Thesis: An Urbanism of Disorganization by Kevin Rogan

An Urbanism of Disorganization Kevin Rogan

1. Europa Prima Pars Terræ in Forma Virginis, by Hienrich Bünting. A cosmogeny that enforces a world of Europeans as ‘chosen’ humanizing agents of enlightenment.

An Urbanism of Disorganization: Autonomy in the Future City Kevin Rogan

2. Modern superstructures: The city of Luanda, Angola.

Table of contents Introduction: What will the future city be? Background Disorganization World-crisis Localization Urbanization Economization Subterranean frameworks Recovering utopia Precedents Shenzhen, China: Reconciling Relentless Expansion with Marginal Populations Urban exceptionalism Linear city Growth & economy The urban underclass Humanity in worlds of capital Expansion Interstitial: Temporary Autonomous Zones A critical framework Torre David: Framework Systems & Urban Agency, Part 1 Demotic city The urban interstitial Self-governance Hak Nam: Framework Systems & Urban Agency, Part 2 Viral growth No-place Relevance Summary: Disorganization City Project program Appendix A: Figures Appendix B: Footnotes

3. Forgotten monoliths: Moss-covered face of Sungboâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Eredo, a massive ~99 mile superstructural rampart system built in precolonial Nigeria (800-1000 CE).

Introduction What will the future city be? As the effects of the Anthropocene Era begin their violent

even spatially, though these elements are extremely

inscriptions upon the world and our lives, paired with

important.)

a worldwide (re)urbanization, now is as good a point to consider this question. Positioned at a singularity, will the

A considerate city takes into account its function

city stay the course, dissolving into the bloated, sprawling

as an ecosystemic piece, its form, its distribution.

technopolis prophesied by postmodernism? Or will we

This is a new urbanism that recognizes nature is not

sieze upon this crucial point and refabricate our conception

an other to be appeased or resituated, but rather

of urban space?

an entity that is itself productive, constructive, and assimilative. Within nature, there is room for the city and its populace, and to negotiate the gradient

Can the city be a conduit: a way forward, a way out?

of expressions that occur at what were previously Architecturally and urbanistically, we exist at a strange

considered natural-urban boundaries as a new

time. Having categorically rejected the scorched-earth

possibility of disorganization.

plans of the early modernists as too stark, the gleefully apocalyptic schemes of the late modernists (Archigram &

A staging ground is necessary to explore an iterative

Metabolism) as not feasible, we are faced with an urban

disorganizational process. Ideally, this staging

status quo that is too rigid, too surveilled, too prone to

ground would also sit at the collision of various

economic unevenness, too misanthropic. The human is

stressors: a tumultuous and uncertain relationship

being removed from the city, producing a metropolis that

between urban expansion and natural preservation;

is not necessarily dependent on the polis that describes

the concern for collective unity threatened by new

it. The city is becoming a landscape of unadulterated

economic power. Following these qualifiers, no

expansion, of agglomeration, of capital. The individual is

ground is more viable than Africa.

rapidly being disintegrated. However, though a site is necessary in a contextual We don’t like it, and register our displeasure. And we try to

sense, these conditions are largely universally

change the city, to reconfigure it, but the underlying strata

applicable in some frequency. The hope of this project

is one shaped by either efficiency, economics, segregation,

would then be to recreate the city as a weaponized

or anything else—anything but the citizen.

item that could be deployed nearly anywhere at any scale, but would not sacrifice contextuality for systematization.

But any attempt to retake the city is hollow because it was never ours to begin with, having been built on the firmament of various autocracies and empires. The city must be reconsidered as a vestige of its citizenry, and therefore it must be remade. An attempt to move from the ekistical bedrock of the current city will have to consider its inhabitants over its economics

4. Foreground: Griemas semiotic square of a new anthropopolis (inspired by Fredric Jameson’s own square of More’s original/ titular Utopia.)

and form. (This is not merely speaking developmentally, or

the individual

ecology

new typology

economy

the polis 7

Disorganization The city of disorganization: an urban zone that

afraid to countermand the city.1 Manchev describes

fundamentally rejects its siezure by majoritarian powers.

disorganization as a signifier that “gives a name to a force of affirmative resistance immanent to life. The

Though the cultural-imperial experiment of European

concept of disorganization indicates that life always

colonialism is now “over” (insofar that could ever be really

has the possibility to organize itself without closing

true), Africa is still a field of exploitation. New empires

itself, without fixing itself in the perfection of a limit,

of exo-Africanic states, corporo-charities, and resource

to experiment always further.”2

exploiters, and so on, all seek to stake claims on African territory and production.

Disorganization on an urban stage is the participation in dismantling and mutating the colonial artifact

Though the sovereignty of African states are no longer

is a new symbiote of praxis and critical theory: the

under political assault, a new terrasystemic process is

urbanism of alteration, of polis-generated, everyday

emerging that aims to utilize the multinational reach of

disorganization. Once the city has been analyzed in

late/postindustrial capitalism to enact new systems of

this way, it can become wholly contextualized, and in

control.

doing so, a generator of sensitive growth. The growth possible in such a city will be inherently under the

Under this new system, would-be colonizers (or ‘states of

ownership of its residents.

accumulation’) offers to “advance” local infrastructures and processes by exporting exploitative Western practices and ingraining them in African life. This is the shape of postcolonial empire, post-imperial colonialism, dedominionated expansion, or any of the other administrative zen koans that late capitalist expansion exists within. The powers of late capitalism see within the cities of the continent schemes debris from previous forms of itself: the panopticon of colonial planning and its re-creation in new structures of spatial enforcement. Using this as a guide, the city reiterates, endlessly replicating the spatial structures of colonialism in iterative succession. As this formation grows, the opportunity for urban autonomy shrinks until it is accepted as logical that the city should be formed this way. The first step is acknowledgement of the repetition of history: an urban resistance is necessary. However, this term is reductive in its current usage. Boyan Manchev’s concept of disorganization perhaps, better than resistance, encapsulates the position necessary to uncover urban character: one that is no longer content to accept the city as a known stratification of an exoAfrican/colonial/imperial dynamis but one that is not

5. A diagrammatic map of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;terrasystemâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; - cities connected by colonial exchange - and the network of flows they establish.

"...the rising tide that supposedly lifts all boats is threatening to inundate the shore instead... " —Battistoni, Alyssa, “Back to No Future,” Jacobin Magazine, accessed 20 November 2013.

World-Crisis The status quo is killing us: according to the WWF’s have an extra planet at our disposal. We are using 50 per cent more resources than the Earth can provide, and unless we change course that number will grow very fast – by 2030, even two planets will not be enough.”3 It is not melodramatic or overly apocalyptic to declare that: “...scarcity is the future’s objective imperative.”4 The current ‘reinterpretive’ tactics of a human

Index Value (1970 = 1)

Living Planet 2012 report, “We are living as if we

future is only a application of , with all its attendant theoretical missteps, fads and counter-movements. The umbrella ‘green’ trend is too concerned with change by modicum and within the strictures of the current system. The main strategies are merely hypo-ficialities: aesthetics, environmentalisms, or mere sustainable ‘tendencies’. This is no longer enough. A deeper foundational reconsideration

6. Graph of ‘Living Planet Index’ (a measure of biodiversity) for the sub-Saharan African region.

is necessary. The severity of this condition is not to be understated. We live in a time period (the

demanding “exponential increase in deforestation,

Anthropocene) in which:

resource extraction, greenhouse gas emissions and waste” to fulfill its “unstoppable need of money to

“• Resources are per definition finite;

increase itself within a competitive environment”.7

• The earth system has been irrevocably altered

In this way, capitalism becomes an inhumanity, an

by human production;

eldritch monster that is unknowable and blithely

• Positive feedback loops under capital are

accelerating

severe

perturbations

misanthropic.

ecosystems;

But this relationship begs a renegotiation: the

• Humans are in the last instance evolutionary

“cynical distance” offered by urbanisms and

entities at risk of starvation, disease, and

architectures

brutality.”5

since

time

immemorial

have,

invariably, posited a dialectical ‘Othering’ of Nature—an devastating concept, and one that

At the root of these symptoms is what Tom Cohen

forms the bedrock for our Enlightenment-shaped

labels an “eco-eco disaster complex”, in which the

thinking, which mythologized the primeval wild as

double oikos of ecology and economy have fused

something exoanthropic. Arun Saldanha’s maxim “...

to generate a chimeric, polyvalent, self-sustaining

Nature has to be jettisoned categorically” is a guide

catastrophe.6 But underneath this duplicity is

towards reunification: by persisting with the current

the engine: the all-devouring tendencies of late

ideological separation, a worldview is cultivated in

capitalism, working at full blast. Capitalism at this

which Nature is a romanticist thing outside to be

stage rakes its influence across the biosphere,

subjugated, controlled, and made permissible, not

Afrotropical LPI: -38% The endlessly consumptive tendency of capitalism has brought us to this point. But in a perverse move, it now attempts to offer a solution. Wearing the mask of objectivity, capitalism aims to present itself as a more softened, accessible varient of itself. Under various names (‘green’ capitalism, ‘ethical’ consumerism, ‘geo’-engineering), capitalism attempts to reposition itself as the solution to a problem of its own devising.9 This new faux-humanism is coupled with the quiet acquiescence of the fact, the removal of the problem from the discursive sphere. These are design problems, but at a much larger scale than we’re used to: the scale of ‘hyperobjects’—“objects that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans. They are not infinite, but they are so large that they humiliate and defeat not only our ability to count, but also our ability to build.”10 Within this new landscape of objects, design changes gears. Instead of being autocratic, disposable, and singularly

as a global system we have complicity in.8 This is a

aesthetic, design must be reconsidered as a medium for

failed notion that must be renegotiated. Humanity

a reconsideration of human life and a conduit for futurist

must be reconsidered as a part of the ecosystem,

possibilities, where “...design [is made to] account for

with a complicity in a world/environmental system

thousand, ten thousand, and hundred thousand year

that includes us and can eject us. Continuing

Cohen’s

eco-eco

timescales.”11 In an urban sense, this must be coupled dialectic,

with the realization that our current methodologies (and

the

morphologies)

current conception of nature as a thing to be re-

are

inherently

damaging,

deranged,

and self-defeating, enacting positive feedback loops of

anthropomorphicized should be balanced with a

consumptive sprawl. Under the aegis of capital, the rule is

concurrent de-humanizing of capital. Capitalism’s

that as the city grows, ecological space must be destroyed—

reach is now endless as there is no outside;

but this does not need to be the case.

beyond the physical world, reality itself has been territorialized and made into a zone of production.

The city as is currently exists is simply a machine for

However, the fundamental inhumanity of capitalism

reproducing an eco-eco status quo of eventual destruction

removes humanity from the picture entirely. As

through the medium of space and form. To begin a move

long as capital, markets, and the economy are

towards a urban futurism, the entire city must be thought

considered to be creatures that must be tended

of as available for reformatting:

and maintained, objectivity and critical removal

the city can become

anti-sprawl, hyperobjectified, terrahaptic, and mediative

is impossible. Without this necessary distance, a

between social and ecological interests.

true consideration of capitalism’s ramifications and disastrous effects are impossible.

Localization When writing about the African city, it’s impossible to ignore the colonial framework left by the ablation of the European imperial project.11 This influence can be felt at every level of the city:

and regional scales, and its digestion of African people,

from its spatial organization, to its juridical structure,

space, and resources (and their subsequent transferal

to even its name and placement. In almost all cases,

to economic/productive use) threatens to overwhelm any

the introduction of imperial urban space into Africa

attempt to negotiate a way out from still-extant colonial

was a microcosmic example of the continent’s

structures. The hyperconsumptive nature of urbanization

appropriation.

under the aegis of capital creates feedback-loop morphologies that sprawl dramatically and with abandon.

In some cases foundational and in others formative,

Homogenization metastasizes and consumes landscapes,

its propensity to warp structures of space and power

creating cacotopian conditions that are just as turgid and

in formerly controlled zones is not to be understated.

dehumanized as the colonial spaces they supplant.

This apparatus of coercive urbanism is still in effect to a large degree; though Africa is (and has been)

How, then, can new geometries of urban development be

experiencing an ‘urban awakening’, there is still an

instituted?

inescapability to the subterranean underpinning of the colonial spatial system and its postcolonial

Is there a methodology that can reject ‘organizations by

reinforcement.

force’ in the city?

The colonial matrix’s alien quality—its status as an

The synthesis of such an argument would attempt to

exo-African emanation into urban African space—

mediate a path between rigid planning and unabashed

gives it geopolitical importance and agonistic

expansionism to create a language of urban expansion

character.

that would allow for and even promote future growth, while offering a ‘soft frame’ which the growth must answer to.

There is at the same time another system of compulsion that has been and is in the process of

To this end, broad areas of study have been identified: a

being applied to African urban space. Similarly, it

report on current trends in urbanization and economization,

has been imported from sources outside of Africa

a discussion of autocratic enforcement and controls in

and threatens to alienate the city further from its

urban space, and concluding with an examination of its

inhabitants.

inverse: ground-up urban spatial generation.

This new framework is, of course, that of neoliberal, or ‘late’ capitalism, which brings with it what Hanson & Lake identify as “twin perils”: that of “social & economic destitution and massive environmental degradation”.12 Though this economic regime is exo-African, its adoption and usage is affective on personal, local, 7. Infilled alleyway in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

8. Future Conurbations #1: Copperbelt City, stretching nearly 120 miles between Lubumbashi and Ndola.

9. Future Conurbations #2: The Ivory Coast Axis, the proposed future megacity created when Accra, Lagos, and Ibadan’s sprawling urbanisms collide.

of Madagascar. The region is comprised of 48 countries,

Urbanization

and further pixelated by tribal allegiances, political affiliations, and geographic divisions.

As a rule, “the world’s least urbanized countries have been The region includes 9 of the top 20 projected fastest-

the most rapidly urbanizing ones since the 1960s.”13

growing cities (between 2006-2020) and is experiencing While the post-Fordist cities of the West are attempting

immense urbanization throughout: from 1960 to 1990,

repurposing and revival, newly ascendant economic

the total population of the region multiplied by 2.5%, but

powers as

new

are

experiencing

socioeconomic,

enormous

urban

growth

the urban population increased by 5% during the same

geopolitical,

and

cultural

UN projections for 2025 put the urban

period.16

17 18

population of the SSA at 705 million people, constituting

reterritorializations draw people in from surrounding rural

13.6% of the world’s urban population.19

regions and reconfigure them into urban citizens overnight. As a continent, Africa’s rate of urbanization per annum is currently at 3.5%, the highest in the world, and expected to

Can societal urbanization of this scope be materially

hold at this rate until 2050 (China’s, for example, is 2.85%,

supported? UN planning/futures directives advise that

and the United States’ is 1.2%).14

an African megalopolis “should develop around Lagos…

[and] between Ibadan and Accra, over a distance of 500 The Sub-Saharan region of Africa (the so-called SSA) has

kilometers”.20 The resulting conurbation would potentially

been experiencing particularly rapid growth for decades. As

total 50 million people in 2025, again, using the UPESSA’s

the name implies, the region is comprised of the African

1995 projections.21 The UPESSA document also attempts

countries south of the Sahara Desert, including the island

to predict other potentialities for SSA megalopolises: “the

Johannesburg-Pretoria urban area; the Niger delta and

the south of the Ibo country, between Benin City [(Lagos)], Port Harcourt, Calabar and Enugu; and the ‘copper belt’ 22 23

between Lubumbashi and Ndola”.

Twinned to the undergoing rampant urbanization

This speculation is countermanded by reality: the city is not

processes, the SSA is also relentlessly developing its

sprawling out, but building on top of itself. For example, the urban municipality of Lagos (‘Lagos State’) has an estimated current population of 21 million.

The city has

not sprawled much yet, (it is currently at only 356,861 hectares, of which 75,755 are unusable, environmentally 25

protected wetlands.

Economization

These numbers put Lagos State’s

population density at 75 people/hectare).

economic status. The October 2012 World Economic Outlook handbook, published by the International Monetary Fund, projects a staggering 5.7% GDP growth (compare to the United States’ 2.1%, the European Union’s 0.2%, and China’s 8.0%).18 However, when broken down more individually, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is projected to

SSA cities are often melting pots of ethnic concentrations—a trend that can both offer diverse cultural possibilities and create frictional tensions. As urban zones grow and population densities rise, these problems could be

grow its GDP 8.2% in 2013, and Mozambique 8.4%.26 Growth across the region is obviously dramatic in its scale, but remains uneven and classist. The Gini coefficient of urban areas remains high at roughly .30-.34 according to CIA World Factbook figures,

exacerbated if not dealt with effectively, humanely, and in a

indicating economic inequality is rampant.27

way that actively preserves the agency of urban denizens.

Urbanization in the SSA is not correlated with an increase in personal wealth. This may be an indication that SSA urbanizing may be a coercive phenomenon, in some respects: rural dwellers are forced to leave their villages, as there is no longer any economic opportunities; and upon arriving in the city, will find their personal wealth disintegrating further. The capitalistic landscape of uneven development reproduces itself. Though Sub-Saharan Africa is currently more rural than the rest of the world, extrapolation shows that it will soon ‘catch up’, both economically and with urban development. Simply put, Africa is urbanizing, quickly. The time is now to enact an urban futures plan that ensures African megalopolises will assume a morphology that does not reproduce the coercive forms of colonialism.

10. World Bank graph of rate of urbanization as a function of GDP/person: comparison in Sub-Saharan Africa. Circa 2011.

11. Workers assemble the frame of a World Cup structure for the 2010 event in South

12. Visions of Africa: 1959 ‘Murdock’ ethnic map. Though perhaps simplistic, this map depicts over 835 ethnic zones.

Subterranean frameworks A large amount of the SSA’s urban history is intrinsically

garrison cities enframed the continent, creating a

tied to the expression of the European imperial project and

lucidly conscious apparatus of exo-political power

its eventual recession. The mad rush for territorialization

and enforcement.30

and the construction of empire led to a brutal regime under the guise of a “civilizing mission” that took the shape of 28

violent spatial subjugation.

This colonial system weaponized the urban zone, making it into what Soja calls a “social hieroglyphic”: not only an unmistakable expression of power but

This territorializing was in many ways a pointed refusal

also a delineation of a new racialized dialectic of Self

to accept the validity of previous ‘unconscious’ planning

and Other in space.31 32 Under the colonial/imperial

practices. Beyond unconsciousness, these precolonial

terrasystem, the European self (the colonizer/

plans also were borne of consensuality—a quality that

oppressor) assumed a metropolitan position,

constructed a built environment with meaning and minute

inhabiting urban zones.33 The demonization of

symbolism as well as locality and inherency.29 These

the Other flattered this Self and made a case for

planning methodologies reveal a layout that is a contextual

its relegation to an urban underclass, existing in

emanation of the settlement’s group mind, be it religious,

surveilled space. The initial colonizing powers had a

familial, social, or so on and is pointless to be read as an

keen sense of this process. The formation of cities as

inscription of power in space. The ‘humanization’ efforts

spaces of coercion was a composed, austere techne

of the European powers brought with them a new urban

of compartmentalization, order, and dominion over

form, one that is a presentation of power. New European

urban zones both public and private.34 The landscape

13. Current-day map of geopolitical boundaries. Largely derived from Scramble-era territorial demarkation by European powers.

14. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Conflict mapâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; compiled from ACLED data. Elements are (for the most part) centered around resources, boundaries, and urban areas.

15. Procession of the Oba out of British-held Benin City, now Lagos. Woodcut from 1668.

is reconceived as a pro-colonial/-colonizer dialectic, with

This trend continued as IFIs like the World Bank and

the intention of not only legitimizing but normalizing power.

the IMF introduced “the years of the rule of money”,

Discipline and allocation of urban space creates a starkly

beginning to push subsidies and programs like the

elitist urban hegemony. Under this system, to walk the

UN Sustainable Cities Programme on cities in the

streets and inhabit space is to be constantly assured that

region—supposedly under the auspices of poverty

all zones and all flows are owned by the colonial overlords.

relief but really as weapons of capitalistic power that

The utopian impulse is followed through to its tyrannical

destroyed subsidies for the urban poor in favor of

endpoint, at which the city is divorced from its denizens.

promoting “growth” (mainly economic).35 36

The colonial powers used their dominion to make the city a tabula rasa project, formulating an urban pragmatic in

These programs are a thinly veiled form of economic

economically/militarily advantageous territory to function

colonialism by new agglomerated powers, claiming

as an enforcer, observer, and segregator.

to be neutral but in fact wholly Westernophilic and hegemonic. Professor Catriona Sandilands points

After centuries of spatial violence and detainment, the

out UN/IFI programs “[obscure] important problems

colonial era began to draw to a close in the middle half of

of definition, valued interest, and ideological

the 20th century. After the recession of the colonial powers,

conflict”.37

however, the cities of the SSA were never redrawn or

reinterpreted, but simply reoccupied. The new non-colonial

Buried within this repurposed system are the same

ruling class often simply changed the name of the party

old methods of control and unevenness, just in

in power, but not power’s application. The doctrine and

different forms. Instead of ‘hard’ structures of

spatialities of the city remained, creating a reframing effect

control (that is, administratively enforced), there are

that reinforced the colonial morphology of exploitation.

now ‘softer’ structures that more insidiously but no

groupings but are also utilized to erect quarantine zones,

less strictly enforce similar segregation practices.

sealing off undesirable populations, such as those with high HIV rates.40

In some cases, this manifests as a direct overlay on existing colonial-era forms, such as the peculiar tendency of formerly predominantly white cities to

Infrastructure is an illusion. Open quarrying can be found

remain financial centers and capitals; but more

in city centers. The deployment of water, sewage, and

often, the forms of regulation are new, or at least

sanitation utilities are politicized and used as weapons to

recombinant, edifices of privatization, capital,

blight objectionable communities and settlements.41

and development.38 The creation of roads, malls, restaurants, internet cafes, connections, and a

Built on a colonial basis, the city remains an enemy of the

new prevalent mobile culture have produced, and

polis, infrastructurally, spatially, and in totality.

been produced by, an expansionary and proactive consumptive capitalism.39 However, all this infrastructural work is being undertaken with an agenda of confinement and control similar in language to the efforts undertaken by

the

colonial

powers

that

came

before.

Development and redistricting projects are routinely enacted along colonial/postcolonial datum that not only refuse to account for factional collective

16. Before and after;; Forcibly excluded from sanitation infrastructures, residents are forced to create ad hoc landfills wherever possible.

Recovering utopia In the classical sense, the utopia is as a semiotic

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia offers a principle of the

emblem of total urban domination. Accordingly, the

utopian form: no politics. More’s city-state takes Athenian

assembly of colonial cities was a function primarily

democracy as its basis but dispenses with the agora. In

of a utopian vision.

a section entitled ‘Of Their Magistrates’, More laboriously expounds upon the chain of command, a parliamentary,

Though constructed entirely for the wrong reasons

oligarchic system composed of Philarchs and Archphilarchs,

(i.e. imperial extensionism) the cities of colonial

(which he is quick to point out are the modern terms used to

Africa are the closest urban builders have come to

denote ancient offices, previous titles being ‘Syphogrants’

a true utopian condition spatially: a city built as the

and ‘Tranibors’, respectively).43 Temporal steadfastness

seat of a heavily top-down governmental machine: a

is the legitimating element here, and the monumental

city, that by its very nature, supports only bourgeoisie

permanence (the records of the community run back

living and access and disallows all other forms of

“seventeen hundred and sixty years”) of the first utopia’s

utilization.

governing structure has become a code for the form itself.

By analyzing this achievement, we can decipher

Durability and perpetuity are taken as expectations, and

is the fundamental failure to the utopian impulse,

with it the semiotic desire underpinning utopia: that of

which is that a true utopia is no such thing. Utopia

totalizing, unchanging stability.

as no-place is a generic assumption that has never come to pass. All utopias are really heterotopias—a

Spatially, the utopia carves out an urban system that is

hallucinatory figment, a kaleidoscopic amalgam

similar to that of a colonial city in a generic sense: a creation

that collates a multiplicity of spaces, conditions, and

unfettered by topography, context, social influence, the

social structures into one finite zone.

utopia is a depositif that seems to be a projection from another world. The paradigm of More’s utopia is wholly

Sir Thomas More, in establishing the genre in his

one of modernity: a reductive monism of the city that

1516 novel Utopia, was the first to enact this sort of

occludes all alternative readings simply by writing them

out of existence, going so far as to prohibit the entrance of

‘chimeric’ world-building.

More’s utopia exhibited

its influences with a distinct lack of subtlety: the first

politics into the daily lives of the inhabitants:

utopia was an island colony, impossibly founded by the survivors of a shipwrecked Greek expedition,

“To take counsel on matters of common interest outside

who had adopted pseudo-Incan communistic

the senate or popular assembly is considered a capital

municipal

offense.”44

structures,

miraculously

practiced

Protestantism, and wore hooded robes, denoting simultaneously the historicity of the Catholic Church and the asceticism of the Middle Ages.

The true failure of the utopian model lies here: utopianism

Spatially,

denotes a lack of fluidity at an inherent level; a vision

this utopia predominantly borrowed common Greco-

of the figure- and the occlusion of the -ground. Though

Roman forms that positioned it as an inheritor of

attempting to propose “the possibility that the present

past glories and an illusion of a triumphant future.

had evolved from the past and that the future could be extrapolated from the present”, it instead offers a vision of detained advance.45 The interstitial is eliminated and jettisoned categorically; the end of history is manifested in

17. Frontispiece from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, 1516 printing

urban form.

"The political unconscious [of utopia] may be imagined... as working like a kaleidoscope: compulsively breaking down, scrambling, and reassembling its

collection of 'social images' from the past of ideology, in response to the recurrent dilemmas, conflicts, traumas..." —Kendrick, Christopher, “More’s Utopia and Uneven Development,” boundary 2 (1985): 422.

Here, once again, utopias offer a model of the mindset of

frames of cognition and ideology. But what these

the construction of colonial cities. Colonial cities, ideally,

utopias reveal, either consciously or not, is utopia’s

also represent the end of history, or at least the closing

refusal to make concessions—its calcification of

of it. The lack of adaptivity that defines them and their

revolution, the arresting of motive political force.

fetishization of control structures points to an underpinning belief that the colonizing power is the modulator of time

The form these utopias take is a fundamental

and history. The colonial city and the utopia both make the

negation of their very construction.

case that the constructing power is in possession of history, As a way forward, Robert Nozick in Anarchy, the

and then undergo the task of aestheticizing the fact.

State and Utopia offers an analytical alternative: But without the proper autocracy to support utopian/ colonial totalization, the system crumbles, and the polis

“The conclusion to draw is that there will not be one

surges, re-adapting and offering an urban becoming-minor

community existing and one kind of life led in Utopia.

in the marginal spaces of the city. This counterpoint is vital:

Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different

it shows that, however repressed, an urban citizenry never

and divergent communities in which people lead

loses an appetite for appropriation. For all its posturing as a

different kinds of lives under different institutions.

finalizing edifice, the utopia cannot hold forever and will be

Some kinds of communities will be more attractive

retaken and remade into something more human: spaces

to most than others; communities will wax and wane.

of spontaneity, urban enclaves of everyday life.

People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias,

But the original geometries of utopia/the colonial city still

a place where people are at liberty to join together

exist and unnecessarily enslave progression to its strict

voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their

spatial overarch. Why is this so? The urban populace must no longer be content to simply exist inside of what is given, within the carcass of the utopian structure.

own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others. The utopian society is the society of utopianism...utopia is meta-utopia…”46

Reconfiguration is required. However, Sir More is not singularly at fault here: though his classical utopia does not allow for alternatives, (likely an emenation of his bourgeoisie thinking), it has been picked up on and celebrated, becoming a genre flaw. Considering the revival of the utopian literary form in the West in the

If this stance is adopted, utopia is eviscerated. The form becomes a methodology of disruption. Reformatted, the utopian city becomes a zero vector for the re-imagining of what Fredric Jameson calls the “collective project”.47

aftermath of the social movements of the 1960s, this cultural anti-plurality persists, though it runs counter to the stated intent of these alter-universes. As did More’s, utopian schemes of the era picked their battles: Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia promoted environmentalism as a political force that manifested in state-building; Gerd Brantenberg’s Egalia’s Daughters re-gendered the zeitgeist and hierarchies; Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye offered an extraterrestrial analysis of racial and caste structures...among countless other examples. These constructs all espouse socially and politically progressive

18. Meta-utopian collectors: View of Loanga (Kingdom of Loanga, modern day Angola

Shenzhen, China: Reconciling Relentless Expansion and Marginal Populations

19. Urban plan of Cuidad Lineal.

20. Satellite image of Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia.

Urban Exceptionalism

Linear City This is not to say that historical urban precedent does not exist in Shenzhen. In its simplest interpretation, Shenzhen

Shenzhen really is the ‘instant city’, long prophesied by Archigram, the Metabolists, and Studio X.1

is a linear city—an urban archetype dating at least to Arturo Soria y Mata’s Cuidad Lineal project for Madrid, and later expanded by N.A. Miliutin’s sotsgorod concept of socialist cities (of which Ernst May’s plan for Magnitogorsk is a

But instead of the science-fictive optimism of the post-

real-world example) and Kenzo Tange’s famous Tokyo Bay

modern avant-garde, the “new city without history”

Masterplan.

was never built with the citizen in mind. Shenzhen is a city made trans-temporal, supra-spatial, and

But Shenzhen is innately different: “Linearity here is not

entirely generated by and subservient to capital.

the materialization of a modernist utopia, the sublimation of an abstract idea of planning as in most XIX century

Shenzhen is the agglomerated, metastasized urban

constructions.”4 In a way, this affiliation with linearity is a

speciation of the Foucauldian heterotopia: a defined

positioning of Shenzhen as anti-modern: a formal negation

zone, experiencing a wild removal from reality (or our

of CIAM’s obsession with centrification and collusion into

perception of it), and seemingly containing a piece

a Tangian ‘urban axis’, which “combined with the arterial

of infinity within a finite space. Shenzhen is an

movement that sustained urban life, would serve as the

urban aberration, resisting all nominative efforts and

symbol of the open organization in a contemporary pivotal

repeatedly eluding all efforts to codify its rampant

city, just as a cathedral sitting at the center of a centripetal

expansion.

organization was the symbol of the [European] medieval city.”5 The applications to Shenzhen are obvious, but buried: in this case, linearity is not a mode of organization, but is “simply a thread, a vector loosely stitching together an assemblage of disparate market experiments.” 6 Shenzhzen’s linearity is not the result of a heavy-handed institutional directive but of a combination of market pressures, topologies, and social stresses—not necessary an autonomous generation, but a collectively willful one, with multiscalar design prerogatives. In other words, the creation and direction of the city is only minorly affected by actual planning directive—but the city grows in response to institutional pressures (largely economic in nature) that create a fertile playground. The city will not be controlled by firm seizures of authoritarian power, but rather by a multitude of iterative socioeconomic nudges. Essentially, the city is a creature: sentient, ambulatory, but domesticated.

21. Photograph of model of Tokyo Bay Masterplan by Kenzo Tange.

Growth & Economy

22. The outer limits of the SSEZ in 1988 (dashed line) vs. the 2013 boundaries.

What are the vital signs of the Shenzhen creature? The facts and figures are almost numbing with their sheer preponderance: The population has multiplied 325 times since its inception as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in 1980, to reach 10.47 million residents as of 2011’s end.7 8 In that same timeframe, the GDP has also multiplied 724 times, fixed capital investment 488 times, industrial gross output 3,014 times, imports and exports 3,918 times.9 Of course, Shenzhen expands to accommodate the demented bacchanalia, having expanded precipitously enough to render the whole idea of an urban plan obsolete, as the city “embarrassingly escapes from every forecast”.10 Shenzhen is the prototype of what Rem Koolhaas has identified as the “post city”, one which is self-evidently a rejection of the traditional view of planning that he maintains is occluded to the new hyperactivity of the post-Fordist, histrionically consumerist world that is the new engine of the urban zone.11 23. Satellite image of a typical urban village in Shenzhen.

Pearl River Delta Conurbation by 2020

Urban Underclass However, the amazed position we are forced to adopt

However, this is usually only a place of temporary

when regarding Shenzhen should not be read as a tacit

occupation, with no basic amenities like as the

agreement of its position and tactics.

reliable provision of food and social services. The campus quarters for workers were often “narrow…

The city consumes its surroundings, despite best efforts

there was enough space between the bunk beds

to contain it with planning (such as the 1996 Shenhzen

for residents to walk to their bed”, and not much

Comprehensive Plan’s abortive sprawl-limiting 1000

else.

km2

‘growth boundary’) and with centralization (the When

Residency in these conditions is impossible,

the sprawl grows, the villages it swallows up, previously

habitation is tenuous, and economic survival is only

countryside

just achievable. These conditions are worsened

‘downtownification’ of the Futian district).12 hamlets,

are

assimilated,

becoming

by the social apparatus of the hukou registration

morphological holes in the city’s fabric.

system—a device and legacy of the Chinese These zones are regarded by the authorities as an

command economy. The hukou regime’s intention

“urban malignant tumour” featuring a “dirty, chaotic, and

is to regulate the permeability of the rural-to-urban

inferior” living environment.14 Completely enclosed by

border for the working class, encouraging regional

the city, these villages often become, oppositional hard

employment paths, but in reality is an element

points of radical informal urbanization and true vitality.

of “social, political and economic control by a

However, the land which these villages sit on is, of course,

centralised government.”18 Possession of a rural

valuable—and expansive (there are, as of 2005, 241

hukou precludes its holder to certain privileges

discrete villages still extant)—and so, are ‘reclaimed’,

and wages that urban residents enjoy. According to

undergoing “the process through which ‘the wealthy lay

Jiang Wenran, the system functions as a form of

siege to poor neighborhoods’”, or “gentrification with

socioeconomic “apartheid”, creating a permanent

Chinese characteristics”.

underclass of extremely cheap labor with almost no legal recourse that essentially function as

Exacerbating this condition is Shenzhen Municipality’s

corporate-industrial chattel.19

corrosive power to strip the villages of their legal status,

Of note is the fact that the hukou system is also

thereby making them vassal enclaves to the city and

notoriously, bureaucratically rigid. As Shenzhen

removing the powers of the popular advocacy groups

expands rapidly, the people that get swept up into

like the collectives that usually hold land ownership

its encroachment often still possess the rural hukou

rights, called Township and Village Enterprises, or TVEs.

they received at birth. Displaced from their former

These informal districts are so marginalized, they are

residences, they are often left with no choice but

not depicted in anyway on planning maps until the 1996

to live and work within the margins as a member of

Shenhzen Comprehensive Plan.

the illegal workforce.

In addition, there is the widespread issue of worker’s rights. Shenzhen has long had issues with the humane treatment of the masses of workers that power its industrial dynamo. Most industrial parks and factory complexes feature dormitories of 4-6 stories to house workers (due to the majority of the workers’ being of ‘migrant status’).17

24. Apartment blocks are ringed around by highrise lofts and financial towers in downtonw Shenzhen.

Humanity in Worlds of Capital The fate of the Shenzhen resident is ambiguous, to say the least. As the city grows, it seems all too easy to imagine the position of the citizen as inversely proportional. Jean Attali warns us of this scenario, telling us that “universal urbanization represents the terminal end of the idea of a polis”.20 In this scenario, “the uncontrollable spread of the city renders ineffectual any attempts of a concerned group of citizens to assert control over the forces guiding its growth.”21 But in this case, the citizenry isn’t completely silenced, but rather selectively filtered; essentially, the city chooses its ‘target audience’—which is, without fail, the nouveau riche bourgeoisie of Shenzhen—and becomes their city, at the expense of everyone else. As the city undergoes a capitalistic ‘worlding’ (or a “placing of Shenzhen in the world”), new initiatives seeking improve “quality of life”, such as those initially introduced under the Tenth Five-Year Plan, are likely to concern themselves with upgrades to

middle-class

amenities

and

attractions—

“everywhere factories and paddy fields give way to condominiums and malls”—and to turn an occluded eye to the constituents of the city’s industrial-labor backbone.22 23 This exchange of economic clout for cultural ascendency inscribes deeply upon the currentlyexisting industrial space of the city. The exchange’s solidification in physical form appears as a “wielding of high-profile megaprojects” by the state (and capital), intended to be read as “material evidence of its power”, while the marginal interstitialities, the “informal spaces of daily life”, are left unnoticed.24 This is where new growth is focused now, not on the construction of factories, dormitories, and services

25. Ad-hoc connections between structures in an urban village, Shenzhen.

to house and apply the migrant workers, but

popularly apocalyptic, hellbent on militarizing city life.26 27

instead the creation of a “world city infrastructure”,

The city has been divided, and somehow made ti cast a

consisting of such cultural touchstones as “high-

shadow over Lefebvre’s urban ‘everyday life’, twisting it

rise office buildings, cultural centers...and an

into its own bellicose twin.

efficient transport system.”

Describing this conversion, Davis portrays uses the This ‘urban renaissance’ is false—it is really the

language of military action and occupation: Los Angeles

systematized assimilation of the city, as piece

is an arena of “high-tech police death squads” making

by piece the more desirable neighborhoods are

“fortress cities” into “fortified cells”, clearly opposed to

regenerated into middle-class economic enclaves

the “’places of terror’ where police battle the criminalized

and the have-nots are pushed further and further

poor”.

into delineated, barrier-ringed neighborhoods.

The equivalencies between this dark vision of Los Angeles and the unchecked future of Shenzhen are rampant; the

In 1992, Mike Davis’ Fortress Los Angeles

spatial marginalization and entrapment of the poor (in

discussed this phenomenon in relation to the then-

SSEZs case, in the urban villages) is a genetic defect of

‘future city’ of L.A. (an Americocentricist position

the city, DNA-coded.

that obviously did not account for the meteoric rise of Chinese cities like Shenzhen). Though the city he discussed was a continent and a milieu away, parallels to Shenzhen are easy (and perhaps even more aggrandized). In the essay, Los Angeles is depicted as a city divided—horribly agonistic, 26. Overlooking Shenzhen Bay.

"Shenzhen is Deng Xiaoping's city, envisioned by him and, at precarious economic moments, promoted and defended by him." —Cartier, Carolyn. “Transnational Urbanism in the Reform-era Chinese City: Landscapes from Shenzhen.” Urban Studies, Vol. 39, No. 9 (2002), 1513-1514.

Expansionism At this point, it’s easy and obvious to identify the status

An emergent urban politics of the polis is necessary

of the human element within Shenzhen as a devalued

in gauging the true health of Shenzhen. Though

one. It’s important to ask whether this should be viewed

it’s immediately rewarding to be seduced by the

as a foregone conclusion of a bloating urban condition, or

astronomical economic growth projections of the

if there is a middle path that values growth but bows to

city, the true measure of the city lies within its

human/worker agency.

ability to support its massive population. Shunning the industrial subaltern workforce of the city in an

By accepting Koolhaas’ assertion that Shenzhen is one

attempt to “[remake] the future” is a poor response.

of a first wave of ‘Generic City’ prototypes, currently in the process of formation, we can extrapolate that an analysis

A way must be found that turns the accumulative

of the human condition in Shenzhen is a valuable datum,

nature of capital on its head, or at least scales

inherently systematizable and applicable to other cities.

down part of the monolithic machine to something

Sadly, the humanity of Shenzhen seems to be nearly

the people can derive meaning from. Whether this

entirely overlooked. Studies concerning the city or the

takes a formal approach, a socioeconomic tactic,

Pearl River Delta conurbation (PRDC) are usually content

or a cultural initiative to do remains to be seen.

to limit their study to purely formal limits (either adopting a pose of giddy excitement at the nearly limitless potentiality

The question that demands an answer is: if uneven

of urbanization or of despondent horror at the loss of some

distribution is a mutual expectation of growth

intangible urban historicity, long buried).

within the sufficiently-advanced market-driven city.

The abscondance of general directive, the removal

The desire for urban planning should not be conflated with

of attempts at urban planning, even in the most

advocacy for Panopticonic urban systems. This planning

universal sense, ultimately produces a deformed,

should be only minimally architectural/morphological, and

grotesquesly

environment,

at its center be a societal apparatus, a cultural engine for

resulting in the confiscation of agency from the

the production of equal usage and status within the city,

urban poor. This process is already extent: we

and one that involves as great of a cross-section of the

can see it all around us, from the authoritative

urban population as possible. If it adopts such a position,

relegation of the urban poor to specific blocks (a

Shenzhen has a real possibility to collapse massive

trend that was taken to its logical conclusion by

accumulation with a program of development that values

the rational housing blocks of the mid-century

urban life.

non-egalitarian

residential projects) and the refusal of essential amenity connections (utilities, services, data), the rich subsume the city with the intention of creating â&#x20AC;&#x153;a relentlessly G-rated experience, micromanaged by a state that has the look and feel of a very large corporation.â&#x20AC;?29 This corporate city is an entity of middle-/upper-class seizures of power, and the threat implicit in Shenzhenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s future. 27. Streetscape in a Shenzhen urban village.

Interstitial: Temporary Autonomous Zones

A Critical Framework The next two precedents (Torre David and Hak Nam)

In a way, Hak Nam and Torre David are examples of the

are examples of a new typology that proves an

spatio-mechanical process of transferring a space from

urban resistance is possible. Lefebvrian reactions to

a definition as ‘striated’ (that is, defined, hierarchical,

overarching appropriations of urban space can exist

segmented, dominated by capitalistic urban processes) to

at urban scales, moving from conceptions of a ‘right

‘smooth’ (anthroposcopic, haptic, filled with events and

to life’ to the ‘right to the city’.

irrationalities), as part of a process of territorialization, division, and codification: “One of the fundamental tasks of

Hakim Bey’s writings on what he terms Temporary

the State is to striate the space over which it reigns... It is

Autonomous Zones, or T.A.Z.s, are especially

a vital concern of every State...to establish a zone of rights

beneficial. Bey describes the T.A.Z. as a geopolitical

over an entire ‘exterior’...”5

hole: “a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is Places like Torre David and Hak Nam function as urban

omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously

examples of smoothed space, or that has been ‘de-

riddled with cracks and vacancies.”

striated’ and removed from oversight. This is accompanied While not explicitly political, the formation of a

by a complete removal of space from ownership, and

T.A.Z. often is expressly so. The existence of a

abscondance with it to a point outside the State’s “zone of

T.A.Z. is a surgical delineation of interstitial urban

rights”: away from surveillance, and from police/security

space as fit for occupation and inhabitation. This

force oversight.

act is a fundamental divorcing of the space from its hegemonic urban definition. This act removes a

Torre David and Hak Nam are particularly helpful illustrations

component of the city from direct capitalistic control,

of the ability of massive spatial systems to support the

which an act which carries with it an inherent political

autonomy of an urban T.A.Z. Contrary to the apparent rigidity

association, whether or not that is the delineated

and inhibitive qualities of these structures (which are in

intent of the actors at work. (Simply put: the act is

Torre David’s case, the form of the uncompleted tower, in

political, but the actors do not necessarily have to

Hak Nam, the footprint of the fort & Sino-British absence),

be).

the frameworks provide an egalitarian basis upon which to build. Instead of the uneven landscapes that a system of distribution under capitalistic oversight would create, growth

The T.A.Z. is a solidification or urbanization of Ignasi 3

de Sola-Morales Rubio’s terrain vague concept.

is shunted into a more equalized, dispensed morphology.

Terrain vague is a conceptualization of urban space, which is “connected with the physical idea of a portion of land in its potentially exploitable state but already possessing some definition to which we are external.”4 The power of the terrain vague/T.A.Z. is its ability to infiltrate occupied spaces—the spaces which Lefebvre calls ‘consensual’ (that is, with a defined, agreedupon usage that is self-sustaining and continuously upheld)—and remake them into occupiable space.

Torre David: Framework Systems & Urban Agency, Part 1

Demotic City The existence of Torre David, the so-called “vertical barrio”,

relations. The progressive meeting of this

in the heart of the Libertador financial district in Caracas,

requirement is the shared responsibility of

Venezuela, is often attributed to financier, banker, and

citizens and the State in all areas...the State

developer David Brillembourg, but he is only responsible for

shall give...those with meager resources, the

the physical structure. The real forces that are responsible

possibility of access to social policies and credit

for the existence of Torre David have their roots in Hugo

for the construction, purchase or enlargement

Chavez’s presidency.

of dwellings.”7

Principal among these is Chavez’ rewritten Constitution

In addition, Chavez and his administration routinely

of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuala, ratified in 1999.

updated and modified the inital intent of Article

The constitution includes within it a variety of articles that

82, first with Presidential Decree no. 1,666, which

explicitly lay out a number of social reforms and promises.

offered a way for families within the sprawling barrios

Most important to the community of Torre David is Article

surrounding Caracas to petition for ownership of the

82, which reads:

lands their homes were built on.8 Further, PD 1,666 specifies that “unused urban land is at the service of

“Every person has the right to adequate, safe and

the public”.9

comfortable, hygienic housing, with appropriate essential basic services, including a habitat such as

While these laws were obviously intended to

to humanize family, neighborhood and community

offer legitimacy to the caraqueños inhabiting the

barrios ringing the city, they have since placed the

rendering the towersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; spaces, intended to be high-rise offices,

nominitively socialist Venezuelan government in such

upper-end hotel rooms, and executive suites, as planes of

a situation that an eviction of the residents of Torre

decay when the initial wave of residents constituting the

David would effectively undermine and delegitimize

current occupation arrived on 17 September 2007.10 Within

the governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s professed position on squatters

minutes, this group began reformatting the tower, giving it

and barrio-dwellers. Thus, the community stays.

over to its new residential/communal usage.

Torre David is the calcification of an intersection of

These settlers had been previously evicted from the La

the formworks of international finance and barrio

Candelaria squat, but instead of retreating to the barrios as

autonomy. This fusion of typologies from wildly

before on the periphery moved towards the city center.

opposing programmatic uses as well as class associations had created a strange liminal space,

Torre David had previously been inhabited, most notably in

massive in size and integral in location, but open for

2003, by another squatter community; but the community

appropriation.

had been unorganized and chaotically composed of individuals and families living in fitful relationship to each

The skeletons of the five buildings that make up the

other, and slowly shrank until it was evicted.11 It was with

Torre David complex were abandoned unfinished and

this knowledge the new wave of squatters entered the tower.

further disheveled by the efforts by looters, previous occupations, and their openness to the elements,

28. Panorama of Caracas, with the 5-building Torre David complex identified in blue.

Caracas: Demotics City limits Informal settlements Invaded buildings

The Urban Interstitial Fernando, a previous resident of Torre David and current mayoral employee, remembers the night of the initial occupation: “...we made the decision to occupy this space… [we found] this dead giant. A giant of 192m, dead in the middle of our capital city, dead, with 45 floors uninhabited!”12 When Fernando says “we made the decision to occupy”, it becomes apparent that the squatters were not operating simply on a platform of inhabitation but of radical ownership. In doing so, a fundamental truth is revealed: the striated hegemony of the Miesian office structure is torn open and stripped of its associative misanthropic identity. It is not a fundamentally coercive set of strictures, engineered to enact corporate diktat in space; rather, it is a simple framework—one that is capable of being smoothed and humanized.

The interstitial is worried out from a restrictive, majoritarian shell and utilized as the framework to a sociospatial urban community: even a titanic edifice of post-modern capitalistic architecture is potentially a playground . The most monolithic of spaces are really assemblages of spaces and crevices which can then be exploited, creating generation zones of an autonomous urban community. The framework of Torre David is the perfect structure to facilitate this community, offering space, shelter, and raw materials (in the form of construction refuse and other debris), as well as a conduit for the introduction of utility and sanitation services.13 Though the structure is relentlessly autocratic, it fades to a position in the background, essentially functioning as a divisional entity in the same fashion as a street grid. But unlike the grid, the superstructural edifice allows for greater autonomy by directly providing amenities to its users,

29. An unfinished stair tower rises beside ad-hoc apartments, with clay-brick walls (a hallmark of barrio construction) filling the gaps between floor plates.

30. Residents congregate in outdoor spaces.

where a street grid can only truly provide transportation (not to mention, via a form of transit that has traditionally been classist and exclusionary).

Self-Governance

This direct provision of amenity, ingrained into the very

Without Torre David serving as the scaffold for these

morphology of the city (and therefore made inalienable),

necessary aspects of community, the settlement

creates an environment in which an uneven urbanism

would’ve likely fell apart (like previous occupations,

becomes nearly untenable. Torre David offers this possibility:

which failed to use Torre David to its full infrastructural

the bedrock is that which offers services and intrapersonal

potential). Thanks to the proximity and resources

conduit.

Torre David offers, the squatters have developed a simulacrum of a representatively/directly democratic

Though life in TD is obviously removed from standard street

municipal system—nearly a mimicry of a board at a

and barrio life, we find that, unlike the rigid, hyperpersonal

high-end cooperative apartment complex—a strange,

vacuities of traditional architectural superstructures, ones

unexpected twist.

populated autonomously possess a vitality that is similar to the archetypical street, and in fact offers an improvement.

Urban-Think Tank explains that “Over time, this

The axial condition of the street does not just become

distribution of space eroded the strictly collective

vertical; instead it is allowed to warp, deviate, diverge, and

organization, giving rise…[to] a stronger framework

permeate in a way the rigid ‘street/building’ or ‘figure/

of overall authority and group responsibilities. The

ground’ topourbanisms could never generate or sustain. The

purely ad hoc and informal solutions to spatial,

laminating effect of multiple street lives, tied together via

social, sanitary, and technical issues have given way

vertical axis, creates a system not just vertical or horizontal,

to the more conventional.”14 If nothing else, this means factors of crime and disrespectful behavior

but polyvalent.

are largely unheard of and/or quickly dealt with, as

Within this polyvalence, hierarchy is dissolved. In effect, a removal of spatial power is underway. No particular location lends itself to a consolidation of power or resources: the groundfloor, the rooftop, any floor in between—all offer different necessities and contribute to the superstructural gestalt equally.

the Tower’s residents act swiftly to evict infractors of the community’s general code of conduct.15 It is apparent that the residents of the tower are highly capable, setting up a microcosmic society within the confines of their tower that both creates order and responds to their needs.

31. Outside Torre David, small shops line Avena Urdeneta.

Hak Nam: Framework Systems & Urban Agency, Part 2 58

Collective Growth In 20th century Hong Kong, which was then still under British territorial control, one of the most simultaneously brutal and promising urban hermetics came into being: Kowloon Walled City, or Hak Nam. Though the enclave was cleared out in 1987 and destroyed in 1993, it remains unprecedented in its density and morphology. Buildings rose from a collection of streets and city blocks that was nearly normative and promptly fell on top of each other. Streets became subterranean tunnels, dripping with water from burst pipes and lit with bare incandescent bulbs hanging in corners. Walkways and passages linked concurrent floors of disparate structures. The territory had been built to such levels of hyperdensity that it was no longer legible with common modes of mediatiation. Sectionate

attempts

were

hypothetical

best,

fundamentally incapable of rendering the agglomerated volumes and spaces on the 2D plane.16 The complex, by the time of the final, massive evictions of 1987, resembled a bulging near-rectangular volume, barely contained by the boundaries of the Boxer-era Chinese fort it was built within the footprint of, furred at the edges with utility connections and residential balconies. The entire volume only extended 14 stories tall, as any higher would have impeded the flight path of commercial airliners on approach to Kai Tek Airport.17

32. Hypothetical section of Hak Nam circa 1989, just before its final destruction.

33. A commercial flight takes off from Kai Tek Airport.

35. A man sunbathes on the rooftop away from the warrenlike

34. Children repurpose the rooftop as play space.

36. Residents approach Hak Nam.

An attempt to understand the structure’s program in

coexisting fitfully. Mixed-use was not an applied formal

a conventional sense would reveal that there was no

experiment here, but rather something that made

organizational tool but organic need. But even this is

sense: the structure, barring an overarching planning

reductive. The term ‘need’ implicates the presence of a

schema, was built according to familiar typologies;

conscious drive, an intentionality fueling the act of creation;

specifically, that of the narrow Hong Kong streets,

assigning this sort of determinacy to Hak Nam is reductive.

lined with shops, homes, and so on. However, when this typology is mutated by restraints and societal

Hak Nam represents, at a small scale, true autonomy—

response, it became an entirely new, recombinant

though it is a result of ugly political and material factors. If

edifice.

taken as a spatial/formal example, the community is a prime example of a collective design, with polyvalent, intermingled

The deprivation of Hak Nam’s residents (befitting

usage; full amenity access to all residents, and a plurality

their status as, essentially, political prisoners)

of business opportunities. The conditions at Hak Nam, as

persisted with respect to a lack of consistent access

well as a general distrust of outsiders (who, variably, either

to amenities and utilities. Residents, marginalized

attempted to evict or pacify the populace), bred an insular,

by sanitation and utility agencies, were forced to

intrapersonal social system.

either form collectives and associations to lobby for utilities or seek access themselves with illegal line-

The residents of Hak Nam lived almost exclusively within the

splicing. Competing endeavors over time resulted

structure. To support this (essentially trapped) population,

in a structure furred with pipes, wiring, conduits,

factories, apartments, gambling halls, restaurants, and

venting, and so on, all held precariously together and

all other urban accoutrements came to life within the city,

maintained by their users.

37. Plane on takeoff from Kai Tek Airport, viewed from the rooftops of Hak Nam.

38. A former street on the ground level of Hak Nam, now essentially a subterranean tunnel.

"At Hak Nam, a cluster of buildings, apartments, and rooms were constructed not by a single logic or totalizing program, but by the ad hoc demands of the residents. The result was a massive, hive-like assemblage of buildings

created by the patchwork coming together of fragments of various architectural styles. As a whole, Hak Nam took on an organic nature...self-organizing, transformative... rhizomatic." â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Suzuki, Shigeru, Posthuman Visions in Postwar U.S. and Japanese Fiction, (Ann Arbor: ProQuest Publishing, 2011), 38.

No-Place Hak Nam is not a utopia, but it is a ‘No-Place’. Geopolitically speaking, it existed in a strange liminal interzone—technically not a part of the British mandate of Hong Kong, but not ever claimed by the Chinese, either.18 It was a figment at the edge of empire, a geopolitical hole, governed by no one. This status bred “a site that generated itself in the absence of a validating history, law and order” that existed in the peripheral vision of Hong Kong as it economically exploded in the last half of the 20th century.20 The city collected those exiled from Hong Kong: the evicted, thieves, criminals, illegal merchants, gangsters, prostitutes, political refugees. With this pedigree, as can be expected, Hak Nam quickly grew into a haven for black market trade, drugs, and gang war between rival Triads—a hornet’s nest that would react violently if kicked.21 39. Rooftops of Hak Nam: a stratified code of mutual but divergent autonomous pieces. 40. Hak Nam in 1973, surrounded by the auxiliary Sun Tau Tsuen squatter’s community.

Repeated attempts to sterilize and stabilize Hak Nam by officials from both the HK-mandate municipality and the PRC from 1948 onward were repeatedly met with riots and violent demonstration.22 However, repeated raids from the Hong Kong police forces, which intensified in the mid-seventies and resulted in the seizure of thousands of pounds of drugs (mostly heroin) from control of the Triads, eventually led to Hak Nam’s status a zone of tyrannical gang control to wane. 23 Even though, by 1983, Hak Nam’s crime rate was

Relevance

reportedly “far below” that of Hong Kong’s, the populace still saw it as an illicit periurban zone, and so did the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984. In

Both Torre David and Hak Nam offer interpretations of

the provisions delineated within the document that

the urban T.A.Z.: never defined and yet self-explanatory,

specified the process of the transfer of Britain’s Hong

manifested in the heart of the urban zone of capitulation

Kong mandate, it was agreed upon that Hak Nam, in

but retaining the vernacular quality of a guerrila spatiality

its current state, could not be allowed to exist.24 By

that avoids “head-on collision with the terminal State”.25

formally recognizing its geopolitical territoriality, the enclave’s fate was sealed.

In a formal sense, both offer some precedents for implementation and scalability. Within both instances, the extreme vitality seems to be in some way a function of the territory at the community’s disposal. In both cases, the amount of physical space was small but smooth, allowed for a constellation of insertions, events, and meaning to be approached and implemented. Lines of flight along abnormal typologies abound, planes of immanence offering “...no structure, any more than there is genesis” proliferate.26

There is an inherency in these spaces, an inclination towards territorial appropriation and true spatial freedom. The figural appearance this independence takes would be unnoticeable without its situating against the ground of the framework—the spatial constraint (the Torre David’s skeletal structure, Hak Nam’s geopolitically enforced footprint and height limitation) that initially seems a limitation but is in fact a focusing tool. The framework’s creation of an interstitial, minoritized marginality leads to an unprecedented urban

zone that is filled with possibilities of individual-level

Summary: Disorganization City

The contemporary city in the SSA is defined by development easily characterized distinct periods of historical time: • pre-colonial • colonial/post-colonial • capitalistic expansion These periods can be associated with general overarching trends: • affiliative usage • autocratic form • dissociative development This second list, however, should not be read similarly to

societies of West Africa, Douglas Fraser notes that a

the first one. Though the correlated time periods can be

central tenet of the residential unit was the possibility

more or less given a definitive start and end date (excluding

of the fluidity of interpersonal relationships to directly

the still-extant capitalistic period), the spatial regimes they

manifest in the unit itself: Bushmen wives, their

introduce in the city never experience a true cessation.

houses arrayed on a perimeter around a central

Instead, they wax, wane, influence, and mutate the city in

communal/productive space, would reconfigure the

iterative, recombinant fashion, constantly manifesting in

placement of the house’s door according to minute

unexpected forms.

intersocial changes.

1. Affiliative usage

For example, if a family wished to flatter another,

This phrase is an attempt to laminate a number of socio-

they may realign their door to face theirs directly.

spatial practices into a palatable form. For the purposes of

Likewise, to shun a certain family or group, the

this analysis, these factors can be identified as intra-urban

door would be repositioned away from theirs to

commonly, intra-faction commonly, and their conflicting

reflect that accordingly. Standing in the center of a

spatial influences. Both commons were, in the pre-colonial

Bushmen village, it becomes possible to transcribe

milieu of small-scale tribal ekistics, one and the same;

the minute social stressors at work, and to watch

however, the city (not just the modern city: pre-colonial African

them shift over time as a constantly-developing cloud

empires like the Kingdom of Mali also collated a multiplicity

of axis and datum. This level of intense morphological

of cultures and factions within an urban & political setting)

reconfiguration of the urban setting in real time as

has caused their separation and distinction.

a result of social fluidity is a casualty of the splitting of the urban and factional commonly. The hyper-

Essentially, this separation has precluded the possibility of

granulated possibilities of urban/social attenuation

current urbanisms as a consensual structural-functional

are impossible when the city is not a generation of

artifact. The consensuality and social cohesion achieved in

its polis.

a pre-colonial village allows the village’s formal qualities to become responsive pieces. For example, in the Bushmen

41. Plan of a Bantoufam village near Cameroon.

urban zone with no deference paid to original cultural However, this is not an objective loss. The strength of the

boundaries. At this stage, most of the SSA’s current

urban setting is its function as an inherently combinative

cities came into being, usually as an imperial collector

artifact, producing collaboration and inter-assimilation of

& tactical hard point.

cultures and worldviews. The failure of micro-cultural urban response is something that can have its place usurped by

Though there are notable examples of SSA

new, more universal possibilities socio-spatial reaction. The

metropoles in existence before colonial occupation

city itself becomes an extensible piece of its inhabitants:

(see: cities from the Yoruba, extant in modern-day

one of “...any number of fluctuating, dendritic, extensions

Nigeria), the majority of current SSA cities functioned

which actively engage with social and natural phenomena,

at varying distances.”

by a colonial subjugator, which, by devaluing the

geopolitical/military

strongholds,

overseen

surrounding region, dismantled village life and drew 2. Autocratic form

its refugees into itself, in the process marginalizing

This factor is, in its most basic sense, the fundamental

them and relegating them to mere functionaries

disruption of personal and cultural agency within the

within a spatial construction of the colonial project.

city. This is the urban manifestation of colonial empire, a configuration of the city into a nodal point in the colonial-

This reconfiguration “regulated, bounded, and

territorial terrasystem.

secured space as a precondition for the embodied

Perhaps the most cruel aspect of this urban form is not

occupations which followed and the subsequent

its mere spatial tyranny, but its generative point in a

incorporation of these territories into the global power

sanctimonious ambivilancy, or its removal of the previously-

grid of empire.”

discussed tribal/cultural factionalism into a single, collapsed 42. Nairobi market street scene. Old practices in non-responsive morphologies.

Within this new system, ‘urban life’ became a

city’, the ‘native city’, the ‘colonial settlement’, all barely

keyword for intensive spatial segregation. This shift

cohered by functional, frictional intra-zones. (A aggrandized,

in the conception of an African city was just as

state-wide case of this is present in the South African

lucidly presented as the intrapersonal fluidity of the

‘homelands’ (or pejoratively, bantustans), in which black

pre-colonial habitation; but instead of reflecting a

South Africans were forcibly stripped of SA citizenship

communal social experience, there were now only

and made involuntary citizens of ethnic ‘homelands’, thus

narratives of racial subjugation and demonization.

removing the possibility of non-Afrikaaner governmental

The colonial power established itself as the holder of

takeover or representation.)

spatial power by making its control tangibly manifest in urban life. These colonial cities often acted out

In the post-colonial age (marked as beginning with the

the utopian impulse of their creators by establishing

wave of African independence movements as a result of

a morphology that rejected schemes of autonomy

the application of the post-war Atlantic Charter, leading

and instead pursued a program of rigidity, hierarchy,

to the expelling of exo-African colonial oversight from the

exclusion, and dominance. These factors created

continent), this morphology has persisted, and reconciliation

what Anthony King has identified as an intra-urbanity

has proven difficult, leading to cities that are “not a single

or a conceptualization of nested cities-within-cities.

unified city, but, in fact, two quite different cities, physically

The inherent impossibility of urban monism (utopia)

juxtaposed but architecturally and socially distinct….” The

was solved by introducing concepts of Self and

dialectical dominance-dependence scheme was maintained

Other to the city. The Self (colonizers) could create

largely by continuing the colonial practice of selective,

and oversee their own utopian core and remove the

classist deprivation of amenities. In this scenario, the city is

the colonized Other to the periphery through the

left compartmentalized along colonial infrastructures. The

establishment of micro-cities, such as the ‘colonial

geographical unevenness of this system persists and is in

43. Twin omphalos of development: high rises and shantytowns.

fact aided by ‘development’ efforts by International

deepening class division and further factionalizing the city

Financial Institutions like IMF and the World Bank,

with new spatial materials.

backed by UN programs like the UNSCP and UNHABITAT, which in collusion promote the selective

When taken as a whole, the portrait of a city in the SSA

development of the city. Areas previously inhabited

becomes muddled. Urban life, while offering potentialities

by the colonizers are improved, while periurban

for

interstitialities are razed for the expansion of the

worldviews, becomes stunted when divided, distinguished,

former under the supposedly ‘humanizing’ auspices

and objectified. The colonial and capitalistic systems that

of the Catch-22 of redevelopment, wherein the

make the organization of the city in this way possible

deprivation of amenities to squatter’s communities

must be either removed or repurposed to allow the city to

and other spontaneous urbanisms is given as

breathe—not speaking of it as an emblem of power but as a

validation/valorization of their destruction: the city

manifestation of its polis. The city has too long been a tool of

surgically eliminates the undesirable components

the autocratic controllers of it, who while kaleidoscopically

of itself by depriving them of resources. This is

recombinant, have remained politically consistent.

the

collaboration

cultures,

ethnicities,

and

the trialectical confluence of class, resource, and territorial wars, enacted passively against a

So too has the shape of the city persisted: even now,

dominated polis by a ‘benefactor’ that more and

development

more appears to be a totalizing, corporate twin of the

debilitating colonial faultlines. Bound up in the genetics of

previous colonial power.

the colonial urban is the decontextualizing process of its

and

redevelopment

occurs

along

old

construction, wherein by existing the city is an affront to 3. Dissociative development

local cultures and social lives. This process is fortified and

This trend is semiotically identifiable as the logical

re-fortified by the intentional unevenness of the cityscape,

conclusion of the years under the aegis of the UN/

which removes certain population groups from amenities,

IFI collective, marked by a move away from the

services, and even the possibility of their existence for the

denominationally ‘humanitarian’ goals of such

foreseeable future.

entities towards one of bald, unabashed capitalistic exploitation. This element, only now becoming truly

The negative cacotopianism of the colony can be

ascendent, is the spatial product of late capitalism in

appropriated, optimized, and made into a force for

colonial spaces. While enforcing divisive polydominion

urban agency. The urban spaces undergo a becoming-

within the city, capitalistic redevelopment threatens

minor, stripped of authoritarian overtones and reformed,

to concurrently swamp it as the city explodes

repurposed, and reassembled into a new form that

unchecked. This trend is also tied to a larger more

ensures the right to the city and provides a framework for

urban scope, as the sprawl tended towards by this

sustainable, egalitarian growth. Dynamic disorganization is

organization threatens to subsume spaces currently

the key, serving as the lens through which another world is

removed from the urban sphere—if not making them

possible.

a part of the city, then at least indoctrinating them into an apparatus of production. The expansion and conurbation of urban space is not tied to economic development, however, and threatens to further delineate class lines by creating a permanent productive underclass dominated by financial lords and elites. When introduced to a colonial morphology, capitalism acts as an amplifier of its segregationary practices,

Project program

The Disorganizational City consists of four ‘components’ that, as systematizable, weaponized, and repeatable pieces, comprise the urban totality. Those pieces are: • Existing urban areas • Resource extraction zones • Mandelbrotian ‘neighborhoods’ •The ‘trunk’

Existing urban areas

Mandelbrotian neighborhoods

Extant cities are the generative component of the disorganizational scheme. They are vital to the existence of disorganization not only by providing a responsive polis,

These are residential core typologies, identified

but also by serving as the (dys)functional figureground

as ‘Mandelbrotian’ due to their appearance as

that, by its slow induction into a system of disorganization,

endlessly fractalizing, iterative components, similar

reconstitutes itself into a usable disorganizational core.

but never identical. The Mandelbrotian aspect ensures a constant disappearance, as opposed to the permanent imminence of our modern sprawl

Resource extraction zones

morphology.

Resource extraction zones are the other ‘nodal’/discrete

Though formally prevalent, the trunk really serves

points within the system. The name, though it initially

as background infrastructure. Directly inhabitable

sounds exploitaitive, is a possibility toward a more

and capable of endless bifurcation, the trunk offers

sustainable relationship between an urbanism and its

a minimalist framework formally driven by the

productive zones.

delivery of amenity, utilities, transit, public space,

The ‘trunk’

et al. Packaging these functions into an indivisible By existing as a permanent fixture within the apparatus,

arcology protects them from exploitation and

there is a tendency to select zones that will supply

contains future growth without expressly inhibiting

renewable resources, and due to its nodal spatial

it. Linearity negates the possibility of centralizations

quality, impact will be surgical, minimal, and as-needed.

of spatial/amenity power along its length.

Examples include dense farmlands or agricultural efforts, water/aqueduction, or factory/industrial manufacturing components.

Mandelbrotian neighborhoods

Resource extraction zones

The â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;trunkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

Existing urban area

Appendix A: Figures 1. Bünting , Heinrich. Europa Prima Pars Terræ in Forma

created when Accra, Lagos, and Ibadan’s sprawling

Virginis. Woodcut. Madgeburg, 1581. Originally published

urbanisms collide. Satellite image from Microsoft

in Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae, commons.wikimedia.org

Bing Maps service & Earthstar Geographics with

(4 November 2013).

annotations by author. Underlay image accessed 19

2. Aerial image of city of Luanda, Angola. Image taken by Flickr user Arshibald. http://www.flickr.com/photos/

November 2013. 10. World Bank, “Urbanization and Income”. Accessed

arshibald/2979327160/ 3. Image of moss-covered face of Sungbo’s Eredo, a massive ~99 mile superstructural rampart system built in precolonial Nigeria (800-1000 CE). Accessed 4

September

2013.

http://www.

economist.com/blogs/dailychar t/2010/12/ urbanisation_africa 11.

Workers

constructing

World

Cup

November 2013. http://titiswanderlust.files.wordpress.

2010 facilities in South Africa. Building and

com/2013/02/dscn1835.jpg.

Wood

4. Image courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis

Worker’s

November

International.

2013.

Accessed

http://www.bwint.org/

defaultasp?index=1483&Language=EN

Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center, #ISS023E038605. Accessed 6 November 2013. http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/, with

12. The famous ‘Murdock Map’ of African ethnicity distribution lists 835 ethnic regions on the continent,

diagrammatic overlay by author. 5. Diagrammatic map of the imperial ‘terrasystem’ - cities

but still suffers on simplification bordering on

connected by colonial exchange - and the network of flows

naïveté: presenting Africa not as a fluid, intermingling

established therein. Image by author.

collective but as a static series of factions not

[Spread]: Map of Lagos, Nigeria. Artificially colored.

unlike states. Whats more, these associations are

Accessed 5 November 2013. http://geology.com/world-

often inaccurate, overlooking linguistic and cultural

cities/lagos-nigeria.shtml

variations within the selected groups. However, the

6. Living Planet Index graph for the Afrotropical bioregion.

map is still one of few that attempt to represent

Taken from Grooten, Monique, Rosamunde Almond, and

Africa’s remarkable cultural diversity and remains

Richard McLellan. Living Planet Report 2012: Biodiversity,

an indelible resource. Accessed 6 November 2013.

Biocapacity, and Better Choices. Published by the World

http://peterslarson.com/2011/01/19/african-

Wildlife Fund. Available at http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_

conflict-and-ethnic-distribution/ 13. Map of SSA by author.

earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/2012_lpr/, 62. 7. Alleyway filled in with marginal development in Dar es

14. Map of African “Conflict Hot Spots” Compiled

Salaam, Tanzania. Image taken by Flickr user Stuart Barr.

and produced by Peter S. Larson from ACLED data.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuartbarr/3342042723/

Accessed 6 November 2013. http://peterslarson.

8. Lubumbashi-Ndola Sprawl, called the ‘Copperbelt’. This metropolitan zone is developing along Highway N1

com/2011/01/19/african-conflict-and-ethnicdistribution/

and includes the cities of Chingola, Mufulira, Kitwe, and

15. City of Benin. Woodcut. From Dapper, Olfert.

Luanshya as well as numerous smaller towns. Satellite

Description of Africa. 1668. Accessed 5 November

image from Microsoft Bing Maps service & Earthstar

2013.

Geographics with annotations by author. Underlay image

com/688/flashcards/2627688/jpg/view_of_

accessed 19 November 2013.

benin_city1360893878532.jpg

9. The Ivory Coast Axis, the proposed future megacity

http://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.

16.

Forcibly

excluded

from

[Spread]: Population map of the Pearl River Delta

sanitation

conurbation by 2020. Illustration by Jeroen Brulez.

infrastructures, residents are forced to create

24. Dense apartment blocks are ringed by high-rise towers.

ad hoc landfills wherever possible. Accessed 22 November

2013.

Image taken by Herbert Wright. Accessed 18 November

http://theworldisourdistrict.

2013. http://herbertwright.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/

com/2013/05/09/jungle-walk-moshi/

sampling-the-urban-future-in-shenzhen-2/

17. Woodcut frontispiece from Sir Thomas More’s

25. Handshake buildings in Shenzhen urban village. Image

Utopia, 1516 publication.

by Lisa Ma. Accessed 10 November 2013. http://fringejoyride.

[Spread]: Harbour panorama in Mopti, Mali. Image

files.wordpresscom/2011/08/5-e1314197987306.jpg

taken by Flickr user Carsten ten Brink. Accessed 5 November

2013.

26. Shenzhen, overlooking Shenzhen Bay. Image taken

http://www.flickr.com/photos/

by Flickr user Zhixun Zhang. Accessed 10 November 2013.

carsten_tb/2975912915/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zhangzx08/9282774777/

18 a. “City of Loango”; Image Reference 3-215, from Thomas Astley (ed.), A New General Collection

[Spread]: Image taken by Wikipedia user Dr. Bernd

of Voyages and Travels (London, 1745-47), vol. 3,

Gross. Accessed 18 November 2013. http://commons.

facing p. 215; taken from D. O. Dapper, Description de

wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deng_Xiaoping_billboard_01.jpg

l’Afrique . . . Traduite du Flamand (Amsterdam,1686;

27. Road in a Shenzhen urban village. Image by Lisa Ma.

1st ed., 1668), between pp. 320 and 321. (Copy in

Accessed 10 November 2013. http://fringejoyride.files.

Special Collections, University of Virginia Library).

wordpress.com/2011/08/2.jpg

18 b. Masterplan rendering of Kenyan satellite

[Spread]: Facade of Kiefernstrasse squatter’s community

campus Konza Techno City, designed in part by SHoP

in Dusseldorf, Germany. Image taken by Flickr user Clint

Architects. Image from konzacity.co.ke. Accessed 18

McMahon. Accessed 22 November 2013. http://www.

November 2013.

flickr.com/photos/clintw/7994084228/

[Spread]: Urban village alleyway in Shenzhen.

[Spread]: Residents in Torre David. Image by Iwan Baan,

Image taken by Flickr user trevor.patt. Accessed 10

published in Urban Think-Tank, Torre David: Informal

November

Vertical Communities, (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2012), 181.

2013.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/

28. Caracas panorama. Image taken by Flickr user Only

trevorpatt/8666484508/18 19. 23

Cuidad October

Lineal, 2013.

urban

plan.

J. Accessed 20 November 2013. http://www.flickr.com/

Accessed

photos/joan_rodes/6242954263/

http://web.tiscali.it/icaria/

29. Map of Caracas, with Torre David & other informal

urbanistica/utopie/soria.htm 20. Current-day satellite image of Magnitogorsk

settlements highlighted. Image by author from information

in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. Image from Google

published in Urban Think-Tank, Torre David: Informal

Maps. Accessed 24 October 2013.

Vertical Communities, (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2012), 97. 30. An incomplete staircase rises by floor plates, made

21. Photograph of Tokyo Bay Masterplan, model

inhabitable by walls constructed by residents. Image by

by Kenzo Tange. 22. SSEZ municipality circa 1980 (dashed

Iwan Baan, published in Urban Think-Tank, Torre David:

line) vs. SSEZ in 2013 (solid line). Satellite image

Informal Vertical Communities, (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2012),

from Microsoft Bing Maps service & Earthstar

181. 31. Residents in Torre David. Image by Iwan Baan,

Geographics with annotations by author. Underlay

published in Urban Think-Tank, Torre David: Informal

image accessed 24 October 2013.

Vertical Communities, (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2012), 181.

23. Satellite image of urban village. Image from Google Maps, as processed by FAVEL Issues.

32. Outside Torre David, small shops line Avena Urdeneta.

Accessed 10 November 2013. http://favelissues.

Image by Iwan Baan, published in Urban Think-Tank, Torre

com/2010/12/01/urban-villages/.

David: Informal Vertical Communities, (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2012), 125.

[Spread]: Hak Nam facade. Image taken by Greg Girrard,

43 b. Khayelitsha township outside Cape Town,

published in Girrard, Greg and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness:

South Africa. Image from Flickr user No Lands Too

Life in Kowloon Walled City, (Honolulu: Watermark, 1999).

Foreign (profile now deleted, image accessed via

33. Hypothetical section of Hak Nam, circa 1989. Drawing

Wikipedia mirror). Accessed 20 November 2013.

by ‘a Japanese team of architects’. No further data I could find.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Townships_of_

34. Daytime view of southwest corner of Hak Nam, taken in 1987. Image taken by Greg Girrard, published in Girrard, Greg and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, (Honolulu: Watermark, 1999) 35. Kai Tek Airport/Hak Nam. Image by Vincent Yu. 36. Children living in Hak Nam play on the rooftops, taken in 1989. Image taken by Greg Girrard, published in Girrard, Greg and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, (Honolulu: Watermark, 1999). 37. Rooftop view looking towards Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport, taken in 1990. Image taken by Greg Girrard, published in Girrard, Greg and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, (Honolulu: Watermark, 1999). 38. A nearly subterranean corridor, once a sunlit street. Image taken by Greg Girrard, published in Girrard, Greg and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, (Honolulu: Watermark, 1999). [Spread]: Tung Tau Tsuen Road, taken in 1987. Image taken by Greg Girrard, published in Girrard, Greg and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, (Honolulu: Watermark, 1999). 39. Uneven rooftops at Hak Nam, taken in 1989. Image taken by Greg Girrard, published in Girrard, Greg and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, (Honolulu: Watermark, 1999). 40. Aerial view of Hak Nam, circa 1973. The auxiliary Sun Tau Tsuen squatter’s community surrounds the polystructure. Image taken by Greg Girrard, published in Girrard, Greg and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, (Honolulu: Watermark, 1999). 41. Bantoufam village plan near Cameroon, Africa. From Fraser, David, Village Planning in the Primitive World, (New York: George Braziller, 1968). 42. Market area in Nairobi, Kenya. Image taken by Flickr user Timo. Accessed 26 November 2013. http://www.flickr. com/photos/timokoo/2420836043/ 43 a. Aerial image of downtown/waterfront eThekwini (Durban), South Africa. Image taken by Flickr user Esther Dyson. Accessed 18 November 2013.

Cape_Town.jpg

14.

Appendix B: Footnotes

“Field

October

Listing: 2013,

Urbanization,”

accessed

https://www.cia.gov/library/

publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2212.html. 15. The rankings of those 9 SSA cities: 6) Bamako, Mali; 7) Lagos, Nigeria; 9) Dar es Salaam, Tanzania;

Introduction & Background

12) Lubumbashi, Congo; 13) Kampala, Uganda; 15) Luanda, Angola; 17) Kinshasa, Congo; 18) Nairobi,

1. ‘Imperial project’ is a term I’ve borrowed from Jane

Kenya; and 20) Antananarivo, Madagascar.

Jacobs’ Edge of Empire (cited below).

16. CityMayors Statistics. “The world’s fastest

2. Hanson, Susan, and Robert Lake, “Needed: geographic

growing cities and urban areas from 2006 to 2020,”

research on urban sustainability,” Urban Geography 21:

accessed 30 October 2013, http://www.citymayors.

1-4. As quoted in Disposable Cities (cited below).

com/statistics/urban_growth1.html.

3. Grooten, Monique, Rosamunde Almond, and Richard

17. Venard, J.L., “Urban Planning and Environment

McLellan. Living Planet Report 2012: Biodiversity,

in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Building Blocks for Africa

Biocapacity, and Better Choices. Published by the World

2025 95 (1995): vii.

Wildlife Fund. Available at http://wwf.panda.org/about_

18. Ibid., 4.

our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/2012_

19. Ibid., 7.

lpr/.

20. Ibid., 8.

4. Saldanha, Arun, “Some Principles of Geocommunism,” Geocritique.

http://www.geocritique.org/arun-saldanha-

21. A denomination which the report defines as exceeding 10 million inhabitants each.

some-principles-of-geocommunism/

22. Ibid., 7.

5. Ibid.

23. Based off of 2006 census totals which record

6. Cohen, Tom, Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of

a 17.6 million population. Assuming a growth rate

Climate Change, Volume One (Ann Arbor: Humanities Press,

of 3.2%, the Lagos State Government estimates

2012), Kindle edition.

a 21 million population as of 2013. Data from

7. Saldanha, Arun, “Some Principles of Geocommunism,” Geocritique.

http://www.geocritique.org/arun-saldanha-

some-principles-of-geocommunism/

Lagos State Government, “Population,” accessed 2 November 2013, http://www.lagosstate.gov.ng/ pagelinks.php?p=6.

8. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

25. International Monetary Fund, “World Economic

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Quote

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Carl,

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Apart,

affluent inhabitants of the sprawling grounds of

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Though

the estates of now-gone colonial masters, and the

Malmgren is speaking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and

compound people are poorer, relegated to formerly

its importance in generating the science fiction genre, but I

illegal compounds that have now been recognized

would argue his quote is even more applicable here.

and granted a modicum of autonomy.

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39. This cannot be understated: Using mobile phone penetration rate as a baseline metric, as of 2012, the SSA countries of Gabon, Nambia, Botswana, and South Africa had a rate above 100%, and Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, Sierra

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Leone, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, The

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41. A favorite tactic of the UN-HABITAT/UNEP

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senseable.mit.edu/papers/pdf/2003_Ratti_Aspenia.pdf,

schemes drawn up by the organization intentionally

209.

fail to supply ‘illegal’ settlements (such as squatter’s

5. Lin, Zhongjie, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist

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