Jamini November 2014

making cities

we are the city

by Kazi Khaleed Ashraf

I dream of a city called Calvino where turning the corner of an alley, as children run out of a schoolyard, I decide what I want to do for the rest of my life. As I gaze upon a street, on whose brick paved surface millions have walked on, I hear the hum of stories. Cities are millions of stories. I see evidence of the monumentality of the city, its staggering repetition. I also see signs that the city is ephemeral, that it dissolves once it is approached. Even if there is no there there in a geography of constant iteration, I sense that where I stand: I am the city.

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n Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, when Kublai Khan and Marco Polo exchange accounts of places, I come to understand the city as an existential theater of actions, practices, dreams and imaginations; our actions, practices, dreams and imaginations. A city is neither hell nor heaven, nor simply a mastered plan; we make 12020000000000000000000000000cities in the shadows of our selves. We are the city.

As a theater of social action, the city “fosters art and is art.” It is in the city as theater, according to the urbanist Lewis Mumford, that humanity's “more purposive activities are focused, and work out, through conflicting cooperative personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations.”

One cannot proceed into the heart of a city without a mytho-poetic imagination. A city is not mere buildings, streets and spaces; it is, first and foremost, an idea in which buildings, streets and spaces play key part. In considering Dhaka as the toughest city in the world, the challenge is not one of solving its endless crises but in producing the idea of how one should live as part of a collective. People do not arrive at the gate of a city with just a pragmatic impetus; they arrive with an image of the city, with an idea.

A narrative of cities cannot be contained only by techno-functional notions around urbanization and economy. Talks of urbanization distract the discourse of cities with number games, not taking into account

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that a city is shaped, bit by bit, not only by policies and ordinances but imaginations and practices. Statistics do not show how a city can be designed and lived in its fullest human, social, aesthetical and ecological potential, a dynamic that is approached best by the term “urbanism”. Urban sociologist and thinker Henri Lefebvre would like us to think that a city is about material and spatial facts, and urbanism is about social relations staged there.

I dream I inhabit a city for a “total experience of life,” where the antagonism between the city and the landscape is not brutal, where the clichéd opposition between city and village has been overcome, where wide sailed boats ply in the heart of a downtown, and when the waters come from the mountains people do not escape to the roofs of their houses but embrace the bounties of the delta. And, where, in the vision of master architect Muzharul Islam, there is no question of “haves” and “have-nots”. I dream that such a Dhaka is possible. * As the most ancient artifact, older than the making of shrines and monuments, the city now reverberates with a greater poignancy as a human collective. New practices of the city are redefining what we take for granted as our inviolable spatial containers. The certainty and dominance of the nation-state as the unilateral spatial container of our lives are now

FIELD OF SYMBOLISM Suffused with the memory and symbolism of the War of Independence, Suhrawardy Uddyan in Dhaka is a hallowed ground. In responding to this difficult site caught between a park, civic forum, and national history Urbana (Kashef Mahbub Chowdhury and Marina Tabassum) went part subterranean and part minimalist to create the Liberation War Museum and the Tower of Independence. Embodying tactics of topographic modulation, spatial itinerary and material expression in a precise geometry, the Liberation War Museum appropriately merged landscape operations to create a civic forum. The result is a non-building that presents a journey from the fabric of the city into a field of symbolism, and finally a descent into the depth of a subterranean space. While the overall organization of this civic space relies on a subdued landscape operation and an architecture of invisibility, a stunning 150 feet tall tower, sheathed in glass, makes for an iconic and dramatic presence. (Photograph by Abdun Nime, courtesy: MTA)

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challenged by the city.

An unprecedented urban phenomenon in a global theater is opening up a new conceptual and political scope of the city. With Venice voting recently to secede from Italy, and Hong Kong struggling with China, territorial boundaries of the nation are being redefined, and spatial obligations rearranged. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's argument for a “post-national constellational” as an antidote to nationism is becoming more reasonable. In his proposal for making Paris a “city of refuge” in the ancient theme of hospitality, Jacques Derrida speaks of the city as an unbridled harbor for those who arrive there despite the nation-state's refusal.

At one level, the city as the generator of numerical gains is a principal player in the neo-liberal economic game, but at another level, it is the core of our existential being and consciousness, what Henri Lefebvre describes as the specificity of the city. Our designation of the city has to be revised, and planners have to learn how to engage with the existential quotient of the city. They do not know that yet.

Cities can be the most beautiful collective dream, as the urban wizard Jaime Lerner claims. Rejecting the notion that the city is a problem, Lerner insists that cities instead are solutions to our nature of collective existence. In transforming the Brazilian city Curitiba, Lerner as the mayor proved that the city is not defined by smog, crisis and deluge but as an exemplar of how we should live as a decent society in which the fruits of urbanism are available to all citizens. More recently, another South American city – Medellin – for long a poster child of a city gone terribly awry (drug, murder and mayhem!) has shown that meaningful changes can happen through, as Alex Warnock-Smith notes, “visionary leadership, tough politics, and experimental urban design”(Architectural Review, 2014).

If there is a puzzlement to why an art journal like Jamini should adopt the city as a theme, writers from Lewis Mumford to Henri Lefebvre have articulated the city as an art, a production. “The city,” to Lefebvre, “is an oeuvre, closer to a work of art than to a simple material product. If there is production of the city, and social relations in the city, it is a production and reproduction of human beings by human beings, rather than a production of objects.”

As an oeuvre, a French word denoting an ensemble of

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RECLAIMING THE WATER While components of the project are still incomplete, Hatirjheel as the first big urban reclamation project for the city is already showing benefits of an urban catalysis. Despite being a part of Dhaka's vast water network and located in the heart of the city, Hatirjheel over the years became an abused wetland and gigantic refuse site. The task for a multiprofessional and multi-iorganizational effort, carried out with state support, was to convert the deteriorated area into a new public realm reconnecting the tattered tissues of neighborhoods and pathways. With the urban design carried out by Vitti Architects, the ambitious plan offered new transportation network, public spaces, lake restoration, and what have been projected and not fully carried out yet: new civic activities, water-based transportation and ecological enclaves. (Drawing by Vitti Architects)

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A GARDEN OF HOPE For many years, Khondaker Hasibul Kabir, an architecture professor at BRAC University, opted to live in Korail, a settlement that goes by the name of a slum. He embedded himself in that community by building a small bamboo platform with a garden ( ashar macha, or platform of hope), a nondescript space that is both political and humanistic. The delicate macha provides a gentle but persuasive presence in the rhythms of a community left outside official reckonings. Like wild flowers and extreme poor people sprouting in the shadow of the city, ashar macha allows the slum children to gather there, tend the garden, and find a purposefulness that is denied to them otherwise. The macha is a demonstration of what is also possible in a condition of adversity. Kabir explains that being a happening in rhythm with an ecologically informed garden design, the macha acts as a seed of generative aesthetics providing for children a lesson in producing future spaces of wellbeing.

(Photograph by Khondaker Hasibul Kabir)

distinctive work in art, music or literature, the city is contrasted with the “exchange” value that money and commerce generate. The city above all has “use” value such that streets and spaces, and edifices and monuments, have the preeminent purpose of being used or consumed “unproductively,” something that may not be estimated through monetary value alone.

This issue of Jamini is not only a reportage on urban works but a subtle manifesto for imagining and making a city. Whether it is narrated through an alternative “master” plan of New York City (Michael Sorkin), the green history of Philadelphia (Kate Wingert-Playdon), the urban farming revolution in Havana (Carey Clouse), conservation projects in Kolkata (Manish Chakrabarti), brilliant remedial landscape designs from China (landscape architect Kongjian Yu), eco-city plans of China (Zhongjie Lin)or a recollection of the master plan for Bangkok (Gary Hack), the collation of themes promises the making of a new urban landscape. What is also critical is that all the themes are pertinent for a wholesome transformation of Dhaka.

A choreographed transformation of Dhaka requires a new line of imaginaries and narratives.

Imagination precedes inhabitation, or according to Tabassum Zaman in tracing imaginaries of the city, experiences are extended and worked upon by imagination in order to produce another construction

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that eventually becomes the city, becomes another Dhaka. Naeem Mohaiemen conducts a retrospective imagination of their house in Dhaka's old Rankin Street from traces of photographs made by his father in 1953, and produces a re-construction of a vanished present.

Examples from the architecture design studios of Kieran Timberlake at the University of Pennsylvania present new possibilities for developing Dhaka, from a re-countouring of the hydrological landscape to a reconstitution of wastes. Steve Kieran and James Timberlake are prominent American architects based in Philadelphia, who have for over five years adopted Dhaka as a laboratory for design research. Going farther into the deltaic landscape, a design studio at the University of Washington's Department of Architecture in Seattle conceives a synthetic network of hydraulic passages and floatable nodes.

In a desirable city, heterogeneous relationships and competing claims find enduring recognition and reception. Drawing people from different economic, ethnic, social and professional categories in one space, the most critical need for a city like Dhaka is a civilized mode for addressing differences and diversities. Awash with many building enterprises in a new economy, most buildings in Dhaka remain as enclaves unsure of how to form civic precincts or connect to the public fora. What needs to be celebrated are design of spaces that engage the civic realm, from the larger-scale and monumental to micro operations, and from the planned to the spontaneous. (Examples in this articles how five degrees of such urbanism.)

Bangladesh's urban questions cannot be all about Dhaka even if it hogs up all our investments and concentrations. To think beyond Dhaka, to engage the multitude of small towns – the mofussils – is now critical. Unmapped and untheorized, small towns are developing on a false premise: they are adopting a spurious Dhaka as a role model while abandoning their own stories. Saif Ul Haque delineates a plan for decompressing Dhaka by focusing on a network of smaller towns ringing the besieged capital city. If cities and towns are million stories, Adnan Morshed writes other stories of Chittagong. * As incubators of our futures, cities are not simple

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manifestation of social formation, but prognosis for emerging social and cultural forms. Again, whether delirious or dubious, there is a new city in the horizon whose contour remains largely unmapped. While the fabric of Euro-American cities remains mostly stable (or, in some cases, dwindling, like Detroit), migratory dynamic and predatory economics are fast changing the Asian urban landscape.

Clearly, there has been a quantum leap in the urban phenomenon of Asia. Bolstered by economic and climate migration, and administrative impetus, more people now live in cities. China is literally building 20 cities every year, and India proposes spending $20 billion in seven years for its National Urban Renewal Mission. Despite the fact that contemporary cities are responsible, according to Warnock-Smith, for “history's greatest disparity between the wealthy and the poor,” cities are key catalysts for the future of the planet, and its transformation, but most importantly, the destiny of subsequent generations. * From the deluge of the late 1980s to the unforgettable tragedy of the Rana Plaza factory, Dhaka can be easily written off as an evidence of an apocalyptic city-site. Blood springs from the pillars of a garments factory, a tattered shirt is all that remain of a young man who toiled in a stitching section, a delicate foot of a young woman protrudes between slammed slabs, the sad anklet on her foot a sign of a thwarted hope. Such is the landscape of an unruly industrial globalization.

Borne of the bewildering dynamic of the Bengal delta, people for centuries have learned to live with the extremism of nature that has tested their mettle, creativity and fortitude. Dwellers of the delta, however, do not know how to live with collapsing and burning buildings, of which they do not have any collective memory or folk knowledge. This is the dark side of urban development, the conundrum of magical economic growth and consumer capitalism centered on cities.

Death in the plaza is also a consequence of Dhaka's irresponsible planning, a result of an abysmal failure by city fathers to establish what should be built where and how. Along the way to Gazipur in the north of the city, on the riverbanks towards Naryanganj, and

A CORNER OF ONE'S OWN While coffee houses have become an obvious benchmark of the urban experience, the recalibration of chai-corners into coffeehouses is a new culture in Dhaka. In the absence of effective parks, playgrounds or other such social gathering spaces, the newfangled coffeehouse is becoming a de facto civic forum for the middle-class in the city. CafĂŠ Mango, conceived and designed by Salauddin Ahmed, spearheaded a microscopic civic typology that combines coffee drinking, light fares, music, and art displays, and a certain kind of youthful bonhomie. In developing it as a micro-urbanism, especially as a network of such places in the city, CafĂŠ Mango is more than a place for the consumption of coffee; one finds there in the intimacy of a conversation, or adda, a literal window to the city, the world. (Photographs by Salauddin Ahmed, Atelier Robin: left, Dhanmondi, and right, Wari)

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on the road past Savar, sand and debris cover fields of mustard and rice, and concrete and steel rods replace the vernacular of bamboo and thatch. Multi-storied buildings—six to ten-story high—hum with the music of a far-off Gap or Walmart. Freshly laid sand-beds announce the arrival of an upcoming housing society.

The transformation of Dhaka and its regions, along with its physical and social landscape, has been relentless and brutal. When an agricultural milieu at the fringe of the city rapidly transforms into a hodgepodge urbanization, strange things will happen when nobody takes notice. Nalas, dobas and pukurs– the lowlands – will get filled to shore up tottering towers, without any basic recourse to safety and buildability, and petit goons with the blessings of political leaders will become crorepatis, and enter the mystical chain of globalization.

By creating one landfill after another, emaciating rivers and canals, and decimating flood-plains and agriculture, Dhaka makes for a perfect candidate for an urbanization without urbanism. But it is in this conundrum, a new narrative is being composed. Even if dubbed the worst city to live in and the toughest city in the world, we are already in an unprecedented urban dynamic. If a new and better Dhaka is possible, we have to start from here. * “Leave Paris and Amsterdam – go look at Atlanta, quickly and without preconceptions…” urges the canny urbanist-architect Rem Koolhaas in his note on the contemporary city (1989), in an attempt to take focus away from the usual city discourse based on classical European models. I would rephrase that and say: Leave Paris and Amsterdam – go look at Dhaka, closely and without preconceptions. Dhaka presents not simply a catastrophe for the usual reasons of urbanization but a new theorem for city-thinking.

An urbanism for Dhaka, I have argued, has to be conceptualized from the hydrological property of the delta. The theoretical challenge is this: surrounded and infiltrated by a labyrinthine and delicate network of rivers and canals, tissues of wetlands and floodplains, and organic formations of mounds and settlements, Dhaka needs a new approach to city-thinking and city-form.

A socio-political program is also aligned with the physical fabric of the city. “Cities should provide the

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SITES OF CATALYSIS The power of civic architecture to catalytically remake the dynamic of a city is well known. While not all urban catalyses are implemented, some as ideas may settle in the public imagination as provocations or possibilities that may produce an impulse to bring positive changes to a dreary or underdeveloped condition. Kazi Khaleed Ashraf's proposition for areas of catalysis for Dhaka suggests such a possibility. Anticipating the city's accelerating economic growth, and need for new office, commercial, institutional and residential facilities, Tejgaon can be totally refurbished to become a new urban hub, a model of a new urbanism. Similarly, the site of the Old Airport can be transformed into a new civic space containing parks, gardens, and new cultural and institutional facilities. (Top, Tejgaon as part of three hubs, image by Raphael Tran; and, next page, visualization of Old Airport area as urban garden and park, by Arghya Bhattacharjee)

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environment for civilized life within the context of our own culture,” Muzharul Islam wrote in 1968. “The city can develop only as a part of the physical environment of the country, with the ultimate aim of abolishing all differences between the city and rural areas. The traditional relationship with nature (still existing to a certain extent in the villages of Bangladesh) should be continued in the cities.” This is not a plea from a romantic advocate or a modern incarnation of Ebnezer Howard but someone wary of configured differences between “haves” and “havenots,” and between urban forms and rural patterns. * Bengalis have an ambivalent relationship with cities. Poets and writers sing the sweet songs of villages and versify the vileness of the city. Even when they live and enjoy the city, they dream of the little village through Poet Jasimuddin's comforting image of salubrious vegetation and that untranslatable sense of

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being wrapped in “maya-mamata.”Apu, in Satyajit Ray's filmic Pather Panchali, reclines wistfully in his hovel in a grimy neighborhood in Kolkata, playing the flute like a Krishna dislocated from his arboreal habitat. The psychologist Ashis Nandy talks of the troublesome oscillation between the village and the city in the course of which both emerges dystopic.

Yet, the city thrives in its cantankerous ways.

Thousands arrive at its shore, suffering the insufferable, and not giving up the promises of an upcoming destiny.

Dhaka's primary urban crisis is one of imagination, of not being able to think of an appropriate form even when there are inspiring clues.

With spacious green spaces, majestic trees, crisscrossing canals, civilized riverbanks, boats with unfurled sails plying through the heart of the city, Dhaka can actually be the garden city and a place by the water it always was. The idea of a city as a garden is not a fantasy but an ideology of a city-form as Louis

EDGE AS A NEW LANDSCAPE The edge of Dhaka city is a precious landscape where new patterns of space need to be organized in response to a hydrologically fluctuating condition that includes flood-plains, wetlands, and agricultural fields.

Innovative ideas, with new visions for housing typologies, transport network, and civic spaces, will have to negotiate between the hard city and vast fluid landscape of the delta. (Sketch by Khaleed Ashraf)

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THE POLITICS OF THE POSSIBILE There is always the possibility that the true potentials of a city will be recognized and then realized. (Image by Salauddin Ahmed)

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Kahn envisioned and built in his ensemble of buildings, parks, gardens, orchards and lakes. Muzharul Islam imagined “the whole country as a concentration of population in certain areas in a certain way, but even then within gardens.” He perceived Dhaka not just having a collection of large gardens but the city itself as a garden. “If you can do this [tall buildings] utilizing the highlands of Dhaka city,” he suggested, “even now, you can place here a population three times its current number, and, at the same time, keep the lowlands as lowlands, keep the water bodies, and create gardens.” (1992) * The biggest challenge in the recomposition of Dhaka lies in engaging its landscape reality – the dynamic hydrology of the delta. With an ever expanding city, the dynamic also involves an ecology of the edge.

Koolhaas also introduces the notion of the “edge” in his cartography of the contemporary city. But where the Dutch urbanist meant the fringes of the Euro-American city defined by a frazzled fabric of the post-industrial condition or the tattered terrain of suburbia, a place like Dhaka confronts the edge as the new “center”.

Most urban planners and policy-makers focus on the core city. Even when they are dealing with the edge, they see it in the image of the core. Official planning is unable to conceptualize this edge, to recognize that the edge is its own ecology, and a critical one. Without that realization it is easy to participate in the destruction of the city's hydrogeographical landscape. An audacious vision for Dhaka has to begin from the edge in which the norm of planning of privileging the core has to be reversed.

The geography of the edge is determined by the built-city marching up to meet the “non-urban,” a magnificent but precious terrain of land-water mass made of wetlands, flood-plains, canals, and agricultural fields. The edge is where the dry meets the wet, the “developed” meets the “primitive,” and infrastructure meets the structure-less. This is also where the urbanite meets the farmer, the land grabber discovers his opportunity, and the uprooted often makes her habitation. Site/s of the biggest battle in the city, the terrain of the edge is determined by the presence and

flux of water. No planning scheme will work for Dhaka if this simple equation is not recognized. It is a battle because it is in that terrain the instruments of landfill and embankments are in play. A new imagination and creativity are needed to address this phenomenon in which neither the stilted ecological ethos of DAP (Detailed Area Plan) nor the aggressive pragmatics of developers has risen to the task.

Nothing short of imagining a new landscape of city-form will offer a salvation for Dhaka. The edge conditions of Dhaka presents the possibility of renegotiating the social and economic, as well conceptual, separation between city and its conventional anti-thesis, whether the village or agricultural plains. The edge is where new forms of space organization in response to a fluxed landscape will have to be reorganized, along with newer types of economic and social opportunities. In the meeting of an older form of the city with agricultural land-form and hydrological landscape, a new conception of a city will have to be developed that integrates urbanism, agriculture, infrastructure and flooding.

As guest-editor of the current issue of Jamini, Kazi Khaleed Ashraf stubbornly believes that imagining a new and innovative city-form is the answer to Bangladesh's urban challenges. Ashraf is an architect, urbanist and architectural historian, and teaches at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. Author of numerous publications, his books include: “The Hermit's Hut: Architecture and Asceticism in India”, “An Architect in Bangladesh: Conversations with Muzharul Islam”(editor), “Designing Dhaka: A Manifesto for a Better City”, The Architectural Design volume

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making cities

Views from The Bangkok Plan 1996

cities are the instruments of economic development An interview with Gary Hack Bangkok and Dhaka share remarkable similarities in urban conditions, but since the late 1990s, due to a combination of foresight, planning, and bold decisions, Bangkok has been transforming itself into a truly modern metropolis. Gary Hack, a leading urban designer and planner, was part of the team responsible for the new plan for Bangkok that triggered the transformation. Hack is former Dean of the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, in USA. His projects include waterfront plans in New York and other cities, downtown and redevelopment plans in USA and Canada, and metropolitan plans for cities throughout the world. He collaborated with Studio Daniel Libeskind on the competition-winning plan for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center in New York. He has also been part of an Urban Land Institute team advising the Mayor and other officials on the reconstruction of New Orleans. Gary Hack spoke to Kazi Khaleed Ashraf in Philadelphia in December, 2005 (part of which was published in The Daily Star in 2005), and again in May, 2014.

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KA: What was the background to the Bangkok project?

GH: Thailand is what people referred to as one of the emerging tigers. Economically it became a success story in the late 1980s when a lot of industries moved to the country. Thailand actually took the decision that they wanted to specialize in a few industries, especially automobile. What went with all this industrialization was that they gave industrial companies land for their plants. In fact, the government built the plants for them. In order to get trained employees, they often built housing around the plant. But they under-invested in infrastructure that connected one place to another within the city.

The other thing the government decided to do was clean up the difficult congestion and industrial pollution in Bangkok. They wanted to relocate many of the heavy industries out of the city to remote locations. One of the strategies was to move the port out of Bangkok and actually create two ports at some distance, 50 km. from the city, and also to shift steel plants and heavy industries. This did a bunch of things. One, it displaced a lot of low-income workers. People were not happy about that. Unemployment in the city went up. Slowly and surely industries started to follow the port to that location.

And so the city was in a kind of a vacuum.

At the same time, there was also growth in office industries, and in white-collar jobs in the city. When you have a country like Thailand that has a single language group, all the telecommunication industry, advertising and other services tend to locate in the primate city. The same is true for Tokyo, Seoul and elsewhere. As societies become modernized, the instruments of modernization such as telecommunication, legal services, management services, higher education, all those things tend to be located within cities. While the city was transforming itself economically there was very little investment in infrastructure. Even in the 1990s, there was no sewer system in the city. They were basically using the waterways as their sewage system. Water quality was very poor. Typically, in the flood and rainy seasons, the agricultural land around the city was allowed to flood and all the water drained off over a period of time, but those areas were being filled with industries. Nobody was planning for the drainage system in the city. As a result, they were

experiencing more and more intense floods every year.

The other thing that was occurring was that with more and more middle-class people owning cars, commuting just became impossible. In 1990, people were commuting two hours each way on an average, four hours a day between going to work and coming back home. People were just struck in traffic. So that was the condition.

Still, the city had some delightful areas, wonderful street life, many neighborhoods that were stable and were actually heterogeneous, and so on. What happened in the meantime was that a governor was elected who was an architect and an MIT graduate (from Boston). Shortly after he was elected he came to Boston, and said to us, look, I need some new thinking on this; come over and give some advice on what should happen. A number of us went over.

Ralph Gakenheimer, a transportation planner, Paul Levy, an infrastructure planner, and myself, and a couple of others. We looked at a number of things.

I became particularly interested in the transportation issue.

What became absolutely clear was that the problem of transportation was not created by roadways; it was created by the land-use pattern which meant far too many people had to travel long distances every day between home and work. What you had was highways that were absolutely clogged going into the city during the day. And at night it was reversed. We argued that some infrastructure improvements were needed to build an expressway system to basically get the people off the roads. In the long haul what was needed was a mass transit system. The real issue was that they had to gain control of land development patterns. We argued that there ought to be a job-housing balance in every sector of the city, not to say that everybody would live and work in the same sector. They also ought to create some nodes in the city where you could actually make connections with business and work without having people to get on the roadways and drive.

We had a series of ideas about this. Until then Bangkok had a number of master plans but they were impossible plans. They went for more regulations than they were capable of carrying out. They didn't alter the overall structure; they basically

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KA: Who was funding this? The BMA? GH: The BMA funded this. They used some ADB money they had for some infrastructure planning in the city. Our work was finished by 1998.

proposed. One above ground which would essentially serve a circulator system in the center of the city, and two below ground. One was being done by the federal government, one by the municipal government, and one was a concession they were offering to a private company. In the original plan, before we got involved in any of these things, there was actually no connection between these three systems. There would be a station here and half a block away there would be a station of the other system. There were no transfers, etc. We worked very hard to get these plans revised as they were emerging so that they could actually make connections to various places. There was a rudimentary regional rail but there was no connection to it for people coming to the city to get linked with the mass transit system. So our coordination and pulling things together pointed out the nodes where the regional rail system, the mass transit system and expressway systems come together. You can actually plan major developments that can get people moving between these systems. That actually got adopted and a couple of the big, opportunity areas are going through development now.

KA: What about follow-up plans?

GH: What happened is that these plans were taken up by the Minister of Interior who had the bottomline responsibility for adopting the land-use plans for municipalities and mandating them. They made some modifications to our plan but incorporated that in the master plan of the city. It is interesting that they require the master plan of the city to be revised every five years and what we were doing in theory was revision of the previous master plan. But in fact we started from scratch as previous master plans really did not address most of the issues that were important to the city. The city recently did a new revision to the plan, and they maintained all the key elements we proposed.

KA: Two things come to mind. What about the political will at the national, regional and city level? And the other is the financial part. Who finances something like this, especially a major transformation of the transportation system? Could Thailand carry this out on its own, or did it need external help?

GH: Both are needed. The Thai government put up much of the money for the regional transportation system. The expressway system was done as a concession they gave to outside investors. Now privately owned and operated, it will revert to the city or government after fifteen years. In some of these cases, they had loans from ADB, World Bank and other sources. In many cases, there was private capital.

KA: Have you visited Bangkok since then? Do you think things have changed?

GH: Yes, they are doing some things. They are creating metropolitan sub-centers. They have revised the development regulations, and installed the transportation system. I will give you an example: At one time, three transportation systems were being

KA: What about the political will to take this on?

GH: Well, Thailand is not terribly stable politically, but I must say that the current Prime Minister, Chuan Leekpai [the last time, when he was in office, as a Prime Minister from March 2001 to May 2003], was quite an amazing man. He was elected after we finished the plan so he was not involved with it. He

followed the land growth pattern in the city. For a year and a half, we went back and forth, sending policy proposals to the city. We had a big seminar where people in the city were invited to come and debate and discuss the issues. That's what the governor wanted. Up to that time, the national government prepared the master plan of the city.

They had decentralized it. They asked the city government, actually called the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority (BMA), to do that. And the governor said, we want you to draft it this time. What he suggested to us was that we come, bring a team of people, and lodge them in the city planning departments, and the city would bring ten of their bright young people to work with us. We produced a new master plan for the city in eighteen months. The idea was two-fold: to bring in new thinking into the picture, but also in the course of that process train a set of people.

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Infrastructure is coordinated with development

Elevated transit stations connected to developments

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Intermodals allow transition between different modes

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is amazing in the sense that he is a private entrepreneur, a pretty wealthy one, one of the wealthiest people in the world. He took on his job partly to prove that the country could be efficiently managed.

Despite the ethnic conflict they had which was very taxing for the government, he has done a very god job of getting the country going managerially.

Before that Thailand had a really unstable governmental system. There was more stability at the municipal level than the national level. And the governor of Bangkok is elected and not appointed like in other cities. In a couple of four-year terms, the governor was able to accomplish quite a lot.

KA: One of the key elements in your proposal is the creating of sub-centers that rearrange the urban matrix and relieve pressures from existing districts.

GH: Bangkok like many cities is a primate city. It is both a capital city and also the largest economic unit in the country. Bangkok was facing calls to relocate the capital out of the city. This is a very intriguing idea being considered in many countries in similar situations. There was a law passed in Japan to move the capital out of Tokyo but that has never happened. This summer I was in Korea when the government wanted to move the capital out of Seoul but it hasn't happened. The parliament in Thailand voted to move the national capital as a way to decrease congestion at the center of the city.

What happens when that occurs is that there are certain reactions from several groups. People with property interests are keen to keep the capital where it is because of industries and headquarters, and these are close to the center of the city and government. People who work for the government do not want to relocate 150 km. out of the city because their children are at school, etc. This is a deadlock issue.

It is clear that some of the functions within the center of the city could actually be relocated and redistributed to the perimeter of the city. They would be the first piece of the process of getting better jobs and housing in various sectors of the city. A number of metropolitan sub-centers were seen as places of decentralizing certain government units out of the center and to the perimeter. The idea was to put them in locations where there was either, in short-term, a mass transit service from the

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center of the city, or in long term, a corridor, a good highway access.

The strategy was that a city had limited money for infrastructure improvements, and rather than spending it on a little bit of roadway here and a little bit there, we argued that they consolidate this money in these areas, and create a really good infrastructure there with sewer, water, roadway, electrical lines, all of which would make them attractive as locations for commercial, residential and other high density developments.

KA: One thing about the geography of Bangkok: I find it that it is remarkably similar to that of Dhaka. You are also involved with the reconstruction of New Orleans, a similar landscape.

GH: The problem Bangkok was facing was that they were using up all the storage capacity for the rainy seasons, draining into the klongs[canals], and the klongs were overflowing and flooding the city. They didn't have a very good system of regulating the klongs. It was just total chaos. We proposed creating large reserve lands in the perimeter of the city that could be parklands but would have the capacity to hold the water during the rainy season. It also clarified the drainage system around the perimeter of the city. This was really a difficult thing because the national government was looking after it but was simply incompetent in managing it. It's not so different than New Orleans in that sense. But I think Bangkok is now moving according to the proposals.

KA: You have studied the phenomenon of contemporary cities closely, and have looked at how cities transform themselves.

What are your thoughts on cities that are changing not so much from a post-industrial developed state but from a sort of extreme urbanism, cities that have not figured out where they are heading?

GH: Well, cities go through a dynamic, and countries go through a dynamic. There are traditional cities and traditional societies for sure, but cities go on an economic growth cycle. Now they usually capitalize on low-wage labor starting with garments – which are always the first – and then go through phases of converting to increasingly sophisticated technologies. Usually during that early phase which is catering to mass markets in the west, there is

assembly work and not much basic design and research. Cities have to accumulate enough capital and position infrastructure to be able to support the next level of growth that usually has to do with services and banking and things that require large amount of capital. At each stage, the city basically has to create the platform for the next stage of development, and if it doesn't, the city stalls. Look at Manila, for example. There is a city that has never been over the initial stage of development, in part though there is huge amount of capital in the Philippines, but it resides with a very small group of people. They have not invested in the infrastructure of the city, and so it hasn't had the capacity to move on to the next stage of development.

Ultimately, developed cities are not places of production but places of consumption and places of culture. On the road to getting there what's really important is a new stage to build the structure for the next stage. Cities are in fact instruments of economic development. Look at Bangkok. Here is a city with 20% of the total population but 40% of the GDP. You find the same for Seoul, Tokyo, Yokohama, with a disproportionate share of GDP in those countries. Why? Because as the city becomes more advanced in its economy, there is more and more production in software and services.

You have to get to that point.

Parks and riverfront

Klongs are restored to their former elegance

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Intermodal connection to water transport system

[Postscript, 2014] GH: It has now been almost 20 years since we completed the draft Bangkok Plan, and 15 years since it was adopted in a slightly revised form by the National Government. What has become of the ideas incorporated in the plan?

First, many of the transportation improvements -the initial phases of both the skytrain and mass transit systems -- have been opened and have had a profound impact on congestion as well as on attitudes about development. The proposition that densities be increased around transit stations has become increasingly accepted. The city is obliged to revise its metropolitan plan every five years and the plan revisions of 2006 carried forward our proposal that density bonuses be offered for any developments within 500m of mass transit stations.

The idea of concentrating suburban densities and stopping the spread of urbanization has also persisted, and the proposal that a form of greenbelt designed to provide detention of flood waters, which we first

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proposed, has been included in the most recent metropolitan plan. This is also a response to several devastating floods that have occurred in the intervening years, which have resulted in major areas being set aside for retention at the edge of the metropolitan area, and major public works in the form of flood gates and large tunnels to transport flood waters to the river, lessening the impacts to the canal system. The open space plans have also been carried forward, with major new parks created and landscaped parkways developed. They have had a measurable impact on the quality of life.

Finally, Bangkok has turned its attention to actions it can take to deal with global climate change. It has set a target of 15% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, even as the city grows, and reports indicate that by 2011 80% of the target had been reached. This would never have been possible without increased densities and decreased reliance on private vehicles.

BENGAL GALLERY OF FINE ARTS House 42 . Road 16 (New) / 27 (Old) . Sheikh Kamal Sarani Dhanmondi . Dhaka 1209 . Bangladesh Phone +880-2-8123115 . Fax +880-2-9146111 Email: gallery@bengalfoundation.org

making cities

Figure-ground switch in Sunnyside, Queens. 100% scheme.

new york city (steady) state

by Michael Sorkin

For the past six years, Terreform, our non-profit research institute, has been engaged in a thought experiment. New York City (Steady) State is an alternative master plan that seeks to make the city completely self-sufficient, its ecological foot print exactly coterminous with its political boundaries. The idea for this formed a dozen years ago when I taught a seminar in urban sustainability at City College. This began with exercises using to clarify the metrics of urban respiration and reach and students of the class took measurements of their own footprints and of various activities and phenomena in the city. This always yielded striking results and students were suitably abashed at how much of the planet's surface was necessary to produce a Big Mac, a pair of jeans, light in the studio, or a ride to the beach.

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W

A simple figure-ground switch.

hile the exercises were usefully provocative, we wanted to know more and delved more specifically into the respiratory behavior of the city, looking at the actual inputs and outputs of these processes. This literalization– via mapping, tabulation, speculation – of the nature and real sites of the production gave rise to a broader speculation: what would it mean to literally take responsibility for all the elements required to sustain us, not as an abstraction but as a fact of daily life.

What would it mean to actualize the model of import substitution, to think about the city as a bounded system fully obliged to take care of itself. This fantasy was resonant both as a model of sustainability and as a proposition about local collective autonomy.

The conceptual predicate of New York City (Steady) State became the test of complete self-sufficiency. By pushing to the maximum, we stared autarky in the face as a source of form and practice: desire is also subject to tests of practicality. We have now completed enough work to demonstrate, among other things, that it's possible to feed the current population of the City of New York with food grown entirely within its boundaries. The environmental, economic, political, cultural, culinary, and morphological arguments for doing this are, however, complex.

While our study is infused with a romantic, utopian aroma, it is also an instrument for testing the practicalities and efficiencies of environmental autonomy at many sites and scales. Of course, there are economies of scale or even comparative advantage.

But, societies and economies are always bounded and New York City (Steady) State examines the fantasy of autarky and a series of logics of the local, and, an idea about cost-benefit in the environment that is not based on purely economic arguments, the algorithms of capitalist realism. For example, the question of “food miles” is often reflexively understood as a metric in defense not simply of localism but of a minimized carbon footprint. But a giant cargo ship of containerized apples inexorably sailing from New Zealand has a far smaller footprint per apple than a fleet of aging pick-up trucks, conveying hand-hewn wooden crates of Jonagolds [apples] from upstate to the local co-op. However, artisan apples have other advantages, irreducible to carbon.

We have organized our research by respiratory

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Figure-ground switch in Sunnyside, Queens. 30% scheme.

function and are dealing successively with food, water, air and climate, waste, manufacture, energy, movement, and building. Each of these has strong economic, social, and political implications since each has boundaries that are very porous and has a complex set of interactions with the others. We've chosen to begin with a focus on food. Urban agriculture is a subject of much speculation and obviously fundamental to survival; it has the appeal of a certain challenging improbability in the context of the densely built city.

Most of the images presented here are from our elementary investigations.

We are now almost done with this first volume (of a projected seven or eight) and have demonstrated that – from a purely spatial standpoint – it is possible to produce enough food for 8.5 million people to have at least 2400 nutritious calories each day. Our work has investigated sites for production at every scale,

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including buildings, transformed streets, re-purposed infrastructure, existing open spaces, and vertical agriculture. This latter type– constructed by the thousand – would be indispensable to full “selfsufficiency.” However, such vertical farms– the sine qua non of self-sufficient urban agriculture – require enormous investment, recast the skyline, are incapable of producing many foods in appropriate quantities, and reinvent the city's planetary position in ways that are not completely positive. The primary technical impediments to a “self-sufficient” system of vertical urban agriculture are the extremely high energy input required for both illumination and heating, as well as for the massive initial construction. Although enough thirty story agricultural towers (using advanced hydroponic and other cultivation techniques) could be built to supply the city with food – several steps in quality and freshness above Soylent on 2% of its total

Figure-ground switch in Sunnyside, Queens. Interior view.

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Green Network, View Manhattan

land area, a photo voltaic array sufficient to supply them would require an area 3.5 times the total surface area of the city, that is to say 750,000 acres. Alternatively, 28 nuclear power plants would do the job but this is somewhat contrary to the spirit of the exercise!

Recognizing the impracticality of this arrangement, we've looked at a series of “sweet spots” that are more aligned with really closing neighborhood loops, using producible amounts of energy, reasonable construction investment, available land, and always honoring existing people and communities right to remain.

We've investigated a variety of morphological transformations that would characterize a city committed to autonomy and the idea that urban respiration begins locally. One of the speculations that we pursued in our investigation of urban agriculture is the “figure-groundswitch,” in which the nineteenth century block pattern sees its built mass migrate into the space of the street, freeing the block interiors for agriculture and other public uses.

When we first investigated this maneuver, we saw it too simply. We were somehow always looking for an outcome in which we could combine the modernist fantasy of living in greenery with a more historic idea of the street. This city was understood to be one in which urban circulation had been radically transformed with streets mainly removed from the automobile system and now with a mix of pedestrians, bikes, trams busses, and relatively few small, slow, nonemitting vehicles: complete streets. These were imagined as decidedly pre-modern and a particular inspiration was the medieval and Islamic city.

Early on, our work was largely directed to questions of movement and of the public realm, to strategies for reconfiguring the ratio of public to private space in the city. At the conceptual outset we devoted too little time to the actual metrics of sufficiency, the relationship of the new morphologies to the needs and numbers of existing populations. We soon realized that even if we devoted all of the new terraced roof-tops and interior courts to agriculture, the harvest was insufficient to feed more than 2% of the population of the block.

Our speculation in Sunnyside, Queens reveals the dilemmas. We begin to investigate the parameters of transformation with a basic assumption: the population of the blocks under study must remain constant and the area of calculation will not exceed the

Amsterdam Avenue transformed

dimensions of the streets and blocks under combination. In our initial sketch of a “pure” figure-ground switch, the morphology is attractive but the real potential for intensive food production is very small.

More interesting was the 100% scheme. This has a stimulating, Kowloon-like, urban flavor. The densities and architectural relationships in section and the nightand-day between the narrowed streets and the expansive interiors are great. But the vertical farms present their usual problems. The most constraining is that the density of the towers on the site compromises efficiency at lower levels. This does not preclude food production but means that energy inputs for artificial illumination are increased. One solution is to employ the lower portions of the towers for other uses, including residences (although this is a use that also requires sunshine). Another is to have fewer towers.

Both reduce on-site capacity to grow food, and we settled on developing a 30% scheme.

The nature of the Steady State Economy reveals itself. Adding residential units to the site means that housing can be subtracted elsewhere in the city. This is useful in reconsidering parts of the city that are built at suburban densities and still heavily dependent on cars. Energy isn't entirely fungible: it is tied to the site of its thermodynamic conversion, whether in a car or an A/C unit. Using additional energy to up food production has implications for city-wide conservation and production strategies. And, if most of the food is coming from off-site, it ramifies in bigger strategies for provisioning the city as a whole. In this particular case, the “switched” blocks are adjacent to one of the very large vertical farm complexes we are proposing, above the vast Sunnyside railyards, which is near enough to be part of any local aggregation and disaggregation schemes. In the same spirit, the area might be used for solar arrays to power the vertical farms…or something else.

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Accretive growth on 125th Street

Vertical Farm over the Long Island Railroad

We have looked at many specific architectures and solutions and have designed prototype vertical farms for both crop and animal production, various smallerscale greenhouses, wall-systems, and other elements of what is now a fairly well-developed repertoire of agrarian resources. The more the better. We have looked at the way these structures and techniques can be integrated into the fabric of the city and have been particularly interested in reclaiming the space of the street from an automobile-dominated movement culture for a broader mix of public uses, including such “immobile” examples as agriculture. We have looked at all scales– from window boxes to skyscrapers – in order to suggest a system in which production in not monopolized by the urban equivalent of the agri-business this whole project critiques. We are perfectly aware of how tempting a target for Archers Daniels Midland or Monsanto would be the millions of square feet of municipally-developed automated farm shells.

We have investigated scenarios for re-configuring of the city as a whole to allow it to grow 100% of its food supply. The main media for production include large areas of vertical farms, particularly in portions of the city that are currently built at suburban densities, figure-ground switches, over-building of highway and rail infrastructures, and intensive utilization of rooftops, vacant lots, brown-fields, and other available spaces. Our larger re-imagining of the city is based on an intensification of neighborhood autonomy – we are always looking to scale autonomy down - and a strong preference for local accountability in all aspects of urban respiration. These drawings of whole of New York “reorganized”are diagrammatic – we don't imagine a literal circular morphology for these transformed neighborhoods – but we do intend their re-calibration on the basis of walk-time and the emergence of a green super-grid as a zone of circulation, agriculture, climate control, recreation, water management, and organization. We are also in the

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NYC(s)s vertical farm tower, drawings

Master Plan B

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NYC(S)S vertical farm animal tower

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Vertical farm, mid-town Manhattan.

This 30 story, block-square farm can produce food for approximately 12,000 people.

process of designing a re-purposed subway system to facilitate not simply the movement of people but of goods.

We anticipate that the completion of this study will take another five years and that we will be able to demonstrate the very high degree to which it is possible to radically ratchet up the autonomy of the city. The encyclopedia of technologies and morphologies that are represented in the work are meant to offer a practical lexicon for the global transformation of cities – and the broader assumptions of urban culture about the nature of human autonomy – that must increasingly characterize a planet alert to its limits and moved to deal both with distributive justice and with our very survival.

Michael Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York.

Sorkin's long academic career has also included professorships at Cooper Union, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania and Michigan. He lectures widely and is the author of several hundred articles on architectural and urban subjects. For ten years he was the architectural critic of the Village Voice and is currently architecture critic for The Nation. His books include Exquisite Corpse, Wiggle, Local Code, Some Assembly Required, All Over the Map and Twenty Minutes in Manhattan. Sorkin is also President of Terreform, a non-profit organization engaged in urban research and advocacy and President of The Institute for Urban Design.

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making cities

The historic Vedado neighborhood in central Havana now features front yard and backyard gardens, urban chickens, and goats tethered along streets. Photo credit: Andy Cook.

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reimagining the commons

city gardening and urban greenspace in havana, cuba

by Carey Clouse

With unpredictable weather changes, global warming, and increasing resource scarcity, instability may become the defining environmental characteristic of future cities and towns. In this unpredictable context, a transition to resilient, flexible and productive urban systems could also dramatically alter urban forms. The once-reliable dispersed solutions for critical services such as food provisioning will need to be redesigned to accommodate instability through local alternatives. In the case of food production, urban agriculture can be appliqued directly onto existing infrastructures, providing a hyper-local source for food security. As urban dwellers prepare for self-sufficiency in the future, they could dedicate some portion of their public domain to the production of subsistence agriculture.

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T

he urban commons presents a unique territory for the development of productive civic services. This state-held common property is typically used by civilians through a shared social or cultural understanding. Moreover, this collective use of, and decision making for the urban commons, can be used to develop new urban services in this space. In Havana, Cuba, this land was reimagined in the early 1990s for productive agricultural use, and it remains the preeminent model today. In redesigning the urban commons of Havana, citizens effectively bolstered their food security, diversified their foodshed, and developed many thousands of new acres of greenspace on collectively held urban lands.

As architects, landscape architects, and planners look for tested models addressing the cognate issues of scarcity and food security, the progressive urban farming work stemming from Cuba's Special Period stands out as a rare and important precedent. Widely understood to be “one of the most successful examples of urban agriculture in the world,� Cuban urban farming incorporates grassroots organizing, the appropriation of public space for growing, and shared technical and educational support. This surprisingly effective movement stands in stark contrast to other wartime or post-disaster environments, with outcomes ranging from widespread self-sufficiency and profound community engagement to environmental remediation and improved stewardship. Moreover, this Cuban model highlights a number of infrastructural, social and political features that could be applied to other areas.

When Cuba found itself abruptly cut off from trade with the Soviet bloc in 1989, the country spun into an economic crisis of unprecedented severity.

Suddenly lacking the oil, pesticides, and machinery with which to grow crops, and without access to the imported food that had previously sustained it, Cuba's foodshed suddenly caved. Nearly twenty-five years later, this food crisis has vanished almost as swiftly as it arrived, in no small part due to the country's innovative and widespread urban food production efforts. Combining state support and citizen participation, Cubans created an urban design framework to support urban agriculture initiatives through a reimagining of the commons. Today almost a dozen distinct types of urban farming approaches are visible

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A rooftop has been converted to productive space for chickens, rabbits, and guinea pigs. Photo credit: Andy Cook.

A greenhouse in Havana. These urban farming structures are now commonplace inside the city limits. Photo credit: Andy Cook.

Incorporating salvaged materials for his raised beds and even the seed spreader, an urban farmer in Havana makes the most of urban debris.

Photo credit: Andy Cook.

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in Havana, Cuba. These forms are a direct response to the 1989 food crisis and reflect the flexible modes of self-provisioning that followed. The decision to farm on the commons exposes the context, constraints, and cultural norms unique to Havana's urban environment, revealing changing attitudes towards urbanism in Cuba's capital city. In its incorporation of shared and public landscapes for food production, this urban agriculture system could well be translated for other parts of the world.

With natural and man-made disasters increasing in both frequency and severity, architects, landscape architects and planners can help cities plan for resilience by identifying replicable methods for selfsufficiency. The model urban farming programs underway in Cuba demonstrate self-sufficiency and food security in an oil-scarce environment. Moreover, Havana's innovative urban agriculture on the commons suggests a method that could inform the development of productive landscapes in other parts of the world.

BACKGROUND In 1989, the Cuban government abruptly lost an important trade ally with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. Already isolated from world trade due to the U.S. sponsored trade embargos, Cuba became, almost overnight, cut off from the rest of the world. In the years that followed, the country was both incapable of effectively exporting sugar and citrus crops, and unable to import critical staples. This period became known as Cuba's food crisis, in which most Cubans lost access to roughly one-third of their daily calories; there was widespread hunger, and the government instituted a peacetime austerity program for food rationing.

Beyond the overwhelming reduction of foodrelated imports, Cuba suffered from pervasive oil scarcity. One of the major motivations for turning to urban farming was that transportation in Cuba became very limited, as well as time-intensive and expensive.

Growers had difficulty moving vegetables, meat and fruit to the tables around the region. In this sense, Cuba's food crisis was both political (in the case of trade embargos) and locational (people were stranded in a food desert). Although Cuba had become reliant on other countries for food provisioning, its geogra-

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phy, history and political values actually pointed to a latent local foodshed. The island benefits from an ideal tropical coastal climate zone for growing yearround crops, sizeable tracts of arable land, a strong post-1959 government, and a socialist appreciation for agriculture and self-sufficiency.

Presented with a near collapse of its food provisioning system, the Cuban government responded with an overhaul of agricultural systems on the island, preferencing organic farming, useful edible crops, and peasant labor. In urban areas, guerrilla gardening initiatives blossomed into new statesupported urban farming programs, with widespread voluntary participation. Born out of necessity, the urban farming in Havana opportunistically reappropriated the commons by converting many public and state-owned landscapes into production.

TODAY Havana is an exemplary model for this type of selfprovisioning, and a useful precedent for individuals seeking to understand the opportunities and obstacles for transference. The city has more than two million people, many universal or ubiquitous infrastructural elements, and a contemporary urban form. In an effort to bring food production into the city, agricultural initiatives were necessarily layered over, and knitted into the existing urban fabric. From a design perspective, Havana's urban agriculture can be read as an afterthought or a stop-gap measure, rather than a considered and intentional design process. This practice of greening the commons, however, is perhaps the program's most salient design feature, demonstrating that productivity can be introduced and infused into hardened urban wastescapes.

Havana provides an example of a systematic approach to rethinking shared state-owned landscapes for more productive means. Today, Havana has a unique food production infrastructure woven into its contemporary city form, including 475 large state farms, 318 livestock farms, 179 organopรณnicos or collective farms, 418 high production orchards, 28 seedling production centers, 324 greenhouses; 162 school or workplace gardens, 7,848 vacant lot gardens, 126 forest farms, 67 cattle farms, 52 different agricultural stores, 3 compost production sites, 7 centers for artisanal biopesticide production and 40 urban

In Havana, old infrastructure now supports new life through urban farming. Photo credit: Andy Cook.

At the Vivera Alamar Orgรกniponico in Havana, growers harvest carrots and greens. Photo credit: Andy Cook.

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Block-sized urban farms in Havana allow growers to offer a diversity of products and services. Image credit: Jade Jiambutr.

veterinary clinics. (GonzĂĄlez 2008, 24) Economics professor Sinan Koont estimates that “more than 35,000 hectares (over 87,000 acres) of land are being used in urban agriculture in Havana!â€? (Koont 2009, 1) URBAN AGRICULTURE ON THE COMMONS Urban agriculture in Havana occurs at a host of different scales, from the vacant lot to the multi-acre fields that comprise Havana's greenbelt. These gardens also have a range in terms of production, from highlyproductive enterprises to pleasure gardens, and varying degrees of state support and recognition. Havana's urban gardens typically produce food for human and animal consumption, although the same formal structure of gardens also supports the production of compost and biofuels, as well as tree nurseries. While the vast majority of land for urban farms varies widely in size, shape, and character, most of these growing spaces are located on shared or state-held lands: what could be called the urban commons.

Many of these gardens have emerged somewhat opportunistically from vacant and blighted properties within the city, exploiting usufruct rights (free land provided by the government, at ten year intervals) to seize available space. The need for productive agricultural space in and around Havana required that growers reimagine the form of agrarian landscapes.

Rather than looking to virgin land for farm develop-

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ment, many growers have restructured brownfield and grayfield landscapes within the city limits, and in doing so, effectively reimagined Havana's urban commons.

THE ROLE OF DESIGN Designers such as planners, architects and landscape architects have historically played a limited role in the development of agriculture systems. While food production has been disassociated from the design disciplines in the past, it is increasingly becoming relevant in the urban context. As societies begin to consider new forms and types of farming, designers could help to shape that work, especially on shared land within urban areas.

In the context of environmental crisis, the design disciplines could present useful agendas, advocacy and strategies for envisioning future cities. Architects, landscape architects and planners are poised to help ease the transition to more sustainable cities, by visualizing new forms of farming, developing new technologies, systems and materials, and working to connect farming to contemporary city life. Traditionally, designers have acted as the gatekeepers for public space shaping; indeed many of the same issues that affect urban spaces also impact urban farming. For instance, food production in cities has the potential to be form-based, affordable, efficient, visible, and to represent the interests of all citizens.

Micro-gardens, on rooftops, windowsills and front stoops, allow opportunistic growers to take advantage of tiny slivers of urban space for more productive use. Larger lot and block-sized farms provide space for more traditional planting schemes for farmers.

Image credit: Jade Jiambutr.

Moreover, designers could benefit from opening up new terrains in their field, as well as new forms of interdisciplinary work. Engaging in the design of urban food systems would highlight broader issues of food security, thereby expanding the field. As the design disciplines move from largely aesthetic conversations to topics of utility and resilience, this kind of work could serve to increase the relevance of the profession.

CONCLUSION Cuba's innovative approach to urban farming provides a blueprint for urban food security, demonstrating a form of reinterpreting the commons that could be useful in other areas. While not originally planned into the city fabric, this countrywide initiative suggests logical land-use transitions, provides a model for hyper-local agricultural production and offers a method for greening the city. Perhaps most importantly, Cuba presents a useful case study because the country has endured a food crisis brought about by oil scarcity, and has thrived.

Indeed, the urban agriculture practiced in Havana provides an important model for any city transitioning towards food independence. As global warming intensifies and energy, land and water reserves diminish, many see the value in a return to locavorism and the development of more resilient food systems.

Havana's model, which is affordable, accessible, comprehensive, and de facto organic, could be particularly instructive for other nations seeking improved food security. And while Cuba was forced to innovate due to the food crisis of 1989, other countries have the opportunity to develop their own selfsufficiency before such a crisis unfolds. The urban commons provides the interstitial space for such efforts, civic landscapes that could be retrofitted to host new urban food systems.

REFERENCES González Novo, M. et al. 2008. Testimonios: Agricultura Urbana en Ciudad de La Habana. Havana: Asociación Cubana de Técnicos Agrícolas y Forestales.

Koont, S. 2009. “The Urban Agriculture of Havana,” in Monthly Review, vol. 60, issue 08.

Carey Clouse teaches architecture and landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After completing a degree in architecture and urbanism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she co-founded Crookedworks Architecture with Zachary Lamb (www.crookedworks.com). Clouse is the author of Farming Cuba: Urban Agriculture From the Ground Up (Princeton Architectural Press).

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making cities

United States Geological Survey Map of Philadelphia, 1898.

United States Geological Survey Map of Philadelphia, 1967.

philadelphia's green city

a narrative of equality and equity

by Katherine Wingert-Playdon

Since 2009, Greenworks Philadelphia1 has guided Philadelphia's effort to become the greenest city in the United States by 2015. Goals that define the Greenworks program are familiar: reducing energy consumption, controlling waste, improving air quality, and encouraging recycling and reuse. The plan aims at the future, addressing the long term impact of sustainability in an urban context.

Initiatives are understood in terms of the city's economy and wellbeing for urban inhabitants and the environment. Organized according to five areas – Energy, Environment, Equity, Economy, and Engagement – Greenworks initiatives according to Mayor Michael Nutter are guided by the following approach:

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“Greenworks Philadelphia is a vision for how Philadelphia can and should seize the moment, building on assets left to us by earlier Philadelphians and creating a better 2 future for ourselves, our children and generations still to come.”

M

any US cities have a current focus on sustainability, but Philadelphia's role in the discourse is unique in its ability to find a sustainable future directly linked to the city's past. The terms 'Green' and 'Sustainable' can have a range of definitions in relation to the urban context. In the Philadelphia green narrative, the use of the term Equity, used in the Greenworks plan, links to a longheld civic value originating from the city's founding, Equality. Both equity and equality serve as guiding principles for the spatial aspects of urban planning.

The use of green urban infrastructure – through trees, public spaces and agriculture – historically and in the present day makes manifest the abstract ideas of Philadelphia's urban vision to become part of the urban imagination for the city.

The 'assets of earlier Philadelphians' referenced in the Greenworks plan include the vision set by the city's th founder, William Penn, and the accompanying 17 century city plan delineated by Pennsylvania Surveyor General Thomas Holme.

William Penn envisioned Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, as a 'Holy Experiment.' Philadelphia was to be a place where values such as tolerance, equality, fair government and religious freedom were the civic foundation. The 1683 city plan entitled, “A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania,” situated Penn's vision. The plan is commonly referred to as a 'Greene Countrie Towne' where Penn's philosophical underpinnings were expressed as an ideal city laid according to a system of measurements guiding the plan's dimensions. Equality was well expressed in the urban infrastructure through the measurement system and the distribution of public and private property, institutions, and areas of commerce. The introduction of public green park spaces in the plan has had a lasting impact. Each of the four quadrants of the city has a public park and a fifth park was located in the city center. The public park system, open space for use by all citizens, was uncommon for an American city at that time. As Philadelphia grew, other public spaces emerged out of the urban infrastructure, building on the park system

3

and the initial civic aim. Other major infrastructural initiatives in Philadelphia included the development of the first urban water system in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the development of one of the largest urban park systems in the country in the th 19 century. Both of these large scale endeavors impacted the development of public green space in the city and further articulated the idea of green as a core asset and value for Philadelphia.

Thomas Holme, "A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania in America.”, 1683 (Source: Athenaeum of Philadelphia).

From the Greenworks 2013 Progress Report: A family in Cobbs Creek with their newly installed rain barrel.

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Soak It Up! competition winning entry in the “Neighborhood Greening the City” category. Image from the winning entry, the “Meeting Green Team,” which proposed extensive neighborhood infrastructure in places of social activity including parks and streets.

As Philadelphia grew, the original 1683 plan was altered, but the original public spaces in the center of the city remained and became central to the city's identity. The four squares in the four quadrants of center city are primary to the city's open space organization, and the fifth, Center Square, is now an open courtyard held within the massive City Hall. It marks the intersection of Market and Broad Streets, the cardo and decumanus of Philadelphia. The courtyard is the place in the grid from which the ideal plan is understood.

URBAN SPACE, WATER, AND INFRASTRUCTURE, A MANIFESTATION OF EQUITY In the current Greenworks plan, Philadelphia's green infrastructure is included in the category Equity which has the stated goal of delivering more equitable access to healthy neighborhoods. Equity has four target initiatives including updating the management of stormwater and providing park and recreation resources.

Historically, stormwater management coincided with development of parks. A large portion of the city's green infrastructure includes green areas that were initially set aside to protect the city's water supply.

The growth of the green infrastructure was greatly aided by the designation of Fairmount Park in 1858; the park as a site for recreation was possible because

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the watershed area surrounding the Schuylkill River th had expanded over the course of the early 19 century.

Water and green space, health and recreation, key factors in the current sustainability aims in Philadelphia, have always been considered contributing factors to the city's overall well-being.

Philadelphia was the first city in the modern world to develop a water system to provide fresh water to its citizens, a response to the repeated epidemic th outbreaks in the 18 century. A municipal drainage

Images from “Soak It Up - Meeting Green,” that show strategies for three public areas at three scales - “Play Green,” which is in a public park.

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Images from “Soak It Up - Meeting Green” that show strategies for three public areas at three scales - “Branching Green: Beck Street,” shows a proposal for an alley.

system was developed along with the water supply system. Philadelphia's is a combined stormwater and sewage drainage system. Given the city's current size, the system is outdated. The overflow of sewage and stormwater is the primary cause of water pollution during major storm events. A new program initiated by the Philadelphia Water Department, “Green City, Clean Waters4,” contributes to current sustainability efforts in Philadelphia. The program addresses the environmental value of storm water management by giving monetary value to greening initiatives. With the drainage system as a permanent part of the city's infrastructure “Green City, Clean Waters” has a primary goal to slow down the flow of stormwater, alleviating the problem of pollution in streams and rivers and contributing to health of the urban environment. The new taxation structure related to stormwater management encourages the building of underground water retention basins as part of new development on large properties. As such, much of the new drainage infrastructure is invisible. But the program also presents opportunities for visible infrastructure. The Philadelphia Water Department has converted portions of streets into 'green streets' by reworking sidewalk areas to include stormwater planters at the curbside. The “Green City, Clean Waters” program also encourages property owners to control stormwater by considering changes to a property like adding green roofs, removing hard surfaces or using permeable pavements. And there are more immediate initiatives like the distribution of rain barrels for use on private property.

The city's Office of Sustainability, the Philadelphia Water Department, and other government agencies look to increase general knowledge and literacy about stormwater management and have engaged many partners in their efforts. For example, the Philadelphia Water Department, the Community Design Collaborative and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency5 sponsored a design competition focused on how stormwater management could be transformative in the city. The competition, “SOAKITUP!: Revitalizing Urban Neighborhoods through Green Stormwater Infrastructure,” asked teams to consider stormwater management's relationship to urban design. Teams were guided by three entry categories: Industrial - Warehouse Watershed, Commercial – Retail

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Images from “Soak it Up - Meeting Green” that show strategies for three public areas at three scales “Branching Green: Beck Street,” shows a proposal for an alley.

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Retrofit, Neighborhood – Greening the Grid. The design proposals were varied in scale, included visible and invisible infrastructure, and anticipated small and large efforts on the part of the city government, property owners, and communities.

Figures 5 through 8 are from the winning competition entry in the Neighborhood - Greening the Grid Category from the interdisciplinary team, 6 “Meeting Green.” The scheme presented low-cost projects that were also investments in neighborhoods.

Responsibility for storm water management was envisioned to be shared between public entities and private property owners.

The SOAKITUP! design competition is the kind of participatory effort that has the benefit of fostering citizen awareness of comprehensive storm water management. The schemes were attentive to the goals of “Green City, Clean Waters” and many of the design proposals included the objective of public participation and public awareness. In the competition and other efforts, it is understood that water retention for large-expansive properties has a larger impact on the overall problem of storm water management but greening through small-local interventions has a greater psychological impact. Both are crucial, and small initiatives and participation by citizens give visibility to the water infrastructure and greening of the city.

URBAN FARMING AND LAND USE In greening the city, the transition from vacant land to land occupied by plants, people who are actively using the land contribute to the role of making greening visible. A third target initiative in the Greenworks plan under Equity, is to increase local food availability for all residents. This initiative, along with a fourth, to increase tree coverage, is potentially transformative for the poorest areas of the city.

Similarly to other post-industrial US cities, there is a direct relationship between areas of the city where the poorest people reside, the lack of availability of fresh food, a shortage of trees, and an overabundance of pavement. In the Greenworks plan, food and trees have been included as part of a value system that can increase the quality of inner-city neighborhoods.

In the Greenworks plan increasing local food availability is carried out through the initiation of new

Diagrams for the 2035 Plan for Philadelphia that show tree coverage, pavement (add more here).

Image from the Greenworks 2013 Progress Report: Teens 4 Good youths, who learn farming and entrepreneurial skills, staff one of the organization's farmstands.

Philadelphia Tree Truck transports trees for Tree Philly, a Philadelphia Parks and Recreation program, to neighborhoods for the yard tree giveaway in the spring.

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farmers markets in Philadelphia neighborhoods. In 2014 there has been a marked increase in farmers markets, and the increase in food availability has had a positive impact on eating habits. Fresh food availability has also increased with the growing number of supermarkets in the inner-city. Urban farming and land use also play a role in increasing local food availability while also having a major impact on the green infrastructure of the city. Philadelphia has a newly established Land Bank program and a newly revised zoning code. Both address the problem of vast areas in urban neighborhoods that contain vacant lots and buildings. And the zoning code recognizes food production and urban agriculture as important aspects of city land use. Philadelphia's registered community organizations are invited to comment on land use proposals in their neighborhoods. Community voices in land use decisions and urban agriculture on small holdings add a degree of complexity to the city's sustainability efforts. But the role of individuals and small groups in land use decisions supports the longheld desire for equality and equity in Philadelphia.

A tree awaiting delivery to a neighborhood site for distribution and planting.

Urban farming also supports social and environmental aims of sustainability through urban institutions. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHA)7 has guided groups to create community gardens for many years. And groups like Philadelphia 8 Urban Creators, the local branch of a national youthled organization that brings agriculture to the innercity, focus on economic drivers skill building and job creation of urban agriculture, aiming for a positive future in areas of the city with very few job opportunities. Greensgrow Farms9 in North Philadelphia is a well-established example of an urban farm. First established in 1997, Greensgrow started as a hydroponic farm on a post-industrial Superfund brownfield site. The operation has grown and matured to become a central focus in its neighborhood. Over the years improvements such as the addition of raised beds, a greenhouse, and a community kitchen and a farm stand have anchored the operation. And with mobile trucks, Greensgrow is able to supply fresh food to underserved Philadelphia neighborhoods.

Many threads of the organization build on other principles of a sustainable city. Reuse and repurposing materials give opportunity to create unique environments. The CSA subscription program and the community kitchen offer educational opportunities and connection to local businesses. These all contribute to the building of a living and livable sustainable community.

HORTICULTURE, TREES, AND CIVIC INSTITUTIONS The fourth Equity goal in the Greenworks plan is to increase tree coverage by 30% in all neighborhoods by the year 2025. Trees have a positive effect on livability.

Increasing the tree canopy can directly impact energy use by decreasing the heat island effect in the innercity. Trees impact the environmental condition by improving air quality. The majority of Philadelphia's trees are concentrated in Fairmount Park and other greenways. Increasing tree coverage in neighborhoods parallels the goal of providing neighborhood parks and recreation space within walking distance for all residents. The effort to increase the number of trees in Philadelphia is moving forward through initiatives 10 like TreePhilly, led by the Philadelphia Department of Parks and Recreation.

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The role of city trees is inextricably linked to the visions of greenness in Philadelphia's history.

Philadelphia was originally a woodland forest. The city was carved out of the forest and as the city grid emerged, the forest was replaced by urban parks. The current plan to increase neighborhood trees allows the tree canopy to spread beyond the parks. This links the use of trees in the current day back to the initial understanding of greening for Philadelphia. In the 'Greene Countrie Towne,' trees were part of public land but were also dispersed among private residences.

And trees provide a powerful symbol that links the civic aspects of the urban environment to Philadelphia's early and still extant institutions like the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHA). Currently, PHA impacts all city and suburban neighborhoods through greening programs, including Plant One 11 Million, a multi-county effort to increase the tree canopy.

Horticulture had a primary place in the history of Philadelphia. The city benefited directly from th th horticultural discoveries in the 18 and 19 centuries, through John and William Bartram's explorations and plant discoveries in the eastern United States. Their nursery had a global reach which secured Philadelphia's role as a center for horticultural knowledge. Another foundational institution in Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society 12 (APS), had a mission focus on 'useful knowledge.'

One example of the role of APS in city development – members served as advisors for the Lewis and Clark Expedition in the early years of the 19th century and APS was a destination for some of the floral specimens from the expedition. Specimens found their way into Philadelphia's gardens and green spaces. Most notably, trees from the Rocky Mountains were planted th in the southeastern public square in the mid-19 13 century. Here, trees are an important symbol of the building of a nation, linking the city square to the vast wilderness of the new country. Historically the institutional dimension of Philadelphia's green identity was both local and global; the ambitious agenda set forth in the Greenworks plan continues that tradition.

GREENING'S ROLE IN PHILADELPHIA'S URBAN IMAGINATION Although the goals of greening the city of

Philadelphia have changed through the city's history, the green city narrative has always been part of the urban imagination. Philadelphia's vision continues to be rooted in an optimistic idea of 'greenness' that visibly represents the city's cultural vision. The green infrastructure is an important part of city-building in Philadelphia with the aim to positively impact the overall health and well-being of the city. Current initiatives for a sustainable city such as the Greenworks plan and Green City, Clean Waters initiative consciously build on the legacy of green infrastructure in Philadelphia. The power of the sustainability efforts is in many initiatives that work together to impact the whole through well-considered integration. Like many of the initiatives through the city's history, current efforts that contribute to the 'Green City' narrative are first and foremost a description of an urban landscape, sited and placed.

1 2

3 4

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

The Greenworks plan, updates, and initiatives can be accessed at: http://www.phila.gov/green/index.html Michael Nutter, Introductory note, 2009 Greenworks Plan, The City of Philadelphia, Mayor's Office of Sustainability: http://www.phila.gov/green/greenworks/pdf/Greenworks_OnlinePDF_FINAL. pdf To understand city growth compare Figures 1 (1683), 2 (1898), and 3 (1967).

The Green City, Clean Waters report and guidelines can be accessed at: http://www.phillywatersheds.org/what_were_doing/documents_and_data/cso_l ong_term_control_plan The Infill Philadelphia: Soak it Up! interdisciplinary design competition included many partners. More information can be found at: http://infill.cdesignc.org/participate-2/design-awards/ The interdisciplinary team was comprised individuals from a range of firms and disciplines: landscape architects- OLIN Design Studio; civil engineers – Gilmore and Associates; construction estimators – International Consultants, Inc.; real estate developers – MM Partners LLC; planners – Penn Praxis; and architects – SMP Architects. http://phsonline.org/ http://phillyurbancreators.org/ http://www.greensgrow.org/ http://treephilly.org/ http://www.plantonemillion.org/ http://www.amphilsoc.org/. APS was founded by the botanist John Bartram and the inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin.

For more discussion, see Milroy, Elizabeth, “Repairing the Myth and Reality of Philadelphia's Public Squares,” Change over Time. vol. 1, number 1. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (Spring 2011): 52-79.

Kate Wingert-Playdon is Chair and Professor of Architecture, Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia. Her work is focused on the underlying cultural manifestation of places and the particularity of sites and settlements. Sites for inquiry include Route 66 and Amboy California, Sky City at the Pueblo of Acoma, the Philadelphia grid, and the Main Road in Cape Town. She is author of the 2012 book, John Gaw Meem at Acoma: The Restoration of San Esteban del Rey Mission (University of New Mexico Press).

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making cities

suzhou industrial park

an emerging chinese model new town

by Zhongjie Lin

China has been undergoing rapid urbanization in the last three decades, with the percentage of urban population surging from 20.4% in 1982 to 52.6% in 2013. The trend continues with more than sixteen million rural residents moving to urban area each year in what geographer David Harvey regarded as 'the largest mass migration the world has ever seen.'

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First Phase of the Suzhou Industrial Park, 2005.

Photo courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee

C

hina has been undergoing rapid urbanization in the last three decades, with the percentage of urban population surging from 20.4% in 1982 to 52.6% in 2013. The trend continues with more than sixteen million rural residents moving to urban area each year in what geographer David Harvey regarded as 'the largest mass migration the world has ever seen.'

The massive urbanization has resulted in an unprecedented construction boom and the emergence of numerous new towns across the country. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Chinese government announced that it would build 20 new cities each year in the next 20 years; therefore approximately 400 new cities would emerge by 2020. These ambitious new town projects were not only created to house the swelling population, but also to sustain

economic growth in the major cities they serve.

Recognizing its enormous impact on Chinese society both in terms of challenge and opportunity, Premier Keqiang Li highlighted 'urbanization' as the keyword of economic restructuring in his political agenda after he took the post in 2013. He called for a more sustainable approach to the country's mass urbanization to create new venues for jobs, consumption, and investments, to balance mega-cities with small towns, and to correct economic disequilibrium between coastal and inland regions.

The pursuit of a sustainable path of urbanization in China has actually accompanied the growth of urban population. Since the 1990s, the central and local governments in China have created a number of high-profile model city projects, using them as experiments of urban planning and development as well as stimuli of economic growth and transformation, and hoping they would generate replicable experience for the rest of the country. The Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) was one of the earliest and successful comprehensive new town projects. It provides a remarkable example of how urban planning and design can trigger the economic engine and transform a sleepy tourist destination into an economic juggernaut.

This paper will trace the development of SIP in the last two decades. By analyzing the urban design and development strategies of this modern new town, the case study will cut a cross-section of the ongoing massive new town movement in China and examine the role of planning in urban transformation and economic development.

CREATION OF SIP SIP started as a project resulting from top-level inter-governmental collaboration between China and Singapore. Such partnership was not only built on an economic foundation, but also based on a presumed cultural affinity because the majority of Singaporean residents are Chinese immigrants or descendants. The Chinese government has long admired Singapore government's national economic development strategies and has tried to imitate them. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping, the former General Secretary of China’s Communist Party, famously said 'We can inspire ourselves using the Singaporean social model and then do better' when he visited Shenzhen. Deng was

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especially interested in how the Singapore government achieved rapid economic growth and industrial transformation and maintained its dominance in the social and political sphere as well. Singapore's version of 'authoritarian capitalism' was perceived by Chinese political leaders as an alternative to the Western 'free market capitalist' system. China's administration was also keen to learn from Singapore's policies and strategies to attract Foreign Direct Investments or FDIs. Meanwhile, seeking to expand its economic interest and political influence beyond its limited territory, Singapore government was also in search of investment and development opportunities overseas. Based on an overarching 'Regional Industrial Park' program, the Singapore government had planned to build a few industrial parks in Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Thailand, and China. These industrial parks would be modeled after Jurong Industrial Estate, which has achieved remarkable success in attracting FDIs since its inauguration in the 1960s and which has continued to build up Singapore's experience in housing and industrial development and management in the context of economic globalization.

In February 1994, China's Vice Premier Li Lanquing and Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew signed two highly publicized agreements, which aspired to build 'a world-class modern international industrial park modeled after Jurong Industrial Estate in Singapore.' With the location of their operations by industrial transnational corporations in this new industrial park, the Chinese government could benefit from development effects such as employment generation and technology transfer, while Singapore could financially benefit from sale or leased of the industrial units with profits generated thereby eventually supplementing its domestic economy in the long run. For the Singapore government, a joint new town project was also an opportunity to improve bilateral government-togovernment diplomatic ties with Beijing.

This ambitious 20-billion-dollar project, then known as Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park, is located in the east of the scenic historic city of Suzhou and is only 80 kilometers west to Shanghai. It occupies an area of seventy square kilometers, originally marshy and agricultural land. The proximity to Shanghai, China's economic engine and financial center, was apparently one of the primary factors in the selection of the site as it was expected to provide competitive advantage in attracting industrial investments.

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Establishing SIP at the current site also fulfilled the vision plan for Suzhou known as 'One Body and Two Wings' proposed a few years earlier. This comprehensive plan envisages two new towns (wings) flanking the center city (body), one to its west and the other to the east, forming a linear city. The old city of Suzhou, with a total area of 14.2 square kilometers, was first built in 514 BC and has always been a culturally significant city during its 2500 years of history. It is home of numerous Chinese Classical Gardens, some of which have been named UNESCO World Heritages. The city also features a traditional urban fabric known as a 'double-chessboard' structure defined by two overlapping grids, one consisting of streets and the other canals. The extensive canal network has led to the city's prosperity and brought the city's reputation as the 'Venice of the East.' The continuing growth of its urban population and the demand of economic development in the last few decades, however, posed a threat to the city's historic heritages and the urban pattern its citizens rely on. The concept of 'One Body and Two Wings' was intended to preserve Suzhou's historic urban fabric by channeling industrial and housing development to the new towns yet still maintaining its continuity as a whole city. The SIP in the east and the Suzhou High-Tech District in the west -- established in 1990 -- constitute the two 'wings' of Suzhou.

SIP was given the status of one of China's Special Economic Zones (SEZ), which offers policies and incentives different from the rest of the country to encourage offshore production within self-contain industrial estates. Singapore and China each formed their economic consortiums as shareholders of this new town, consisting primarily of their respective stateowned corporations. The two consortiums then established a joint venture China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park Development Corporation (CSSD) as an authorized land developer on January 10, 1995, and the Suzhou Industrial Park Administrative Committee was formed to serve as the local agency of governance.

SIP MASTER PLAN AND ITS DEVELOPMENT The development of Suzhou Industrial Park has been influenced by three master plans. In 1994, the first master plan was drawn up by Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority along with Jurong Environ-

(top) A classical garden in Suzhou.

Photograph by the author (right) Diagram of 'One Body and Two Wings.' Image courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee

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mental Engineering and SIP Planning and Construction Bureau. The area, sometimes known as ChinaSingapore Collaboration Area or 'super-development' zone, covers about 70 square kilometers – later expanded to 80 square kilometers – in which Singaporean institutions were the primary shareholder.

In 2001, SIP Planning & Construction Bureau and Jiangsu Urban Planning & Design Institute prepared a revised plan after the Chinese consortium became the primary shareholder. The plan area was expanded to 288 square kilometers, with the China-Singapore Collaboration District surrounded by three townships: Loufeng, Weiting, and Shengpu. In 2006, a master plan for Eastern New City and a SIP Zoning Plan were prepared by China Urban Planning & Design Institute to consolidate the last version.

The 1994 plan laid the foundation of SIP's development. It focused on the core area to establish a 'Multi-center Linear Structure' that extended Suzhou's urban axis eastward. The area would be developed in three phases, also in a linear manner from west (adjacent to Suzhou Old City) to the east (bordered by a national highway to Shanghai), with the centers of all these phases located on the axis. They constituted an urban and landscape axis, linking the city's new Central Business District, governmental center, commercial center, high-density neighborhoods, and parks.

The plan also delineated a hierarchical organization of the city, following the planning concepts of 'new town' and 'neighborhood unit' in Singapore's planning system to provide four levels of public facilities: region, district, neighborhood, and cluster. Each of the three districts, developed in the three phases respectively, would house 33,000-100,000 households.

Each neighborhood would include 8500 households, laid out around the neighborhood center with public facilities serving a radius of 400 meters. Each cluster would have around 700 households, and is equipped with cluster-level public facilities. The target population for the city was 600,000, and citizens were to be supported by abundance of job opportunities supplied by the industries in the zone.

In terms of development sequence, the 1994 plan introduced an approach suitable for a model giving priority to industries. It meant infrastructure should be built first, then industrial land, then with the flowingin of workers, residential areas would be built, and finally commercial facilities, once the influx population

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reached a certain level. For instance, considering the region's relatively low ground, the entire Collaboration Area was raised by three feet through massive landfill to protect the city from floods. Once the urban framework of a new city was laid out, construction began. The first phase of development focused on the area of about 2,000 acres between the old city and Jinji Lake. Jinji Lake, a four-square-mile lake, was completely redesigned to build state-of-the-art waterfront landscapes. It became the jewel in the crown of the entire city.

At the turn of the 21st Century, SIP went through a significant transition. Despite its impressive accomplishment in attracting FDI since its inauguration, the zone continued to report substantial financial losses, and its state worsened after 1997 when the Asian Financial Crisis impacted the economies across the Asian Pacific Rim. More importantly, SIP faced competitions of other special economic zones in the region, particularly another industrial estate in Suzhou, Suzhou High-Tech District. As a result, the Singapore government decided to disengage itself from this project. Holding 65% of joint venture, the Singapore consortium dropped its share to 35% while its Chinese partner picked up the difference to become the major shareholder. Nevertheless, the inter-governmental collaboration continued, and soon SIP was able to extricate itself from the financial predicament and began to generate profits once more.

SIP's transformation under the new management began with a new master plan. The 2001 plan covered an area of 288 square kilometers. It not only provided SIP with more developable land, but also addressed the connection of SIP with its regional context. SIP moved beyond a segregated industrial park to exercise greater influence on Suzhou's development at large.

Among the new districts included in SIP, the area around Dushu Lake in the south was identified as a Higher Education District, and the area around Qingjian Lake in the North was slated for ecological development and leisure.

URBAN DESIGN IN SIP Suzhou Industrial Park was arguably the first new town project in China that extensively used the tool of urban design in its developments. An elaborate review system was established to make sure all projects, from the Central Business District to residential areas, and

Master Plan for Suzhou Industrial Park, 1994. Image courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee

Master Plan for Suzhou Industrial Park, 2001. Image courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee

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Central Business District urban design digital model. Image courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee

Central Business District skyline control. Image courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee from infrastructure to landscape design, are regulated under the master plan, and each piece is a good addition to the city. The urban designs also looked after building designs and suggested contemporary styles to maintain consistency in the urban landscape.

The city is also characterized by an extensive network of landscape and public facilities, meant to establish a high standard in the built environment. All these measures have distinguished SIP from other new towns in China, were lauded as the 'Suzhou model' and have now been emulated by many new town projects.

Two areas in SIP, the Central Business District (CBD) and Jinji Lake, demonstrate the project’s dedication to exemplary urban design. The CBD is located on the city's central spine in the west of Jinji Lake with office towers lined up along a boulevard. A

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detailed urban design guideline was prepared prior to development, which defined the parameters of the buildings on each parcel including height, setback, location of the tower, pedestrian and car entrances, and even colors and materials of the façades. Building heights were regulated in such a way that they could form an impressive skyline with buildings escalating from the west (close to the historic city center) to the east (near Jinji Lake). A 900-foot tower, known as the 'Oriental Gate', terminates the axis at the lakefront.

Most office buildings along the boulevard have been completed. Constructions began recently on a large shopping mall and a cluster of office towers around the Oriental Gate, some of which would be even taller than the Gate, forming an impressive skyline along the lake. The urban spine extends across Jinji Lake to form a high-density retail and entertainment zone. The

Jinji Lake landscape plan. Image courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee

city's newly completed metro line connects SIP along this east-west axis.

Jinji Lake itself is a showcase of landscape design.

The American firm EDAW's award-winning landscape planning and design delineated a vision of developing this 11.5-square-kilometer area, including a lake of 7.4 square kilometers and its surrounding area, into one of China's largest and finest urban lakes, and made it the core of SIP. The majority of the lakeside area is reserved for public spaces, consisting of eight parks with different themes. The western side of the lake is bordered by a promenade and woods; the southern side features Li Gong Di, a beautiful causeway flanked by numerous restaurants, bars, and galleries; and the northeastern side is dotted with a few large-scale public buildings including the Science and Cultural Center and the Convention Center; while the Eastern side is dominated by a children's park with a Ferris wheel among others. Together these parks provide 17 kilometers of pedestrian paths and 25 kilometers of bike paths. Water plays a unique role in shaping the urban landscapes of this new town as in the historic towns in South-Yangtze River Delta Region. This tradition was re-interpreted with contemporary

designs and larger-scale landscapes in SIP. Placing priority on landscape development as part of the city's infrastructure has proved a successful strategy of SIP as landscape significantly increases the value of land, generating more revenue for ensuing projects.

The residential areas in SIP are organized based on the principles of Clarence Perry's concept of Neighborhood Unit. Perry's idea referred to a relatively lowdensity neighborhood centered on school and community and bound by vehicular thoroughfares, with houses laid out within a quarter-mile radius from the neighborhood centers. When the Neighborhood Unit was introduced to Jurong Industrial Estate in Singapore, it was used for residential areas consisting of 4000-7000 households; most residents would then live in public housing complexes. When this concept was brought to Suzhou, the density grew to 8500 household per neighborhood unit, each placed around a 'neighborhood center' with a 400-meter service radius.

The neighborhood centers house basic amenities like grocery stores, banks, pharmacies, and bookstores, as well as other services like barber shops and small clinics. Schools are located adjacent to the neighborhood centers. A regional shopping center is planned

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for each district serving multiple neighborhoods. This hierarchical order has provided the residential areas a rigorous organization able to allocate resources of public services logically and efficiently.

The network of neighborhood units in SIP, however, was not intended to encourage TransitOriented Developments, which is a missed opportunity. In fact, SIP is essentially a hybrid of Western suburban model and the density and building typology of Asian cities. The city is laid out on super-blocks occupied by gated communities or corporate campuses. Uses are segregated, and retails are contained in neighborhood centers or regional shopping malls.

Although not really automobile-dependent, SIP is not easy to get around without a car except in the Central Business District. Although the first metro line in Suzhou was completed in 2012, and runs along the city's East-West axis, traffic and parking remains a problem in SIP. NEW TOWN AS ECONOMIC BUILDING Suzhou Industrial Park became a 'model' in China's massive urbanization first and foremost because of its economic success. Its Gross Domestic Products has grown at an incredible rate of over 30% annually since its inauguration. Occupying only 3.4% of land in Suzhou and accounting for just 5.2% of its population, SIP contributes more than 15% of Suzhou's total GDP. It continued to rank No. 1 in China's 'most competitive Economic Development Zones.' In 2001, Newsweek named Suzhou as one of the nine emerging High-tech cities in the world, and stressed SIP's role in this endeavor.

Urban planning and design played a significant role in SIP's economic accomplishments. Unlike many economic development zones or high-tech industrial parks in China, SIP was designed as a balanced and self-contained city from the beginning. The plan referred back to Ebenezer Howard's Garden City concept, yet addressed the new context of globaliza(top) Li Gong Di Causeway night view. Image courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee (middle) A neighborhood center. Image courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee (bottom) Diagram of neighborhood units in SIP. Image courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee

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A residential area in SIP. Image courtesy: SIP Administrative Committee

tion. Therefore, housing, commercial, and public services are developing in parallel to industrial and business with the rapid influx of FDIs. A series of masterplans laid out the blueprint for its urbanization, prioritized infrastructure, and allocated resources logically to support the city's continuing growth.

Numerous urban and landscape designs provided further guidance for the city's development, enhanced its environments, and boosted land values. In this case, economic development and city building reinforced each other and worked really well to make SIP China's 'model new town.'

The systematic planning and design also distinguishes SIP from many other new towns in China, which often appear dynamic but are basically chaotic and segregated from the old city. In Suzhou, the preservation of the historic city center and the development of the new town are inseparable. The economic vitality and financial success of the new town have rejuvenated the old city while protecting its historic legacies. In turn, the old city supports SIP's gradual growth, particularly in its early phases, by providing necessary infrastructure and urban

amenitiess. Their mutual enriching relationship is among the other strengths of Suzhou that won the city the 2014 Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize. With its successes as well as the remaining issues typical of Chinese new towns, Suzhou Industrial Park represents a remarkable sample of China's ongoing urbanization.

Dr. Zhongjie Lin is Associate Professor of Architecture & Urbanism at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Director of its Urban Design Program. He is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow.

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making cities

Qunli Stormwater Wetland Park, Harbin (2010)

an art of survival

the landscape architecture of kongjian yu text and photographs from the office of turenscape Kongjian Yu and his office Turenscape are beyond doubt the foremost landscape architecture practice in China today. To many, writes William Saunders in Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu, Kongjian Yu is the Frederick Law Olmsted of China. The vast scale of China and her apparently boundless growth have enabled Yu to test many ideas that are still largely theories in the Western world.

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K

ongjian Yu describes landscape architecture as an art of survival. This is particularly relevant for China with its explosive urban growth and its consequences, especially catastrophic effects on the environment. In an interview with Time Magazine, Yu declared that China misconstrued what it means to be developed. In the changing relationship between land and people, there is an urgency in China to develop a new system, a new vernacular to express that relationship.

“The new language,” Yu declares,“should be native in terms of material and plant use. Secondly, it must be for the common people, normal people. We should not consider this high-culture, traditional landscape gardening as the solution for modern China. We should find a new solution, which I call the vernacular – a new technology for common people from local vernacular materials.”

Yu calls his practices Turenscape. “Tu-ren is two characters in Chinese. Tu means dirt, earth, the land.

Ren means people, the man, human being. Once these two characters come together, it actually means earth man, which also expresses my understanding about land and people. It's a relationship between land and people. The firm's ideology, or the firm's concept, is to create harmony between land and people. Turen and scape. It's dirt man landscape, or earth man scape. Earth man landscape.”

The new language should, instead of being ornamental or geared towards pleasure making, address the issue of survival. The question of “survival” is especially relevant for China, as well as other Asian nations. Citing a crisis of energy, serious shortage of water, and pollution of whatever water is there, and sounding apocalyptic, Yu points out that we

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are at the edge of survival, because we all have only 7 percent of natural resources – water, energy – but we have to take care of 20 percent of the world population.

In China, the issue of survival affects not only the higher classes but common people, including farmers, or a class defined by “low culture.” Since it is the socalled low culture that is far more effective with survival skills in a precarious environment, Yu proposes developinga new set of survival skills based on that culture. In his book, The Beautiful Big Foot, Landscape as Ecological Infrastructure, Yu argues for an ecological ethic that is messy, fertile and organic – characterized by the beautiful big foot – seen in contrast to the aesthetics of the little foot favored by China's privileged class for thousands of years that sacrificed function in pursuit of ornamental and cosmetic values.

Calling it 'Little Foot Urbanism,' Yu sees its manifestation in newer landscapes, cities and buildings that are unhealthy, deformed, and deprived of functionality.

The path to well-being and healthy environment is through the ethic of the beautiful, big foot.

KA

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on kongjian yu's art of the landscape

by Xin Wu Born a peasant's son, Yu Kongjian grew up working in agricultural fields. Land was both part of the daily life and the source of livelihood. His hometown is situated in the heart of Zhejiang Province, a region famous for its scenic mountain-water, and rich in vernacular architecture. The time-honored Feng-shui concept remains deep in people's beliefs and plays important roles in site planning for villages, residences, temples and tombs, etc.

Chinese landscape culture is one of the overarching interests of Yu Kongjian. Since the end of the 1980s, Yu has studied Feng-shui theory in the light of modern analytic methods based on geography, ecology and environmental psychology. His stay in the US did not interrupt this interest but added new thoughts to it. As a contemporary landscape architect and urban designer, he respected Feng-shui for its role in place making while fighting against its superstitious operation. Using evolutionary and anthropological approaches, he explored the origin, structure and meanings of Feng-shui and the ideal Chinese landscape models. Adapting statistic data, together with field observation and literature review, Yu recognized that the Feng-shui landscapes share similar structures with other Chinese ideal landscape patterns. Soon after his return to China, he published his first book: Tracing the Origin of Ideal Landscapes: the Cultural Meanings of Fengshui and Ideal Landscape (1998).

During the past ten years, Yu Kongjian has been slowly building up the edifice of contemporary landscape architecture in China. As a professor, Yu convinced people, from the university planning committee to national education administration, of the importance of landscape architecture as a discipline and created the landscape architecture program in Beijing University from scratch. As a practitioner, Yu is the owner, president, and the design principle of Turenscape founded one year after the design school in 1998. Turenscape (Turen means "earth man" in

Chinese) embedded his ideal of design for a harmonious living environment that unifies the worlds of nature, human beings and spirituality (天地-人-神).

Through all these activities, Yu has developed a body of landscape thinking based on his understanding and engagement with the reality, demands and concerns of today's Chinese society. Firstly, he sees landscape architecture as the important part of an integrative construction process for a new world.

Taking landscape and ecology as points of departure, he has promoted the concepts of "Landscape Security Pattern", "Ecological Infrastructure" and "Negative Planning" on the levels of urban and regional planning. Secondly, he advocates a new aesthetics that is productive and functional, insisting on design as "the art of survival" and being adamantly against formalism and aestheticism. In recent years, his outspoken criticism of traditional imperial and literati gardens in opposition to the vernacular and the agricultural has stirred controversy, debates and thinking among designers and scholars. The numerous projects his office has built provide good demonstrations of his ideas such as "The Beauty of Weeds", "Protection of Agricultural Landscape and Industrial Heritage" and "Vernacular Urbanism".

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that Yu sees education, in a broader sense, as his paramount task in the hope to elevate awareness of all parties in the process of landscape creation. He has not only published textbooks and journals, but also a pedagogical book tailor-made for decision-makers- The Path to Urban Landscape: Exchanges with Mayors (2003), a best-seller reprinted more than 10 times.

Xin Wu teaches in the Department of Art and Art History at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, USA. The text originally appeared in: http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/icfa/documentcollections/contemporary-landscape-design-collection/yukongjian/copy_of_doaks-gal-dc-yu-bio

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a mother river recovered

qian'an sanlihe greenway qian'an city, hebei province, china, 2010 The Qian'an Sanlihe Greenway has undergone a transformation from its former existence as a garbage dump and sewage drainage. It exemplifies how a neglected landscape can be recovered as a green infrastructure and everyday landscape with restored ecosystem providing multiple services. The combined pedestrian and cycle paths for both commuting and recreational use have been integrated artistically, revitalizing social identity by reflecting local traditions.

Through the generation of ecological and aesthetic benefits, the project catalyzes sustainable urban development in the region.

The greenway stretches 13.4 km in length and varies from 100-300m in width across the city of Qian'an. It covers 135 hectares and benefits a population of approximately 700,000.

Qian'an City is located at the south foot of Yanshan Mountain, at the bank of Luan River, in the northeast of Hebei Province.

Although the main city lies near the Luan River to the west, one cannot see the water since the topography of Qian'an is situated below the riverbed with its high embankment blocking the river view. The river is notorious for its unpredict-

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able flooding, and has thus been kept outside of the city for decades through this high embankment. Meanwhile, as the life source of Qian'an, Sanlihe River has shouldered the long history of the city and carried the collective memory of its inhabitants.

Since the 1970s, the river has been badly polluted by sewage and waste that has resulted from the region's continuous industrial development and urban population growth. As a consequence, with the depletion of regional water sources, the Sanlihe River became subsequently dried up and its channel blocked by solid waste.

The design strategies are comprehensive and have been developed across scales, and includes: cleaning the site, especially waste water from the urban storm water runoff; creating a scenic water byway; producing a resilient green river strategy; creating pedestrian and cycling paths; integrating of art and conceiving the greenway as a catalyst for urban development. It presents a strategy that suggests that landscape can guide urbanism.

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slow down

liupanshui minghu wetland park liupanshui, guizhou province, china, 2010 Through a series of regenerative design techniques, particularly measures to slow down the flow of storm-water, a channelized concrete river and a deteriorated peri-urban site have been transformed into a nationally celebrated wetland park that functions as a major part of the city-wide ecological infrastructure planned to provide multiple ecosystem services, including storm-water management, water cleansing, and recovery of native habitats, as well as a creation of a cherished public space for gathering and aesthetic enjoyment.

Liupanshui, known for its cool plateau climate, is an industrial city built in mid 1960s in a valley surrounded by limestone hills, with the River Shuichenghe running through it. With an area of 60 square kilometers, the city is densely inhabited by a population of 0.6 million. As part of a major campaign of environmental improvement, the city government commissioned Turenscape to develop a holistic strategy to address multiple problems including water pollution, flood and storm-water inundation, recovery of the mother-river, and creation of public spaces.

The water system that was once a blessing to the city has become a deserted backyard, garbage dump and the dangerous backside of the city. Pedestrian access to a restored green space system is badly needed in such a densely populated community. The strategy is to slow the flow of water from the hillside slopes and create a waterbased ecological infrastructure that will retain and remediate the storm-water, and make water the active agent in regenerating a healthy ecosystem to provide natural and cultural services that transform the industrial city into a livable human habitat.

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landscape as a living system

shanghai 2010 expo houtan park shanghai, 2010 shanghai expo park, china, 2007-10 Built on a brownfield of a former industrial site, Houtan Park is a regenerative living landscape on Shanghai's Huangpu riverfront. The park's constructed wetland, ecological flood control, reclaimed industrial structures and materials, and urban agriculture are integral components of an overall restorative design strategy conceived to treat polluted river water and recover the degraded waterfront in an aesthetically pleasing way.

The site is a narrow linear 14-hectare (34.6 acre) band located along the Huangpu River waterfront in Shanghai, China. This brownfield, previously owned by a steel factory and a shipyard, had few industrial structures remaining and the site was largely used as a landfill and lay-down yard for industrial materials.

The objective of the park design was to: create a green Expo park; cope with the large influx of visitors during the event that takes place from May to October; demonstrate green technologies; transform a unique space to make the Expo an unforgettable event, and transition into a permanent public waterfront park after the Expo.

The first challenge was restoring the degraded environment. The site was a brownfield littered with industrial and construction debris both on the surface and buried throughout the site. The water of Huangpu River is highly polluted with a national water quality ranking of Lower Grade V, the lowest grade on a scale of I-V, and one that is considered unsafe for swimming and recreation and is devoid of aquatic life. The eminent site design challenge was to transform this degraded landscape into a safe and pleasant public space. The second challenge was to improve flood control. The existing concrete floodwall was designed to protect against a 1,000-year flood event with a top elevation of 6.7 meters (22 feet), but it is rigid and lifeless. The 2.1 meter (6-foot) daily tidal fluctuation creates a muddy and littered shoreline and is currently inaccessible to the public. A conventional retaining wall would continue to limit accessibility and preclude habitat creation along the water's edge, so an alternative flood control design proposal was necessary. The third challenge was the site itself. The area is long and narrow and locked between the Huangpu River and an urban expressway with water frontage that is over 1.7 kilometers (one mile) in length but averages only 30-80 meters (100-265 feet) in width.

Regenerative design strategies were used to transform the site into a living system that offers comprehensive ecological services which include: food production, flood, water treatment, and habitat creation combined in an educational and aesthetic form. The site was meant to be an innovative demonstration of ecological culture for 2010 Expo.

Through the center of the park, a linear constructed wetland, 1.7 kilometers (one mile) long and 5- 30 meters (16.5 100 feet) wide was designed to create a reinvigorated waterfront as a living machine to treat contaminated water from the Huangpu river. Cascades and terraces were used to oxygenate the nutrient rich water, remove and retain

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nutrients and reduce suspended sediments while creating pleasant water features. Different species of wetland plants were selected and designed to absorb different pollutants from the water.

The wetland also acts as a flood protection buffer between the 20- and 1000-year flood control levees. The meandering valley along the wetland creates a series of thresholds contributing to visual interest and refuge within the bustling world exposition and providing opportunities for recreation, education, and research. The terrace design of the wetland alleviates the elevation difference between the city and the river, safely reconnecting people to the water's edge. Additionally, the existing concrete floodwall was then replaced by a more habitat friendly riprap that allows native species to grow along the riverbank while protecting the shoreline from erosion.

Inspired by the fields of Chinese agricultural landscape, terraces were created to break down the 3-5 meter (15-18 foot) elevation change from the water's edge to the road, and to slow the runoff directed to the stream in the constructed wetland. These terraces are reminiscent of Shanghai's agricultural heritage prior to the industrial development of the neighborhood in the mid-20th century. Crops and wetland plants were selected to create an urban farm that would allow people to witness seasonal changes: the golden blossoms in the spring, splendid sunflowers in the summer, fragrance of the ripened rice in the fall, and green clover in the winter. It provides a premier educational opportunity for people to learn about agriculture and farming within the city.

The terraces enrich the landscape along the wetland by creating spaces that encourage visitors to enter the living system through the field's corridors and experience firsthand the agricultural landscape and wetland. The paths, like capillaries of a sponge, absorb and pull people to circulate through the park.

The industrial spirit of the site has been celebrated through the reclamation of industrial structures and materials. Shanghai is the birthplace of China's modern industry and the iconic structures that remained onsite have been transformed into hanging gardens and overlook platforms.

An ecologically recovered landscape, urban agriculture and industrial spirit are the three major layers of the park, woven together through a network of paths where visitors are educated about green infrastructure within a lushly restored recreational area. The pedestrian network is composed of a main loop, a series of perpendicular roads bisecting the wetland and a multitude of footpaths leading through the terraces. This network ensures seamless connections between the park and its surroundings, encourages access within the site that not only effectively accommodates the massive pedestrian flows during the Expo, but also ensures a pleasant and accessible public park at the human scale afterwards.

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Regenerative Design

Tianjin Qiaoyuan Wetland Park Tianjin City, China, 2005-08 Through regenerative design and by changing landforms, the natural process of plant adaptation and community evolution is being introduced to transform a former deserted shooting range used as a garbage dump, into a low maintenance urban park; providing diverse thereby services for the city including containing and purifying storm water; improving the saline-alkali soil, providing opportunities for environmental education and creating a cherished aesthetic experience.

This is a park of twenty-two hectares (fifty-four acres) in the northern coastal city of Tianjin, China. Rapid urbanization had changed a peripheral shooting range into a garbage dump and drainage sink for urban storm water; the site was heavy polluted, littered, deserted, and surrounded with slums and temporary rickety structures, which had been torn down before the design was commissioned. The soil is quite saline and alkaline. Densely populated at the south and east boundaries, the site is bounded on the west and north sides by a highway and an overpass.

In early 2006, in response to residents' call for environmental improvement of the site, the municipal government of Tianjin contracted Turenscape with the difficult task of an immediate transformation of this degraded site.

The overall design goal for this project was to create a park that could provide a diversity of nature's services for the city and the surrounding urban residents, including: containing and purifying urban storm water; improving the saline-alkali soil through natural processes; recovering the regional landscape with low maintenance native vegetation; providing opportunities for environmental education about native landscapes and natural systems, storm water management, soil improvement, and landscape sustainability; and creating a cherished aesthetic experience.

Inspired by the adaptive vegetation communities that dotted the landscape in this region, a solution for this park was developed called The Adaptation Palettes, designed to let nature work. A simple landscape Regenerative Design strategy was devised. It included digging twenty-one pond cavities varying from ten to forty meters in diameter, and from one to five meters in depth. The garbage was handled in the earth work. Some cavities were constructed below ground level and some above on mounds.

Through the raining season and due to the shallow underground water, some cavities can turn into water ponds, some into wetlands, some into seasonal pool, but some stay as dry cavities. Through seasons' rain wash and filtration, the saline-alkali soil of the dry cavities keep improving, while nutrients deposit in the deeper ponds can catch storm water runoff.

Diverse habitats were created and the natural process of plant adaptation and community evolution were initiated. Seeds of mixed plant species were sowed initially to start the vegetation, and other native species were allowed to grow wherever suitable. Through the seasons' evolution, patches of unique vegetation are being established in correspondence to the individual wet or dry cavities, and various PH values.

This project helps to define the new aesthetics of landscape today, defined by a continuous evolving process. Untidy forms, unplanned biodiversity and nature's messiness keep ongoing, letting plants live and expose their genuine beauty to enrich the landscape. The ecology-driven Adaptation Palettes has in the process become a valuable and remarkable site fun the community of Tianjin.

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making cities

Photographs and drawings in this feature were kindly provided by the office of the architects of each project.

Photographs on page 104 by Tomio Ohashi.

housing as the fabric of the city

by Kazi Khaleed Ashraf

How we define and conceive housing is finally how we make our cities, and the way we visualize cities is ultimately translated into patterns of housing. A city is not about fanciful buildings and stunning structures but spatial patterns that reflect social conditions and housing environments.

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H

ousing is the material and social fabric of the city. How we define and conceive housing is finally how we make our cities, and the way we visualize cities is ultimately translated into patterns of housing. A city is not about fanciful buildings and stunning structures but spatial patterns that reflect the quality of social conditions and housing environments.

Housing is also where the greatest investment in a city is made (developers know that and that is why they do not make museums or libraries, but build housing).

Yet, housing is more than a numerical and fiscal matter; it is another way of considering how communities are formed and maintained (or not).

If housing is the key to enhancing the quality of life in a city then it is Dhaka's greatest deficit. In this city, considered by some a developers' dreamland, very few housing projects can be cited that are exemplary and directed by social or community goals.

One reason for the muddled condition of Dhaka city is that it is developing along individual building decisions based on the distribution system of lots and plots, all the while ignoring how buildings can come together to create a coherent community and integrated social fabric. A ferocious individualism, mostly guided by economic motives with an intensity that has increased manifold in recent years, makes the issue of collective benefits irrelevant. There is no reason why individual gains cannot come to terms with a collective goal. At the same time, when it comes to large-scale arrangements represented in the sad debate between Dhaka’s Detailed Area Plan(DAP) and developers, there is also no reason why innovative models of housing that are also sensitive towards a hydrological landscape cannot generate more economy.

Despite furious building activities, Dhaka has not been able to create suitable residential buildings for the many different communities within its fold. The only two models that circulate are based on individual plots with the independent bungalow-style house or boxedup apartment buildings. But the ‘individual building’ or

‘flat’ models fail to generate a wholesome urban ensemble; nor do they create the fabric of an integrated residential environment. While the uncreative strategy of making new housing zones by simply subdividing land – plotting and scheming – should cease immediately, alternative models of group or mass housing need to be explored.

Group housing offers a wholesome social experience. With older pattern of communities – such as the moholla – disappearing fast, and the current typology of buildings hardly encouraging socializing, it is important that the designs of new housing consider the need of communities.

Areas like Dhanmondi cannot be cited anymore as examples of ideal residential planning. Based on the model of “plotting” in the heart of the city, the original Dhanmondi scheme has been transformed beyond recognition by new living and economic drives. The situation could have been better: Instead of building up in an isolated manner on a plot, 8 to 10 plots could have been pooled together and developed as one single housing complex with shared facilities such as generous courtyards or gardens, meeting areas, shops, and play areas. Each unit could have received more light, air and green, and residents would have thus gained more meaningful social experiences.

It is important to explore alternative and imaginative models of mass housing for every economic and social group in the city. We feature here examples from various parts of the world, from strategies of highdensity living in a high-rise tropical environment (The Met in Bangkok) to social and affordable housing (the Mi Casa Mi Vida program from Brazil and the Vivienda Mapuche project from Santiago), and from innovations in building typology (the Silodam in Amsterdam and the Space Block in Hanoi) to a modernist insert in an urban core (Yerba Buena Lofts in San Francisco) to an example of a traditional housing type (New Toulu, China).

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yerba buena lofts

by Stanley Saitowitz, Natoma Architects

san francisco, usa, 1998-2003 Modeled on the city by extruding a vertical grid, and situated in the middle of a city block establishing a series of lots for lofts, the Yerba Buena project has two hundred loft-style residences. The recipient of numerous awards including the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Design Excellence Award (2003), the building is acknowledged as one of the most significant structures built between 1998 and 2003 by The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture.

The Yerba Buena building is in the tradition of matter-offact industrial buildings that have been converted to lofts.

In addition to double-height private balconies and large urban decks, all units have inter-related indoor and outdoor spaces. These spaces offer a connection to the climate and culture of California, maintaining a tradition that originated with Spanish courtyards and that continues with the trellised decks and garden living of the kind so prevalent in the San Francisco Bay Area. The entry sequence also shares this character with an urban court, a private plaza, and a dry garden; roofed and protected, and yet open and connected.

This ambiguity between inside and outside is a character of the spatial experience of the building.

Within an egg-crate concrete structure, translucentglass-cube bay windows alternate with balconies in a musical composition, creating an image both familiar and new to the San Francisco streetscape. The bays and balconies are two stories high, reflecting the lofty interiors.

Channel glass on the outermost face of the bays provides radiant interior light and a veil to the city beyond. The glass cubes project above the roof, creating an articulated geometric skyline.

The building is poured-in-place concrete, with posttensioned floors. A systemized and repetitive method that uses flying forms for floors and standardized forms for the egg-crate walls/columns (wallums) is fast and simple, exchanging time for material, and facilitating higher quality.

Two trades produce the sealed envelope concrete and glazing in contrast to the seven trades that follow each other in sealing a typical stucco and window facade. As soon as the forms were stripped, the structure was complete and ready to be glazed. No scaffolding was used; the building basically was built from itself. The patterned facade dissolves the figure of the building, creating the texture of street grain and expressing the mass. At night, the translucent-glass-cube bays, framed by the concrete grid, make a glowing lantern for Folsom Street and the city skyline.

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silodam

by MVRDV

amsterdam, the netherlands 1995-2002 An extensive urban operation has transformed a former dam and silo building in the western part of the Amsterdam harbor on the IJ river. In the 1980s, when Amsterdam was undergoing a housing shortage, the city returned an interest in the potentials of the IJ through a variety of restructuring projects in which designers tried to fuse existing structures and the character of the harbor with a new architecture.

For the Silodam, 157 residential units, a mixed program of housing, offices, work spaces, commercial spaces and public spaces have been arranged in a 20 meter deep and ten-story-high urban envelope. Appealing to a changing demography and desire for individuality, the apartments differ vastly in size, price and organization. The apartments are not only different from each other in size and color, but also have flexible interior spaces because of the placement of the interior walls that can be moved and replaced by future inhabitants. Units differ both in orientation and size; they can be half a block, a whole block, or diagonal over two floors, some with terraces or balconies while others have patios.

The demand for a large variety of living spaces has led to different apartment types that have been put together in 'small neighborhoods'. Groups of 4 - 8 of the same house type can be recognized by the similar use of material in their fronts and also by the specific color of the hallways and galleries. A big collective balcony for residents is located on the western side. The dam has been 'pulled' through the building and ends as a big deck with a view of the IJ river.

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tulou collective housing

by Urbanus

nanhai, guangdong, china, 2005-08 Tulou is a dwelling type unique to the Hakka people in southern China. As a communal residence between the city and the countryside, it integrates living, storage, shopping, religion, and public entertainment into a single building.

Traditional units in tulou are evenly laid out along the perimeter like modern slab-style dormitory buildings but with greater opportunities for social interaction. By introducing a new tulou to modern cities and experimenting with its form and organization, the architects intended to apply a conventional modular dwelling for an urban design operation.

Design experiments explored ways to stitch the new tulou within the existing urban fabric that includes green areas, overpasses, expressways, and residual land left over by urbanization. The cost of residual sites is low due to incentives provided by the government, an important factor in the development of affordable housing. The close proximity of each tulou building helps insulate users from the chaos and noise of the outside condition while creating an intimate and comfortable environment inside.

Integrating the living culture of traditional Hakka tulou buildings with affordable housing is not only an academic issue but also an important social phenomenon. Research of tulou dwelling is characterized by comprehensive analyses ranging from theoretical hypothesis to practical experimentation. The study examined the size, space patterns, and functions of tulou. The new programs also inject new urban elements into the traditional style while balancing the tension between these two paradigms.

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the met tower

by WOHA

bangkok, thailand, 2004-09 The concept for The Met was to develop an advanced form of high-rise living for the tropics based on research on possibilities of low-wind, tropical climate in dense urban conditions.

High-rise designs have traditionally followed temperate models developed in New York or Chicago with cold weather and strong winds. Apartments in those conditions are compact, insulated from the exterior and without sun shadings or overhangs. By contrast, design for the tropics should take advantage of year-round warm weather, capture breezes, allow cross-ventilation, and incorporate outdoor spaces, verandahs and gardens. Buildings are framing devices with minimal environmental loss for an indoor-outdoor lifestyle.

The Met was designed to create a better lifestyle for central city living in the tropics. Going high in the tropics means cooler breezes, less dust, more privacy, more security, less noise, and better views. To take advantage of these conditions, the design incorporates a staggered arrangement of blocks that allows for cross ventilation and enhance the gentle breezes by funneling them between towers and views to both the city and the river. The gaps between the towers are bridged with sky gardens that provide exterior entertaining areas directly off living areas pools and gardens.

With full height glazing, balconies, sky gardens and sky terraces, the interiors of the apartments interact closely with the exterior. Sun shading and overhangs provide weather protection and screen and filter the strong tropical light. Walls of greenery provide sun-shading that converts heat into oxygen, improving local air quality.

Common areas are spread throughout the towers, offering inhabitants a variety of experiences, from the intricately designed carpet of water, stone and vegetation at the ground level, to the extensive indoor-outdoor facilities at the pool level, to libraries, barbeques, and function areas at sky terraces.

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space block hanoi model

by Kazuhiro Kojima, Kojima Laboratory (Science University of Tokyo), Magaribuchi Laboratory University of Tokyo, with the collaboration of Fujimori Laboratory (University of Tokyo)

hanoi, vietnam, 1999-2002 The Space Block is an experimental housing complex in Hanoi built with the theme of 'development of a model for high-density residential quarter with low emission properties in a climate of high temperature and high humidity (Asian monsoon).' The low-rise architecture has 4 floors, and is the basic unit for a compact city where residential density of 1000 inhabitants/ha is expected to be realized without relying on any conventional airconditioning.

A decrease in productive green brought about by an explosive urban sprawl in most Asian cities has been exerting a considerable impact on environmental and social qualities. In considering a counter-model against such a situation, an old part of the city called Hanoi 36th Street district was targeted as an intervention site. The area has a vibrant charm, characterized by extremely elongated plots (2.5m wide, 70 to 80m deep) and a low street ratio. Buildings are double or triple storied. The living environment today requires improvement or renewal as most buildings have lost their patios and common spaces. Using a design method called 'space block ,' 'porous' spaces were developed with particular emphasis on full-time ventilation and shade. The porous ratio is 50%.

CFD simulation was adopted in determining the layout of porous spaces (three-dimensional patios) and openings.

As a result, the space realized enjoys excellent ventilation.

Living activities continue in this semi-outdoor space. The double room of PC louvers controls the overall effects while providing ventilation through the slits. Glass louver windows, popular in Southeast Asia, are in heavy use. Some of them are converted into louvers to control direct light, with the help of a double sash.

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vivienda social mapuche Cristiรกn Undurraga with Paul Lopez, Raymond Salgado, Jean Baptiste Bruderer

huechuraba, chile, 2010-11 Described as a milestone in developing housing for the aboriginal people who live in Santiago, the project is intended to restore the customs and world-view of the Mapuche community. A group of 25 housing was created as part of a larger project that consists of a total of 415 units of social housing located on the sector of La Pincoya in Huechuraba, Santiago. This is the first social housing designed according to the logic of a ruca Mapuche in Huechuraba's commune.

This project was the result of the joint work developed at various meetings between the architecture workshop, the "Un techo para Chile" foundation and the Mapuche community (formed by beneficiary families already living in the area of La Pincoya). In developing these new homes, the indigenous families articulated their activities integrally with the urban life of the city of Santiago, and also reflected their own form of expression. Even as a modern house, the arrangement embraces the worldview and functionality of this indigenous community.

Each house is developed as two floors with a total of 61.60 m2. Public areas and kitchen are located on the first floor, and bedrooms and bathroom on the second floor.

Layout of the bathroom, kitchen and stairs to one side yielded a relatively large and open space on both fronts. The light in every window is screened by an outer lattice supported by regular aluminum racks.

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minha casa minha vida (my house my life) program affordable housing in brazil In response to a huge housing deficit, Brazil has been implementing since 2009 an ambitious national social housing programme called My House, My Life Programme (Programa Minha Casa, Minha Vida). The initial goal was to install 1 million housing units in the biennium 2009-2010.

For its magnitude, scale and amount of subsidies, the program is considered an important milestone in establishing social housing as an issue of national importance for government policy and action.

As part of an Acceleration of Growth Programme, The My House, My Life Program represents an important government effort to reinforce a twin-track approach to social housing, in which curative and preventive programs have been combined to solve current housing problems, offer better housing alternatives and stem the growth of informal housing. Many of the units constructed in Rio are destined for groups displaced by development projects associated with the World Cup and Olympic Games.

In summary, the ambitious goals include: reduce chronic shortage of housing for low-income families, open up and expand the Brazilian mortgage market, reduce slum areas and inadequate housing stock, act as a stimulus to the Brazilian construction industry and, by extension, improve wages and increase employment. Acceleration of growth (PAC) calls for a total of USD 235 billion to be invested in building and repairing highways, airports and ports nationwide, boosting energy development in targeted areas, and providing housing, water and sewage systems that will benefit poor Brazilians.

As with any project of this scale, there are criticisms.

Hasty development has often led to problems with the new units that are almost always of poor quality, on cheap land to increase construction profits, [and] far from centers of commerce and without proper transportation. Interest rates secured for participants in the program appear to hurt other groups such as the middle-class. In the delivery of units, neighborhood based militias have often intervened and made profits in the transaction.

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making cities

imagining dhaka

by Tabassum Zaman

A city imagined is not necessarily a city that is not lived. Yet, whenever the topic “imaginary Dhaka� is broached with a varied audience, a common retort is one where imagination is seen as an antithesis to reality making any association between the two seem implausible.

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“What is there to imagine about Dhaka? It exists in all its corporeality all right! You imagine things that don't exist, right?”

“Dhaka is no fairy tale city! It's real and has real problems. Can we afford to waste our time on something as ancillary as imagination?”

“Dhaka - a whirlpool of confusion, chaos and disorder – is not ideally sensitised to the subtleties of imagination.”

These are some of the common replies I get whenever I broach the topic of an “imaginary Dhaka” to different groups of people. A city imagined is not necessarily a city unlived. But the antithetical position that we generally accord to imagination and reality makes any association between the two seem unnatural. I would like to draw attention to the fact that more than an active relationship between the two, is a 1 “productive transaction” is also possible; so much so that it can become constitutive of our urban experiences. Contrary to traditional understanding, imagination is a daily exercise, used as an organizing principle by even the most ordinary city dweller. It gives meaning to the regular experience of city life.

Consider the following: “My wishes are fulfilled coming to the city of Dhaka/ My eyes are gratified by its glittering lights” – a famous movie song from the eighties, sung by two ecstatic migrants upon their first arrival to the city.2 “If you want to make it big you have to go to Dhaka, a city where money floats” – that is a migrant's imagined 3 Dhaka portrayed in a popular TV play. “The city is unpredictable. Once you have left your house, anything can happen and you are never safe out there” – a long time resident feeling in a 2008 TV drama serial.4 The imaginary Dhaka that emerges – a city of modernity, of glitz and glam, a site of opportunity, a dystopian place – is hardly antithesis to the hard city, by which I mean the physical city phenomenologically.

Quite the contrary, this city is very much informed by the sociological conundrums associated with the city.

However, looked at carefully, one finds no mere mimetic representation of what is experienced. The experience is extended and worked upon by imagination but reified into another construction that eventually becomes the city. This city in turn shapes the collective experiences of all, making it what it is to its dwellers. Thus, the imaginary city can be said to be a telling and rich concoction of one's cognition,

memory, aspirations, dreams, wants, needs, and lived and unlived experiences. In that sense it is not an exaggeration to say that the city we all live in is this city in between, one that is produced in an intersection of many invisible cities and intertwined realities. I strongly believe that this imaginary city, the city of the mind, remains the hidden driving force determining our lives in the city and it is this that holds the clue to understanding why we do things the way we do in this megacity. Let me give some examples of how these imaginary cities are so much a part of the lived Dhaka.

A sense of nostalgia for a lost city engulfs anyone trying to imagine Dhaka. The city is constantly being pitted against what it was and is not any more, i.e. absences. The only way one understands or responds to its destabilizing present is in juxtaposition to the past or a time lost. Think how frequently regular conversations get peppered with sentences like “gone are those days, when things were more affordable.”

One can easily substitute the latter half of the sentence with other clauses – such “when people were less commercial,” “life was less stressful,” “the city was more livable,” etc. – things that people “recollect” as once intrinsic to the “city that was.” The nature of association with the past will vary, from the city of antiquity or the more recent national history of independence to one's personal childhood. In whatever form the past informs any discussion of the city, it blurs the line between times gone by and the present. Thus, Dhaka is placed in a forged continuum with the more comfortable past, not the traditionally understood historical past, but a past that is elliptical, selective, abstracted and decontextualized.

In contrast to such glorious and desirable pasts, references to social life in Dhaka at present are often marked by common generic negative terms – such as “noshto” and “ghune dhora” (Bangla words meaning “rotten,” “corroded” respectively). Such invocation validates the overall moral undertone and suggests a sense of descent from an “ideal state,” which in most cases is symbolized by innocence, simplicity and an anxiety free and relaxed life style.

What is intriguing in all this is that the past figures less as factual history and more as fictional rhetoric, deployed to envision an abstract but possible future in an aspirational city of ordinary dwellers. The bleak present is made negotiable when seen as a phase in

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that forged continuum with the past. This little act of liberty, inventiveness and fantasy, which may be counter-factual, perhaps is a tactic devised to cope with the madness that is present-day Dhaka.

Another archetypal “other city” that conditions the imaginary Dhaka is the remembered village and to a certain extent mofussil on the provincial city, unadulterated by forces of modernity, and almost mythical in its idyllic qualities. Dhaka is never quite enough in contrast to this ruralized city of beauty, contained in memory, nurtured by nostalgia and often by sheer idealization. This rendition too feeds on difference, partly fuelled by displacement and dislocation, Dhaka's citizens being largely migrants from different rural parts of the country. Like the city of the past, this spatially distanced other city is also governed by the logic of memory, imagination and nostalgia. Life in the village is often remembered in selective and ideal fragments abstracted from their original contexts.

A recurrent recollection of the idyllic village thus includes carefree movements, easy access to neighbourswho were innocent and goodhearted, unrestrained socialising, innocent and good-hearted villagers, and more engagement with the public than the private world. No reference is made to the poverty, lack of work, nosy villagers, and the physical constitution of village houses in clusters with shared facilities that make discreet choices difficult.

More than the credibility of such claims, what matters is the fact that in most instances where the rural is invoked in the urban setting, it is used as a frame, as the available and prominent “other,” to articulate visions, aspirations, and dreams that people nurture about the city, especially those that are still unrealised. Since in Bangladesh in particular and in South Asia in general, the most prominent antithesis to the city still remains the village, the rural becomes an icon for everything positive which Dhaka is perceived to be lacking, or to have lost over time during its transition from a provincial town to the capital and primate city of a densely populated country.

The vision of the village or the ruralised city is also inextricably connected to the myth of the typical villager. In connection to the city's rural antithesis, people of Dhaka are often seen as unsympathetic, materialistic, self-centred and shallow. The ideal villager – simple, naïve and selfless, someone who has not sold his soul to the materialistic pursuits of life –

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like an all-pervasive antithesis conditions the way the urbanite is perceived as deficitful – lacking in the scale of morality, sensitivity and often humanity. The perpetuation of this mythic villager-urbanite dichotomy manifests in the decisions and choices the urbanites make in their day-to-day life. One classic example could be how people prefer hiring housemaids from rural areas than urban ones. The thought governing such choices has its roots in the imaginary Dhaka which is believed to affect people negatively once they land here, allegedly making them commercial, cunning and self-serving. Internalizing this selfdemonising representation, urbanites themselves prefer the simple and susceptible country bumpkins over the shrewd city slicker.

Not surprisingly, Dhaka is seen as a city that lacks a heart. It is a sweeping generalization no doubt. There are plenty of instances of compassion, sympathy and help extended to strangers in the most unlikely places, just as there are examples of deceitful urbanites exploiting fellow citizens. Yet, lack of trust has become the overriding image of urban life in Dhaka.

This lack of trust leading to lack of interaction is not something personal. Rather, it is part of the customary castigation of the urbanite in opposition to the proverbial Good Samaritan, that is the villager. This representation pervades the general air of the city so much so that children in Dhaka grow up on parental advice such as “never eat anything given by a stranger”, or “never talk to a stranger.” The other city in between thus replaces the physical city as a reference point.

Thus, there exists a meaningful transaction between the city of materiality and the other immaterial cities. All three predominant imaginaries of Dhaka discussed above are hinged on moments and experiences that have been experienced either directly or indirectly at some unspecified time and place, the accuracy of which cannot be absolutely determined.

What is more important in this regard is that these have been transformed into a construction that forms a formidable part of our urban experience, no less thoroughly lived as the physical city. Dhaka is always conditioned by these other invisible cities5 that are in some ways refracted forms of the actual city and yet removed from it.

A pertinent question at this point would be why do people indulge in such constructions? Can these imaginary cities be deployed to negotiate the present

city, which can often be destabilising on its own? Do they generate hope that like alloys can strengthen and hold the material city together and help the dweller cope with, make sense of, and often overcome the overwhelming negativity that forms a considerable part of the urban discourse and life of a city like Dhaka?

Also, the very invocation of the other city by the dwellers as a regular exercise is an indication of something amiss. It points to an unease, a jarring movement beneath the mad rush of development, which if taken into account may provide a better hold on the future of the city. It is time we asked these questions and gave these imaginary cities their due place and recognition in the official urban discourse.

REFERENCES Donald, James. (2000). The Immaterial City: Representation, Imagination, and media technologies. In Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Eds.). A Companion to the City. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell. Pp. 46-54.

1. James Donald, “The Immaterial City: Representation, Imagination and Media Technologies”2000, p. 47. Discussing how representations inform our imagination of the city, Donald underscores how the city is a product of crosscutting realities beyond the material experience of it.

2. The song featured in Azizur Rahman's famous Bangla film The Illiterate (Translation mine).

3. Conceived and directed by Mustafa Sarwar Faruki, the Bengali drama serial 420 traces the trajectory of the lives of two petty village frauds as they migrate to the city and make it their own. Their rise from floating migrants to political leadership, only by flowing with the city, its own rhythm and pace makes a critical comment on a dystopian Dhaka where anything goes.

4. The dialogue appears in Ekannoborty, a Bangla drama serial by Anisul Haque and Mustafa Sarwar Faruki. Ekannoborty, the title means those who live in house number fifty one. The word has another meaning: a joint family. The drama intertwines both the meanings as it traces the micro stories in the lives of the family members.

5. Of which I have discussed only three here. The list is not exhaustive.

Tabassum Zaman is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Journalism at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). She graduated in English from the University of Dhaka and attained her doctoral degree in Cultural Studies from National University of Singapore.

Images are from the exhibition “Urban Experiences,” from the printmaking and poetry workshops for young artists jointly organized by Bengal Foundation and The American Center, 2014.

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making cities

rankin street, 1953

by Naeem Mohaiemen

This text accompanies Naeem Mohaiemen's project 'Rankin Street, 1953' based on photographs taken by his father that year. The project was shown at Art Basel (2013), Dhaka Art Summit (2014), and in the ongoing solo show of Mohaiemen's work, 'Prisoners of Shothik Itihash,' at Kunsthalle Basel.

A

fter a few weeks of interviews, the retired officer warmed up. He insisted, from then on, that the day's interview always ends with lunch. Your auntie made this. You like fish of course? Not too many bones.

Then he would say, sometimes, You are becoming part of the family.

I started wondering why I could not have moments like that with my father. He had only agreed to an interview once, about ten years ago. It had been a small disaster. His answers were short and clipped, basic details from dinner table stories went missing.

He insisted on answering in English, which gave the answers a stilted air. On the audio track you can hear my mother interrupt and say: No, that's not how it happened why are you leaving that part out tell it properly ahha, why are you speaking in English?

Until finally he said to her, You tell the story then.

That is when I knew the interview was over.

Since then, father never agreed to sit for another interview. Just spend time with us, we are not subjects of investigation. He does not think he has any stories to tell. He was an army doctor, who had the bad luck to be posted in West Pakistan right before the war. Not a protagonist, but a hostage to history. I insist that microstories are crucial, but he remains unconvinced.

Later, when I stumble on that box of negatives, it was during the bathetic task of vacating the family home. The developers prevailed, all cousins united on this transaction. The Dhanmondi house had to be surrendered. They told me: You don't have family, you won't understand the pressure.

Inside a steel cabinet where house documents were

fastidiously stored, was a maroon box. May be steel was the reason ants, termites, and other hazards had not frayed the negatives. Looking at it for the longest time, I thought I had found a way into my father. He bought a camera in 1953, while in medical school. This was his first box of negatives. But it was also the only box; nothing before or after.

When I started scanning them, the first few sleeves were promise followed by disappointment. Cats, cats, so many pictures of cats– the only subject that would willingly pose. I stopped scanning. What if I scanned the whole box and it was only cats?

Cats can be quite political, Yasmeen reminds me. After all, a cat may look at a king.

When I leave Dhaka, things come into sharper focus. Father may not sit still for interviews, but he likes mastering new gadgets. The phone line was crackly, I was impatient (so impatient, what is with children today?), but in the end, he understood how to operate the machine.

In the last week, he scanned 300 images. Now, other things start emerging. More cats, yes (she had a litter, there's a photo of a box of mini kittens). But also, aunts, nieces, balconies, streets, rickshaws, signboards.

The beach. They went to the beach Later, father writes: I am not really a professional photographer. I took pictures of what interested me at that time. *** Rankin Street. The rooftop. A clean, clear unobstructed view. The clearest sign that it is 1953. In these first images, there are many roof shots. Either

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clumsily framed or deliberately akimbo. I cannot tell.

Father cannot remember the photos. He remembers this was his first year with a camera. But he cannot remember taking the pictures.

In an ideal context, the one you always read of in magazines and books, he would remember exactly what he was thinking when he composed the photo.

This was what I was thinking at this moment. Like that iconic photograph taken in 1958 of Richard and Mildred Loving. The photograph, by Grey Villet, comes with a back story: In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving were arrested in a nighttime raid in their bedroom by the sheriff of

Caroline County, Virginia. Their crime: being married to each other. The Lovings — Mildred, who was of African-American and Native American descent, and Richard, a bricklayer with a blond buzz cut — were ordered by a judge to leave Virginia for 25 years. Two lawyers took their case to the Supreme Court, which struck down miscegenation laws in more than a dozen states. Asked by one of his lawyers if he had a message for the Supreme Court, Richard said: "Tell the court I love my wife.'"

Father doesn't recall the details, so I look for familiar faces instead. Besides that cooperative cat, on whom he used up many rounds of film, most of the

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photos are of my aunts. There were seven sisters and three brothers, all living inside that one house on Rankin Street. There was an eighth sister and a fourth brother, but they died very young. The sort of thing that was common in those days. Tuberculosis, Typhoid, the most common causes.

There is a sharp gap between the sisters. The older ones all studied up to a certain point and then became wives. The younger sisters came of age after 1971.

They all went on to have jobs. They became university professors and doctors. One aunt ended up at the World Bank. Well, I don't know how I feel about that.

These aunts are the ones I see most often these days. We have more to talk about. It feels bad to say that, but it's the truth. For the older aunts I didn't grow up, still "babu" in their eyes. Endearing and oddly suffocating.

The Rankin Street house was sold sometime in the 1970s. A greedy city came and swallowed up entire blocks. Seven sisters each got one-seventh of the sale

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price, a pittance in the 1970s. Three brothers inherited the other house in Dhanmondi. These are the ways the swaps happened.

Father has no stories. He can't find any negatives after 1953 either. From 1954-1971, everything is gone.

During the war, that was the first thing to disappear.

In Rajshahi, another old man mournfully talked about his lost diaries.

When father snaps family events now, the images are hopelessly plain, I mourn the loss of his possibilities. Abba, please turn off the flash, I request for the hundredth time. Without flash, everything looks dark, he replies. Then he grumbles. I can see it in his eyes, my son is trying to teach me photography.

But maybe, he's smiling inside.

Yasmeen writes a letter to me. She says: We have to use flash these days. The flash keeps us in the pleasant darkness so the shadows that show our stories, our faces, the worries in our irises, our wrinkles of almost forced smiles - these things are all hidden in the bright light. It is easier to use flash; it is more

comfortable. Why not think of comfort when the alternative forces us to face divisions of memories, of properties, of homes, of lives, of children. A life that no one but he who did not use flash in 1953 could ever put together again.

Father says he took all the photos. But there are three where he is inside the frame. Posing with a cousin, lying on a chouki, standing in front of a calendar. April 1953.

Who took this picture? He can't remember.

Naeem Mohaiemen uses essays, films, and photography to research the “memory wars” of Bangladesh history. His current project, “Prisoners of Shothik Itihash,” is a seven-gallery solo show spanning the years 19471977, at the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland. His work is in the collection of the British Museum and the Tate Modern.

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making cities

Map of Land Cover in Greater Dhaka

in the seams of dhaka

research and design

by Jacob Mans

Each year, Philadelphia architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake travel with their students from the University of Pennsylvania to Dhaka as part of a unique design research laboratory in which deep investigation is undertaken to stimulate design and planning interventions that can interact dynamically with the urban systems in place and promote positive change.

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O

ne of the few constants about Dhaka is that nothing is quite as it seems, or at least nothing today is at it seemed yesterday.

Everything is changing. You can stand along a roadside in Dhakshin Khan and watch one landscape being unmade as another is made by thousands of cubic meters of liquified silt, pumped through elaborate laceworks of pipes to terra-form the floodplain in preparation for Dhaka's expansion. In between this year and last, some 500,000 people have migrated to Dhaka, and it feels as if an entire new city has merged with the one we left behind. We come to expect major infrastructures to appear between our annual visits, and we are no longer surprised when they are just as quickly overwhelmed. Design in this context is what planners refer to as a wicked problem: one in which the boundaries are unclear, the variables are undefined, and successes are unquantifiable.

It is within this ambiguous, and at times ambivalent, context that we have challenged ourselves to situate our design research laboratory. The laboratory is built around a deeply analytical, collaborative, research-based approach that resists the premature presumption of solutions. It is distinct from typical design studios in that problems are not assigned at the outset, and solved singularly; rather, students are challenged to work collaboratively to define their own problem statements out of a thorough and careful analysis of researched data. We understand research not simply to mean data collection but the application of focused analysis, hypothesis, and testing—with the goal of exposing synergies and opportunities for intervention.

During the seven years that our lab has focused on Dhaka and the six trips to Bangladesh that we have taken with our students, the arc of our investigation has changed. Our initial focus was micro-scaled interventions that could be implemented through, for example, the Grameen Bank micro-finance model, which we used to filter the topics of our research and frame the interventions that it yielded. While conducting this early research, we witnessed the need for inquiry at the opposite end of the spectrum: research and design focused at the scale of the city, region, and delta. We have recently begun to focus on the convergence of water and soil, documenting the means and methods used by people to manipulate

their flows across the delta in order to understand how these elements impact the topics of human health, food security, shelter, migration patterns, movement, economies (both formal and informal), urban morphology, ecology, environmental degradation, and biodiversity.

We pull and pry at these strands of inquiry until we can isolate and document our understanding of them across scales and over time. Once we can characterize them individually, we then work to understand how they are woven back into the collective knowledge of the studio and the incredibly dynamic and dense network that is Dhaka. At times, this process of weaving, of synthesizing data, yields moments of focus, always partial and more often than not temporary, that help us form insights into the critical networks that have coalesced in and around Dhaka.

These insights offer seams within Dhaka's fabric that we have identified as moments rich for design intervention. The seam is the question of what to design. In most cases, its definition is more difficult to articulate than the design that answers it. Over the years, we have identified more than 30 such seams, each supported by an exhaustive research effort to understand what Dhaka is and to identify a question that in its answering has the potential to be positively transformative.

HYDROLOGICAL URBANISM Zhengeng Chen (2014) There is a conflict in Dhaka: a territorial pursuit for position that is annually yielded and contested by the waters that flow over and erode the delta and the soils that are carried and deposited to produce the subtle shifts that define the performance of its vulnerable landscape.

This inquiry traced the physical and performance characteristics of soils at different resolutions across the delta to identify their unique abilities to support vegetative cover and their resistance against erosion.

Extracted from this data are universal strategies that could be applied to reclaim areas of increased soil degradation in and around Dhaka.

The data was distilled to produce a working taxonomy of landscape programs that can improve the outputs and benefits of a discrete set of hydrological, biological, and geological systems. Depending on

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the ecosystem services required for a specific situation—water retention or purification, biodiversity rehabilitation, waste recycling, etc.—one can define a design intervention that incorporates the necessary landscape programs outlined within the taxonomy and deploy them against the environmentally degraded situation in question.

A demonstration shows how this method can be used to reclaim an in-filled canal near Hazaribagh and is documented through a detailed phasing plan that deploys these landscape programs over a 15-year remediation period. This includes a 1-year preliminary excavation period followed by 9-year staged restoration period, after which the landscape would be able to support the necessary ecologies needed to rehabilitate the canal over the course of the final 5 years.

NEW SOIL Mathew Stone (2014) What does it mean to make new soil? In Dhaka, we have actively observed this process occurring in two ways. One is glaringly visible, involving the industrial dredging, barging, liquefying, pumping and/or trucking of sand and silt from the bottoms of rivers and collecting it into the expansive earthworks that become the “new soil” onto which the city's expansion eventually extends. The other, while not

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invisible, is less conspicuous, camouflaging itself amongst the millions of people who participate in the gradual land-filling of Dhaka's lowlands and canals to create “new soil” that is considered higher value than the hydrological functions previously performed by these landscapes.

The need for new soil is not a recent development in Dhaka but rather a geologic precondition of its existence within the delta. It is an environment dependent on a cycle of flooding in order to maintain a temporary margin of elevational stability—a condition in conflict with modern patterns of urban development that give preference to permanence and security. The processes of “new soil” production in Dhaka are likely to cease as surely as the lands within the Delta are likely to suspend sinking. In the meantime, we must consider how, where and when we create “new soil” so that the landscapes which result are sustainable in the long run and not solely determined by the profits of illegal land grabbers and developers.

This inquiry researched the quality of soil being created in Dhaka and built an intervention around the high organic content found within the city's waste stream. The design is of a networked compost system with facilities located throughout the city that divert organic waste away from land-filling operations and

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toward a new composting industry that provides the city with nutrient rich soil. The soil can be used to facilitate urban agriculture as well as applied to sandfilling processes, creating more sustainable landscapes as the city expands.

ENVISIONED ECOLOGIES Margo Angelopoulos, Mary Carroll-Coelho, Joshua Seyfried (2013) This inquiry looks at a transect of land that runs along the Dhaka-Aricha Highway connecting the industrial zones of Mirpur to those of Savar. Lowlying areas such as these provide the ideal conditions for the production of one the region's primary building materials: fired clay brick. Identified by the verticality of the chimneys in contrast to the relentless horizontality of the landscape, these kilns support a complex sequence of events that transform the fluid soils of the floodplain into the stabilized building blocks of the region. Bricks are made by extracting clay from the flood plain adjacent to the kilns, pugging it to remove air, molding it into bricks, and then drying it in the sun. After this initial green stage is complete, the bricks are moved and stacked in the kiln, fired, unloaded, stored and eventually transported to market.

The clay that is extracted in this process is only partially replenished by annual flooding, and as the bricks are fired, so is the soil underneath and adjacent to the kilns. PH levels and organic matter decrease as the sand content of the clay increases. Eventually, the clay is of such poor quality that the kiln shuts down, moves, and repeats the process in a new location,

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leaving behind a fired landscape that is neither healthy nor productive for its future inhabitants.

By changing the operative structure of the brick industry and coupling it with regenerative ecologies, we can reduce pollution and restore the critical natural processes that help sustain healthy environments and retain the economic productivity of the land. The proposed interventions establish a phased transition to new industrial and dwelling practices that advance air, water, and land remediation as well as personal health.

By reusing the existing infrastructure of the brick kilns and optimizing the potential of their transient systems over time, the seasonal and long-term cycle of “Remediate, Re-purpose, and Re-activate� introduces new lumber, fish and agriculture industries, new methods and materials for making brick, new approaches to forestation, new plans for water control and water treatment, and a shift to alternate methods of construction and building materials.

Jacob Mans is an architect based in Philadelphia. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 2012 where he has worked with Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake on their Design Research Laboratory investigating Dhaka.

making cities

Aerial Night Perspective.

synthscape

a waterborne settlement in the ganges-brahmaputra river delta, c. 2055

by Jared Luther and Matthew Rothlisberger

A featured team project of the McKinley Futures Graduate Design Studio, University of Washington, Spring 2014: Jared Luther, Alden MacKey, Matthew Rothlisberger, and Monica Sarker, conducted by Daniel Friedman.

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“The oceans cover over 70 percent of the planet and are critical to life on Earth. The oceans drive almost every natural system on the planet, including carbon absorption, oxygen exchange, nutrient cycling, temperature regulation, hydrological cycles and other crucial systems. Traditional thought has assumed that the oceans are vast, endless, and capable of absorbing waste and change at any scale.

While the oceans are expansive, we now know that this perception is incorrect. Humans are changing the oceans, and the rate of change is increasing. The subsequent impact on humanity and the oceans is staggering.”

—Arup Foresight, s.v. “oceans” [http://www.driversofchange.com/oceans/].

“Futures studies (also called futurology and futurism) is the study of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. There is a debate as to whether this discipline is an art or science. In general, it can be considered as a branch of the social sciences and parallel to the field of history. In the same way that history studies the past, futures studies considers the future. Futures studies (colloquially called "futures" by many of the field's practitioners) seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to determine the likelihood of future events and trends. Unlike the physical sciences where a narrower, more specified system is studied, futures studies concerns a much bigger and more complex world system. The methodology and knowledge are much less proven as compared to natural science or even social sciences like sociology, economics, and political science.”

—Wikipedia, s.v. “futures studies” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_studies]

I

n spring 2014, the University of Washington undertook an advanced graduate architecture studio to explore research-based, speculative design scenarios that envision urban developments constructed on sea-borne platforms, designed in response to the urban and environmental challenges of global climate change, in particular sea-level rise and population displacement. The studio employed a keyword-based framework to guide its investigation of the areas of human activity on which future global equity and prosperity depend—society, health, education, government, economy, science, and urbanization.

The studio brief called simply for a city on water anywhere in the world, fifty years hence. This article reports on one of three scenarios to emerge from the studio; for its site, our team proposed a speculative

urban settlement in the outflow of the GangesBrahmaputra river delta, partly in response to projected population pressure caused by immigration and displacement. Our proposal features the design and construction of hybrid “synthscapes” that combine carbon fiber with natural vegetation and bamboo in an expansive seaborne urban network, engendering new community morphologies, new systems of water detoxification and management, a new economic base, and environmentally resilient infrastructure that can continuously absorb and support migrating populations.

The Ganges-Brahmaputra river delta is in constant flux, as dynamic and powerful as the rivers themselves.

Among external forces that have adversely affected this region are environmentally unsustainable local economies that issue toxic effluence, compounded by

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A TRANSECT THROUGH THE DELTA

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Synthscape pathway.

the vulnerability of low-lying regions to sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. The fundamental premise of our proposal reverses the typical environment/building relationship: it modulates sediment deposition and generates newbiosynthetic, biomimetic infrastructure. The development responds to the impending cataclysm of global climate change by proposing new ways of building and new types of spatial organizations that provide both social and economic updraft by combining digital technology, local agency, and robust grassroots environmentalism.

Our proposal seeks to honor the singular qualities of place and space in this region, which are defined by expansive low-lying coastal vegetation and estuarial horizontality. These natural features inspired the composition of our project—flexible, buoyant, lowlying biosynthetic hubs and bridges that create negative spaces of habitable water and reclaimed sediment, a new kind of place, capable of accomodating the increasing populations of climate refugees. The structural logic of the urban infrastructure mimics lessons learned from the role of mangroves, which have been identified as beneficial to climate change mitigation, and which oxygenate of the water Ganges. The ground level platforms of waterborne settlement are designed to wash away in

Synthscape

Synthscape section overview.

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Housing Typology.

Diagram of node and house relations.

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Synthscape, a monsoon perspective.

case of storm surge; the carbon fiber and vegetative elements can secure smaller structures and house agriculture production, bringing hybrid parks and farms to community centers. Orthogonal bamboo scaffolding serves as the armature for the assembly of engineered components. Both the architecture and the infrastructure flexes, bends, decays, and grows.

Our project's “synthscape” is an organic system comprised of highly flexible, adaptable, and resilient urban components. The central hubs integrate housing, ports, markets, and small businesses with waste management and energy infrastructure; a linear network of major and minor canals integrate circulation infrastructure, telecommunications, water, and pedestrian and non-motorized transportation; floating boats and barges support mobile commerce; floating multi-family and single-family homes develop organically in the vertices of the circulation spokes; and a a lily-pad-like system of floating membranes deployed during the monsoon rains channel fresh water into giant bladders held within the spatial voids

of giant “synthscape” space frames, expanding the economic base to include the harvesting and export of potable water.

Jared Luther and Matthew Rothlisberger are in the M.Arch program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Monica Sarker and Alden Mackey were also members of the project.

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making cities

Vidyasagar's residence.

St. James Church.

Tagore Hall.

conservation is viable

by Manish Chakrabarti

A conservation architect and historic buildings consultant ardently worked to conserve some of the historic and significant structures of Kolkata: residential houses, churches, chapels, and the historic city centre of Dalhousie Square. The conservation of the house of Vidyasagar, St James Church, and Tagore Hall are three projects featured.

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I

am attracted to the special architectural wealth of Calcutta/Kolkata. The ensemble of grand old buildings in Dalhousie Square - the seat of British administration and commerce from where the Indian subcontinent was governed - expressed in Georgian, Victorian and late Gothic architectural styles, and the multitude of eclectic architecture of courtyard houses and palaces is a rich architectural asset that still survives in much of its authentic form, although in various degrees of decay.

A growing consciousness and concern for conserving historic buildings and places in Kolkata and India began only a little over a decade ago. I owe my knowledge of the history of Kolkata greatly from my experience of engaging in research and conserving historic structures in the city. A knowledge of the history of the city is intimately linked to these projects.

As a conservation architect and historic buildings consultant, I am passionately engaged in conserving some of these historic and significant structures ranging from residential houses to churches and chapels, and the historic city centre of Dalhousie Square.

Our first project was the conservation of the house of Vidyasagar that began in the year 1998.

Pandit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820 - 1891) bought a two-storied house in North Kolkata in 1840 to keep his collection of 20,000 books and accommodate his relatives and friends from the neighbouring villages.

Following his demise, his family members rented the house. Slowly the house slipped into decay over the years and the tenants showed unwillingness to leave the property. Finally the Government of West Bengal settled with the tenants with a financial package and decided to restore the house.

The house is a load bearing brick structure with traditional lime mortar and plastered surface with projecting arched and louvred verandah. When we began the conservation project, the roof was leaking from all corners, walls were damp, plasters debonded and bearing portion of the wooden beams were rotting and sagging.

Following a detailed documentation and estimation for its repair, the work was undertaken using traditional materials for its plaster, strengthening and removing the wooden beams, repairing the wooden louvers and recasting the lime concrete roof wherever

Vidyasagar's dilapidated residence.

necessary. The house was restored in a span of 9 months at a cost three to four times less than building a new one in the same area, making conservation of the house economically viable.

The Vidyasagar house project taught us many lessons and informed us about many practical issues for executing conservation projects. The sourcing of authentic materials like limestone and shell lime, sand blasted cast iron, lime punning (araish) as opposed to Plaster of Paris, the use of lime paint for the exterior to make it more breathable and durable by traditional admixtures, and the traditional method of lime terracing are all possible. They are part of a continuing tradition. Investing in traditional masons and not so

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th

Vidyasagar's residence after conesrvation.

much on new materials gave a new meaning to our conservation and design practice.

Since then we worked on many historic buildings.

Here are brief descriptions of two of our recent projects: St James Church built in 1864 and Tagore Hall, a residential two-storied bungalow built around 1840s in Kolkata.

Deeply etched in the landscape of Calcutta for over 174 years, and one of the largest edifices in the city and unique in its architectural expression, St

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James' Church is a prominent 19 century early English Gothic Church with traces of Norman details.

The Church was consecrated by Bishop Cotton on St James’ Day, 25 July 1864. Designed by Walter Granville, the outer walls of the Church are firmly supported on all sides by well-proportioned buttresses.

At the west-end is a spacious carriage drive porch with two pointed arches on the eastern and western sides.

Above the porch is an ornamented gabled frontage surmounted by a cross and flanked on both sides by two double-tier turret towers from which comes the local name "Jora Girja.” Lofty spires rise over the towers surmounted by large metal crosses. On the upper portion of the lower southern tower is a double-dialed clock facing west and south.

With the building slipping into decay since 2000, parishioners could feel the dampness rising from the floor. Though the main wooden roof of mahogany was still strong, leaks had developed along the drip channels leading to seepage during monsoon. The wooden floor at the second level was gnawed through by termites which were also busy boring into doors and windows as well. Lack of regular maintenance, paucity of funds and inappropriate repair interventions in the past led to deterioration of the physical fabric of the building. This is when the church authority and two neighbouring schools – Pratt Memorial and St James School – decided to conserve the church for posterity under professional guidance.

Finally, in 2008, the Pastor Committee of the Church and Rt. Rev Ashok Biswas, the Bishop of Kolkata and the Calcutta Diocese Trust Association assigned us the task of conserving this significant building.

Work started with archival research and documentation in order to understand the significance of the church. Research and study of old drawings and photographs along with physical measurement led us to prepare updated and accurate floor plans, elevations and sections of the Church. A detailed study was undertaken that included documentation, measured drawings, condition survey and assessment of the historic fabric of the church in order to prepare a detailed estimate and specification for various items of works for an authentic and appropriate conservation of the building.

A detailed condition survey of the Church was undertaken by exploring various locations in order to

The twin towers of St James Church.

assess the brick mortar system, external plaster, extent of vegetative growth, serviceability of the drainage system and structural distress. Based on the studies, analyses and assessments, repair specifications and conservation strategies were drawn on the following principles.

Minimality: Only those portions were minimally repaired and strengthened which were absolutely essential so that there was minimal loss of original fabric of the structure thereby ensuring the continu-

ance of survival of the material of the structure.

Authenticity: The church was conserved by continuation of traditional materials of lime and sand plaster, and lime and brickdust mortar using traditional admixtures adopted in the same proportions as found from existing plaster and mortar analysis. The strength of the lime rich mortar was improved by the addition of puzzolanic materials like brick powder, brick chips or marble dust. Traditional additives like casein, egg white, molasses, black gram (urad ki daal), curd, etc

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Tagore Hall in dilapidated state.

were used for weather resistance. The previous cement pointing was scraped and repointed with lime surkhi mortar.

Breathability: The faรงade was rendered with traditional lime-sand plaster and finished with silicone and weedicide added paint to trade off between breathability and susceptibility of growth of moisture and lichens in our extreme rainfall months.

The Conservation of Tagore Hall, a two storied residential bungalow in South Calcutta, was redeemed from a state of extreme dilapidation into a high-end quality space for residential living for the group chairman of Goodricke Group Limited, a part of the Camellia plc UK, the largest tea producer in the world.

The house belonged to Rathindranath Tagore (1888 1960), son of the poet Rabindranath Tagore(1861 1941).

The building was unsafe as portion of the roof had collapsed, the beams and runners supporting the ceiling sagged, and the central wooden staircase damaged. In the absence of any plan of the bungalow, a detailed documentation, condition survey and inspection were first conducted to draw a Conservation Plan and a Adaptive Reuse Plan for a new residential living.

Portion of the roof was relaid with reinforced

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precast tiles supported by renewed RS joist where necessary covered by a screed concrete. The method of construction was similar to traditional terracotta tiles and lime concrete over beams and runners, but the materials used was steel and not wooden beams, RCC precast tiles instead of terracotta tiles, and screed concrete instead of lime concrete. The walls were deplastered, pointed, and joint sealed and replastered with composite mortar. The original spiral wooden staircase at the Tagore Hall was strengthened and restored, and the bedrooms and living /drawing rooms which were subdivided by partition walls were recovered and aesthetically presented with period furniture as part of the idiom of interior design With these two projects, we encountered different approaches and strategies for conservation responding to differences in need and significance of the buildings. The strategy for conserving Tagore Hall was not material conservation unlike the St James Church where it was important to retain as much of the original material of the fabric as possible. With Tagore Hall, it was more critical to adopt a responsive repair method that was akin to the spirit and method of constructing the structure to accommodate services for modern living (such as concealed wiring for electrical and air conditioning).

Tagore Hall, exterior.

Tagore Hall, interior.

In Kolkata, and many cities of India, conservation is shrouded with a misconception that it is not possible to recover and conserve a heritage building with a lesser cost. Such arguments are generally posed by developers to curb the slightest opportunity in favour of conserving a structure. We firmly believe – and it is something we learnt through our practice – that conservation means judicious, informed, appropriate and responsive repair to recover a building for present and future use. This is what makes conservation of heritage buildings economical and viable.

Manish Chakraborti is a conservation architect and urban planner based in Kolkata, India. Member and Coordinator of the National Scientific Committee of Shared Heritage of ICOMOS India and the Heritage Committee of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, his practice CONTINUITY, provides conservation consultancy to the West Bengal Heritage Commission, the Department of Archaeology of the Government of Rajasthan and Archaeological Survey of India.

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making cities

chittagong's stories

by Adnan Morshed

“Well, here we are at last in Chittagong. I am glad we are to live here instead of Dacca. Where Dacca is a bit larger and has all the old British government buildings, it is hot and level. Chittagong is on the Karnafuli River and is a city of “A Thousand Hills.” There is always a fresh breeze from the river. The shops, native homes and old part are in the ravines and at river level, while the fine residences occupy the hills.”

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Chittagong, the sprawling metropolis.

Ellura, wife of Robert Kirby Winters, Chittagong, Tuesday, February 25, 1953; posted in Chittagong to establish a forest experiment station and laboratory for then East Pakistan on behalf of the United States Forest Service; (Letters from Chittagong: An American Forestry Couple's Letters Home, 1952-54, 1992).

C

hittagong's identity politics has always been driven by various claims of “uniqueness.” The uniqueness of its geography, urban origin, local dialect, a complicated “meltingpot” racial history, multi-faith social amalgamation, history of anti-British movement, and Porto Grande global attraction through the ages, among others. Ellura Harvey Winter's finding solace in “a thousand hills” of Chittagong—away from the

tempestuous street agitation of Language Movement-era Dhaka—unwittingly partook of an enduring historical narrative that celebrated many myths of Chittagong's distinctiveness. Uncharacteristic hilly terrain in a predominantly flat deltaic country has always been an essential part of the city's mythology. The Chinese traveler poet Hsuan th Tsang's 7 -century depiction of the city as “a sleeping beauty emerging from mists and water”

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was no doubt a reference to Chittagong's hilly idyll.

Let's harken back to earlier times.

Legend has it that the Buddha came to a vihara or a chakrashala located in Patiya, a southern town of greater Chittagong, employing his miraculous powers for disembodied travels.

According to some historians, Buddhism spread to Chittagong during the time of the Buddha himself, over twenty-six centuries ago, when Socrates was not yet born and the Parthenon had not yet been built in Athens! The presence of many viharas in the city lends credence to the suggestion that the name of Chittagong comes from chaitya (a Buddhist vihara). Some claim that a Buddhist King named Gopichandra even established his capital in Chittagong in the 10th century.

Within a century after Islamic forces under the leadership of Tariq ibn-Ziyad crossed Gibraltar in 711 CE to colonize most of the Iberian Peninsula, Arab sailors began to arrive on the shores of Chittagong. They left enduring marks in the port city's life and local dialect. Place names, such as Alkaran (Al Qarn) and Sulak Bahor (Sulukal Bahar), demonstrate Arab influence. The use of negative before a verb in chatgaiya, Chittagong's local dialect, is another instance of Arabic contribution to the culture of the port city.

Portuguese explorers in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries frequently called Chittagong the “City of Bengala.” Duarte de Barbosa, one of the earliest Portuguese writers to offer a geographical account of the African and Indian coasts in the early sixteenth century—almost a century before the Mughal subahdar Islam Khan Chishti's arrival in Dhaka—described Chittagong as a natural attraction for traders, missionaries, and fortuneseekers from far-flung places. He noted: “[T]his sea (Bay of Bengal) is a gulf which enters towards the north and at its inner extremity there is a very great city inhabited by Moors which is called Bengala, with a very good harbor.” D. Joao de

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Silveira, who was reportedly the first Portuguese commander of a sea expedition to Bengal in 1517, belonged to the generation of Portuguese that had not only scurried the Moors (as the Arabs were called in Iberia) out of Portugal, but also sought to create a Portuguese Empire in the East.

Chittagong was their gateway to the East. In exchange for military and political support, the Sultan of Bengal Ghiyasuddin Mahmud Shah allowed the Portuguese in 1537 to create a settlement in Chittagong. He gave them powers to collect port tax. A Portuguese empire never materialized in Bengal, and their historic footprint slowly diminished over time. But, as Mons. R. Dalgado's book The Influence of the Portuguese Vocabulary on the Asiatic Languages reveals, the Iberian country's influence on Bengal, particularly the Bengali language, began to fertilize from their settlements, trading outposts, and forts in Chittagong.

This is not a place to belabor a chronological history of Chittagong, except to say that the port city's history is richly crisscrossed by actors of all sorts: Buddhist mendicants, Hindu zamindars, Arab saints, Mughal governors, European traders, British colonialists, anti-British revolutionaries, Western development experts, wealthy industrialists, national leaders, and global entrepreneurs.

When history becomes a jigsaw puzzle of people, events, places, and narratives, myths thrive!

Thus, to know Chittagong and to imagine its future, one must first learn to negotiate its stories.

The city's genius loci is found not just in its people, hills, dighis, rivers, and the sea, but also in its stories, mythos, fables, and allegories. The fantastical tales of the Buddha's divine voyage to Chittagong or the Muslim dervish's lighting a chati on Cheragi'r Pahar to drive away demons are as important as the city's life-giving river, Karnafuli.

In fact, these stories are phenomenologically ingrained in Chittagong's geography. They propel how Chittagonians mentally map their city.

Many historic events that occurred in Chittagong fuel Bengal's collective folklore. The city was a real-life theater for revolutionary sagas during the heyday of anti-British agitation. In a much mythologized political action, Master Da Surya Sen's young comrades captured the armory of the British Raj in Dampara Police Line in 1930. The gallows in the Chittagong Central Jail, where Surya Sen was hanged, is considered an archetypal symbol of popular resistance. In 1932, a nationalist group led by the fearless Pritilata Waddedar attacked the European Club (that had mounted the infamous notice: “Dogs and Indians not allowed�) in Pahartali. Waddedar was injured in the subsequent firefight, but she refused to surrender to her oppressors, eventually committing suicide by swallowing cyanide. Bedabrata Pain's 2012 film, Chittagong, recaptures the sentimental history of the city's gallant fight against the British Raj. Chittagong has other, more recent, stories, steeped in a combination of patriotism, political intrigue, and entrepreneurship. The nation's independence was declared on the radio from Kalurghat, a sleepy outpost steps away from the Karnafuli River. The much venerated journey of modern-era microcredit began from an impoverished but now famous village named Jobra in the vicinity of the University of Chittagong. The city is home to a thriving world-class institution, the Asian University for Women. The university's graduating class of 2014 included students from 12 countries, from Vietnam to Palestine.

But, like all stories, Chittagong’s stories have darker sides too. One of the tragic failures of Chittagong's urban administrators and planners has been their inability to hear the city's stories. A visit to the port city today makes one aware the mismanagement that pledges it now, and brings home the fact that when a profiteering and crony development agenda takes precedence over a city's ecological wellbeing the result is disastrous.

Chittagong is a chaotically expanding, environ-

(top) Mushrooming apartment buildings in the port city. (bottom) Kamolbabu's Theater (later renamed as Bishwambhar Hall and then Lion Cinema Hall) has been razed to construct an apartment building. Rabindranath Tagore was accorded a civic reception here in 1907.

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The Chaktai canal (above) in Old Chittagong. The reclamation of the canal should be a top urban policy priority. Just as in Venice, canals can become the city's transportation artery.

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mentally challenged metropolis. Its population jumped from approximately 200,000 in the early 1950s to over 5 million in 1991 and about 7 million in 2014. The metropolitan area is home to 3.4 percent of the country's population (Dhaka has 10%). The economic performance of the city is noticeable, contributing 11% of the country's GDP (Dhaka has 36%). Yet, livability is an acute issue. Chittagong, like other burgeoning metropolises of developing economies, has been experiencing a laissez-faire construction boom. Realestate development has become a key economic driver, unfortunately giving rise to a widespread culture of land-grabbing and hill-cutting. The Chittagong City Corporation and the Chittagong Development Authority are both oblivious of and complicit in these illegal and harmful activities.

The city's western seas front – from Faujdarhat to Bhatiari and beyond – is, as the BBC (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia18182706) hauntingly noted, “where the world's ships go to die.” The ship-breaking industry's corrosive effect on the area is no less an environmental “genocide.” Having spent six childhood years at the nearby Faujdarhat Cadet College, I have fond memories of playing football on the Faujdarhat beach and watching blue waves stir the sand. Alas, the seafront's tranquility has been replaced by the disquieting industrial wasteland of half-cut ships and desperately poor workers. The Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado's Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (1989) shows the tragic transformation of the pristine beach into a maritime graveyard and an environmental disaster. The shipbreaking industry, a hefty contributor to the national economy buttressed by a power-wielding political and business mafia, reigns with impunity. Access to the site is prohibited.

The preservation of heritage buildings is a far cry. The famous Nalapara site of Rabindranath Tagore's civic reception in 1907, Kamolbabu's Theater (established in 1906; later

renamed Bishwambhar Hall and then Lion Cinema Hall) has been razed to create an unsightly apartment building! Nobody seemed to have noticed what kind of damage was done to the city's stories.

I grew up in Chittagong and remember a safe and picturesque city. Donning the heavily starched green school uniform, I used to walk from home to my school, nearly three miles away, with other neighborhood kids. We would take a short-cut through the Panchlaish residential area.

On our way, the gigantic, modernist building of the Chittagong Medical College Hospital (established in 1957) would appear soon on the right side against the backdrop of Mehedibagh's dark green hills. The busy road intersection of Chawk Bazar would be next. There, we would routinely gawk at the delicious sweets and hot cakes displayed at the glass window of the famous bakery called League Store. Next to this bakery was the Gulzar Cinema, which sometimes featured obscure English films. We would endlessly discuss the stories of those films, based entirely on the gargantuan and gaudy billboards mounted on the front façade of the cinema.

Within minutes, the Parade Ground—one of Chittagong's very few remaining playgrounds—would be on our left. Shortly thereafter we would arrive at the school and quickly fall in line for the morning P.T., followed by the national anthem.

Life was simple. Kids felt a kinship with their city. The ability to walk to school every day inspired us to appreciate the city's streets, buildings, trees, fields, and hills. There was no choking traffic congestion in front of our school, a common spectacle nowadays. During the latemorning tiffin break, there were vendors at the foot of the rolling hill on which our school was located. They would sell 25-paisa jhalmuri, to whom we would gravitate like moths!

Is this just a case of innocent, and ultimately useless, reminiscence? Cynics would claim that

Ashutki (dried fish) shop in Old Chittagong. While it is an essential element of Chittagong's culinary culture, shutki is also a social commentary on the Port City's maritime geography.

nostalgia is an exclusivist sentiment, zooming in on only favorable memories and airbrushing away all the blemishes. But the Chittagong of my childhood offered simple delights of urban experience. There were places to visit for recreation. The Patenga beach on the southernmost point of the city on the north side of Karnafuli was a popular weekend destination. At the Tiger Pass, more or less the geographic center of the city, the 280-foot high Battali Hill offered the highest vantage point for a 360-degree view of the city. In the west, one could see as far as the Bay of Bengal; the gentle bend of the Karnafuli would be visible in the south and east; in the north, on a clear day, one could see Chittagong's legendary hills, running parallel to the sea. An inquisitive observer could also notice Old Chittagong in the south. Upon their arrival in the early 16th century, this is where the firingis (as the Portuguese were called) created their settlement.

This area is now Firingibazar.

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(top) Chittagong New Market (built in 1964). (bottom) The Circuit House (built in 1913).

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J. M. Sen Hall in Rahmatganj (built in 1920).

The Lal Dighi area, the site of legendary speeches and Abdul Jabbar's Bolikhela (wrestling fair). Source: Hajar. Bochhorer.

Chattagram (35th anniversary special supplement of Daily Ajadi; Nov. 1995), 45.

I recall many urban retreats that families would visit to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Among them was the Foy's Lake, about 8 km north of the city center. It is an artificial lake created in 1924 as an English Picturesque-style park by the Assam Bengal Railway. At its inception, Foy's Lake served the dual purpose of a reservoir to supply water to the railway colonies and a hill-water recreational park. Then there was the oasis-like7-acre War Cemetery (designed in the early 1950s) that for us was a solemn urban history “book” to learn about the devastations of World War II. This gated urban park contains755 small cenotaphs of fallen soldiers from Britain,

The Mughal-era Jami Mosque (built in 1669) in Andarkilla.

A lonely urban behemoth - the Bahaddarhat fly-over.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, and Netherlands—who fought on the Burma front.

We viewed the War Cemetery as a verdant delight in the middle of the city.

There were many buildings that shaped our perception of the city. Window-shopping in the Chittagong New Market—an American-style shopping mall built in 1964, the first of its kind in the then East Pakistan—was a magnet for shoppers. It was even a domestic tourist attraction.We would go up and down in its escalators, a novelty in the country then. Among the 458 shops in this 4-story art-deco mall our prime destination was the air-conditioned Liberty Ice Cream Shop. We

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Umberto Boccioni, “The City Rises (1910-11);” oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.z

would save money in our little clay banks to buy ice cream there. On my way to the Collegiate School (established in 1836)—where I studied for less than a year—I would always look at the New Market's architectural originality with amazement.

Across the outer stadium located at Kajir Dewri—where we played cricket—the colonialera Circuit House (built in 1913 as a guest house for government officials) provided a lush forecourt. This patch of green was also used as an outdoor eating area for what used to be a local culinary institution: Darul Kabab. Alas, during the mid-1990s, driven by the era's wrong-headed development plans, the site was taken over to create a garish theme park for children Near my father's medical clinic at the commercial district of Rahmatganj was J. M. Sen Hall, built in 1920, during the pivotal days of shawdeshi andolon whichwas basically a movement for self rule. The well-known British-trained barrister and anti-colonial revolutionary, Jatindra Mohan

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Sengupta of Chittagong, commissioned the city's first town hall in honor of his father, advocate Jatra Monan Sengupta. A political hotspot for anti-British meetings during the 1920s, J. M. Sen Hall later became the heart of cultural activities in Chittagong.

I recall venturing out of my father's office to explore this basilica-style town hall's unique wooden architecture and its shapely forecourt that was used for public gathering. Today, in the absence of any conscious preservation efforts, J. M. Sen Hall stands aloof amidst towering apartment buildings. Minutes away was Andarkilla, once the town center during the Mughal era. I used to go there to buy textbooks and stationary, while also routinely visiting a famous bakery that used to sell airplane-shaped saccharine cakes!

While our sweet dreams were fulfilled in the bakery, quite literally, we remained oblivious of the three-domed Shaista Khan-era Jami mosque, built in 1669 located in the same area.

Lal Dighi was not far from there. The Dinghi is the legendary site for political speeches and the famous Abdul Jabbar's Bolikhela (wrestling fair).

We would wait all year for this historic fair, a quintessential Chittagong cultural relic from the early Muslim era. Aristocratic and wealthy Muslim Chittagonians used to traditionally employ professional wrestlers to stage Roman-style gladiatorial sports, albeit without the bloodbath.

Held every year on the 12th day of Boishakh, the first month of the Bengali calendar, Bolikhela has always been a true urban affair that attracts not only wrestlers from many countries, but also artisans, potters, folk artists, traders, pita-makers, and city dwellers. If we didn't get our 3-taka bobbing-head clay dervish doll from the Bolikhela we would be sad for days! If we did, we would laugh incessantly seeing its silly head-nodding!

Bolikhela still takes place, but its democratic, peaceful urban setting is long gone. Today, it is hard to find Lal Dighi, almost hidden by an incessant stream of people, cars, rickshaws, and shops. Chittagong is now marked by an infernal growth frenzy, as if occupying every square inch of the city with buildings means progress! The near-empty flyovers of Bahaddarhat are a tragic reminder of how urban development decisions are taken for political patronage and not for public good.

There is a broader philosophical issue to ponder. Modern city life has been a whirlwind, at least since the beginning of the 20th-century, as Umberto Boccioni's painting, “The City Rises,” showed so presciently almost a hundred years ago.

Cities of the West—London, Paris, Vienna, New York—all have undergone the traumatic process of modernization. These cities, however, withstood the environmental impact of economic growth and prosperity by adopting appropriate planning initiatives. They made mistakes, but they eventually rectified many of their problems which protected the interest of the people.

The crucial question for the cities of Bangla-

desh (and other developing economies) is whether they can avoid making the same planning mistakes of western metropolises in the early stages of their modern growth and adopt the practices of ecologically balanced urbanism.

They can and they must. Chittagong too can.

The first step toward this end would be to start listening to the stories that provided Chittagong its physical persona and mental universe. It is not possible to return to a simpler past, because growth is inevitable. But it is possible to design the present and the future. The city's stories should be the guiding framework for moving forward.

Adnan Morshed is an architect, architectural historian, and urbanist. He received his Ph.D. from MIT, and is currently Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. He is the author of Oculus: A Decade of Insights into Bangladeshi Affairs (UPL) and Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder (forthcoming in Fall 2014 from the University of Minnesota Press).

He serves as a director of the $1M Mellon Foundation Grant to MIT's Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative.

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making cities

Megacity Dhaka

dispersing dhaka

developing a nexus of towns

by Saif Ul Haque and Salma Parvin Khan

2008 was an important year for planet earth as for the first time its urban population reached fifty percent of its total population. It is now estimated that by 2050, seventy percent the figure will go up to indicating that the world is becoming increasingly urban.

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2

008 was an important year for planet earth as for the first time its urban population reached fifty percent of its total population. It is now estimated that by 2050, the figure will go up to seventy percent indicating that the world is becoming increasingly urban. Currently, Tokyo, Jakarta, Seoul, Delhi, Guangzhou, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York, Sao Paulo, Manila and Shanghai are the most populous cities of the world. But rapidly growing cities like Karachi, Shenzhen, Lagos, Beijing, Dhaka, Guangzhou-Foshan, and Istanbul are climbing up the ladder. The forecast is that by 2020, the top ten populous cities of the world will be Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, Dhaka, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, New York, Kolkata, Shanghai and Karachi.

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and a megacity featuring fifth in the list of rapidly growing cities of the world, has been experiencing phenomenal growth during the last few decades which is not showing any sign of slowing down. Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with an estimated population of around 160 million, inhabiting an area of 143,999 square kilometers. Since its independence in 1971, the country has been experiencing a rapid urbanization process, much of it concentrated in Dhaka, followed by its second largest city, Chittagong.

Cities all over the world have many things in common but there are also many differences, an important one being the living condition. The rapid pace of urbanization in Dhaka has exerted tremendous pressure on its urban infrastructure, causing a near breakdown in its services. In particular, the road networks system experiences a regular congestion, causing substantial economic loss and unbearable discomfort to users. Haphazard urban development has choked the natural storm water drainage system, which is responsible for periodic water logging. No wonder the Economist Intelligence Unit study has found Dhaka to be the worst livable city for a number of years.

(from top) Poor planning leading to water logging.

Children in Korail slum.

Land exhausted, constructing in water.

Extending dry land into wetland.

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Poor governance, absence of effective planning, and lack of substantial investment in urban infrastructure have contributed to the current situation. Nevertheless, despite the difficulties of functioning as a livable city, Dhaka the home of more than a million people, continues to thrive, attracting a large number of migrants every year. The dual role that Dhaka plays, being both an administrative as well as a legislative center and the economic hub of the country, is its chief attraction for its citizens.

The fact that the city’s harsh living conditions have not deterred people from not making Dhaka their home may give some solace to some people. but one cannot also escape the question, for how long can this state of things go on? The day may not be far when a total breakdown of the urban system may occur in spite of all the piecemeal measures currently being adopted for its mitigation.

(from top) Sand transportation on water.

Sand pump for creating dry land in wetland.

Imagining the Dhaka Nexus.

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GROWTH INFINITUM Dhaka has been growing both demographically and physically. The physical growth, visible both horizontally and vertically, has taken place mostly in a poorly planned manner, creating numerous problems in the quality of life in the city. Initially extending into flood-free areas, the physical expansion of the city is now taking place in the vast flood plains that surround the city. This process of urbanization of the ecologically sensitive flood plains has been accelerated by indiscriminate dredging of sand from the rivers around the city which is then transported in barges and pumped into the flood plains.

The intention of this mammoth operation is addition of flood-free land for building. This process of land filling and extending the urban boundary has also not been a peaceful one; rather, there are numerous instances of force being applied to occupy land for filling.

Dhaka’s edge conditions defined by nature are continuously being altered. Rivers, canals, ponds, wetlands, and villages are constantly being erased to create land to satisfy the demand for growth.

Alteration of natural conditions without proper planning will no doubt create enormous environmental problems that can have serious implications for the future sustenance of Dhaka.

Some such problems are already visible in terms of

Housing as a balance between open and built up space.

the quality of the environment, social conditions and urban amenities. In terms of environmental changes, the city has lost essential buffer open spaces, natural drainage, and flora and fauna. Socially, there has been an erosion of law and order as clashes and conflicts continue over the issue of land grabbing and forceful eviction of original owners. This process of urban accretion and needs to be looked into with urgency in order to find effective remedial measures.

DEVELOPING TOWNS AROUND DHAKA IS AN OPTION Judging from the current situation and development trends, it can be said that Dhaka will continue to be the centre of the country's administration and economy in the coming days and the pressure on it is not going to ease soon. The increasingly complicated ‘Dhaka problem’ needs to be addressed on an urgent basis – one has to look into all the available solutions before formulating a strategy.

Work is required with both the existing city as well as the expanding city.

The focus of this article is the expanding city.

Whether the city will continue to expand without a boundary definition and ecological sensitivity or alternatives are matters that require urgent attention.

An alternative that needs to be seriously considered is decentralization and dispersion of Dhaka, that is to say, to look beyond Dhaka. Decentralization offers the possibility of improving both existing cities and towns, and also developing new towns and urban areas with easy communication connection with Dhaka and other major cities of the country while offering attractive living, working and leisure urban environments. New developments can lead to absorption of a sizable number of the future urban populations and also initiate a counter migration from Dhaka to these places. This process will undoubtedly reduce pressure on Dhaka.

Towns that can be looked into to share Dhaka's growth include Narsingdi, Munshiganj, Manikganj, Tangail, Kishoreganj, Brahmanbaria, Comilla, Chandpur, Gopalganj, Madaripur, Shariatpur, Faridpur, Rajbari, Mymensing, Sirajganj and Pabna.

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At their current rate of growth these towns and their surrounding areas have ample scope of absorbing more population, thus easing the pressure on Dhaka. Most of these towns are well connected by the national highway network, rail and waterways, and through these networks, access to the two major seaports as well as the land and airports. Success of this option will, however, largely depend on appropriate development economic strategies.

Creation of investment and employment opportunities, quality housing, education, health and leisure facilities for all walks of life is a must for offering attractive alternatives to people opting to inhabit these new areas. What is required is a careful study to identify which activities – manufacturing, service or agriculture – will support the economy of these new developments and provide a dependable and sustainable infrastructure for them.

As a deltaic country, Bangladesh is crisscrossed by numerous rivers and canals that continue to play a major role as an important communication network.

Development of existing and new cities and towns can take place by utilizing this economic mode of communication that nature has provided. Water transportation at this stage offers zero traffic congestion and with suitable landing stations and easy connection to other transportation modes it can be an efficient basis for new development. Along with water communication, expanding other existing modes of transportation will also make these new developments viable. The building of express roads and rail connections also needs to be considered.

While communication is an important requirement, the quality of the environment will also be a critical consideration for people deciding to move into these new developments. Needless to say, the environment of the new developments needs to be an attractive one. Places that are less crowded, having facilities for ease of movement, healthy and safe housing and work places, quality educational and health facilities, ample open spaces, parks, playgrounds, theatres, museums, art galleries and places of leisure, with dependable and clean supply of utility services which one prerequisites for an attractive environment can promote sustainable urbanization.

PUTTING TOGETHER A STRATEGY,

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MASTER AND IMPLEMENTATION PLAN Implementing a plan for dispersing Dhaka and developing towns around Dhaka to absorb a sizable population in the coming years rests largely on arriving at a consensus involving the givernment, political parties, business communities, most of all citizens.

And, for arriving at such a consensus, it is important that a dialogue involving all these stakeholders and actors be initiated without delay.

Once a consensus is reached and potential areas of development identified, the next step will be the preparation of a plan. This plan will essentially have a two-stage exercise. The first stage will involve preparing a strategy plan, and the second stage a master plan. The work can be done in two stages. The strategy plan will describe and illustrate planning and design policies and principles based on a thorough assessment and analysis of existing and future developments. The strategy plan should include the rationale for identifying locations for developing a new township, including its economic potential, communication links with the national road networks, rail networks, year round navigable water system, seaports, land ports and airports, extent of future physical growth keeping in view the physical condition of the location, existing demography and future growth projection, and various institutional requirements such as education, health, and leisure. A timescale and various components of the plan and design also need to be clearly identified in the strategy plan.

The next stage is the preparation of a master plan for each of the identified locations. The master plan has to be a detailed, three-dimensional plan which sets out an intended layout of the development. It will present proposals for buildings, spaces, movement, land uses in three dimensions matching the implementation strategy. The master plan also needs to include ways of sustainable urban environment keeping in view natural and other important features, population size, physical extent of development, communication networks, distribution of housing, workplace and leisure ares, source and distribution of utilities, urban design and planning guidelines and visualization of parts of the proposed township.

The strategy plan and the master plan will together form the essential guideline for implementation.

(top) Parks are the lungs of a city. (bottom) Galleries and Museums are cultural treasure troves.

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(top) Efficient and adequate bus service can make life easy in a city. (bottom) Water transportation is the natural way to go in the deltaic country.

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As the task of preparing the strategy and master plan requires a vision of the future urban environment, it needs to be entrusted to architects who will be aided by urban and regional planners, economists, sociologists, engineers and other experts.

Emphasizing the need for an architect to lead the team is based on the fact that they are trained to produce three dimensional visualizations. The entire exercise can be coordinated by the Ministry of Planning in conjunction with other relevant ministries, the important ones being the Ministries of Finance, Land, Commerce, Local Government, Energy, Water Resource, Communication and the Prime Minister's Office. The initial investment for carrying out the task of preparing the Strategy and the Master Plan can be carried out with local resources.

The proposal outlined above should not be a difficult one to pursue as the government is already carrying out plans for establishing Export Processing Zones (EPZ) and Special Economic Zones (SEZ), Readymade Garments Village and Tannery sites. Our proposal here is an extension of such plans but includes housing and various institutions with a quality urban environment in mind. With Bangladesh's urban population on the rise, a major shift in its distribution within the country is likely to happen in the next decade; and the bulk of the population will surely head for Dhaka unless attractive alternatives are in place. Dispersing Dhaka is therefore an urgent issue.

The sooner this strategy is pursued, the better are the chances of averting an urban disaster of greater scale then what is already happening. The future can be decided today.

Saif Ul Haque is a Dhaka based architect involved in practice, research and education. Salma Parvin Khan is an architect and an urban and regional planner in Dhaka. Diagrams and renderings are by Sadia Sharmin and photographs by Saif Ul Haque.

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making cities

colors of the city There is always an architecture without architects that display an impromptu aesthetics and surreptitious sensibilities.

Colorful buildings and meticulous details made by neighborhood masons and painters create the urban landscape for another Dhaka.

Buildings featured here are from Lalbagh, Mirpur, Banasree, Tejgaon, Shonir Akhra, Jatrabaari, Shantinagar, and Badda.

Research was conducted and photographs were taken by Md Wahiduzzaman Ratul (architect at Shabbir Ahmed Architects), Dilruba Yasmin (lecturer at Dhaka University of Engineering and Technology), Fahmida Islam Aumi (architect at Ehsan Khan Architects), and S M Ruhul Amin Toy (architect at Decon Design Studio).

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book review making cities

Designing Dhaka Cover

reforming dysfunctional dhaka Designing Dhaka: A Manifesto for a Better City. By Kazi Khaleed Ashraf Loka Press, 2012 Dhaka

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tuck in one of dysfunctional Dhaka's horrendous jams, gridlocked by traffic, and with the minutes ticking away, what would you do? a) curse fate that you were born in the city/country; curse the government, and make plans to leave this dystopian nation once for all; b) accept things stoically or even doze off, saying it was all written in the stars and there was nothing that you can do to make things better; c) tell yourself that you are the eternal optimist and things will eventually get better what with new flyovers and all being constructed all over the city, reflecting a government committed to change; d) decide that desperate situations could only be solved

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by drastic redesigning of the city based not only on utopian vision but knowledge of urban success stories of recent history and proactive planning.

If you are Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, you are going to opt for option d), for as his impressive and important book Designing Dhaka: A Manifesto for a Better City suggests in persuasive detail and with impeccable logic, there is ample scope for utopian thinking and drastic redesigning of the city to make it livable, viable and loveable once again. This is a book based on existing knowledge of recent international experience of coping with rapid urbanization, extensive study of the city's unique location and physical features, (no doubt) countless hours spent on modeling a comprehensively designed Dhaka, and, most importantly, love of the city. It is also based on knowledge of the city's past glory, personal experience of its present problems, and a visionary imagination. Ashraf has given us a book to ponder over and be thankful for, but most importantly, to act upon.

Designing Dhaka is premised on the assumption that a newer and re-formed Dhaka is feasible and can be imagined based on radical rethinking, holistic planningz and hands-on designing. Throughout the

A language for the canalfront, image by Arghya Bhattacharjee

book Ashraf provides evidence that he and his colleagues, associates, fellow-architects, and students in Dhaka and the United States have done extensive “urban design exercises”, carried out workshops, discoursed on the city's problems and worked on panaceas for its survival continually before he came up with this manifesto. Indeed, this is not the first “manifesto” Ashraf has published and it is certainly not his first attempt to initiate a discourse on revisioning Dhaka, for as old-time readers of the Daily Star and its now defunct weekly publication Forum will know, he has been tirelessly pursuing his mission to alert us of the way we can rebuild Dhaka and get rid of its immense and seemingly endless problems eventually through willed and transformative action.

As he reminds us in the “Prolog” of the book, it is essentially “a collection of propositions that have been generated over twenty years through various efforts and programs, individually and collectively.”

The core of Designing Dhaka consists of a longish essay titled “A New Dhaka is Possible” and a 15 point manifesto made vivid through slide-like visualization as well as a succinct and thoughtfully developed exposition of each one of them. The essay begins by

taking into account the 400 year history of the urbanization of Dhaka, noting its ups and downs. It describes the contemporary period of the city's formation as nothing less than “wild urbanization”.

But Ashraf feels that the chaos besetting the burgeoning city so neglected by its official caretakers can and must be solved through first raising and then answering two critical questions: “What does Dhaka want to be? What do we want Dhaka to be?” The solution, he declares with the conviction that comes from total commitment is to come up with “big and bold initiatives and not micro responses.” To be utopian in such cases, he implies, is essential. He quotes very appropriately at this point the words of Daniel Burnham, the great American architect largely responsible for redesigning Chicago and Washington DC in the nineteenth century: “We need to dream lest we become like owls accustomed to the night and thinking there is no such thing as light.”

Ashraf's exposition of a new Dhaka first dreamt and then built into existence depends on coming up with a master plan for the city that builds on but also goes way beyond the first one produced for it in 1959, the Dhaka Metropolitan Plan of 1995, the Detailed

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Area Plan of 2009, and on contemporary success stories of urbanization the world over. The plan of the future, he is sure, would have to draw on the city's “geological history”, and the examples of men such as Jaime Lerner, “the former mayor of the miraculous city of Curitibia in Brazil” who in the nineteen-eighties transformed it from “destitution to dazzling hope”.

Such a plan would also be informed by the French Marxist philosopher Henre Lefebvre's concept of “Rights to the City” such as housing, health services, educational institutions, recreational spaces, clean air and greenery—all that relentless constructions work by “developers', land-grabbers sanctioned by officialdom and/or blessed by parties/governments have been scanting, wolves all tearing the body of the city into pieces with their ravenous maws/claws. What Ashraf presumes is that the negative energy that is visible in all the frenzied constructions schemes and projects could be transformed into positive currents based on a “cohesive and comprehensive plan.”

Ashraf's vision for Dhaka is also a vision for a transformed Bangladesh. Perceptively, he notes that a remodeled and functional Dhaka could be replicated throughout the length and breadth of the country through a “greater conversation among planners, engineers and architects/urban designers.” Thinking no doubt of the famous exhortation of the visionary creator of China, Mao Zedong Ashraf would have a “hundred Dhakas' be replicated across the country.

Ashraf's fifteen points—remember Bangobondhu's six-point manifesto so decisive in the birth of Bangladesh?—shows the extent of thought and work that has gone into writing Designing Dhaka.

The first is the credo of urbanism that presupposes “a philosophy of the city” based on divining its “soul” and meditation on its distinctive being. Next is the belief that any viable plan for a livable Dhaka must take into account its deltaic and riverside origins.

Which is to say, Dhaka needs to be re-visioned by making optimum use of its “crucial hydro-geographic system.” This necessitates Ashraf's third point: in the case of Dhaka, planning must begin from its rivers' banks; the key to redesigning the city is to “think 'landwater' use” and not concentrate merely on “land use.”

Consequent to this formulation is the point about an action plan based on preserving Dhaka's wetlands, reclaiming its lost and threatened canals, demarcating its flood zones, and using its water bodies to drain away pollutants; in other words, working with ecoconsciousness and respect for Dhaka's unique

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aqueous-impacted environment.

The fifth point for Dhaka is surely quite obvious but often scanted: the city must be spread out sensibly; the existing city, especially old Dhaka, must not only be restored to its old glories but also revitalized; the new one has to be seems as comprising nodes, or as Ashraf puts it, “a network of settlements” connected through fast and efficient transportation systems. This brings Ashraf logically to his next point— crucial to connectivity will be mass transit. He would like to see more roads of course, but also light rail, dedicated bus routes, “circular river routes” and last, but by no means least in importance, “traffic civility” (although Ashraf could have digressed here to include civility on the whole, discipline, and civic consciousness, which surely should be put under one heading and introduced as a course in all Dhaka schools). But Ashraf is well aware that paying attention to mass transportation systems can never be enough, and so his next point stresses streets dedicated to pedestrians, sidewalks reserved only for walking, promenades and esplanades paralleling our water bodies, covered walkways where appropriate, and all these constructions carried out with aesthetic finesse, helped by astute landscape gardening.

Ashraf's subsequent three points are perhaps the ones that would occur as the most obvious ones for people who are less sophisticated and untutored than him but who are already engaged in the civic designing of a city. In Point Eight he thus recognizes like these people the urgent and unending need for housing, but his punning exhortation to them is “stop plotting and scheming”. To put it somewhat differently, it is the nexus of corrupt administrators and landsharks that lie at the root of the problem of a city that can't offer decent housing to its denizens. The thing to do instead is to plan in terms of housing clusters and “compact walkable neighborhoods.” The next point underscores the importance of keeping intact whatever open spaces are still left and planning for more gardens, parks and cultural happening places anywhere and everywhere with them. Ashraf then turns to the question of city government, for he recognizes the urgent need for good governance, enlightened leadership, and a mayor of the stature of Tayyip Erdgoan, who transformed Istanbul between 19941998, Segio Fajardo, who uplifted Medellin between 2004 and 2007, Lee Myung-bak who heroically came up with a green Seoul in the first decade of this century, and most importantly, Jamie Lerner, who in

his three terms of Mayor of Curtiba in the nineteen seventies proved that “even a desperate city can be turned around.”

The final five points of Ashraf's fifteen point manifesto rely heavily on his architectural background.

Point Ten notes that preserving heritage sites and “architectural and urban treasures and maintaining historic districts are crucial to make a city special as is planning for diversity and variety in city redesigning.”

The point that follows notes the necessity of having more “catalytic architecture” or daring feats of redesigning and construction based on “exhibitionary buildings” such as Louis Kahn's creations or the dramatically redone Hatirjheel. Such projects can clearly transform neighborhoods and make the city spectacularly different as a phenomenon and infinitely pleasing a place to be in. Ashraf is conscious too of providing citizens with places where they can play, perform, gather, loiter, read and just relax, and as he puts it at the end of his thirteenth point: “This is the Dhaka we dream of. And it is possible.” His fourteenth point would take advantage of the rapid industrialization of Bangladesh centered on its capital city; he would have arrangements made for structures and facilities that will not only facilitate increased movement and meet housing needs ensuing from fastpaced economic development, but will also poise the city so that it can become a hub of regional and international financial and trade activities. Ashraf's final point may at first seem his most far-fetched argument but, in fact, it is among his most critical ones: what with global warming, climate change and rising sea levels Dhaka needs to come up with schemes of “sustainable urbanism” through radical ideas such as solar farming, water harvesting, waste recycling and energy-efficient buildings. As he concludes sensibly and wisely, “Dhaka will have to demonstrate that it recognizes the enormity of the challenges of climate change and is prepared to develop innovations to face that with its own resources and capabilities.”

Ashraf's Designing Dhaka thus offers a comprehensive, systematic, thought-provoking as well as thoughtfilled plan for re-designing the city and overhauling it drastically so that we are ready for a city that will withstand the immense pressure on its resources. He has also given in this book the schemes and arguments that can take Dhaka's citizens towards the urban future they deserve. But what makes Ashraf's book so convincing an exposition of such a Dhaka are the

Riverfront walk Khaleed Ashraf

details he offers of his plan through figures, maps, photographs, models, illustrations and diagrams. All of these features make Designing Dhaka a beautiful book to look at and a compelling work to ponder over where the reader's imagination is stimulated by the wealth of images offered and where he and she can at least imagine the possibility of his or her dream of a livable, loveable Dhaka come true.

It would be great to only use superlatives about this brilliant book but it does have a weakness that must be noted and that the writer must eliminate in future editions. The book has been produced lovingly as far as content and graphics are concerned, but it needs to be edited much more carefully. More attention, for sure, needs to be paid to the writing; the labor of love that is Designing Dhaka surely must be re-presented to us as perfectly as is possible.

It is important, however, to end with praise. Kazi Khaed Ashraf has given us an invaluable book that needs to be read by our politicians, administrators, business people, and all citizens with the consciousness that something drastic and dramatic must be done for Dhaka without delay. Hopefully, next time they are stuck in traffic jam, such people will have a copy of Designing Dhaka to read while waiting for their cars to move again so that they can think of a different Dhaka made possible by ideas derived from the

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the greening of architecture Rafiq Azam Architecture for Green Living Skira - Bengal Foundation, 2013 Milan

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n his 1851 classic, Moby-Dick, the great American novelist Herman Melville makes his meditative and depression-prone narrator Ishmael ponder on mid-nineteenth century Manhattan and its citizens and then exclaim, “but these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this?

Are the green fields gone? What do they here?” Surely, a sensitive and sensible Dhakaite, contemplating the mushrooming, mildewed metropolis that Dhaka has now become in the second decade of the no longer new millennium, and surveying its cluttered, chaotic, soulless buildings and jaded, fed-up citizens, could say, “where have our lush-green spaces, our flowing water bodies disappeared; how can we cope any longer with this claustrophobic world? Where is the way out of

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urban squalor and dreary cityscapes?”

Surely, one way out of Dhaka's ugly and nightmare-inducing sprawl will be to reclaim its verdant spaces and flowing water bodies through daring architecture and visionary planning. This is the message that the exquisitely produced book Rafiq Azam: Architecture for Green Living delivers so effectively at this critical juncture of the city's existence. Surely, the kind of vision embodied in architect Rafiq Azam's work can lead to a design recipe that others may emulate so that we can start rebuilding for a viable, livable city where even in crowded, poor neighborhoods as well as relatively spread out, affluent ones, one can hope to view greenery everywhere, breathe fresh air, and even glance occasionally with pleasure at the few water bodies still surviving in the city. Viewed from this perspective, this is a timely and valuable book, and Azam's visionary architecture and the thinking behind it deserves the compliment of close attention.

Clearly, Bengal Foundation (along with Skira Editore, the Milan-based and internationally renowned publisher of fine arts book committed to splendid publications) has brought out Rafiq Azam: Architecture for Green Living purposefully to show how Bangladeshi cities can still salvage nature's bounty through creative architecture that takes inspiration from Bangladesh's

infinitely green and riverside world. In fact, Abul Khair, Chairman of the Bengal Foundation, suggests in his introductory note that he has “dreamed of creating a new vision for Dhaka that would take in the beautiful rivers and canals encircling the city” and that would “become an urban planning charter for its future growth.” That is no doubt why Bengal Foundation felt that it should co-produce this book to enable readers to view not only Azam's architectural creations and read his thoughts about them, but also to see them in the perspective of insightful essays and a thought-provoking interview that articulate fully the aesthetics informing the architect's creations.

The first of the prefatory essays by Rose Maria Falvo, the Italian Editor of the volume, titled “The Poetics of Space” notes how Azam's architecture is rooted in a landscape full of water bodies and abundantly green vegetation and an enduring tradition of poetry, folk art and even science (remarkably, she reminds us in this context of Jagadish Chandra Bose's experiments with plants) expressive of nature's bounty, if only to make us aware of the necessity of human interaction with “its beauty and potential.”

Falvo's work is followed by the distinguished Australian architect Kerry Hill's brief but suggestive piece where he notes that Azam's achievement is in his discovery that “a building must respond to its physical location,” which is why his buildings make so much out of “the use of water, the placement of a tree, and the masterful orchestration of sun and shade.”

These shorter pieces of this lavishly conceived and sprawling book are followed by two more substantial essays on Azam's architectural vision. The first of them is by Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, the author of Designing Dhaka, the important book on the city reviewed elsewhere in this issue. Perceptively, Ashraf situates Azam's work in two major contexts. The first of these is what he identifies, following the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, as “second modernity”, that is to say, the modernity of the digital age and late capitalism, which has to contend with relentless “development” and “the dense hyper-built fabric of an urban reality.” Ashraf sees in Azam someone who extends the modernist architecture of Le Courbusier and Louis Kahn. However, he also views Azam as someone who walks in the footsteps of Muzharul Islam, the pioneering Bangladeshi architect, who brought modernist architecture to this part of the world, and even succeeded in giving some of his

buildings a Bengali facade through the use of pavilions, “projected eaves and green setting.” But still another context of Azam's work for Ashraf is the flora and fauna, the watery landscape and seasons of Bangladesh. In other words, Azam's is an architecture where location is the ultimate determinant and source of inspiration. What the architect does, Ashraf suggests insightfully, is meld these two contexts, inspired in this also perhaps by the contemporary Japanese master architect Kengo Kuma, so that modernist fascination with form is blended with “the reality of tropical nature.”

The second of the longer essays prefacing Azam's part of the book is by Philip Goad, an Australian professor of architecture. Deftly, Goad places Azam's creations alongside those of other contemporary architects of Asia such as Kevin Low of Malaysia, Andra Matin of Indonesia and Chelvaduri Anjalendran of Sri Lanka, all of them designers committed to “ practice that is thoroughly in tune with the constructive capacities of its context.” Goad notes that even in his first major work which involved redesigning his mother's Lalbagh house, Azam tried to

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work with “places of nurturing landscape, conviviality, contemplation and quiet,” based on treasured memories of an old Dhaka that is now facing urbanization on an unprecedented and unbearable scale. Elsewhere, Azam has incorporated water too into his designs to complement greenery. As Goad puts it, “The courtyard, water, and the garden are the three essential elements of Rafiq Azam's act of dreaming Dhaka into his unique building projects.”

But Azam's ability to incorporate Dhaka's traditions goes beyond a preoccupation with giving a green look to his creations and keeping provision for water bodies in his design. Goad thus notes Azam's use of brick and concrete, “local stuff ” of buildings, both rooted in building practices that go as far back in history as the medieval city of Pundranagar, which existed close to where Dhaka now is, where brick was also used as the basic building material. The use of reinforced concrete, on the other hand, has been spectacularly established in Kahn's constructions in Sher-E-Bangla Nagar. But Goad notes other international influences on Azam's increasingly ambitious later works—the Australian architect Glenn Murcutt's “language of thinness” and the Japanese architect Tadao Ando's innovative concrete constructions to give buildings protection from seismic upheavals. For Goad, then, Azam's “new modernism” is dreamt out of Bengali history and the Bengal landscape but also out of modernist and internationalist experiments with brick and concrete. As far as Goad is concerned, this unique fusion makes Azam “symptomatic of a new generation of architects “who are “rooted in their own traditions but who combine local knowledge with cosmopolitan building and structural innovations”, benefitting, as it were, from “transnational practices.”

These prefatory essays are followed by the main section of the book where Azam's building projects—completed or ready to be executed—are displayed chronologically in vivid and elegant fashion.

Each project is introduced by Azam succinctly so that readers can understand the vision behind it; some excellent photographs, sketches and drawings; and in some cases, models. These image the projects delightfully as well and make them meaningful for readers. Interspersed throughout are bonuses for readers provided by Azam in the form of his beautiful watercolor pieces that reveal his fondness for the colors suffusing Bangladesh's landscapes. Beginning with the project that lead to his rebuilding his mother's Lalbagh residence, this part of the book concludes

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with Azam's works-in-progress, at least a couple of which are meant to be constructed outside Bangladesh sometime soon. Seen in sequence, they also show an architect who began by designing modestly but who now dreams grandly and even with the confidence of a visionary builder.

Azam's introductory notes to his various projects reveal his nostalgia for Dhaka's lost green spaces.

They show him to be a romantic, someone who would retrieve those spaces and gesture at least at recreating “heaven on earth.” They indicate that he is sensitive to the need to play with light and shade and offer vistas of “nature and the sky” as well as water. These brief paragraphs also tell of his conviction that Bangladesh's climactic conditions must figure in any building design. They point to an aesthetic that considers sociability as an important consideration in such design, for he has no doubt that opportunities of communal interaction must be treasured just as the need for privacy should be ensured by the architect.

Where Azam has more space to work with, as in his later works where he was commissioned to build outside the city, he reveals a mystical/metaphysical side, as in his execution of a family graveyard project in Noakhali, where he points out he that he attempted to create “a transcendental space, connecting the temporal to the celestial through a frame made of concrete.”

The final part of Architecture for Green Living consists of a section where the eminent writer and critic Syed Manzoorul Islam engages Rafiq Azam in a conversation that very successfully highlights major aspects of the architect's aesthetic, while illuminating the man behind the work. We realize from it that Azam's instincts have always been painterly and that he is a natural fit in a profession that blends “science and art.” The conversation indicates that Azam is at least in instinct a poet, for he creates images as a poet would by playing with “desire, hope, and memories.”

But the conversation also reveals an architect who is very au courant as well as architectural theory is concerned, as when he talks about “the changing textuality of architecture” or reveals his intimate knowledge of the works of Louis Kahn and Glenn Murcott. The interview is important, finally, because Islam makes Azam ponder over the challenges facing the architect in contemporary Bangladesh, where the architect must contend with shrinking spaces, water logging, river and land erosion, and the sundry problems of a developing country. As Azam so pithily

expresses the predicament facing Bangladeshi architects in our time: “at the moment, architecture here is at a cross-road between necessity and desire.”

However, any thoughtful reader of Azam's book will think at this point of the central problem associated with the presentation of his architectural oeuvre in this otherwise splendid book—Azam articulates the predicament of contemporary Bangladeshi architects well, but he himself seems to have opted not to face the predicament in the work that he took up after his Lalbagh project. Almost all his later works appear to be designed for affluent neighborhoods of Dhaka, or for people or establishments based outside Bangladesh. In other words, he talks about the problems of designing buildings in crowded Dhaka eloquently, but in his work he has been evading it consistently. Where in the architectural execution of his vision is the Dhaka that we all know—the jam-packed, chaotic, increasingly ugly city where 99 % of its citizens live? It is all very well to talk about panaceas for these places but he can only offer one of his buildings as a solution. What is the use of a “philosophy” that clearly perpetuates the charge always brought against architects—they cater to the rich and come up with projects that only the wealthy can translate into reality? No reader of the book will doubt that Azam has been getting better and better in his work, but has not he been working exclusively with open spaces, plots neighboring lakes and water bodies, and already green and sprawling places such as Gulshan or Savar or Ghazipur?

The other caveat that must be recorded about this otherwise exemplary book is Azam's very loose use of the word “philosophy” as when he prefaces the section on the Mamun Residence that he designed in Chittagong by saying “the philosophical cue here came from the traditional mathal (hat) farmers in this region wear during harvesting to protect them from rain and sun.” At least to this reader, such a statement sounds pretentious; surely, words such as “philosophy” or for that matter “mysticism” must be used with precision and must not be bandied about, or made to sound like waffling.

These caveats aside, it must be said that Architecture for Green Living is as good a book as one can have on one's coffee or tea table. However, it should be treated not only a visual feast but also as a work that will have some use as a source of ideas for future planners and architects here in Bangladesh and elsewhere. The book is of course not meant for everyday use and will no

doubt be owned by very few people because of the expense that has gone into its production, but it is to be hoped that it will find its way into university libraries, architectural studios, town planning resource centers and think tanks, because it contains much food for thought for architects, town planners, designers, and anyone interested in the beautification of Dhaka as well as the eventual restoration of greenery to its neighborhoods. It is also to be hoped that the work will be seen by the discerning as a worthy tribute to a visionary architect's unfolding design brilliance and evolving aesthetics.

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