Relational Urbanism: A ruleset for agent-based evolution of the city by Jason Heinrich

RELATIONAL URBANISM: A RULESET FOR AGENT-BASED EVOLUTION OF THE CITY by Jason William Heinrich B.Eng., University of Victoria, 2009

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture in The Faculty of Graduate Studies School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Architecture Program

The University of British Columbia (Vancouver)

April 2016

Committee:

Mari Fujita (GPII Chair)

Signature: ____________________________

Ray Cole (GP1 Chair)

Signature: ____________________________

Martin Nielsen Signature: ____________________________ `

Â© Jason Heinrich, December 2016

The aftermath of modernism has fractured the Western city’s social and natural relationships through the increasing formalization, prescription, and separation of the city as parts. The scale of building, capital and regulatory bureaucracy, and the rapid urbanization has limited the informal component of the city, the complex network of relationships between inhabitants, nature, and built form that evolves through inhabitant agency. To repair and grow these relationships, the architect must give agency for shaping the city back to the inhabitants through an incremental process of assemblage; this thesis intent is to design a new rulebook based on adjacent relationships for mediating formal systems and informal agency and to define not how much, but how little formal prescription is necessary for productive growth. Relational Urbanism is an exploration of the process of decentralized city building that began with the question: can the rules that dictate a modern city be relative to local contexts (instead of absolute values) dictated by the many agents that make up a city? BASECO, an informal settlement in Manila, Philippines was analyzed and simulated to understand existing models of multi-agent and decentralized planning. Using a housing

settlement model by Augustijn-Beckers, Flacke, Retsios, the process of development was simulated. The results demonstrated that high levels of complex organization are possible through many localized decisions and negotiations between agents (e.g. settlers). Kitsilano, a neighbourhood of Vancouver, BC, was selected as a test site for a hybrid urban ruleset due to its relative low density, future rapid rail transit station (and projected development), and high degree of central planning. The proposed hybrid ruleset simplified the existing zoning bylaws into five rules and applied them dynamically—the values for each rule are determined by the local and regional contexts and constantly update as development occurs, creating a fluid ‘relational typology’. Within each block, a local free market for negotiation and transfer of development assets (e.g. excess density) fosters negotiation, and development based on the collective decisions of the inhabitants. The relational ruleset was simulated on neighbourhood and block scales, and resulted in an incremental development process that doubled density over thirty years with a gradient between dense transit hubs and infill neighbourhoods.

RELATIONAL

URBANISM iii

ABSTRACT iii CONTENTS iv ILLUSTRATIONS vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS viii DEDICATION ix GP01 01 welcome 03 Urban Complexity and Informality

abstract boundaries of design 04 abstract boundaries of property 06 abstract boundaries of ownership 07 the emerging city of complexity and diversity of scales 08 abstract boundaries of scale 10 informality, agency and adaptation 11 conclusion 16 Case Studies 17 la maison mÃ©dicale faculty housing 19 la defense 23

CONTENTS

diagoon housing 25 casa familiar 27 quinta monroy 30 making space in dalston 33 baseco 35 case study comparison 42 A New Rulebook for Development in Vancouver

proposing a new rulebook 46 site selection 46 site mapping 48

GP02 63 research question 68 zoning, vancouver and the cd-1 74 relational zoning 76 urban simulation 80 three block simulation 89 results 104 further questions 104 BIBLIOGRAPHY 107

Figure 1: Comparison of morphology of the old town of Muharraq, Bahrain and a modern suburb of Muharraq.

Figure 2: Example of cellular automaton. 9 Figure 3: Adjacency based aggregation of units at various scales.

Figure 4: Scales of operation in the formation of formal and informal settlements.

Figure 5: An informal assemblage in Baseco, Manila responding formal organizing infrastructure before (red) and after (blue) a typhoon. 17 Figure 6: Process of design for hybrid architecture.

Figure 7: Map and timeline of case study projects.

Figure 8: Exteriro of La Maison Médicale faculty housing.

Figure 9: La Mémé Floor Plan 29 Figure 10: Examples of inhabitant adaptions and infill to a dwelling

Figure 11: Exterior fire escapes and balconies provide continuous flow and multiple entrances.

Figure 12: Top of the Slab (constructed ground plane).

Figure 13: View of La Defense from old Paris along Champs Elysee axis.

Figure 14: Section of the Slab with proposed shopping mall.

Figure 15: Axonometric of Diagoon Housing.

Figure 16: Diagoon housing plan variations. Credit:

Figure 17: Streetview of Diagoon Housing. 37 Figure 18: Incremental development of Casa Familiar Housing.

Figure 19: Street views of exsiting non-conforming land use in San Ysidro.

Figure 20: Development of zoning policy for San Ysidro.

Figure 21: After initial construction (left) and adaptations five years later (right).

Figure 22: Courtyard and housing five years after inhabitation.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 23: Examples of interior adaptation.

Figure 24: Connecting public spaces. 45 Figure 25: Temporary road event and temporary playground in Gillette Square.

Figure 26: Mapping of cultural spaces. 47 Figure 27: Baseco and adjacent Metro Manila.

Figure 28: Baseco land accumulation from 2001, 2005 and 2010.

Figure 29: Tiers of housing quality based on topological and weather security and settlement time.

Figure 30: Three section cuts through Baseco showing the tiers of dwelling evolution.

Figure 31: Morphology of informal meeting formal.

Figure 32: Scales and densities of capital exchanges of case studies.

Figure 33: Table of tactics for informality and agency.

Figure 34: Conceptual volumetric assemblage of Vancouverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s evolving suburban typologies.

Figure 35: Proposed Broadway corridor subway.

Figure 36: Illustrative sketch included in the CD-1.

Figure 37: Arbutus/Vine Industrial Area Boundary of the CD-1 and adapted hierarchy of access infrastructure.

Figure 38: Formal zoning map with radius from W Broadway Ave & Arbutus St.

Figure 39: Traditional nolli ground floor plan.

Figure 40: Revised nolli plan with public, restricted and private space for informality.

Figure 41: Private and public amenities within 5 pedestrian minutes.

Figure 42: Future pedestrian access within 5 minutes due to proposed subway: W Broadway Ave & MacDonald St. and W Broadway Ave & Granville St.

Figure 43: Photo documentation of amenity space, informal adaptation, and boundary conditions.

vii

I owe immeasurable gratitude to the following, for their guidance, support and critique.

Mari Fujita

Ray Cole

Martin Nielsen

Sara Stevens

Scot Hein

Andrea Comande

Geoffrey Cox

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

viii

For Renee, Ira, Jude, and the boys at Shishya.

DEDICATION

Urbanism is a complex network relationships that evolve through exchanges between entities of diverse scales at varying durations. Architecture is primarily concerned with prescribing exchange on a subset of physical scales with a fixed temporality. Related to the prescriptive is an informal and incomprehensibly complex layering of exchange: financial, manufactured, social, human, and natural. What then is a city but a spatial concentration of exchanges and an evolving network of relationships? Cities have increasingly been separated into predominantly formal or informal sectors. Modern cities are increasingly formalizing, resulting in a scale of development beyond the agency of inhabitants. The counterpart to this development is informal settlements which act as an assemblage but contain a particular scale of agent and thus exchange between its parts. Both sectors suffer from a lack of diversity since each tend to operate a specific scale. The integration of formal and informal and the resulting differentiated scales of parts enables more exchanges and new networks of relationships. Thus an architecture of relationships operates at the interstice of formal and informal, becoming a hybrid of prescribed design and fluid assemblage that operates on multiple nested scales of adjacency.

The challenge for the architect then becomes: »» to understand existing formal systems (e.g. regulations, built form) and mediate these systems to provide small agency and informal relationships; and »» to determine the degree of prescriptive design to enable productive agency within the productive and existing formal systems. The case studies provide a wide range of precedents for incorporating and designing for agency and informality. Collectively, they provide insight into a new set of tactics for designers. These projects can be grouped based on the mediating tactics: »» Base infrastructure/skeleton: La Defense, Diagoon Houses, Quinta Monroy, La Meme, »» Adaptation of formal environment: La Meme, Casa Familiar, Baseco »» Space for temporary occupation: Making Space in Dalston The intersection and surrounding neighbourhood of W Broadway Avenue and Arbutus Street in Vancouver has been selected as the site for testing this thesis due to the proposal of a new subway line and the resulting future development.

01 01

welcome

Urbanism is a complex network relationships that evolve through exchanges between entities of diverse scales at varying durations. Architecture is primarily concerned with prescribing exchange on a subset of physical scales with a fixed temporality. Related to the prescriptive is an informal and incomprehensibly complex layering of exchange: financial, manufactured, social, human, and natural. Exchange is a critical term, for it denotes two (or more) entities and a reciprocal relationship. Exchange does not elevate any single actor or item of transfer, but considers all as parts; therefore, exchange is both object and action, form and process, and spatial and temporal. Relationships emerge from a continuing pattern of exchange. What then is a city but a spatial concentration of exchanges and an evolving network of relationships? This is certainly how the first cities emerged, without planning but with exchange between land and human, human and material, and human and human. Slowly, spaces were appropriated and joined the intricate network of exchange. Physical walls were added but exchange persisted, for if severed

from the network, a space would secede from urbanism. This understanding implies that the city is not formal or social, but a combination of built form, social activity, natural ecology, and financial economy. Throughout history, cities have been premised on an arising spontaneous order that emerges out of multiple actors spontaneously and adopting a dynamic set of action relative to other actors.1 This process occurs at both the individual and collective scale, developing networks of beneficial relationships that become an attractor for more agents. This produces a city of incremental agglomerations of individually and collectively built form along natural paths of movement. North American cities, however, have been built from a prescriptive set of rules relating to an abstract grid of access and property. This prescriptive urbanism has defined the typologies of cities in the modern era.

01//01 Âť URBAN COMPLEXITY AND INFORMALITY

abstract boundaries of design: spatial politics and building codes

Regulation is required to mediate the spatial (or otherwise) politics that arise between agents. According to Hayek, the role of regulations and judges is to preserve spontaneous order—given sufficient scale of authority and density of spatial politics, these regulations are compiled into comprehensive building codes.2 Cities initially started without regulation, but conflict demanded arbitration. Over time, patterns of conflict recognized by a collective organization formalized arbitration into regulation. Interestingly, many of the original building codes started not as prescriptive codes that are common today, but as proscriptive codes that impose restraint. Proscriptive codes are those which say, “thou shalt not…” whereas prescriptive codes are those that say, “thou shalt…” The former is an open ended constraint and premised on a relational conflict, whereas the latter is an interpreted solution that is severed from the original conflict. This distinction becomes important not only for designers working on creative solutions, but more importantly for the dynamic nature of cities and society—as cultures age and relationships and values change, prescriptive rules are much more likely to become inapplicable and restrictive towards this evolution. Hakim followed the common morphologies of ancient Mediterranean cities and traced building codes back to a common set of both proscriptive and prescriptive standards, the 6th century treatise of Julian of Ascalon. This treatise deals with a wide range of legal systems including building customs. Written in Palestine for the Byzantine Empire, the treatise was adopted in Egypt, Arabia, Tunisia, Andalusia and Greece, with prescriptive rules adapted specifically for each culture. The intent of these customs was clearly identified and is arguably still applicable for today’s cities: “The goal is to deal with change in the built environment by ensuring that minimum damage occurs to preexisting structures and their owners, through stipulating fairness in the distribution of

rights and responsibilities among various parties, particularly those who are proximate to each other. This ultimately will ensure the equitable equilibrium of the built environment during the process of change and growth.” 3 These codes defined an important set of relationships at various scales. Between neighbours, it literally describes how to embed houses into each other to create a single continuous building through iterative additions. The treatise proscribes rules at the neighbourhood scale to ensure issues of access. Without a master plan, these scaled rule sets created a common morphology that was highly adaptive to the present needs within a dynamic culture—each incremental form reflects the present needs of the city while responding to the adjacent forms. Old city centers such as Muharraq in Bahrain still maintain this ancient morphology. This preoccupation with adjacency creates a dramatically different morphology than the modernist Cartesian regulatory system that is premised on abstract property lines and geometric order. The suburbs surrounding Muharraq developed in the 20th century follow this new morphology.4 In the early 20th century, planners and architects sought an efficient industrialized city, rejecting the irrational spontaneity of historical cities. Le Corbusier’s plan Voisin first demonstrated a shift in design from the scale of the pedestrian and resident to the scale of the automobile and work force. The city became master planned and separated into parts consisting of subdivisions, industrial parks, and commercial centers. This process of rational compartmentalization has largely been considered a failure since the destruction of Pruitt Igoe and Charles Jencks famous declaration that modern architecture died. However, many of the modern processes persist and inhabitants are alienated from environments through the overlay of an abstract organizing intermediary (i.e. the grid of property and roads).

Figure 1: Comparison of morphology of the old town of Muharraq, Bahrain (above) and a modern suburb of Muharraq (below). Credit: Hakim, B.

abstract boundaries of property: city as market, building as commodity

North American cities were divided equitably into a grid and land was partitioned into homogeneous parts. Despite noble intentions, our cities and our architecture have suffered from the superimposition of an abstract legal guarantee that has reduced land to property. This guarantee is backed by a formal organization of power and grants an abstract value that is measured relative to all other commodities. Blackwell argues then, that “this apparatus, built of heterogeneous parts, is the concrete abstraction that organizes all spaces subject to the capitalist mode of production and power. As a result, property is both the foundation and guiding form of all contemporary architecture.”5 This abstraction of land prioritizes the exchange of financial capital, of which the value considers only a small subset of the associated spatial exchanges. A recursive analysis of housing condos in Vancouver, for instance, show that value is based predominantly on a hierarchy of size, views, distance from major transportation infrastructure, and number of bathrooms.6 Following the widespread adoption of neoliberal policies in the 1980s, the built environment began to take on a fundamentally different role from the traditional function of shelter or even the capitalist view of space for production; space as property became the means of production. Buildings entered into the economic commodity cycle: low cost production traded for the highest possible return. What is unfolding has long been pointed out by Henri Lefebvre: urbanism is both a means of production and a product of it.7 This recursive process leads to spatial homogeneity, as is evident by the increased commoditization and trend towards a generic set of North American building stock. Lefebvre describes the homogenization of abstract space as both fluid but separate. “Formal boundaries are gone between town and country, between center and periphery, between suburbs and city centres, between the domain of automobiles and the domain of people . . . And yet everything (“public facilities,” blocks of flats, “environments of living”) is separated, assigned in isolated fashion to unconnected “sites” and “tracts”; the spaces themselves are specialized just as operations are in the social and technical division of labour.”8 Lefebvre’s description recalls the image of most North American cities and Vancouver in particular. A spatial grid of streets and property have created a boundless urbanism that is inherently separated and insular. Abstract legal boundaries define architectural and political limits, reinforcing the city as a series of isolated buildings. Perhaps Rem Koolhaus’s view of

Manhattan as a cultural archipelago in Delirious New York, is accurate in identifying isolated cultures, for the archipelago city requires layers of relationship stripped away to become a series of isolated urban centers.9 Property is production and thus its function is to seek its own highest return. This functionality is inherently insular. It sets forth an ideology of capitalistic individualism, and reduces series of natural complexity to prescribed politics between neighbouring properties and the city networks. The trend towards generic commoditization is certainly observed in Vancouver, particularly amongst downtown condominium towers and Shaughnessy estates. Downtown has little new housing commodity as current development has become concentrated around new Skytrain stations, particularly in Marpole, Brentwood Mall, and Cambie Corridor. The grid has become the antithesis to the equitable and nonhierarchical order—views, parks, and rapid transit have created a hierarchy of value within the grid and thus the grid has organized land into fungible commodities. That is, the demarcation of property in an abstract and rational system facilitates the speculation and commodification of property. Upon its inception, Vancouver’s property was parceled for individual purchase and outside of downtown resulted largely in suburb development. The suburb is a curious condition of mass production at a scale that allows for adaption and incremental evolution of properties. Similar to Vancouver, Tokyo also functions similarly (albeit more densely) with single properties allowing for a slow regeneration of the city. In Vancouver, the increasing financial and regulatory scales for development have favored larger developments which has resulted in the agglomeration of properties to create larger typologies, such as podium block and tower typology in Downtown, and block condominiums in the rest of the city. Although the space of these mega projects is typically subdivided into increasingly smaller volumes (typically legally divided as condominiums), the scale of design occurs at the macro scale, creating homogeneous and unadaptable micro-units. This jump in scale has meant that architecture has become a tool for the developer, the entity with access to large capital and able to negotiate the bureaucratic regulatory process. The result is a distribution of units dictated by a market that prioritizes investment over inhabitation, and a fundamental shift in residents understanding of ownership from place to commodity. The shift in ownership ideology further reduces networks of relationships between citizens and their environment, while the increasing scale of development favours formal and top-down agency for shaping the city as opposed to informal citizen based change.

abstract boundaries of ownership: city as disassociation

Property as a prescribed regulatory system of spatial organization has lost its original intent within the global neoliberal evolution of Vancouver. Matthew Soules refers to this form of Vancouverism as “controlled, safe, and hygienic version of the city that is urban in scale and density but suburban in character.”10 This description of a controlled

urbanism is enforced through the top-down growth and operation of the city by planners, developers, and strata councils. The suburban character of Vancouverism, however, offers a false promise of agency over one’s environment (or ‘land’ in the original suburb context).

Ownership of space as a commodity changes not only the designer’s intent but the resident’s occupation of the city. The urban sociologist, Robert Park wrote: “man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.”11

formal plans, regulations, and codes. For instance, external building rating systems like LEED have been adopted, but these are prescriptive solutions that target individual entities without engaging in the complex network of exchanges between the residents of the city. Centrally automated buildings offer greater efficiency but at the cost of removing exchanges between residents and environment and further disassociating residents’ agency.

If Park’s commentary is true, then the definition of the city is intangible from the definition of its residents. What does a city that prioritizes financial capital and adapts, grows, and functions at the corporate scale, say about its residents? More alarming is the question: how can residents initiate change—for themselves and for the city—when their agency has been removed? Agency for shaping one’s environment extends beyond one’s own identity and space. Larger issues such as climate change have been targeted by

From abstract space Lefebvre predicts the emergence of a diverse, differentiated space.12 This diversity will not be generated from converging topdown formal systems; thus, it will emerge from the bottom-up as a series of individual actions. David Harvey builds from Lefebvre’s arguments to claim the collective inhabitants the right to the city, that is “some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and re-made and to do so in a fundamental and radical way.”13 This right to the city begins with the need for a diverse scale of agency and a return of the spontaneous informal.

the emerging city of complexity and diversity of scales

Jane Jacobs’ well known critique of the modernist city, Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, is founded on insights of citizens and relationships. The final chapter discusses problems of the modernist approach of singlevariable organized simplicity and the reality of multi-variable organized complexity. The latter for which she defines an entirely different method of study that stemmed from authenticity and spontaneity: “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”14 This mode of thinking further influenced her economic theories when she later described how economic growth happened incrementally by small businesses expanding in service and geographically and forming trade relationships with other cities. This type of organization through accumulation of relationships was academically defined as complexity science decades later by Stephen Wolfram. Stephen Wolfram, a computer scientist and mathematician, presented an alternative scientific method to explore processes unexplained by traditional science—processes that include urbanism. Emergence is the process described by complexity science and is based upon cellular automaton. Matheiu Helie describes cellular automaton in a simplified model: “Each cell in a row is an actor, making a decision on its next action based on its state and the states of its direct neighbors. All cells share the same rule set to determine how to do this, that is to say all cells will act the same way with the same context. In this way each row is the product of the actions of the cells in a previous row, forming a feedback loop. The patterns of these rows are not in themselves interesting, but when collected in a sequence and displayed as a two-dimensional matrix, they develop complex structures in this dimension.”15 The process described is comprised of many actors that act independently but according to a common set of rules. Emergent urbanism is a similar set of processes, but with a diversity of actors and heterogeneous but related set of rules; differentiated space is created out of the existing city network of buildings to fulfill a need the existing building stock cannot meet. This differentiated space can be any type of space such as new or renovated buildings or public squares. Complexity science can be used as a formal

parametric tool for ordering chaos and creating classical notions of beauty by patterning disparate parts through a common transformative language but the power of emergence is the inherent exchange networks that develop through adjacency based aggregation. This type of development is one that responds to current needs and existing relationships. Each aggregate is able to respond to the nuances of its needs as well as the existing adjacent needs and potentials in a radially diminishing prioritization of relationships. Figure 3 demonstrates an example of a single unit’s hierarchy of relationships: the top diagram represents the internal relationships; the second shows the adjacent relationship of other agents such as a tree or another dwelling; the third diagram shows the indirect adjacencies within the block; and the last represents adjacencies beyond the block cluster, severed by a formal boundary such as a transportation network. A geometrical and formal emergence is useful as a measurable signifier of emergence but should not be considered the product of an emerging urbanism. Steven Johnson describes emergent processes in self-organizing ants, brains, and cities—the critical function of these systems is the process of exchange between parts.16 Geometry is fixed, but the emergent city is continually being redefined as new agents are added and existing agents are adapted and renewed. Many architects have explored ideas relating to complexity science with a focus on urban patterns, such as the architect and mathematician, Christopher Alexander. Alexander described the process of working with complexity as “searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.”17 Alexander’s process for development in the Oregon Experiment uses a participatory planning and design process that is user initiated and results in a wide distribution of scales of projects with an emphasis on smaller projects. In A City is Not a Tree, Alexander demonstrated that social and economic networks formed complex semi-lattice patterns; however, these networks when observed through a limited perspective were described as trees with parts and sub-parts, much like the modernist view of the city. Human observation struggles to comprehend complexity and thus returns to simpler tree structures when conceptualizing existing urbanism and planning. Salingaros later described the formation of urban network connections between complementary nodes and that complexity of networks depends on a diversity of nodes.18 In Salingaros’s model,

Figure 2: Example of cellular automaton. Credit: HĂŠlie

Figure 3: Adjacency based aggregation of units at various scales. Credit: author

nodes could be buildings, public spaces, transit hubs, or other discrete parts of the city. The connections between nodes is perpetually moving and growing which requires dynamic urban tissue. An example of this process is the natural aging of a neighbourhood: the urban tissue can respond with the introduction of ‘granny flats’ or the movement of the elderly to different neighbourhoods with senior housing. Within commercial networks in grid cities, shops spontaneously organized around the multiple centers of the grid. This spontaneity created further hierarchy that attracted additional commercial activity. The initial spontaneity is based on complex and multi-faceted hierarchies that are impossible to predict during the design. Furthermore, extensions or transformations of the grid change the hierarchy of exchanges for commercial activity and commercial centers shift.19 Emergent cities begin with network structures that anchor network exchanges through access and transportation. In modern cities, the predominant network structure was the automobile street that prioritized automotive movement over pedestrian movement. The network structure is a starting

abstract boundaries of scale: city as urbanism; building as a architecture

Scale is a critical aspect when addressing agency for citizen’s to shape their city. Buildings are easily understood as singular fixed entities within an urban network. This distinction breaks down as buildings merge into megastructures. In historical Mediterranean cities, there is a distinction between units of the resulting urban assemblage that is readable from the incremental process of construction. This distinction stems from the traditional understanding of architecture as space bounded by material. Within a modern context where space is defined by the abstract boundary of property lines that consists of both enclosed space and landscape, architecture has expanded to include the discipline of landscape architecture. Urban design can be considered the design of the space in between property and occurring at the scale of the city. Abstract and physical boundaries are constructed to promote or prevent exchange, but networks of exchanges do not adhere to boundaries. Therefore, the design process of architecture and urbanism cannot stop at a certain boundary of scale. Dwellings were historically separated by the need

point, but should also respond to feedback from the emergence of other parts of the city such as buildings. This requires initial planning without a rigid master plan that allows for a natural growth of infrastructure with respect to the growth of the city. Salingaros notes another important design consideration that access infrastructure should be designed such that one form of network structure does not cut another and hinder its formation process.20 These access networks, particularly streets and rail lines, have the undesired function of boundaries that can severe the network of relationships. Emergent urbanism is a process of creating exchanges, enabling the addition of new agents and new relationships. The primary challenge for this process is the scale of time—historic cities grew gradually but today industrialized cities develop rapidly. In Vancouver, the extension of major transit infrastructure has accelerated and concentrated the rate of growth. Additionally, the scale of development of the building is increasing—at what point does the building become urbanism that contains constituent parts that are part of its own emergent system?

for private space, but the modern building has become increasingly separated for commodity. Within a perspective of urbanism and architecture as a network, the boundary between the disciplines dissolves, as does the abstract boundary of property. Architectural boundaries are then free to reconsider roles such as environmental mediation and private distinction. Sou Fujimoto’s architecture challenges these traditional perceptions of architectural boundaries. His thesis represents the house as the city: different public and private amenities are assimilated by his perceived ‘home’. This programmatic and occupational fluidity between urbanism further challenges the distinction between building and urbanism as well as traditional spatial boundaries. This confuses the cellular unit of space that aggregates in the emergent model. It suggests that the unit itself is diverse and based on need. It may be reduced to the realm of dwelling, change room, shop, etc. Within the emerging assembly of spaces, architecture and urbanism blend together as units merge into volumetric and spatial arrangements.

informality, agency and adaptation

A parallel view of emergent architectural urbanism is assemblage theory, based on DeLanda’s interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. DeLanda describes an assemblage as a dynamic spatial whole that is formed from the interconnectivity and flows between constituent parts.21 Kim Dovey offers the street as an example of this assemblage: “The street is not a thing or a collection of things. The buildings, houses, shops, signs, cops, shoppers, cars, hawkers, rules, sidewalks, goods, trolleys, etc. all come together to become the street, but it is the assembled connections among them that are crucial – the relations of buildings to sidewalk to roadway; the flows of traffic, people and goods; the interconnections of public to private space, and of the street to the city. An assemblage is dynamic – it is the flows of life, traffic, goods and money that give the street its intensity and its emergent sense of place. From this view all cities and parts of cities are assemblages.”22 If emergence is a process of growth, then an assemblage can be considered the resulting fluid entity of parts and relationships. This description challenges “three thousand year old perception of buildings as solid and static objects as a means to stabilize, institutionalize and establish permanence in society”23 and suggests that architecture is thought of as a verb. It is dynamic and adaptable, “accommodating the evolving demands of its context… [and] ceaselessly adapting and negotiating changes, defining and redefining itself in time, space, size, use, performance and location.”24 Assemblage theory, like cellular automaton, is based on a field of relationship between parts. However, cellular automaton and the corresponding theories of emergent urbanism have been understood through a scientific approach that assumes the parts and rule sets are fixed at the cellular scale, which translates to the building scale in architecture. Assemblage, on the other hand, consists of dynamic parts in nested scales of entities. For example, individuals make up a family, that inhabit a dwelling, that constitutes a unit in a building, that makes up a block, that forms a neighbourhood, that makes up city and so on. Each of these scales can be considered a dynamic entity that forms and is formed by its parts and its relationships to other entities. A pure assemblage more closely resembles traditional villages or informal settlements than it does formal cities. Slums are radical (and prolific) example of a dynamic and adaptive urbanism and emergence through self-generation of adjacent

parts. Interestingly, informal settlements have remarkably similar morphologies across cultures despite different contextual formal systems.25 The scales of influence on the built environment in informal settlements are based on a more intrinsic code of small scale, adjacent micro-politics between neighbours and topology. A comparison (see Figure 4) of the drivers of built form of the formal city and informal settlements in Manila, Philippines reveals that these systems, the top-down formal system and the bottom-up informal system, largely operate on disparate scales with little overlap. The comparison also reveals productive political, economic and material exchanges between the two systems. Like the informal settlement, a pure assemblage is premised entirely on logics of agent relationships without any formal governing systems. They are responsive to external stimuli such as formal infrastructure. A study of the Baseco slum in Manila discovered the role of formal infrastructure as an organizing feature of the settlement. During typhoons, dwellings are destroyed and rebuilt in new spatial arrangements following the same morphology but different arrangement. Dwelling organize from fixed points of infrastructure, namely roads, electricity and water. Multiple housing typologies have evolved from this process of interruption—protected huts built on more solid ground evolve from stilted construction to more permanent structures. These formal and informal infrastructure networks are illustrated in Figure 5, which shows the dwellings and infrastructure before (in red) and after (in blue) a typhoon. Buildings which have survived the typhoon are able to continue the evolutionary process and are rendered in black (red and blue overlapped). This relationship between formal and informal forces is an extreme example, but important for demonstrating that just as the formal city inherently contains assemblages of informal actors and relationship (e.g. the street), so to the assemblage relies on fixed infrastructure for organization and exchange. In Turkey, the Gecekondu is an informal housing type literally meaning ‘built overnight’ that provides an example of how informal assemblage navigate not only territory but also regulatory within the formal city. Due to a regulatory loophole, structures that are built overnight are protected from demolition. Until recently in Istanbul, half of the citizens lived in Gecekondu dwellings, although most have evolved into permanent buildings and communities.26 11

Favelas in Brazil began in the late 19th century due to the lack of housing in the growing urban centers. The formal state’s inability to provide formal housing led to recognition of favelas in the Building Code In 1937, recognizing them formally as an exception. Due to the understanding of ownership through occupation, favelas started a highly spatial housing market where roofs were sold to new tenants for construction.27 This process was repeated resulting in a complex volumetric tenant system premised on collective structural and infrastructural systems. Over time, these communities collectively built their own infrastructure and organized municipal systems. Agency does not only occur at the scale of the family dwelling. For instance, La Defense in Paris, an originally master planned business district west of old Paris with a 3+ storey infrastructural slab and repeating series of towers, experienced the tension between formal master planning and individual agency (in this case individual corporations) in the design of one’s building. The master plan was abolished to allow each corporation to register its own identity and needs but the common infrastructure remained. Supporting the idea of the tower as individual agency is the scale of formal slab infrastructure and rail networks built to support the district. This unique approach of a common infrastructure with emergent towers was not supported by the existing territorial legislation of France and required an exception to its formal regulation.28 Urbanism consists of degrees of informality at various scales within the formal system of networks and forms. One way to consider these two systems is the formal as prescribed networks from a collective authority (e.g. planners, architects) while the informal is the loose, dynamic set of relationships that exist within these networks. For instance, the formal city is designed with specific systems some of which include: »» access (such as roads, sidewalks, transit and greenways), »» energy (such as electricity, gas, heat), »» water & sewer, »» program/zoning, »» built form/codes (such as floor space ratio, setbacks, shading), and »» education (such as catchment zones, standardized curriculum). Similarly, traditional architecture consists of prescribed design systems: »» structure, 12

»» »» »» »» »»

program, spatial arrangement, façade, environmental control, and furnishings.

Informal relationships exist within these prescribed networks and consist of various forms of relationships. The street and public square consist of a perceptual relationship between built forms and social activity, as well as tangible financial exchanges. These places also develop relationships with other adjacent spaces by fulfilling the need for access, socialization, commerce, and culture. Sou Fujimoto’s architecture explores informality and agency through inhabitant perception. Inspired by physics and Einstein, his ultimate goal is “a new conception of the basis of architecture, a general theory of spatial ‘relationality’… where people can… choose comfortable places by their instincts. An architecture were space is relationships.”29 His projects can be described more as a field of materials and spaces as opposed to traditional buildings with distinct spaces. The field, such as series of spaces defined by stacked 350mm lumber in the Final Wooden House, create a primitive condition that entices inhabitants to find their own occupation of the space, their own program. This indeterminacy of program is a different type of psychological temporality and agency, as opposed to the cultural and material event based temporality of informal settlements. Teddy Cruz identifies a critical distinction of perception of values between formal and informal systems. The top-down is predicated on economic capital, ownership is understood as part of a commodity market. Density is then viewed as the maximum number of units with minimum public infrastructure and the dweller is reduced to a general consumer. In response, Cruz points out that bottom-up systems perceive ownership as collective and predicated on social capital. Density is measured not through units but by social exchanges. Dwellers are defined as participants in this exchange network, both giving and receiving.30 In addition to value and inhabitant perception, formal prescriptive systems resist ceaseless adaptation through a mostly static temporal perception of the city. Diurnal and seasonal variations and projected growth are considered, but this rational view of change negates the fluidity of the assemblage described by Schmidt III. Existing only temporarily, an urban assemblage can be understood as the informal (or bottom-up) relationships that exist within the fixed formal

Figure 4: Scales of operation in the formation of formal and informal settlements. Credit: author

system. In this context, the formal interacts with the informal through agency of the latter. Inhabitant agency further results in the adaptation of the formal, or the informalization of the formal. This adaptation occurs materially in the built form as well as regulatory in amendments to legislation. Informal and formal systems are interdependent but have opposite temporal characteristics: the formal is standardized to enable rapid deployment but resist adaptation, while the informal slowly evolves and grows but is able to more rapidly adapt and redefine itself. The relationship between these two systems occurs through mediating agency by designers and inhabitants. Teddy Cruz identified need for mediation between these systems in the evolving suburbs of San Diego that were increasingly being inhabited by immigrants from Tijuana. These immigrants rely upon creative individual agency and adaptation of their environment to accommodate growing families and small businesses but had difficulty operating within the strict formal regulatory system that resisted adaptation. Teddy Cruz adopted a role of mediator between the formal system and the informal cultural practices of the immigrant community. His subsequent designs for housing included public spaces for informal use and a cultivation of social wealth. There are numerous historical precedents for urban projects and processes that address the challenge of mediating agency and informality within an increasingly standardized and formal city. Social movements in the 1960’s and 70’s started politically rooted architecture such as Participatory Design and the Animal Urbanism (Lucien Kroll), the Situationists (Constant Nieuwenhuys ), the Metabolists (Kenzo Tange), and Open Building (John Habraken). These movements had commonality in their attempt to

reconcile the growing industrialization and mass production with the scale of individual agency, adaptation, and expression. A parallel discourse was occurring in developing countries, using resident agency and selfbuilding organization to address issues of poverty in industrializing cities. John Turner experimented with these concepts from 195765 in the squatter settlement of Peru. Since then there has been a resurgence of these ideas beginning with ELEMENTAL’s Quinta Monroy (half-built housing) in Chile which began as a response to the lack of funding for social housing. In western cities, there have been different contemporary approaches to using a collective bottom-up approach for shaping places. muf architecture/art sees culture as an informal practice comprised of a long series of temporary events. To enable local people to initiate change in their neighbourhoods, the propose greater public and stakeholder participation and the design of public space from the collective intelligent of locals with the intention of nurturing informal cultures that already exist. In this way, they design formal public spaces of open-endedness to accommodate temporary informality. Another contemporary firm, the atelier d’architecture autogeree (AAA) uses community needs for design insight and community capacity for construction and operation of productive social spaces. Their project, R-URBAN, is a public space built around gardens, compost, and recycling depot—the project was initiated with the community and relied on community volunteers for construction and the ongoing functioning. Their intent is to create social relationships as well as sustainable natural and material cycles.31

Figure 5: An informal assemblage in Baseco, Manila responding formal organizing infrastructure before (red) and after (blue) a typhoon. Credit: author

conclusion: architecture in the interstice of formal and informal networks

notes

These practices not only provide agency to citizens, but rely upon citizens’ agency for shaping architecture and the city. Through these practices new relationships emerge from a diversity of scales of exchange. Cities have increasingly been separated into predominantly formal or informal sectors. Modern cities are increasingly formalizing resulting in a scale of development beyond the agency of inhabitants. The counterpart to this development is informal settlements which act as an assemblage but contain a particular scale of agent and thus exchange between its parts. Both sectors suffer from a lack of diversity since each tend to operate a specific scale. The integration of formal and informal and the resulting differentiated scales of

parts enables more exchanges and new networks of relationships. Thus an architecture of relationships operates at the interstice of formal and informal, becoming a hybrid of prescribed design and fluid assemblage that operates on multiple nested scales of adjacency. The challenge for the architect then becomes: »» to understand existing formal systems (e.g. regulations, built form) and mediate these systems to provide small agency and informal relationships; and »» to determine the degree of prescriptive design to enable productive agency within the productive and existing formal systems.

1. Hayek, F.A., “Rules and Order,” Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973): 1. 2. Hakim, Besim, “Julian of Ascalon’s Treatise of Construction and Design Rules from Sixth-Century Palestine,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60.1 (2001): 4–25. 3. Hakim, Besim, “Mediterranean Urban and Building Codes: Origins, Content, Impact, and Lessons,” Urban Design International 13.1 (2008): 24. 4. Hakim, Besim, “Revitalizing Historic Towns and Heritage Districts,” International Journal of Architectural Research 12.2 (2007): 90. 5. Blackwell, Adrian, “What Is Property?” Journal of Architectural Education 68.1 (2014): 50. 6. Song, Yan, and Gerrit Jan Knaap, “New Urbanism and Housing Values: A Disaggregate Assessment,” Journal of Urban Economics 54.2 (2003): 218–238. 7. Lefebvre, Henri, The production of space (Vol. 142. Blackwell: Oxford, 1991) 26. 8. Lefebvre, 97. 9. Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994). 10. Soules, Matthew, “The ‘Livable’ Suburbanized City: Post-Politics and a Vancouver Near You,” Harvard Design Magazine 32 Spring/Summer (2010): 145. 11. Park, Robert E, On Social Control and Collective Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967) 3. 12. Brenner, Neil, “Global, fragmented, hierarchical: Henri Lefebvre’s geographies of globalization,” Public Culture 10.1 (1997): 135. 13. Harvey, David. “The right to the city.” (2008): 2. 14. Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961) 15. 15. Hélie, Mathieu, “Conceptualizing the Principles of Emergent Urbanism,” ArchNet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research 3.2 (2009): 79. 16. Johnson, Steven, Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software (Simon and Schuster, 2002) 10. 17. Alexander, Christopher, “A City Is Not at Tree,” Architectural Forum 122 (1965): 26-27. 18. Salingaros, N, “Theory of the Urban Web,” Journal of Urban Design 3.1 (1998): 53-71. 19. Hillier, B, Space Is the Machine (2007). 20. Salingaros, 60. 21. DeLanda, Manuel, A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity (A&C Black, 2006). 22. Dovey, Kim, “Informal Urbanism and Complex Adaptive Assemblage,” International Development Planning Review 34.4 (2012): 353. 23. Schmidt, Robert et al, “Moving Architecture and Flattening Politics: Examining Adaptability through a Narrative of Design,” Architectural Research Quarterly 16.01 (2012): 76. 24. Schmidt, 75. 25. Sobreira, Fabiano, and Marcelo Gomes. “The Geometry of Slums: Boundaries, Packing and Diversity.” 44.0 (2001): 1–24. 26. Saracgil, Ayse, “The Gecekondu and Turkish Modernity.” Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 1-2, Ed. Attilo Petruccioli (1997) 104-107. 27. Neuwirth, Robert, “Global Bazaar,” Scientific American 2011: 56–63. 28. Hélie, 85. 29. Worrall, Julian, “I Want to Make Primitive Architecture,” Iconeye, n.d. Web. 12 December 2015. 30. Cruz, Teddy, “Tijuana Case Study Tactics of Invasion: Manufactured Sites,” Architectural Design 75 (2005): 32–37. 31. AAA, “R-Urban : Resilient Agencies , Short Circuits , and Civic Practices in Metropolitan Suburbs,” (2008): 2–6.

case studies

Seven case studies have been selected and each has been analyzed to determine how the designer (or residents) mediated the formal requirements and what relationships occurred as a result. This process is also illustrated in Figure 6. Each case study has been separated into four components for this analysis: »» formal requirements of the site/project; »» mediation of the these formal requirements; »» individual agency (or adaptation) that occurred; and »» resulting exchanges from the individual agency. This analysis provides insight into tactics for mediating formal systems and new rules for the designer. The intent is to establish a new rulebook for a design process predicated on a broader scale

of individual agency with the goal of developing an urbanism that is shaped by the complex relationships of the city and enables further growth of these networks. Historical and contemporary precedents have been selected from various regions and political spheres and consist of varying degrees and scales of inhabitant agency. Figure 7 shows the location and dates of each formal design and construction, as well as the informal design and adaptation. This timeline not only represents eras of social agency movements within architecture, but more importantly demonstrates the difference in timeframes between formal and informal design. The two longest formal projects: La Defense and Casa Familiar were projects that operated on the scales of urban and architecture and between formal and informal.

01//02 » CASE STUDIES

Figure 6: Process of design for hybrid architecture. Credit: author

Figure 6a: Map and timeline of case study projects. Credit: author

la maison médicale faculty housing (La Mémé) Architect: Lucien Kroll Location: University of Louvain, Brussels, Belgium

In the late 60’s when the Catholic University consulted students about the a proposal for a monotonous master plan for La Maison Medicale, the students responded with the desire for a fluid kind of organization as opposed to the rigid zones of functional buildings. Upon a successful campaign by the students, the University agreed to invite Lucien Kroll to develop a new plan and faculty building in participation with the students.1 Formal Requirements

Client: University of Louvain

La Mémé had a typical program for faculty housing including residences, shops, restaurant, and common spaces. Mass production of architectural materials was commonplace and expected to meet current codes and construction costs.

Area: 40,000 sqm

Mediation of Formal

Project Year: 1968-76

Kroll considered “communication through architecture is an eminently political act.”2 Thus his approach was a political one that was concerned with a participatory process as opposed to a formal result. He recognized two means of producing space: »» predetermined objective, concerned with control, organization, and production; and »» living process, with key centers of activity in clear spatial configurations. “Architecture must be saved from the architect’s exclusive dominion, and redirected towards participation, with an action open to new necessities and to decisions that are always provisional and incomplete.”3 Unconcerned with specific material or forms, Kroll manipulated numerous mass produced elements with a variety of techniques to create a unique spatial and formal logic that could express the

individuality of the inhabitants. Using a participatory process with a sample future users led Kroll to develop a plan that was a hybrid of unique and repetitive floor plans. The grid of structural concrete columns is nearly arbitrary on one side of the plan while the bay structure with lighter balloon frames anticipates a more adaptable and demountable structure. This is just one example of multiple built solutions employed for nonuniform solutions, each material assembly chosen for its respective function (of which there are many given the diverse needs of the inhabitants). Kroll said of columns: “regular columns make [users] conformist, irregular ones stimulate the imagination. If all columns are spaced at 6 meters, then all rooms are likely to end up at 3 meters. If spacings vary in both directions without repetition of the regulating dimension, then the plan of each room can be different… we have called this ‘wandering columns’, and it is the most complex form which can best welcome and reinforce a varied arrangement of spaces and connections.”4 Kroll’s design further mediates the formal standardization of building components with a freedom for users to infill and shape their own space: he developed an extensive catalogue of compatible components that fit within the modulated 300 mm grid. This grid is based on the standard SAR module, a standardized system implemented by the Stichting Architectural Research group in 1965, headed by John Habraken, a major proponent of the Open Building concept. This standardization was intended to encourage diversity within mass produced buildings and offer possibilities for modifications and replacements of components with different life cycles. Kroll used the SAR system as an independent domain for the inhabitants, while the primary structure was designed to accommodate. This difference

Figure 8: Exteriro of La Maison Médicale faculty housing. Credit: Domus

Figure 9: La Mémé Floor Plan showing the arbitrary column placements on the left and the rigid bay structure on the right. Credit: Kroll & Wolfgang

in scale critically distinguishes the formal (topdown design and infrastructure) and the informal (user generated) and is a cornerstone of Kroll’s participatory design. The main lesson here is that users require an infrastructure/platform in which to generate using a bounded set of options. The formal infrastructure must be deliberately accommodating but not prescriptive, such as Kroll’s arbitrary column placements. Services are provided at accessible distribution points that were seen as advantageous. There is a redundancy in access points, however, which provide more opportunity for spatial arrangements. Conduits and flexible piping are intended to run freely or be ducted from access points to final destinations for lighting and heating. La Mémé was not anarchistic user design, but a carefully designed platform with hundreds of possible layouts and material configurations—Kroll as the architect was both in and out of control of shaping users dwellings. Inhabitant Agency and Adaptation Once the load bearing structure was complete, Kroll stated that the building was finished—he argued that the skin, infill walls, and individual spatial arrangements were to be added by the users. This extension from participatory to design to participatory construction is what Kroll refers to as animal urbanism: “different situations with different people.”5 Dwellings were varied both in plan and in section which allowed for the creative infill of the units. Figure 10 shows the infill of one unit. Resulting Exchanges and Relationships The unique column placements prevented ‘copycat’ construction and encouraged a relationship

between the user and the building (unlike the typical modernist free plan) to “enhance the users’ personal relationship with the building and their appreciation of it.”6 Kroll’s architectural politics extended beyond the individual and to community living, i.e. a transparent society. In addition to the participatory process between users and space/materials, the floor plans followed a logic of continuous flow: “in the Mémé "everything communicates and opens, each element sees and can understand and meet the other. The floor slabs are open between one level and the next, the walls are cut out, the skylights are transparent everywhere, and the balconies are visible to one another. There are numerous entries, so people can come from anywhere, from the cellars to the attics and terrace staircases, from the walkways.”7 Kroll’s freedom with architectural language and his intentional ‘disarray’ of multiple connections enables an assimilation of formal restraints such as fire escapes into his logic. Dwellings were shared with common areas as well as opaque zones of private life. The intent was a place shaped by inhabitants, and who shaped and were shaped by others directly and indirectly through their spatial and material choices. Today, few alterations are noticeable due to an unintended trend of privatization of the units that began in the 80s. Slowly, units were partitioned, privatized, and closed off—the process effectively fixed the adaptation in time since the act of privatization fixed legal spatial boundaries on each unit. This demonstrates that both legal and perceived ownership are important for maintaining collective agency.

Figure 10: Examples of inhabitant adaptions and infill to a dwelling. Credit: Domus

Figure 11: Exterior fire escapes and balconies provide continuous flow and multiple entrances. Credit: Domus 22

la defense (the slab) Architects: Camelot, De Mailly and Zehrfuss Location: Paris, France Project Year: 1967-82 Area: 560 hectares Floor Area: 3,500,000 sqm Buildings: 72 (including 18 skyscrapers)

La Defense is Europe’s largest purpose-built business district. Located in the commune of Courbevoie, La Defense is situated west of old Paris along the Champs-Élysées axis. The project is also known as the Slab, due to the construction of large multi-layered slabs over the project site that differentiate levels for subway, automobiles and pedestrians. The buildings and towers float upon this slab without clear distinction between building boundaries at the ground level. The project is owned by La Defense Management & Development Office (EPAD), who invested in the purchase of the land, the Slab infrastructure, and the regional and metro rail line extensions and stations in the Slab. Formal Requirements Municipalities in France are organized around communes (36,600 in total) whose statues for urban planning and land use are strictly defined in legislation. Unlike North American cities in which property was divided as a means of settling land, French communes were created to break up former feudal lands into parcels for individual ownership. This process had a single vision in mind and its regulatory process did not allow for the creation of a large scale ‘common spatial infrastructure’. Mediation of Formal La Defense was unable to be created under the commune legislation—a detail that could not be circumnavigated within the territorial administration. Therefore, it was declared a national interest operation and its site was declared a zone of territorial exception where traditional legislation was suspended. To provide a new framework of regulation (i.e. a new formal system), the land was purchased by a developer (EPAD) of which the majority shareholder was the state but who was governed by private business law as opposed to territory law. Under the new pseudo-private territory, only the EPAD owns land which follows the logic that their infrastructure covers the entirety of the land within their domain. Corporations, however, do own their own buildings that are integrated into the infrastructure.

Camelot, De Mailly and Zehrfuss initially proposed a modern and rigid master plan with repeating identical towers. As potential corporate users were consulted, the master plan quickly transformed into a common infrastructure that would enable unique towers for each corporate owner. Inhabitant Agency and Adaptation The lesson of La Défense is that for-profit enterprises can create urbanism, markets for land supported by large capital structures, provided that the law allow them to. La Defense is an example of informality working at vastly different scales. In this instance, the entity/user was not at the scale of the individual but the corporation. However, even this scale of informality required an even greater scale of formal planning—in this case, the formal system was the Slab infrastructure and extended transportation networks. The initial master plan “rapidly fell apart and was abandoned when it was realized that the companies for whom the towers were meant had no use for them in their planned shape. From that moment they were free to define what kind of tower they wanted to build, however the system of traffic separation remained.”8 Resulting Exchanges and Relationships La Defense results in a unique form of financial exchange between the EPAD and corporations; by selling development rights to towers, EPAD was able to secure global financing for the common infrastructure that would benefit the collective of corporations. To enable the collective benefit of the infrastructure, a different ownership model— one contrary to the existing legal definition—was required. Here the collective benefit of access was considered more important than traditional land ownership. The common infrastructure provides new social exchanges between building inhabitants as it provides literal platforms for pedestrian movement and gathering in public space. Additionally, the development of La Defense provides the unique role of business district in Paris and its development has the indirect exchange of preserving old Paris.

Figure 12: Top of the Slab (constructed ground plane). Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons

Figure 13: View of La Defense from old Paris along Champs Elysee axis. Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons

Figure 14: Section of the Slab with proposed shopping mall. Credit: Manuelle Gautrand Architects 24

diagoon housing Architects: Herman Hertzberger Location: Delft, Netherlands Project Year: 1971 Area: 8 units at 2-3 storeys

Herman Hertzberger worked with John Habraken to develop housing that fit the Open Building model of architecture: the architect would provide the structural frame and services and each tenant/ user could provide the infill to suit oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needs and tastes. This practice is commonplace for commercial developments where tenant spaces are designed by a tenant selected architect. In 1971, this was one of the first housing developments to use such principles. Formal Requirements Dwellings were required to provide basic services such as plumbing, electricity, and heating, as well a rooftop enclosure. Mediation of the Formal The built homes include the structure skeleton (built with concrete masonry units) and two fixed cores: one for vertical access and one for services including the kitchen and bathroom. The skeleton was designed to work with panelized systems that were standardized to Habrakenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s SAR modular unit.

Inhabitant Agency and Adaptation The occupants decide how to divide the space both physically and programmatically. If the inhabitants change or the family composition changes then the house can be adjusted or enlarged (to an extent). The necessity for occupant agency extends to the exterior where the yard, terrace, and slack spaces that occur around the house are not prescribed and can slowly become tailored to each familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needs. Resulting Exchanges and Relationships Open building is primarily concerned with internal exchanges between users and their environments. It fosters a mindset of ownership between inhabitants and the spaces that extends beyond legal and financial ownership paradigms. The need for owners to define their own space fosters exchange between owners and professionals as the owners must seek out their own designers and contractors. In this model, design and construction have been separated into two scales. Aesthetically, the common skeletal structure provides a regular architectural language and consistent neighbourhood expression, while the infill adds individual expression.

Figure 15: Diagoon housing plan variations. Credit: Architectuurstudio Herman Hertzberger

Figure 17: Axonometric of Diagoon Housing. Credit: Architectuurstudio Herman Hertzberger

casa familiar: living rooms at the border and senior housing with childcare Firm: Estudio Teddy Cruz Architects: Teddy Cruz Location: San Ysidro, California Project Year: 2001-present

Teddy Cruz observed a trend of migration from Tijuana to San Ysidro, a suburb of San Diego near the Mexican Border, one that mirrored a migration of materials including garage doors, kitchen cupboards, and even entire bungalows. In Tijuana, these materials as well as found such as corrugated metal and packing crates were appropriated into new forms such as a bungalow elevated onto a steel framed automotive shop or garage door dwellings. These developments are painted in vivid colours and adapted/extended when the family grows or their financial capacity enables them. The migrants in San Ysidro, however, struggled to recreate the vibrancy of their former suburbs. Under Mexican law, once a new settlement is complete is protected from demolition. Cruz observed that this approach is not only more flexible, but more democratic than the stringent American process that requires a high level of expertise (and thus capital) to enter. Cruz began working with a San Ysidro community non-profit group and together they developed the Mi Pueblo Village Project to revitalize the village. Cruz designed two affordable housing developments as well as a revised zoning code for the informal and incremental rebuilding of the neighbourhood. Formal Requirements San Diego’s strict building and zoning codes are implemented to protect lives and property values through strict preservation of existing typologies. While the latter is of critical importance, the latter is unadaptable to the changing demographic needs of the migrants (which had become the majority of inhabitants). Cruz recognizes the need for the formal planning systems and financial institutions and suggests that the architect’s role is to mediate between these top-down systems and the bottom-up community. Mediation of the Formal Cruz suggested an affordable housing overlay zone over existing suburbs to legalize non-conforming additions and authorize the adaptation and addition to existing houses. In addition to the zoning, Cruz suggests a broader micropolicy for affordable housing: »» site informal additions and mixed-uses;

»» facilitate an expedited permit process where city hall prepackages new units construction permits and allows the community NGO to facilitate the process of designing, producing, and permitting plug-in additions; and »» mediate the economic process by enabling the NGO to manage and prepackage tax credits and other subsidies, as well as provide micro credits by breaking large construction loans. The NGO then becomes a collective agent to enable individuals to easily access the formal system of permitting and financing.9 In addition to the micropolicy, Cruz designed a range of affordable housing that include public open spaces and connect to existing informal access ways. His designs incorporate low cost elements in creative ways with more communal exterior space than fenced lawns to create an architectural language more akin to Tijuana than San Diego. Inhabitant Agency and Adaptation Cruz’s micropolicy was successfully implemented in San Ysidro, which legalized existing additions and non-conforming program use within the neighbourhood. The NGO, Casa Familiar, provides tax credits and micro credit loans to families wanting to expand and adapt their own dwellings for more family members or for a small business. Casa Familiar worked with Cruz to provide a catalogue of plug-in additions that are pre-approved for construction permitting. This approach has enabled residents to modify their space to meet their own needs. Resulting Exchanges and Relationships The semipublic loggia of the Living Rooms project supports micro-enterprise and arts development space in the center of the complex. Other housing models feature open public space to support a wide range of social exchanges and temporary cultural events. Cruz’s work with Casa Familiar has enabled exchanges between the bureaucratic planning process as well as financial institutions with low income residents. These exchanges further connect people with the NGO and other residents to connect them with additional social and educational support systems.

»» create a new affordable housing overlay zone to protect and encourage adaptation; 27

Figure 18: Development of zoning policy for San Ysidro. Credit: Estudio Teddy Cruz â&#x20AC;&#x192;

Figure 19: Incremental development of Casa Familiar Housing. Credit: Estudio Teddy Cruz

Figure 20: Street views of exsiting non-conforming land use in San Ysidro. Credit: Estudio Teddy Cruz

quinta monroy Firm: ELEMENTAL Architects: Alejandro Aravena Location: Sold Pedro Prado, Iquique, Tarapacá, Chile Project Year: 2001-04 Client: Gobierno regional de Tarapacá / Programa Chile-Barrio del Gobierno de Chile. Site Area: 5000 sqm Constructed Area per unit: 36 sqm (row house) and 25 sqm (duplex) Available Area per unit: 70 sqm (row house) and 72 sqm (duplex)

Formal Requirements ELEMENTAL was faced with the task of providing housing to low-income housing using a subsidy of $7,500 for each dwelling. Even using simple and cost effective building materials such as concrete block and rough lumber, this amount would not allow more than 36 square meters of built space per family—half of the space required for social housing per family and without interior finishing. Mediation of the Formal Existing housing types could not solve the funding problem so ELEMENTAL developed a new typology that could provide essential components and allow for expansion by the residents as they were financially capable. Vertical circulation, plumbing, and electrical were provided on one half of each plot. An outdoor deck on the second level allowed for easier infill underneath on the ground leel, and more infill at and above the deck on the second and third levels. Exterior walls adjacent to spaces for expansion allow for punch out doors and services. The 100 homes were separated into four communities and arranged around a central public space. Inhabitant Agency and Adaptation Residents were able to quickly expand their houses, often incrementally by room and incrementally by material, using temporary

materials before replacing them with permanent walls. Ana Lagos, one of the residents in the community, lives in a lot adjacent to the main thoroughfare with her mother, who lives on the bottom floor. Nearly immediately after moving in, Ana completed her first addition: tiling the bathroom, which functionally prevented the leaking through the concrete into the room below and aesthetically gave a sense of permanence and quality. One year later, Ana added a floor on the third level for a bedroom. Two years later she added a room onto the back of her house above her mother’s patio. There are rules for additions to prevent conflict, and rooms above patios are typically disallowed, but Ana’s mother consented to this addition. Ana later enclosed the ground floor slack space to create a storefront that she leases out. One year later, she was able to plaster and paint her interior walls.10 Ana’s story is one of many—each resident taking a different approach to expansion based on their needs and capacities. Resulting Exchanges and Relationships Five years later, the housing value has reached $20,000. However, most families have decided to stay due to the sense of place and community that has developed during the growth process.11 Residents were best suited to understand and meet their own needs, and were able to construct on an incremental scale that allowed them to either save or access micro-loans from financial institutions.

Figure 21: After initial construction (top) and adaptations five years later (right). Credit ELEMENTAL Figure 22: After initial construction (bottom left) and adaptations five years later (bottom right). Credit ELEMENTAL

Figure 23: Five years after construction, half houses are infilled. Credit ELEMENTAL

making space in dalston Architects: muf architecture/art Location: Dalston, London, UK Project Year: 2008-09

Dalston in Hackney, a London borough, is one of the Greater London Authority’s priority areas for development in East London. A new extension to the East London Line Overground will further connect Dalston with London. muf architecture/ art was hired to develop a plan to rejuvenate public space in Dalston. Hackney is the greenest borough in London, but Dalston is deficient in open public space. muf approached the study and proposal by examining exiting assets and forming public space that would complement the cultural activity already taking place. They see “potential pleasures that exist at the intersection between the lived and the built... access is understood not as a concession but as the gorgeous norm.”12 Formal Requirements Muf was mandated to develop a strategy to create and rejuvenate public space in Dalston through the design of public space and art. Mediation of the Formal Muf approached the study following three principles: »» value what is there; »» nurture the possible; and »» define what is missing.13 This process required a detailed mapping of existing public spaces and cultural happenings. Comprehensive spatio-temporal maps were created for: arts and cultural venues, existing open space, green and open spaces, heritage sites, and road markets. Muf also held numerous stakeholder meetings

to mine local knowledge during the analysis and design phases of the project. The final strategy became a series of small (and some large) interventions. This is typical of the way muf operates—creating opportunity for change through many small (and often temporary) moves. Inhabitant Agency and Adaptation Their proposal included twelve host spaces that featured few permanent fixtures and nearly no art installations, but offered a wide range of informal or temporary uses. Instead of the anticipated sculptural art, muf designed for cultural programming either formally or informally by providing ground power, permanent fixtures of staging, typography, screens, and planting. muf states that “supporting creativity is not about public art commission rather making it easy for visual arts film and performance to be part of the public realm.”14 Resulting Exchanges and Relationships The result is a series of temporary social and cultural exchanges that are dynamic and expressive of Dalston’s growing creative community. The series of public spaces are not intended to bring change but to enable local people to initiate change within Dalston.

The featuring of heritage buildings within the public spaces creates new informative exchanges for residents to foster an increasing cultural and collective ownership of the neighbourhood.

Figure 24: Connecting public spaces. Credit muf architecture/art

Figure 25: Temporary road event and temporary playground in Gillette Square. Credit muf architecture/art

Figure 26: Mapping of cultural spaces. Credit muf architecture/art â&#x20AC;&#x192; 34

baseco informal settlement Location: Barangay 649, Manila, Philippines Project Year: 1950-present Site Area: 96 hectares

Baseco, or the Bataan Shipyard and Engineering Company, was formerly known as NASSCO (National Shipyard and Steel Corporation). Based on the population census of the barangay, as of January 200 I, Baseco had 45,017 residents, distributed in 5,515 families.15

These settlements typically situate on undesirable topography such as river/ocean banks, wetlands, or garbage dumps—in the case of Baseco, it fits all three categories—and are bounded by topographical, trajectory, or structural features such as water, roads and walls.17

Formal Requirements

In addition to dwellings, informal economies and community spaces have developed. Baseco has two churches, two mosques, a basketball court and multiple markets. The workforce is generally engaged in a wide range of jobs. Some provide services like drivers of jeepneys (taxis), tricycles, pedicabs or pedaled tricycles, trucks, buses, or taxi cabs; operators of banca or boats: security guards; and house help. Others venture into small businesses suchas as restaurants or engage in street vending. A number of residents work in private companies or overseas. Some households earn income by renting out bed space or rooms in their house.

Following the construction of the east seawall in 1950 and the subsequent dredging of the south harbor to prepare for Queen Elizabeth, port workers began to settle informally on the accumulated sand and garbage that began to make up Baseco. The settlement grew as more sediment and garbage accumulated from the Pasig River that flowed into the bay immediately north of Baseco. In 1982, Baseco was officially declared Barangay 649, Zone 68. In 1986, the government, under the administration of then President Corazon C. Aquino, sequestered the shipping facilities formerly acquired by the Romualdez family (during the Marcos era), which were believed to be part of the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family. Following the adoption of neoliberal policies, foreign investment in Philippines skyrocketed, as did housing prices. The rate of rural migration to Manila surged and with high costs of living, most migrants turned to informal dwellings. This increase caused a series of informal settlement demolitions in Quezon City and other parts of Metro Manila between 1990 and 1993, which accelerated the growth of the barangay as it became the government’s unofficial relocation site for the evicted slum dwellers. In 2003, the government promised to begin a property acquisition program for the residents at Baseco. As of 2015, this had yet to be implemented.16 Mediation of the Formal Informal settlements have a long history in Manila—typically the indigenous settlements organically emerged in the periphery of the colonial power (originally Spain and later America). In the modern city, informal settlements continue to develop on the periphery of the city but also as infill within the formal city of Manila.

An informal housing market was also established. Professional squatters build new dwellings and sell or rent these to new settlers looking for residence. An NGO has been active in Baseco since 2003 and has formally developed two schools, a public market, and housing in the center of the island. The NGO mediated the land tenure process and provided financial loans to families to purchase the land and housing.

Inhabitant Agency and Adaptation Within Baseco, there exist different dwelling typologies and classes based on the ground quality and protection from typhoons. Typhoons cause a complete or partial destruction of more exposed dwellings which causes them to be in a constant state of flux and temporary construction, whereas more sheltered dwellings on the eastern seawall have evolved into permanent structures with defined streets and services. On the more protected eastern shore, the dwelling units are lined up against the seawall. Measuring as small as 4 square meters and stacked alongside one another like a pile of books on a shelf, the houses are made of semi-permanent materials, such as wood and bamboo, and permanent materials like concrete and galvanized iron sheets. In cases where more than one family resides in the house, wooden dividers are used to define each 35

one’s territory or room. The least depressed area is located near the northeastern entrance, where those who are “better-off ” (“nakakaangat”) in the community are found. It is the first block encountered upon entering the community, and its residents have the easiest access to the roads. Found here are the barangay hall, basketball court, playground, and health center. The dwelling units are made of permanent materials like concrete, galvanized iron sheets, and steel reinforcements. There are even two-story houses which double as sari-sari (variety) stores or recreation halls with billiard tables, video game machines, and karaoke. Along the western shoreline, families built their houses on stilts thrust deeply into the sandy ground. These structures are thus easily destroyed during typhoons or heavy rains. On the northern shore the dwelling units perch on stilts along the breakwater. Given the flooding during high tide, a web of bamboo bridges and wooden platforms connects one house to the other, creating a complex maze of pathways and bridges. The entire morphology of the settlement is based upon individual agency and a logic of adjacent micro-politics. Dwellings were first built adjacent to access roads and on the most stable ground. Additional dwellings were constructed a ‘socially acceptable distance’ of approximately 0.5m, except where houses were stilted over water and it was mutually advantageous to build onto existing structures to create a more stable superstructure.18 Over time the informal settlement has organized and now has a community government, regulations, and a recognition of ‘ownership’. However, this organization still retains many of the original informal qualities, such as a prioritization of interpersonal politics over a top down system of politics. Regulations are grey and ownership does

not have hard boundaries—space is negotiated and foremost predicated on individual politics. Resulting Exchanges and Relationships Baseco is an example of informality on multiple scales; therefore, there are scales of exchanges internally and externally. Although a series of individual informal dwellings, the settlement is also a collective entity that could be viewed as an organic megastructure. As a whole, the informal settlement has a series of material, social, and financial exchanges with the formal city. There is an exchange of labour and employment between systems as well as an overlap of trade between the two economies. Mediating business transfer goods from the formal to the informal. Waste material flows from the formal city down the Pasig River to the north shore of Baseco, where it is searched, sorted and recycled as new building and consumer material. Mining for precious metals (such as gold teeth) also occurs in waste. In this way, the informal and formal benefit from closing material cycles. On the scale of the individual, residents (with the aid of their community) shape their own space (with limited resources) necessitating a creative response to building and environmental control. Materials are given new unintended functions. Ownership is informally recognized between residents of Baseco but without fixed boundaries. Instead, the built environment demarcates private from public space with a socially understood grey zone of inhabited ownership and private space surrounding the material boundary. This unwritten social exchange of respect for spatial ownership extends beyond private and public space and into temporary everyday activities such as washing and cooking which often occur beyond the boundaries of one’s dwelling.

Figure 27: Baseco and adjacent Metro Manila. Credit author 37

Figure 30: Sections through Baseco showing the three tiers of evolutionary typologies. Credit: author

Figure 28: Baseco land accumulation from 2001, 2005 and 2010. Credit Google Earth

Figure 29: Three tiers of housing quality based on topological and weather security and settlement time. The left is temporary stilt housing; the middle is stable topography and incremental construction; the right is upgraded housing with permanent materials. Credit Montasco, D.

Figure 31: Morphology of informal meeting formal. Credit authorâ&#x20AC;&#x192;

comparison: scales and tactics

The case studies provide a wide range of precedents for incorporating and designing for agency and informality. Collectively, they provide insight into a new set of tactics for designers. These projects can be grouped based on the mediating tactics: »» Base infrastructure/skeleton: La Defense, Diagoon Houses, Quinta Monroy, La Meme, »» adaptation of formal environment: La Meme, Casa Familiar, Baseco »» Space for temporary occupation: Making Space in Dalston Historically, the case studies can also be grouped by vintage: »» 1960-80: La Defense, La Meme, Diagoon Houses »» 2000-present: Casa Familiar, Quinta Monroy, and Making Space in Dalston »» 1950-present: Baseco Informal Settlement

A compiled set of the case study mediating tactics to provide informality and agency include the following: »» territorial regulatory exception, such as new zoning; »» participatory design process with the architect; »» formal infrastructure to organize and/or support agency; »» collective organization to mediate informal and formal systems, such as the Casa Familiar NGO that connects individuals with financial institutions and can collectively permit individual adaptions to houses; »» formal individual services provided, such as water, electricity, and vertical circulation;

The resurgence in 2000 following the social and political architectural movements of the 60s and 70s suggests a growing global response for improved agency.

»» prescribed skeleton structure with that allows for gent infill

The scale of agency between projects is more limited and predominantly the scale of the individual or family:

»» individual agency over one’s form, size and spatial organization; and

»» Corporate: La Defense

»» informal adaptation of formal systems.

»» Collective: Making Space in Dalston »» Individual: La Meme, Diagoon Houses, Quinta Monroy, Casa Familiar, Baseco The exchanges resulting from agency have been mapped in Figure 32 with respect to the scale of entities, type of capital exchange, and approximate density of exchange. Exchange types are based on a holistic view of capital and extend beyond Cruz’s introduction of social capital as the predominant exchange of emerging urbanism. This mapping can suggest associated tactics for achieving specific types of exchanges. The collective data also shows that the scale of exchange is typically at

the individual—which is unsurprising given that that is the predominant scale of agency. More importantly is the diversity of exchange which suggests new relationships between individuals, collective groups, corporate entities and the city at large.

»» prescribed catalogue of parts to use within skeleton structure;

Figure 33 compares case studies and tactics. The most common tactic is to prescribe a formal infrastructure that organizes and enable agency. This agency is often reduced to infill within a strict spatial and material boundary that while promotes agency is borderline characterized as emergent. The boundaries, adjacencies and politics have been heavily prescriptive. The second portion of this thesis will aim to test these tactics further, finding a design process more similar to Casa Familiar and somewhere between the more formal Diagoon Houses and the informal settlement of Baseco.

Figure 32: Scales and densities of capital exchanges of case studies. Credit: author

Figure 33: Table of tactics for informality and agency. Credit author

notes

1. Kroll, Lucien, and Wolfgang Pehnt, Lucien Kroll: buildings and projects (Rizzoli International Publications, 1987) 75. 2. Poletti, Raffaella, “Lucien Kroll: Utopia Interrupted,” Domus (n.p., June 2010) Web, 12 Dec. 2015, http://www.domusweb.it/en/ architecture/2010/06/30/lucien-kroll-utopia-interrupted.html 3. Poletti. 4. Kroll and Wolfgang, 90. 5. Kroll, Lucien, “Animal Town Planning and Homeopathic Architecture” Architecture and Participation, Ed. Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till (Routledge, 2013) 183–186. 6. Galle, Waldo, and Niels De Temmerman, “Multiple Design Approaches to Transformable Building : Case Studies.” Central Europe towards Sustainable Building (2013): 7. 7. Poletti. 8. Hélie, Mathieu, “Conceptualizing the Principles of Emergent Urbanism,” ArchNet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research 3.2 (2009): 85. 9. Cruz, Teddy. “Casa Familiar: Living Rooms at the Border and Senior Housing with Childcare.” MoMA (N.p., 2010) Web, 22 Dec. 2015, http:// www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/smallscalebigchange/projects/casa_familiar 10. Perry, Luke, “Chile. Quinta Monroy,” The Incremental House (N.p., 2008) Web, 20 Dec. 2015. http://incrementalhouse.blogspot.ca/2008/10/ chile-quinta-monroy.html 11. “Quinta Monroy / Elemental,” ArchDaily (N.p., 2008) Web, 22 Dec. 2015, http://www.archdaily.com/10775/quinta-monroy-elemental 12. muf architecture/art, “Profile: Muf.” muf architecture/art (N.p., n.d) Web, 22 Dec. 2015, http://www.muf.co.uk/profile 13. J&L Gibbons LLP, and muf architecture/art, Making Space in Dalston (N.p., 2009) 18. 14. &L Gibbons LLP, and muf architecture/art, 61. 15. Ragragio, Junio M, “Urban Slum Reports: The Case of Metro Manila , Philippines,” Understanding Slums: Case Studies for the Global Report on Human Settlements (2003): 1–2. 16. Tan, Edita Abella, “Solving the Slum Problem,” Philippine Daily Inquirer (N.p., 16 August 2015) Web, 15 Dec. 2015, http://opinion.inquirer. net/87655/solving-the-slum-problem 17. Dovey, Kim, “Informalising Architecture: The Challenge of Informal Settlements,” Architectural Design 83.6 (2013): 83. 18. Sobreira, Fabiano, and Marcelo Gomes, “The Geometry of Slums: Boundaries, Packing and Diversity.” UCL Working Papers Series 44.0 (2001): 4.

Figure 34: Evolution of Vancouver. Credit: Author.

01//03 Â» A NEW RULEBOOK FOR DEVELOPMENT IN VANCOUVER

proposing a new rulebook

Vancouver is a city of paradox: ranking in the top 5 globally for livability and unaffordability. This is due in part to the commitment of planners and officials to make it global and green. These goals have resulted in an inflated commoditization of the real estate market and strict bureaucratic control of the development process. Vancouver continues to develop rapidly since the 1990s and continues to evolve from single family suburban typologies to multifamily and condominium typologies. This process is largely top-down, resulting in static architecture that offers little agency for inhabitant shaping of the city. Soules describes Vancouver development of condominiums as having suburban character of separation and individuality through autonomy and landscaping. Figure 34 explores a different conceptualization of a suburban characteristic is a volumetric assembly of incremental units differential spaces and form.

site selection

The intersection and surrounding neighbourhood of W Broadway Avenue and Arbutus Street in Vancouver, British Columbia was selected as the site for testing this thesis. The intersection is projected for redevelopment on all corners, as well as the neighbourhood surrounding the Broadway corridor. This projected development is due to the proposal of a new subway line, which will include a subway station on the northeast corner of the intersection. The City of Vancouver is slow to rezone land around transit hubs. The Cambie Corridor was not rezoned and redeveloped for years after the completion of the Canada Line Skytrain (rapid rail transit). The temporal gap in policy provides an opportunity to implement a slower form of emergent and incremental development. This incremental approach has the benefit of responding to changing contexts including regulations. It can aggregate within the confines of existing regulation and continue to grow and adapt as policy changes and formal regulating metrics such as FSR and height increase. The new Liberal led majority Government of Canada as well as the re-elected Vancouver Mayor, Gregor Robertson, are in support of a new subway line along the Broadway corridor. This corridor has been identified as North America’s busiest bus line with over 110,000 people using the buses on

This thesis proposes to test new methods of development within the Vancouver context that follow a new rulebook for growth. Using Cruz’s understanding of architecture as a mediator between formal and informal, the thesis will recognize the need for increased density of dwellings but focus on the density of exchanges. This emphasis will result in a new ruleset that will focus on adjacent relationships and potentials as opposed to property lines. This new rulebook and development morphology requires simulation and testing and will include the following: »» study and simulation of settlement patterns of slums, such as BASECO, Manila. »» Formation of a new urban ruleset based on informal lessons learned from BASECO. »» Simulation and testing of the new ruleset, and iterative design of the ruleset.

Broadway Ave each day. The proposed subway line will extend the Millennium Skytrain from the VCC Clark station to the University of British Columbia campus. Alternative proposals terminate at Arbutus Street; therefore, sites west of Arbutus were not considered. Arbutus and Broadway is a combination of traditional Vancouver building typology and unique conditions—this combination will allow for an extrapolation of the thesis to other sites but also test the hypothesis that informality responds to the nuances of context. The intersection has little redevelopment within 1 km. The intersection consist of pre 1970s lowrise commercial building. Broadway is mix of retail, commercial, and residential buildings ranging from one to eight storeys (the larger developments occurring post-1980). Parallel to Arbutus St is the Arbutus corridor, a decommissioned railway thoroughfare owned by Canadian Pacific. North of the intersection is mostly single family homes built between 1900 and 1950 mixed with apartment complexes built later between 1960 and 1990. The neighbourhood surrounding Arbutus St to the south of Broadway was traditionally industrial land but has begun transitioning to mixed use residential and retail since early 1990. A more comprehensive timeline is included on the following page.

Figure 35: Proposed Broadway corridor subway. Credit: Translink

timeline of development around w broadway ave. and arbutus st.

1902: Arbutus Corridor Line built after province granted land to Canadian Pacific 1920: Carling O’Keefe Brewery built at Arbutus St. and Twelfth Ave. in what is the Arbutus industrial district 1954: Last passenger train ran along the Arbutus Corridor 1968: Fletcher’s Drycleaning built on SE corner 1989: City began process of rezoning industrial lands for housing in Kitsilano. 1989: Augustine Gardens—4 storey, 60 dwellings—built at W 6th Ave. and Maple St. 1992: Vancouver City Council adopted the Arbutus Neighbourhood Policy plan 1994: Arbutus/Vine Industrial Area CD-1 Guidelines passed as extension of Neighbourhood Policy Plan 1994: New Pointe Terrace—mixed use with 54 dwellings—built on corner of Broadway and Yew 1995: Carling O’Keefe purchased by Molson and brewery demolished 1997: The Carlings is the first condominium development in Arbutus Walk 1998: Mainframe office building built on Broadway Ave between Arbutus and Maple St. 2001: Last freight train ran along Arbutus Corridor 2003: Brewery site in Arbutus Walk redeveloped as Tapestry Retirement Community 2004: Final Arbutus Walk condominium, “The I” is completed 2008: Pinnacle Living on Broadway—8 levels, mixed use, 134 dwellings—built next to intersection 2013: 2001 West 10th Ave. (behind Pinnacle Living) is rezoned from industrial to CD-1 allowing for FSR of 2.5 2013: Bastion Development Corp. purchases Shell Gas station on NW corner. 47

site mapping

The site has been analyzed to understand the formal requirements and public space where informality can occur. The series of analytical maps include the following; »» formal zoning; »» traditional ground plan; »» revised ground plan showing gradients of restricted public space; »» amenity sites and temporal access within 5 minutes (400 m) of pedestrian access; and »» photo-documentation of informal adaptation of formal structures and boundary conditions. The regulatory documents for the neighbourhood mostly consist of typical zoning north of W Broadway Avenue. These regulations are characterized by the preservation of the neighbourhood character. South of W Broadway Avenue, the regulations are made up of the following: »» historic industrial zoning (from over 60 years ago) that is in a state of transition; »» historic commercial zoning; »» Arbutus Neighbourhood Policy Plan with prescriptive guidelines for development; »» Comprehensive Development Zone (CD-1) Guidelines; and »» Property specific CD-1 that each requires a unique set of bylaws. These neighbourhood policy plan has been included in Appendix A. The CD-1 development guidelines have been attached in Appendix B. One CD-1 bylaw is included in Appendix C. The Arbutus Neighbourhood Policy Plan has resulted in the unique development of Arbutus Walk that comprises over half of the Policy Plan site. The policy plan is a mostly proscriptive document that clearly articulates the intent to transition the area into “a vibrant residential neighbourhood, providing needed housing, while minimizing impacts on existing neighbouring areas and respecting the needs of existing businesses.”

notes 48

Arbutus Walk is comprised of standard property zoning for smaller sites and unique CD-1 zones for larger sites. The CD-1 bylaws are regulated by the Arbutus/Vine Industrial Area CD-1 Guidelines, which are highly prescriptive. Despite the public community being vocally unsupportive of the final plan, a working group of residents and business owners continued to work with the city and professionals on the process and produce a clear vision for regulatory approval. Figure 36 shows an illustrative sketch used to describe the character and development guidelines. This level of prescriptive detail enabled regulatory approval but it limits any future adaptation of the site. This precedent for CD-1 permitting effectively sets a high scale of regulatory process. To achieve this level of detail requires a sizable investment of capital and design which severely limits the agency for unique development to large scale developers. Furthermore, the CD-1 has become so detailed that any adaptation to the site will require an amendment to the bylaws. The development can be commended for its sensitivity to the existing businesses and its transition of automotive streets (restricted public space) to a mix of greenways, pedestrian right-ofway streets, and typical automobile right-of-way streets. The adaptation of the existing infrastructure to prevent cutting off accessibility allows for informality and new social and natural exchanges that will lead to a denser relational network. This mediation was possible due to the ‘heavy’ regulatory process that was criticized earlier—this suggests that the role of the architect must include navigating this process on behalf of the individual and collective. The informality on the site is contained in the public greenways and streets. Condominium buildings are typical of Vancouver with little agency for adaptation or spatial occupation aside from the selection of one’s unit through the market. There is opportunity to learn from and build upon this adaption and mediation of the regulatory process as the thesis continues in the design phase.

1. Translink, UBC Line Rapid Transit Alternatives Analysis: Findings to Date (N.p., 2013) 3-4. 2. City of Vancouver, Arbutus Neighbourhood Policy Plan (N.p., 1998) 1. 3. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Case Studies: The Carlings at Arbutus Walk (N.p., 2001) 1.

Figure 36: Illustrative sketch included in the CD-1. Credit: City of Vancouver

Figure 37: Arbutus/Vine Industrial Area Boundary of the CD-1 and adapted hierarchy of access infrastructure. Credit: City of Vancouver 49

Figure 38: Formal zoning map with radius from W Broadway Ave & Arbutus St. Credit author

Figure 39: Traditional nolli ground floor plan. Credit author

Figure 40: Revised nolli plan with public, restricted and private space for informality. Credit author

Figure 41: Private and public amenities within 5 pedestrian minutes (400m + future subway line and station in white). Credit author

Figure 42: Future pedestrian access within 5 minutes due to proposed subway: W Broadway Ave & MacDonald St. (left) and W Broadway Ave & Granville St. (right) . Credit author

Figure 43: Photo documentation of amenity space, informal adaptation, and boundary conditions. Credit author

Relational Urbanism is an exploration of the process of decentralized city building that began with the question: can the rules that dictate a modern city be relative to local contexts (instead of absolute values) dictated by the many agents that make up a city? BASECO, an informal settlement in Manila, Philippines was analyzed and simulated to understand existing models of multi-agent and decentralized planning. Using a housing settlement model by Augustijn-Beckers, Flacke, Retsios, the process of development was simulated. The results demonstrated that high levels of complex organization are possible through many localized decisions and negotiations between agents (e.g. settlers). Kitsilano, a neighbourhood of Vancouver, BC, was selected as a test site for a hybrid

urban ruleset due to its relative low density, future rapid rail transit station (and projected development), and high degree of central planning. The proposed hybrid ruleset simplified the existing zoning bylaws into five rules and applied them dynamicallyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the values for each rule are determined by the local and regional contexts and constantly update as development occurs, creating a fluid â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;relational typologyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Within each block, a local free market for negotiation and transfer of development assets (e.g. excess density) fosters negotiation, and development based on the collective decisions of the inhabitants. The relational ruleset was simulated on neighbourhood and block scales, and resulted in an incremental development process that doubled density over thirty years with a gradient between dense transit hubs and infill neighbourhoods.

02 63

Vancouver is a city lauded for its livability and sustainability. In Dream City, Lance Berelowitz attributes this success to strong municipal control over the design process.1 Vancouver is a charter city, meaning it has regulatory autonomy over its urbanity, unlike the majority of Canadian cities. The charter has allowed a unique form of urban evolution int the past 50 years in the form of the Comprehensive Development District, or CD-1. As the city and developers rapidly build to meet demands, new infrastructure is also shaping the city and the planners vision of it. Rapid Rail Transit (RRT) is continuing to grow, recently completing of the Evergreen line servicing the north eastern Tri-cities. The Government of Canada has also announced that they will support a new RRT line along the Broadway Corridor-currently one of the busiest corridors in North America with express buses unable to meet the demands of local residents, workers and students. The City of Vancouver (CoV) has adopted an unofficial strategy of densification around RRT hubs: developer driven CD-1 rezoning. This process enables the CoV to charge high and unregulated rezoning fees (as a Charter city) in the form of Community Amenity Contributions. The ethics of these payments is beyond the scope of this thesis,

but the resulting urban fabric forms its motivation for a new mode of city making. While the CD-1 has arguably been a success, it comes at a cost--the rezoning process and fees effectively shut out small local residents from entering into the development process, resulting in a bifurcated city: suburbs are redeveloped with luxury homes and large developers redevelop along corridors and hubs. The ideal developer, locals, are relegated to public consultation, instead of the opportunity for small stakeholder led growth of the city--a bottom up evolution based on the empowerment of multiple, small agents. The underlying argument of this thesis is that the collective intelligence of many local and small actors will produce a city that is better able to meet the housing needs and cultural values of a community. Economics and regulation are the primary barriers to this process. Relational Urbanism proposes a new urban ruleset and complementary urban economy. Precedents for multi-agent based rulesets do not exist formally--cities without zoning such as Houston, or informal settlements such as BASECO are the closest examples. This leads to the predominant research question:

What is the process and governing logic of agent-based urbanism?

master plan zoning

versus

process driven development

RESEARCH QUESTION what is the process and governing logic of agent-based urbanism?

BASECO, an informal settlement in Manila, served as the site for analyzing and simulating the logic of settlement and growth. BASECO was formed by a bottom-up logic of relationships between agents (including residents, local developers, and prospective tenants) and the stringent relationship between developers and the CoV, with local and prospective tenants involved as consumers within a real estate market. Settlement simulations typically follow one of two methods: cellular automata or multiple agents. The former is typically used for large scale regional approaches since it is based on pixelated, abstract geography and prioritizes the geographic variables with a generic agent. Multiple agent simulations prioritize the varied choices of agents, and are better suited for formal simulations.2,3 The settlement and growth patterns of BASECO were analyzed via historical satellite photographs, personal stories of development, and second hand descriptions of its historical growth. This information implied the predominant variables to patterns of growth, namely proximity to existing infrastructure, proximity to paths and roads, quality of soil structure, and elevation/protection from weather. This information was combined with the framework for informal settlement growth by AugustijnBeckers, Flacke, and Retsios. Their model for a slum in Dar es Salaam uses a fitness field in which unique agents with varying priorities decide to settle or expand their existing structure.4 Their field conditions for Dar es Salaam were replaced with a fitness formula for BASECO as shown to the right. The development of BASECO occurs through two primary relationships: negotiations between the

geographic fields and agents, and agent-to-agent negotiations. The former occurs as agents make decisions within a normalized sum of geographic factors, dependent on each agents preference for risk, economic opportunity, etc. Agent-to-agent negotiations occur as agents decide to move next to existing agents (i.e. residents). This settlement process differs significantly from the legal surveyed property of Vancouver. In BASECO, property rights are negotiated through a rhizomatic system of mutual interests. Kitsilano, on the other hand, operates without neighbouring negotiation-negotiation is completely mediated by authorities. Required negotiations were mapped during the simulation of BASECO resulting and contrasted with the lack of local negotiation in Kitsilano to demonstrate that informal complexity arises not from an absence of a top down framework, but from a density of local negotiation and exchange. The result is a seemingly random settlement and growth pattern that is rigorously algorithmic--its high order complexity is such that formal patterns are indistinguishable, particularly when compared with the rigid grids of most modern cities. Master planning is typically based on static rules requiring manual updating and subject to biased political discretion. This ordered complexity results in a unique, agentdriven process: many small decisions generate a solution that responds exceptionally well to local conditions. In the case of BASECO, new challenges emerge without the presence of a top down framework. The first hypothesis to emerge from this research is that a hybrid model of agent based development with local negotiation (e.g. BASECO) combined with a central planning framework (e.g. Vancouver) can be an optimal method for city making across local and regional scales.

Algorithm for settlement 40% x new construction 60% x infill construction settlement addition = 10% x time of existence settlement probability =

+ distance(infrastructure)

+ distance(roads & paths)

- exposure to weather & soil stability

Frames from BASECO settlement simulation

Rhizomatic urbanism (built on agent-to-agent negotiation)

Hierarchical urbanism (no negotiation)

zoning, vancouver and the cd-1

Zoning was first introduced in the municipality of Point Grey in 1922, one year after its introduction in Los Angeles. In 1929, Harland Bartholomew was hired to prepare a comprehensive plan for the City of Vancouver (including Point Grey) which included comprehensive zoning codes in addition to street and infrastructure networks.5 Bartholomew was a prolific city visionary and planner, having prepared comprehensive city and regional plans for over 20 North American cities, including Los Angeles in 1924 and Rochester in 1929.6 In the decades that followed, zoning was primarily used to shift the balance of land use from industrial to residential during the deindustrialization of the city core.7 In the 1950s, Vancouver introduced a new rezoning method, the Comprehensive Planning District (CD1) which was effectively a unique zone that was developed on a site by site basis under the discretion of city officials. This rezoning method became the process of choice for the development of the downtown district and surrounding industrial lands along the downtown edge. This method provided a win-win for developers and the city—developers could typically receive higher densities, while the city had a greater degree of control as well as charging an unregulated levy on developers. The CD-1 zone represents a penultimate example of incentivized zoning. The City of Vancouver receives applications from developers and on a case by case basis to which they levy an amenity charge, called Community Amenity Contributions, in addition to other formal and function requirements. The amenity contributions are unregulated because Vancouver was not formed under the provincial Local Government Act, but is a charter city with significantly more legal autonomy. Whereas other cities are constrained by development cost charges, Vancouver is free to charge any amount for development and rezoning.8 The City of Vancouver has promoted its discretionary (or incentivized) zoning process and with good cause. Following the 1986 Expo, a CD-1 was issued to the developer, Concord Pacific, which redeveloped the southern post-industrial coastline of Vancouver. The city encouraged a new typology of podiums and slender towers, as well as the creation of a park along the coastline. The park and other community services such as the local library was funded by amenity contributions from Concord Pacific. The result is celebrated as ‘Vancouverism’ and has since become replicated around the world

in both form and process. Whereas economic pressure in New York and Los Angeles leveraged zoning beyond the control of city planners, effectively allowing the mainstream economic interests to determine the land use of the city, the proliferation of the CD-1 zone in Vancouver has created a continuing conflict of interest for the city without an end in sight. Like Los Angeles, Vancouver has maintained a preservationist attitude towards zoning since the 1970s. Following the rise of NIMBYism and homeowners associations protesting against rising density in their single family home neighbourhoods, the city has largely relied on the rezoning process to enact changes in density and land use. This tactic by the city allows a circumvention of the NIMBY attitude by an incremental process of rezoning, but more importantly gives the city the right to control the land-lift associated with rezoning. The city can recoup a significant portion of this land lift through community amenity contributions. The number of CD-1 approvals are shown with respect to election years. The grey line shows the cumulative number of CD-1 zones. The data shows a correlation between CD-1 approvals and election years (or one year prior). This data alone does not prove corruption, but it does suggest that a conflict of interest exists for elected officials and the rezoning of the city. The rate of CD-1 approvals has fluctuated each year but the total rate has remained mostly linear over the past 60 years. However, if we remove the increase of CD-1 approvals in the late 80s and early 90s following Expo86, the graph shows an increasing rate of approvals following 2003. This consistent increase in subsequent years (with 2009 as the lone outlier) suggests a shift in the City of Vancouver’s approach to the CD-1 policy. There also exists a notable difference between typical CD-1 projects in the 1990s and the 2000s. Arbutus Walk, located on six blocks of postindustrial land in Kitsilano is a critically successful CD-1 residential project that was focused on maintaining the character of the city while also increasing the density of the neighbourhood to highrise equivalency. The result is a collection of midrise condominiums with generous park space that extends to the greater neighbourhood. A decade later, the CD-1 projects continue to

develop in low density neighbourhoods, but their rezoning has been shaped by economic potential for the developer and the city. This is evident most notably near rapid transit stations, where 40+ storey towers rise adjacent to neighbourhoods zoned for low density. The zoning of the surrounding neighbourhoods remains fixed until developers with sufficient capital can begin the incremental rezoning process.

relational zoning

An interview with former city planner Scot Hein indicated that the city has an increasing commitment to economic contributions from developers but without the subsequent funding of local amenities to support the new development. “Out of one side of their mouth [city officials] preach livability, but out of the other they only care about printing money.”9

This example overlooks another issue of the CD-1 process and incentivized zoning in general: the interests of the most influential (e.g. access to capital) are the ones that dictate the city. The selective process excludes smaller interests from entering into the rezoning process—these agents are relegated to operate within the existing zoning scheme. Without potential for rezoning, the NIMBY attitude of these smaller agents is reinforced by a preservationist attitude to their neighbourhood’s character and value.

This testament has been observed along the redevelopment of the Cambie Corridor following the completion of a rapid transit line in 2009. Originally, the city had mandated several hundred rental housing units spread among a series of redevelopments as part of the CD-1 process. After negotiations with developers, the city agreed to drop the requirement for rental housing in exchange for several million dollars in community amenity

The City of Vancouver has created a tension between these two scales of development that seems to have found an equilibrium of preservationist attitude and economic speculation. Furthermore, the reluctance to raise taxes of homeowners perpetuates the need for the city to rely more heavily on the amenity contributions. Perhaps this is one reason for the increase in CD-1 approvals since 2003.

Relational zoning proposes regulations that foster a continued process of evolution and that is shaped by the many agents that make up a city. Rules are simplified to five principles based on the simplification of the intent of existing zoning. The datum for regulation is not fixed, but is a function of the context. That is, the allowable or required regulation is a function of a proximity weighted average of the surrounding urban fabric.

Cities maintain some control though the regulation of the framework--manipulating the affects of transit hubs, or the proximity weighting function can encourage or discourage growth in areas. However, the collective actions of landowners will be the primary decision maker for the development (or lack thereof) of local communities.

The proximity weighted average is based on the existing densities, shadows, green space, etc. of adjacent properties, as well as centrally controlled impacts from regional infrastructure. For instance, transit hubs, traffic corridors, schools, and parks can have positive (or negative) impacts on surrounding regulations. In the case of Vancouver, as transit nodes are added, they will provide an immediate impact to local regulations, which will ripple outwards as the blocks immediately surrounding the nodes develop and influence neighbouring blocks’ regulations. 76

contributions. The destination of the contributions remains unclear but if the city will not uphold rental housing and is relying on the private sector for redevelopment, the probability of affordable housing options (as an example of a much needed public amenity) is very low.10

A marketplace for exchange of excess or deficit regulation ‘assets’ exists within each block. This enables a type of rhizomatic negotiation between neighbours and provides for diversity of development across different agents. Unlike the housing coalitions of the 1970s that created regulation through collective voice, the marketplace results in active decisions through collective action. Each agent has equal impact through their decision to develop or not develop, or negotiate an exchange with a neighbour.

urban simulation

To test the effect of relational zoning on the urban fabric, two simulations were developed. The first is an urban simulation across 6 sq.km of Kitsilano. The second is a finer grain development over three blocks near the future RRT hub at Arbutus St. and Broadway Ave. Both simulations were developed as grasshopper scripts and are based on the same multiple-agent logic used in the simulation of BASECO. The urban simulation focused exclusively on density for simplicity and relative priority on an urban scale. It began with mapping the current regulatory allowance and the existing densities. The new

allowable densities under relational zoning were generated using the proximity weighted average for context and regional infrastructure. The simulation was run for 30 years in one year increments and assumed a 10% build out rate (from existing to allowable density). A video of the simulation is included in the accompanying DVD. The result is a near linear increase in density and a smoothing of existing density divides across discrete zones. The simulation shows that density approaches the maximum limit set by the RRT hubs.

Existing typologies of incremental development

three block simulation

A finer grain simulation was carried out over three blocks in Kitsilano. This simulation considered all five regulations. Negotiations were speculated based on different options for each property owner. These include: »» selling property to a developer »» no development but willing to ‘sell’ regulatory assets »» no development and not willing to ‘sell’ (e.g. holdouts) »» small scale development (see existing typologies of small scale development) »» large scale development through negotiation for more density, shadows, etc. Negotiations themselves can occur via different means, including: »» exchange for money

»» trading asset types (e.g. density for parking) »» mutual forgiveness (e.g. shadows cast) »» collective agreement over public space In this simulation, growth was again linear and different blocks discovered new ways to evolve. The first block, dominated by an existing development remained relatively discrete properties. The second block consolidated required green space into a semi-private park in the middle of the block. The third block developed a dominant typology of laneway townhouses with shared green space corridors between the laneway homes and street homes. Development was forced to become incremental-large scale development was nearly impossible with the framework, even after the introduction of the new RRT hub (although that would not be the case for immediately adjacent properties to the RRT).

»» mutual sharing (of green space or parking)

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results

The simulations revealed benefits and challenges of relational zoning. Benefits included: »» small scale, incremental developments (average building footprint decreased) »» slow, sustained densification (FSR doubled over 30 years at a nearly constant rate) »» small, local agents can participate in growth »» responsive to local and neighbourhood contexts »» highly localized evolution at each block, based on collective action and decision-making.

further questions

The results suggest future next steps and questions: »» inclusion of additional agents such as ecologies, infrastructures, and tenants »» inclusion of additional neighbourhood nodes such as grocery stores, employment centres, daycares, or parks »» proximity and algorithm of weighted average »» additional urban factors such as economic and ecological »» new architectural typologies »» expand existing ruleset to include factors such as natural capital or vented energy.

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Challenges included: »» privileges land-owners »» local authority requires some collective decision making »» possibility for ‘block-busting’ developments »» complex for layperson to operate within »» relies on centralized market platform for negotiations

notes

1. Berelowitz, Lance, Dream city: Vancouver and the global imagination (Douglas & McIntyre: Vancouver, 2005) 10. 2. Patel, Amit, “Slumulation: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach to Slum Formations”, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 5.4 (2012): 2. 3. Roy Debraj, Lees M.H., Palavalli Bharath, “The emergence of slums: A contemporary view on simulation models”, Environmental Modelling & Software 59 (2014): 77. 4. Augustijn-Beckers, Ellen-Wien, “Simulating informal settlement growth in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: An agent-based housing model”, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 35 (2011): 93-103. 5. Berelowitz, 215. 6. Heathcott Joseph, “The Whole City is Our Laboratory: Harland Bartholomew and the Production of Urban Knowledge”, Journal of Planning History 4.4 (2005): 322. 7. Berelowitz, 215. 8. Condon, Patrick, “Vancouver’s ‘Spot Zoning’ is Corrupting Its Soul,” The Tyee (July 14, 2014). 9. Scot Hein in discussion with the author (April 7, 2016). 10. Notes from Urbanarium debate (March 9, 2016).

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