraction: “Every girl I’ve kissed in Vancouver I’ve kissed at the Waldorf,” jokes local mason Taylor Dakin.

The Waldorf’s owners sold the property to a condo development company after the municipality indicated they would allow the land to be rezoned from industrial use. In an interview with the Globe and Mail about the closing, Grimes described the Waldorf as “one of the last bastions of the city that anyone can play”.

Keeping venues open in Vancouver is a struggle, but some indie rockers are fighting back.

Over and Under Founded in 2009 by local musicians exasperated at losing several underground venues, the Safe Amplification Site Society set goals for working on feasible alternatives. Safe Amp wanted to create a legal, all-ages-accessible, and financially sustainable music venue that doesn’t rely on

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alcohol sales. Though this aim remains unfulfilled, the group has become a de facto voice for similarly frustrated musicians.

“We’ve become sort of an advocacy group,” Gilroy laughs about their changing role. “We just wanted to open a venue, but then it became clear we had a lot of people who liked to talk and write letters, and we started going to City Hall meetings when they were talking about anything to do with arts and culture, and we would go there and try to speak.”

Ryan McCormick, Safe Amp’s co-director, has made a hobby of studying Vancouver’s bylaws.

Gilroy jokes that he’s a bookworm.

McCormick complains that anyone wanting to open a music spot meets a stifling hodgepodge of legalese—a reality he believes limits accessibility and drives an informal network of underground venues.

“The result is a lot of people just say, ‘Fuck it, I’m just gonna start a space and see what happens’” he says.

“Those spaces last from anywhere from a few months to a few years, and then they inevitably close.

Sometimes they close because of money or because of their own lack of volunteer time, but sometimes because they meet legal troubles.

They get pressure from the province or the city or the police or fire department. You get tired of it after a while, so people give up.”

Such scenes are not without their romance: word-of-mouth events in unofficial places will always hold an allure that fixed establishments cannot mimic.

But financial pressures make it tough for even the most exciting secret locations to stay alive without the ability to sell alcohol.

To legally serve alcohol in Vancouver, one option is a food- primary license. Under this license, the venue must sell equal amounts of food and liquor, can’t stay open past midnight on weekdays, and cannot permit dancing (as Hoko’s learned).

The alternative, a liquor-primary license, is nearly impossible to

Rachel Zablonski

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FEATURE CANADA

Michelle Mruk

procure. Only eight such licenses have been approved since 2009, and the price tag runs between USD 300,000 and 600,000. (In Portland, Oregon, just down the coast, an annual liquor license costs USD 500.) In addition, the city requires a four-step public notification process, including a sign campaign, public meeting, and possible USD 5,000 telephone survey of the proposed establishment’s neighborhood—hardly accessible.

Vancouver’s municipal website offers little guidance. When McCormick attempted to look up the definition of a cabaret, he said “the page was blank”. Visiting City Hall isn’t much better. “I’ve literally been sent to five different offices within City Hall,” McCormick complains. “You go to one and ask them a question like, ‘How do I start a music venue legally?’ They tell you to try this other office. You go there, and they send you back to the original one. It’s a wild goose chase.”

Vancouver is run by the center-left Vision Vancouver party. Mayor Gregor Robertson cultivates the image of a hippie in a suit; he bikes everywhere, plays the tuba, and has signed legislation to allow Vancouverites to keep chickens in their backyards. In its successful 2011 campaign, Vision promised to help the city’s artistic community, with Councillor Heather Deal agreeing to relax bylaws and rezone space to help prevent venue closures. Simpler and more accessible rules could lead to a flowering of new venues, yet many feel Vision has delivered more words than actions.

The fallback is creating places that eschew laws and create their own rules of fun. These take on many forms, from neighborhood block parties to community farms. One local environmentalist transformed an East Van traffic circle into a tiny park which hosts Sunday tea parties and offers coffee and conversation to passing cyclists. Another artist rechristened a park “Dude Chilling Park” by crafting and planting an astonishingly official-looking sign to that effect (months after the sign’s removal, Google Maps still lists the park as “Dude Chilling”).

But these homemade pushbacks come with pitfalls. When Vancouver’s underground venues attempt to obtain licenses to operate legally, they are often cited and closed for issues like high decibel levels or fire code violations. McCormick feels the worries about venue safety are over52

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blown. “The city is really risk-averse.

They’re really scared for some reason that someone’s gonna get trampled or there’s gonna be a fire at a venue. But if someone gets hurt at a skating rink or a swimming pool, they don’t close the swimming pool.”

No Fun City The fight for a good time is nothing new. Local tour guide and history buff Alasdair Butcher describes Vancouver’s early 20th-century ruling class as the “Scottish Taliban”, who arrived in Vancouver from Ontario after the completion of the CPR railroad to find a group of people they viewed as “a bunch of blackout-drunk, dick-out-ofpants, non-church-attending mill workers, loggers, and fishermen surrounded by bar wenches and sporting women”. Their horrified reactions led to Vancouver’s fouryear prohibition (1917–1920) and a lasting obsession with legislation surrounding nights out.

Butcher, whose walking tours refuse to sweep Vancouver’s dark side under the rug, claims that Vancouver’s sobriquet “No Fun City” (or the sarcastic “Funcouver”)

originated in these prohibition-era rules. “No dancing in pubs. No beer crossing from the west to the east side of the Cambie pub.”

“Hey,” he adds, “up until a few months ago it was illegal to bring wine over a provincial border in Canada.”

Jim Carrico traces the root of the problem back further still.

He claims the impulse to create cultural venues is rooted in “monkeys needing to tell stories about other monkeys”. The inability of Vancouver’s modern primates to convey their current artistic stories fuels a frustration that Carrico and friends are eager to fix.

Carrico was the proprietor of Red Gate, another creative hub that shut down in October of 2011. Red Gate occupied a 15,000-square-foot multi-story building in the historic downtown. The top floor functioned as studio space for local artists and musicians—including local indie supergroup The New Pornographers—while its bottom floor hosted underground music shows, art installations, and film screenings. It closed because the building’s landlord was unwilling to pay for repairs to satisfy inspectors.

Carrico points out that Vancouver’s property values are more than double that of the average Canadian city, yet average wages are lower.

Soaring property costs mean almost any space becomes most profitable as a condo—an increasingly popular feature on the skyline. So even a neglected building rises in value, as with Red Gate.

Saving Space We sit in a large, chilly, empty room a few blocks east of the nowclosed Waldorf, as Carrico sardonically prays for a Vancouver real estate crash. A year and a half after Red Gate’s closure, Carrico is trying again, in a 7,500-square-foot space, formerly a frozen-food warehouse. Painting and cleaning the facility by day, he occasionally interrupts our interview to discuss building logistics with punky youths from still another recently closed underground venue, ROYGBIV. The space has a long way to go before events start there. Walls need to be built, heating installed, and random debris left by previous

owners awaits clearing. Carrico would seemingly discuss any subject besides the bitter events that led to Red Gate’s closure, so we chat about Vancouver’s secret history as an underground art haven, tap dancing inventor Master Juba’s effect on the music movements of the 20th century, and the Z-Boys gang of skateboarders—all examples, according to Carrico, of the necessity of unregulated space.

Carrico believes that government could help nurture the street-level support for cultural hubs less by giving them money and more by leaving them alone.

“My strategy here and always is that I don’t want any subsidies; we can subsidize ourselves if you would let us. It’s kind of an entrepreneurial activity, which is hugely ironic because that’s what our whole society is supposed to be about. Free enterprise—there’s people that want something, you have a product, you bring it to market, people like it, and everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, thumbs up!’ and everybody wins. But somehow there’s always things that you’re not allowed to do.”

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David de Rothschild and skipper Jo Royle celebrate aboard the Plastiki as they arrive into Sydney, Australia.

WATER

Ripple Effect

ts

The frame was made of woven plastic, held together with heat-welded tape and steel bolts.

The bottles were joined together with an earthfriendly bonding agent the Plastiki team developed using sugar and cashews.

Photo credit: Used with permission and copyrighted by “The Plastiki.”

WATER:

Ripple Effects

We have all seen the stark warning signs: the world population is increasing, access to fresh water is declining, our oceans are under threat of overfishing and environmental damage. The greatest sources of conflict in the 21st century may well be over water. The concept of “peak water” and running out of the one resource we truly need to survive is daunting.

Yet there is good news. At ENGINEERING & HUMANITY WEEK 2013 we will focus on the positive ripple effects people can inspire when confronted with our current challenges.

Meet British adventurer and ecologist DAVID DE ROTHSCHILD and tour his oneof-a-kind catamaran, the PLASTIKI, made from 12,500 plastic bottles. David made maritime history in 2010 when he sailed his recycled boat 8,000 miles across the Pacific, put together with an earth-friendly glue his team discovered from sugar and cashews. David is the Engineering & Humanity Week 2013 Visionary Award recipient – his expedition was an engineering first and brought global attention to the South Pacific garbage patch – a swirling mass of plastic trash twice the size of Texas.

The Plastiki is a 60-foot-long (18 meters) oceangoing “one-of-a-kind catamaran” that was made from 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles. For buoyancy, the bottles were filled with powdered dry ice, and sealed to re-expand with carbon dioxide and thus float.

Photo credit: Used with permission and copyrighted by “The Plastiki.”

OBSERVED

Observed In back alleys, street markets, and hidden workshops around the world, microentrepreneurs churn out new ideas and products to help them get by or improve the world around them. We could philosophize on this all day. But here in Observed, we ask our correspondents to say nothing. So for the next 10 pages, we invite you to take a long glimpse through the lenses of our far-flung contributors.

This time around, we’ve asked for some visual representations of Celebration in the key of Makeshift. We watched Shanghai residents defy orders to blast off fireworks, heard homemade instruments ring in Lent in rural Haiti, and attended the eclectic jazz funerals of New Orleans. We found ourselves blasted by Brazil’s pyrotechnic sound machines and—like many of you—couldn’t help but click on the wide array of impromptu street performances known as the Harlem Shake. So gaze on, and enjoy this celebratory round of Observed!

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Belem, Brazil Vincent Rosenblatt/Agencia Olhares The “fire eagle” graciously takes off in the middle of the night thanks to its hydraulic system, pyrotechnics, and lasers. Belem’s tecnobrega shows push the limit of sound system technology and host as many as 15,000 revelers.

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Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso Phyllis Galembo Young Muslim performers don crafty costumes for Dodo, a playful masquerade in Burkina Faso during Ramadan. Phyllis Galembo has been documenting these diverse celebrations for over 25 years.

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With the cover photo, from Phyllis Galembo’s book Maske. More at galembo.com.

Shanghai, China Michele Travierso Owners and patrons of a wine bar in Shanghai’s former French Concession set off firecrackers on the eve of Chinese New Year.

The owner stocked up on 120 kilograms of ordnance following a citywide ban earlier in the year.

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Leogane, Haiti Felipe Jacome Toting handmade drums and bamboo horns, rara bands come to life during Lent. On foot, the music pulls people into their march for hours, sometimes even days, of walking from party to party with music to share.

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Mumbai, India Shanna Dressler An artist prepares a statue of Ganesh for procession at Ganesh Chaturthi, an elaborate and colorful festival celebrated throughout India. Ganesh is one of the most widely worshipped Hindu deities.

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Lagos, Nigeria Glenna Gordon Nigerian families offer gifts to guests at weddings, completing the cycle of exchange. In this case, the couple glued their faces to a gallon of Proclean, a dishwashing liquid.

New Orleans, USA Jerry Moran At New Orleans jazz funerals, the band is followed by the second line, an open parade. Here, Baby Doll dancers honor musician Uncle Lionel Batiste, keeping the tradition of street events kicking for over a century.

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Courtesy of Jerry Moran, Native Orleanian Fine Photography. More at nativeorleanian.com.

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Global Harlem Shake Fine, it hit the mainstream. But the Harlem Shake meme brought people together in their regular workspaces, dressed them up in crazy costumes, and gave them license to boogie with the beat drop. We dug up a few surprise twists, though, including a nonprofit in Benin, an office in India, and a message for Assad in Syria.

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Our Creative Future Abstract As Burning Man’s business director, Marian Goodell has helped the notoriously creative community thrive and extended its values beyond the desert celebration. She posits that carefully guided celebration can reinvent society.

Text by Marian Goodell

The world is currently on the cusp of a creative renaissance fueled by technology and human ingenuity. Increasingly, we see new opportunities for personal expression driven by urban planning: spaces for citizen action, the arts, and entrepreneurship.

Tech culture has blended with grassroots art culture to form new possibilities. At the heart of this atomic collision is an unlikely force: celebration.

Black Rock City, Nevada, the site of the annual weeklong Burning Man event, sets the context for our community’s radical form of creativity. The notion of celebration attracts a wildly disparate audience and offers space for over 55,000 participants to experiment. The fundamental design of the temporary city encourages innovation and large-scale collaboration.

As such, the city has proven to be an incubator for radical ideas with broader applications in the world. For instance, a closed text messaging network developed

by Burning Man participants for use on the playa could be used in disaster areas when traditional cell towers malfunction.

Today, Burning Man is a culture guided by our Ten Principles, crafted as a reflection of the community’s ethos as it

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organically developed. Those principles—Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Participation, Immediacy, and Leaving No Trace—were forged in the furnace of celebration but extend well beyond. “Burners” are applying these values back to their lives and workplaces— and toward creative capacity development around the world.

In 2005, I watched burners who had spent months preparing for the event leave Black Rock City to travel to Pearlington, Mississippi to help organize relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina hit. I was floored. In Pearlington, a town otherwise mostly forgotten, they didn’t just pitch in to help clear the mess; they established an outpost that radiated the Burning Man culture through programs and activities that bolstered the community. For me, seeing how much was possible in translating the culture off the playa helped set in motion what would become The Burning Man Project.

Reflecting on his experience, participant Will Chase wrote, “Using Camp Katrina as a model, this concept can be reproduced anywhere in the world by other crews. Burners out there are able to survive in harsh conditions, creatively problem-solve with substandard working materials, apply civic principles within a community, and have a great time doing it.”

Last fall, a crew of burners set up a pop-up space in West Oakland that thrived for eight weeks. A vacant lot in a distressed

neighborhood was completely transformed into a carnivalthemed creative community space on the weekends. The space featured art installations, creative workshops, local performing arts programming, artisan micro-retail outlets, and food trucks. As reported by John Curley for the San Francisco Chronicle, “You can see for yourself that art can be a force for urban renewal.”

Now we’re working with kids from challenged areas to explore their environment and build their craft together.

The Youth Education Spaceship project is a collaboration among a range of civic, arts, technology, environmental, and educational organizations.

Children from ages seven to 15 are learning skills in metalwork, mosaic, glass fusion and blowing, photography, and robotics, as well as information surrounding ancient civilizations, space travel, and astronomy. They’ll use these skills and found objects to craft a spaceship to be displayed throughout San Francisco and ultimately at Burning Man. The Burning Man culture helps people see themselves and their communities differently and, through art and self-expression, come together and manifest transformative experiences. The Burning Man Project is committed to catalyzing positive change and nurturing the growth of the global creative community—but we can’t do it alone. We encourage you to join us in facilitating and celebrating the amazing things that happen when creative people work together.

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