Marcymonroe marchmcpthesis

Towards An Empirical Architecture Synergetic Aid to Deploy Yourself, Not Your Designs By Marcy Lynne Monroe

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture And Master of City Planning In the Graduate Division Of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Nezar Alsayyad, chair Professor Renee Chow Professor Mary Comerio Professor Ananya Roy

TABLE OF CONTENTS i. ii. iii. iv.

Preface___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Acknowledgements_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Camp_’Bearing Witness’___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Introduction____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Part 1: Synergetic Aid I. On Architecture Education______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 08 II. Architecture, Ethics, and Activism __________________________________________________________________________________________________ 10 a. b. c. d.

Architecture Amid the Three Orders______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Historic Shift(s) in Architecture_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Architect’s Toolkit______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Ethics in Architecture___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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III.

Sites of Disaster and Inequality_ Provocations _________________________________________________________________________________ 25

IV.

Case Studies_ Architects in Sites of Disaster______________________________________________________________________________________ 40

a. b. c. d. e. f. g.

Provocation #1_Minamisanriku, Tohoku, Japan ________________________________________________________________________________________ Preparedness________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Provocation #2_Pisco Earthquake, Pisco, Peru_________________________________________________________________________________________ Grey Space__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Provocation #3_Mathare Valley Slum, Nairobi, Kenya_________________________________________________________________________________ Recovery_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Architect As Mediator_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

a. Tohoku, Japan_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ i. Archi + Aid_ ‘Project Lost Homes’, Tohoku, Japan___________________________________________________________________________ ii. Archi + Aid_ ‘Evacuation Mapping Project’, Tohoku, Japan_________________________________________________________________ b. Kenya_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ i. Kounkuey Design Initiative_ Productive Public Space Projects, Kibera Slum, Kenya____________________________________ ii. Wesley Gideyi_ Child Friendly Space Project, Dadaab, Kenya_____________________________________________________________

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c. Observations and Outcomes______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Part 2: Deploy Yourself, Not Your Designs I. Introduction and Main Case Study_Dadaab Refugee Camp, Kenya __________________________________________________________ a. b. c. d.

II. III.

History________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Policy and Economics______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ People and Environment___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Health and Safety___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Proposition for Demonstration________________________________________________________________________________________________________

a. Architect______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ b. Architecture__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Continuing…Towards an Empirical Architecture_________________________________________________________________________________________

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51 52 53 58 60 62 63 65 82

Bibliography_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 84

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i. Preface Much of the content of this thesis is based on the empirical work done through a year of field research made possible by the John K. Branner Travel Fellowship, work from the Nairobi Studio in the summer of 2011, and previous research experiences through the University Scholars Grant Program at the University of Florida in 2008 and 2009.

The author created all photographs and graphics, unless otherwise noted.

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ii. Acknowledgements This work would simply not be possible without the support, care, and assistance of numerous people throughout recent years.

First, I am grateful for the support of both my committee and that of the department for allowing me the space to both critique and re imagine the forms of practice inherently tied to education. It was only at Berkeley that critical reflection was possible for me, which I am incredibly thankful for. I owe a debt of appreciation and gratitude to Renee Chow, Mary Comerio, and Ananya Roy for their consistent guidance, care, and critique as well as that of my chair Nezar Alsayyad for his given direction and support.

In addition to my committee, I want to express my gratitude to both Greig Crysler and Dana Buntrock for their assistance and encouragement.

To the John K. Branner family and the Department of Architecture for providing me with an amazing opportunity.

To my friends and loved ones whom brought joy, laughter, and perspective.

And to my family for their unconditional love and support of my ideas, aspirations, and often insane research ventures.

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iii. The Camp_’Bearing Witness’ “Reasoning in some form cannot but be involved in moving from the observation of a tragedy to the diagnosis of injustice.”

-Amartya Sen, the Idea of Justice

Excerpt from my John K. Branner Traveling journal _January 20th 2012 (two years after the 2010 Haitian Earthquake): “Today, we (Julianna, the team at the International Organization of Migration’s Camp Management Sector, and myself) drove 2 hours to the outskirts of Port-Au-Prince to an isolated displaced camp to give families new tents donated by ShelterBox and year land titles provided by the ministry. There were around fifty or so families living in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a few mango trees. All of the families were living in dilapidated tarps given to them after the earthquake and had been waiting for anyone to come provide them with assistance. They had

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been waiting for over 18 months and were surviving off of the mangos and selling packaged snacks to make ends meet. It took over forty-five minutes via tap-tap (informal transport) to go into town to sell. Some days the tap-tap never came their way.

I began to notice that all but maybe a few of the women had been pregnant. Two or three of them were clearly disabled. Julianna and I went to speak to one of the elder women.

We asked her if one of the teenage girls sitting in the corner watching the men set up the new tents was ok. She told us she had lost her mind about a year ago. It was from the earthquake and seeing the dead bodies of friends and relatives. It was also from living in this place and the violence that happens daily as a result of people being on the edge. We were told her neighbor raped her and caused her current pregnancy. Everyone had heard it happen in the night like most of the violence in the camp. She noted that most of the women, children, and even some of the men were all victims of sexual abuse and other forms of violence.

After our conversation we finished handing out the tents, spoke to a few other families, and drove away. I cannot believe there are still over 650,000 living under tarpaulins, simply waiting for the next tent and never with any sense of security. People constantly running, struggling to survive, no wonder there is so much violence. Shelter sectors have already begun closing down from the lack of funding. It seems wrong to even continue providing shelters, but what else is there to do?�

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iv. Introduction Sites plagued by suspended moments of bare life, structural violence, and the continued short-term provision of basic services by private actors years following an event are not simply character to Haiti. Over the years of research within post-disaster contexts, ‘bearing witness’ to structural violence was in fact indicative of all of the contexts I have undergone fieldwork. To be clear, sites of disaster are not simply emergency crises resulting from a singular event. Instead, the event is understood as a moment of rupture that has further deepened the ruts of existing inequalities. As stated by geographer Neil Smith, “the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.” Smith argues, “There is no such thing as a natural disaster.”1 The event is where this axiom takes center stage, often displaying the political and economic forces that have, over time, structured risks for extreme suffering.2 Disaster is an instance where extreme inequalities plagued by histories of injustice are revealed.

How can architects better meet the needs of the people subject to injustice within sites of inequality and disaster? In order to investigate the ways in which architects can best utilize their skillsets on the ground within such sites to do so, this thesis will explore subjects surrounding global disaster response in conjunction to architecture as radical practice within the current era of global Millennial Development. Regarding disaster response, the two subjects that were character to sites experienced around the globe involved both disaster capitalism and the subsequent rise of the affect economy. Disaster capitalism refers to “the affects of government transforming need into profit” and the “revolving door between government agencies and privatesector businesses that enable large for-profit corporations not only to deploy but also to design public-sector programs, including federal programs to stimulate long-term recovery and the provision of rebuilding resources to post-disaster communities.”3 Tied to this, the privatization of

Neil Smith on Katrina: http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/ Dr. Paul Farmer ties his own experiences of ‘bearing witness’ to structural violence in his work in Haiti. He states, “By what mechanisms, precisely, do social forces ranging from poverty to racism become embodied as individual experience? This has been the focus of most of my own research in Haiti, where political and economic forces have structured risk for AIDS, tuberculosis, and, indeed, most other infectious and parasitic diseases. Social forces at work there have also structured risk for most form of extreme suffering, from hunger to torture and rape.” Pathologies of Power, 30 3 Adams in “Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith” pulls from Naomi Klein’s work in “the Shock Doctrine” regarding the “revolving doors between government and large corporate interests.” Pp.8 1 2

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recovery-related services model for welfare assistance delivery, which demands for non-state actors, i.e. nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), institutions, private actors, etcetera, to act as managers within the recovery process in substitute of governmental service provision. As repeatedly witnessed during my studies on the ground, the inefficiencies of this model lead to much larger longer-term costs for populations affected by events and often causes citizens to fend for themselves. The second subject, or the affect economy, refers to the charity-based and/or free work provided by volunteers, driven by compassion in response to the visibility of suffering, which operates in the absence of adequate service provisions.4 In parallel to these subjects, this thesis will also discuss how market-centered responses to crisis further displaces notions of citizenship, justice, and accountability intrinsically tied to space and the ways in which such models of service have shifted how select architects are choosing to engage in sites. The next morning in Haiti after my experience in the displaced camp in Port-au-Prince I later noted in my journal: “There is no justice for the teenage girl, there are only short-term land leases and more tents.” I wondered, had the universal morals of humanitarianism, under principles grounded in practices of humanity, impartiality, and independence, been co-opted by the disaster-market mechanism, leaving individuals to be treated as objects stripped of agency? Who is included in this global movement towards universal freedoms, human rights, and the alleviation of suffering? What if the same systems providing relief had been perpetuating suffering, deepening inequalities, and instead generated a disaster syndrome complex? Was my role as an architect, to simply render problems technical and to act in response to or be solely driven by market forces that in many ways created and had been further operating off of such suffering?5 In the period of grey space, or the undeclared stage following an event that the mechanisms of short-term response sustain suffering and crisis between the stages of relief and recovery, should I not also assist those involved to seek longer-term service alternatives? Such experiences in sites of crisis and the ongoing exposure to structural violence repeatedly made visible the ongoing ethical dilemmas intrinsic to the profession of architecture. As

See “Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith” pp.9-10 In The Will to Improve, Tanya Li celebrates the role of the critic over one of the planned expert, as she argues that often development practices geared to “render technical” and praise controlled improvement often have dismal consequences. Of the three themes she extracted in understanding how power works, or the focus on problematization, antipolitics, and rendering technical, Li emphasizes the shortfalls of such interventions to be grounded in externally imposed, and often detached, means of accomplishment geared towards a particular set of indicators and tools valued by actors distanced from its users that should be viewed from a multitude of perspectives.

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I continued to ‘bear witness to’ and research alongside individuals on the ground whom were experiencing both the crippling affects of an event as well as the stifling impacts stemming from inadequate response, I challenged myself to seek out other architects who had chosen to expand architecture in order to better meet the needs of people on the ground. It was in the moment of assisting IOM in the Haitian displaced camp that my Branner Travel Fellowship agenda, centered on assisting agencies through a method entitled Synergetic Aid, had ended. This was the moment that I committed myself to otherwise focus my research on the ways in which architects were deploying themselves, not their designs.

This document is divided into two parts and eight sections. The two parts are indicative of both a personal and a larger political shift occurring in architecture. This shift centers on the moment in which one is confronted with and ultimately choses to break from the ethics of responsibility promoted in mainstream discourse in order to engage in an ethics of accountability that aims to otherwise work in solidarity with those affected by structural violence.6 The first part focuses on education in architecture, narrates experiences in sites of disaster that challenge this training, and displays cases of architects working outside of traditional practice encountered on the ground in sites during the John K. Branner Travel Fellowship. The second part considers those experiences and subjects in Part one and displays a main case study that provides the platform to demonstrate a proposition indicative of scenarios demanding ethical reflection in practice. In short, Part one is on reflection whilst Part two seeks to demonstrate and apply such realized ideas to a particular context and scenario indicative of an emerging practice referred to here as ‘Empirical Architecture’.

In “Can the Subaltern Speak”, Gayatri Spivak discusses the manner in which western cultures investigate other cultures in attempt to be “invisible” and to allow for third world or oppressed subjects to speak. Tied to an ethics of responsibility, the invisibility of the expert to empower is otherwise tied to political interests inescapably connected to the self. I am not suggesting that an ethics of accountability would ever provide the subaltern to truly speak (as Spivak also denounces this utopic idea), but instead am proposing for the acknowledgement of difference and self-interest of the sovereign subject (i.e., expert tasked to render technical). Not to speak for in aim of the impossible outlining of truths regarding all that plays into another’s suppression, but instead to attempt to provide the platform for, if they are willing, to speak in aim of mediating interests.

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Towards an Empirical Architecture Synergetic Aid to ‘Deploy Yourself, Not Your Designs’

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Part One_

Synergetic Aid l Fusing Community, Agency, and Professional Technologies into Disaster Response

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I: On Architecture Education Excerpt from my John K. Branner Fellowship application written in July 2011: “With this fellowship, I intend on jointing existing deploy-able design techniques and low-cost sanitation strategies to current International Aid guidelines in order to submit a new systems proposal to the United Nations. I am particularly interested in alternative construction methods and how the re-application of elements can alter the functionality of an architectural object (this refers to space, structure, and/or the material itself). I will be focusing on three main components as defined by the existing tent; skins and envelopes, tensile structures, and earth works regarding both earthen materials and systems for sanitation.

By guiding my itinerary through alternative design techniques and technology, I hope to later discover a cost-efficient solution that follows the United Nations guidelines for deployed shelter.”

At the time of writing my proposal for the Branner Travel Fellowship, my research method sought to tackle the issues defined by actors involved in disaster response on the ground in order to generate opportunities to create architecture for populations displaced by events. The approach was to absorb problems defined by others and tackle them through strategy, spatial design, and architecture in order to create a more efficient system using multiple types of building techniques inspired by people from around the world from varying socio-economic backgrounds. Even though my intentions had been to empower communities displaced by events, my proposal had otherwise remained tied to a particular type of practice and politics that was dependent on following the status quo in which my ethic was grounded in upholding the responsibility of the expert to solve problems tied to poverty with technical solution.7 While shadowing relief agencies in Haiti, it was obvious that being apathetic to existing systems of power, which in this case took the form of humanitarian aid and rendering problems technical, would otherwise perpetuate human and environmental risk for displaced populations in both the short and long-term. What I had not been able to imagine was a methodology that would allow for architects to engage with and transform the mechanisms, both economic and political, which produced risk. In other words, it became overwhelmingly clear that my educational training in architecture was grounded in a technocratic illusion that had not provided me with the methodological skillsets to embed myself within a

Throughout my Branner travels, I continued researching architects whom promoted local and basic building techniques as a means to provide for or work with communities. Photo was taken during a weeklong workshop at the Cal-Earth Institute for Art and Architecture, founded by architect Nader Khalili, which I learned the basic principles on how to build with earth.

David Harvey writes on status quo theory in “Social Justice and the City” as the traditional theories which seek to reproduce power, thus reproducing systems of poverty, crisis, etc. Revolutionary theory, in contrast, centers on creating, rather than solving or finding truth.

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community of users in order to get a better sense of their needs and to set indicators to value the architect’s services beyond the desire of the client. I had not been provided the framework to understand how political economy shaped place. On the contrary, I was trained to consider architecture as apolitical practice, or to render problems technical and to operate without contestation to systems of power.

Diagram above: During my Branner travels, I spent ample time trying to understand how, why, and who had been making decisions for relief and recovery. Because such decision-making processes often determined who would be protected from harm, it was vital to understand the political and economic reasoning that drove the production of space and the allocation of services.

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II: Architecture, Ethics, and Activism.

The point is this; Architecture is political. Whether or not education and/or broader architectural discourse choses to make this visible, it is an inescapable truth. The longer it is claimed that the profession is apolitical and should solely be exercised as technical craft and symbolic practice, it is through our apathy that we choose for architecture to continue to take part in shaping a less equitable built environment and further the increase of environmental and human risk in future catastrophes. In distinction, when the architect takes part in extending their service to engage with and shape the policies and decision-making processes that produce the built environment, then architecture has the opportunity to otherwise be used as tool to meet the needs of people subject to injustice. Where the architect stands amongst this divide determines more than their ethic. It determines the architect’s ability to define the efficacy of their services beyond that of the influence of capital. As stated previously, my education promoted apathy. My experiences, however, have otherwise led me to explore architecture as radical practice. This document narrates some of those experiences in aim to reflect on the current need for architects to partake in radical practice in our moment of social inequality in sites around the globe.

Architecture Amid the Three Orders "Our subject, then, is not architecture, but built environment. It is innately familiar. Anew, we observe what always has been with us - not to discover, much less to invent, but to recognize” -John Habraken in the Structure of the Ordinary, Prologue What are the forces that guide and limit, which thereby determine, the production of space in the built environment? How is architecture innately tied to those forces? In the Structure of the Ordinary, John Habraken writes on “three orders” that shape place based on his observations and theories about the built environment as a self-organizing entity.8 He outlines the orders of form, understanding, and place as follows: “In The Order of Form, it is observed how we operate on different 'levels' of the built environment.

This hierarchy may differ somewhat from time to time or place to place, but always has the same characteristics. This is the ‘physical order’ pertaining to environmental factors, for example.

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See the Structure of the Ordinary by Habraken.

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In The Order of Place, we look at control of space; it brings to light territorial hierarchies different from those found in physical form. The two - the formal and the territorial hierarchies - mutually influence and interpret one another.

The Order of Understanding, finally, comes about because those who intervene always do so, inevitably, in a context of meaning and social understanding. The largely unspoken conventions we adhere to are revealed in patterns, types, systems, and other regularities that can be seen in environment in endless variety.“

These orders, described by Habraken, portray the rules and limits of building beyond architectural design, which the profession currently centers on solely shaping built space based on adapting to rules in consideration of human and environmental factors. After walking through the Haitian displaced camp, I finally challenged myself to fully explore beyond architectural design, or the Order of Understanding and Form, in attempt to better make sense of architecture’s relationship to power, or the Order of Place. In architecture, one is taught to consider environmental (physics, building science, etc.) and human factors (observed culture, history, how people adapt to place, etc.) when shaping the built environment and creating spatial designs. But through my experiences in sites of disaster, it became clear that there was an unforeseen consideration that also took part in governing the limits of building tied to the production of risk. A consideration that in many ways both produced additional crisis and guided my own decision-making processes as a designer. It was not until after I completed my Branner travels and extended my education in urban planning, which I then could identify that force as Place, or Habraken’s territorial order, which involves political economy.

The relationship between these three orders will be central in demonstrating the role of architects in sites of disaster. To expand further, diagram 1 shows how Habraken’s orders intersect in the production of space (See diagram 01). Essentially, there are two intersecting themes between the physical and social sciences (pictured in diagram 01 as two intersecting squares), which determine the rules and limits of building. One field (or square) we can consider as Habraken’s Place, or territorial order, which, again, involves political economy. The rules pertaining to the height, location, and ownership of the depicted house, for example, is determined by a combination of policy and economic reasoning. The other field can be considered as Environment, or how people adapt to rules as well as environmental realities that shape built form.

Architecture, when guided by the traditional client-architect practice model, falls solely on the field of environment. But, as experienced in sites of disaster during my fieldwork, economic growth was 11

often privileged in policies shaping the built environment, further intensifying the platform for catastrophe. The red ring in the diagram is representative of disaster, which is often claimed as a symptom of societies with economic markets. 9 As decision-making processes became more distanced, heavily reliant on market reasoning, and grew more inequitable, experiences in sites demonstrated that larger scale human or environmental crisis would follow (See diagram 02).

Diagram 01 above: The vertical plane represents Place, or territorial order, whereas the intersecting horizontal plane represents that of Environment, or the orders of form and cultural understanding. Architectural design rests solely on the field of environment.

9 Tied to the market economy, Karl Polanyi in the Great Transformation discusses a “double movement” in which society navigates between a market society and that of a society with markets. In the first movement, Polanyi argues that populations within a market society (a society in which economic reasoning directs all aspects of life as governing ethic, i.e. neoliberalism) that are unprompted and mostly grassroots oriented, attempt to rescue the environment and society from the disabling initiatives of globalization in order to promote a more sustainable and just world. Societies with Markets are the counter movement to the Market Society, which remedies inequities and takes part in conserving nature.

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Diagram 02 above: As policy and decision-making tied to how space is produced in the built environment becomes distant from the ground, the level crisis magnifies.

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Historic Shift(s) in Architecture In what ways has this parametric relationship between political economy (the order of Place), environment (the orders of Form and cultural Understanding), and crisis (human and environmental risk) been discussed and engaged with in recent histories of architecture? Often previous models were politicized in relation to larger socio-political movements and national policy.

For example, 1960s attempts to answer the housing problem focused on participatory and self-help methods like that of John C. Turner, which emphasized that housing was best managed by the users whom occupied houses rather than having been administered through state control.10 One could also argue that Turner’s work had been made visible in response to the critiques of the then paralleled Model Cities program that occurred in the 1960s as a bureaucratic failure in providing coordinated centrally administered services such as housing.11 Likewise, in the 1990s the work of Nabeel Hamdi was popularized in his critique that the ‘trickle-down effect’ did not create large-scale changes predicted by conservatives throughout the 1980s at the beginnings of US neoliberal policies in the US and UK.12 Beyond these two examples, the point is that the recent decades of addressing poverty, inequality, and disaster issues and the ways in which architects have engaged in such contexts were tied to larger political openings constructed through socio-political movements and policy (See diagram 03).

But what does our current moment demand of practice? How are larger socio-political movements influencing both our legitimacy and the ways in which architecture is and can be defined, both by the profession and broader society? It is argued that what is unique about the context of this discussion in architecture today is that such issues have emerged alongside the heightened effects of a more globalized world.13 Such discussions are not simply revolving around the top-down affects of state policy, but also the social processes influencing our lives via globalization that have overflowed territorial boundaries.14 Currently, architecture practices that

See Turner’s work, Housing by People and Freedom to Build http://www.whatworksforamerica.org/ideas/the-past-present-and-future-of-community-development-in-the-unitedstates/#.VIYD54cwlzA 12 See Hamdi’s book Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities 13 In Expanding Architecture, Thomas Fisher discusses the linkage between globalization, architecture, and the calamaties that are occurring around our increasingly connected world. Pp.9-13 14 In Scales of Justice, political theorist Nancy Fraser states, “globalization is changing the way we argue about justice” (12) and that “under current conditions, one’s chances to live a good life do not depend wholly on the internal political constitution of the territorial state in which one resides. (13)” These influences range from institutional processes to capital flows.

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seek to serve the underprivileged are re developing in relation to local, national, and international nongovernmental agencies, philanthropic enterprises, and social movements that have responded to the affects associated with globalization in our Post Westphalian world. It is also often argued that today many societies are no longer identifying the nation-state as a legitimate source of authority and/or apparatus to protect the public good. 15 Instead, it is nongovernmental organizations, often referred to as the biopolitic guided by global Millennial Development, which have attempted to take on the enormous range of activities previously performed by state actors.16 In other words, as disasters, inequality, and poverty have intensified alongside the affects of globalization and market-centered policies, it is nongovernmental organizations, other non-state actors, and essentially middle class actors/experts, whom are struggling to assess, mobilize communities, and respond to the levels of risk and injustice locally. Architects, as witnessed in sites of crisis, are also working alongside the biopolitic and operating on a local scale in attempt to meet the needs of those impacted by disaster, poverty, and inequality. They are doing so, not simply through housing, technical solution, or design of physical space, but through community action, the generating of socioeconomic protocols, and reorganizing resources surrounding the politics of space that are necessary to transform top-down policy centered on economic growth favoring global capital flows through ‘trickle-up’ acts of transgression.1718 These select architects are choosing to extend their services beyond that of architectural design into a realm involving the rearrangement of territorial order and the redeployment of community mobilization practices, both guided and in many ways limited by, global mechanisms of soft power and capital.

“Architecture is not a temporary deployable tool within development practice, but a tool of equity.”

-Rick Lowe, Artist and 2014 MacArthur Recipient from Project Row Houses “We cannot wait on developers, they are not our clients. I think that we need to begin gaining the knowledge of the developer, so that we as designers, as architects, urban planners, become the developers of new housing models. Because the knowledge is out there to be mobilized.”

-Teddy Cruz

William F. Fisher, in his article “Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices”, discusses the growing literature that is concerned with the growing numbers of nongovernmental organizations that have had significant impacts on lives around the world in replace of the nation state.

16 See Peter Redfield’s piece “Bioexpectations: Life Technologies as Humanitarian Goods”.

17 One could argue that this movement is responding to the work of past human centered designers, like that of Hamdi who promoted the trickle-up affect of local building on top down decision-making processes.

18 See Teddy’s Cruz’s TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/teddy_cruz_how_architectural_innovations_migrate_across_borders 15

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Diagram 03 above depicts the relationship between architecture and larger socio-political movements in recent US history. Image courtesy of Anna Goodman—do not reproduce without explicit permission of author. What is not pictured in this diagram but related to this text is how such US political movements were connected to global politics. For example, from 1968 to the early 1980s, the War on Poverty was also undeniably connected to that of McNamara’s World Bank presidency promoting ‘Basic Needs’. Again, in the early 1990s to the mid 2000s, Wolfensohn’s World Bank ‘Era of Millennial Development’ has also directly influenced the recent decade and emergence of our current War on Poverty.

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The Architect’s Toolkit “As a natural being, I belong to the sensible world. My actions are determined by the laws of nature and the regularities of cause and effect. This is the aspect of human action that physics, biology, and neuroscience can describe. As a rational being, I inhabit an intelligible world. Here, being independent of the laws of nature, I am capable of autonomy; capable of acting according to a law I give myself.“ -Michael Sandel in Justice, pp. 127 “As an architect, I was trained in basic engineering, construction, and design principles. I am capable of taking complex issues and providing a multitude of solutions at any number of scales. Yet, the skill I simply do not have is the ability to see such spaces via policy and other intangibles. Through solely architecture, there is no set of tools to measure or value the success of our insertions outside of the client-architect model. In disaster response, experiences have shown that the result of ill-guided metrics and economics is often the cost of human life, additional enironmental catastrophe, and ultimately the platform for future disaster.”

-Blog entry written in post-Katrina New Orleans while on the Branner Fellowship.

A main argument expressed throughout this document will be that the architect’s toolkit involves much more than technical expertise. We are also privileged experts and citizens that can shape the processes that define notions of citizenship tied to the right to urban life.1920 Regardless of the architect’s stance, whether they are solely interested in the aesthetic and making aspects of design or focus on activism, the decision-making processes that go into “who decides” the value, ownership, and use of space makes architecture inherently a political practice. In this sense, the architect’s toolkit involves much more than simply design thinking and the creation of spatial designs, it includes our ability to utilize our stature and expertise to proactively engage in the design of socioeconomic protocols necessary to inscribe in space. If they chose, architects can extend their toolkit to engage in basic and applied research to assess the impact of design alongside communities and other professionals. Architects have the opportunity, in our moment of social inequality and era of Millennial Development, to re engage in practices involving community

19 In the Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre writes on the processes tied to the production of space, “…the deployment of the world of commodities now affects not only objects but their containers, it is no longer limited to content, but to objects in space. More recently, space itself has begun to be bought and sold. Not the earth, the soil, but social space, produced as such, with this purpose, this finality (so to speak). Space is no longer an indifferent medium, the sum of places where surplus value is create, realized, and distributed...” In Ch. 8 The Urban Illusion, Kindle 20 Also see David Harvey’s article, “The Right to the City”

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mobilization, the lessening of human and environmental risk through collaborative assessment, and the reorganization of resources and politics that surround space.21 Outside of this, architects are also extending discourse to engage in basic and applied research, intersecting with public health, planning, and public policy professions, because of the apparent erosion of the architect’s influence within the building professions over recent decades.

As social movements and the transformation of new world orders occurred, the building professions also endured major changes in mainstream practices tied to technological advancement, increased complexities in building finance, and in particular the improved responsibilites of project and construction management. 22 During this period, the services previously taken on by the architect have been argued to be absorbed by the construction and project management industries (See image 01). In many ways, the combination of factors, such as the fragmentation of the building professions, later led by project and construction management, coupled with the sustained presence of market-centered social policies, financialization, and increased trends in inequality and economic crises, has intensly narrowed the architect’s role, client base, and scope of influence. Cesal, architect and Executive Director for Architecture for Humanity, elaborates on this moment of practice transition and crisis in his book Down Detour Road: An Architect in Search of Practice in 2010: “When technology surges, the role of the architect is validated.

The last twenty-five years stand as an exception to the historical rule. Buildings have become enormously more complicated—in their systems and tectonic complexity, but more so in their financial, political, and legal trappings. The act of building is more complicated; there are increased numbers of stakeholders, all of them potential litigants. There is increased influence and involvement by the financial classes, because the money we use to finance buildings is borrowed, and subject more to interest rates than to capital constraints. As the act of building has become more complicated, architecture in many ways has shrunk from that complexity. This retreat has allowed the professions of project management and construction management to fully develop. It assumed, mistakenly, that there was something strategic in focusing on what we were really good at and/or really interested in: the professional production of schematic designs and construction documents. This latest surge in technology has only served to validate the existence of other professions.”-Down Detour Road pp.33

21 In William Easterly’s book, The Tyranny of Experts, he describes the ‘technocratic illusion’, or the “belief that poverty is a purely technical problem amenable to such technical solutions.” He describes that this illusion is in line with global orders and many of those whom are part of the Millennial Development movement, such as the UN agencies, governments, and large foundations such as Ford and Gates Foundations. Kindle 22 See Cesal’s book, Down Detour Road

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Left: Richard Llewelyn-Davies, diagram showing the architect’s relation to other professions (1967). Right: Cesal’s diagram relating to the architect’s influence today.

Why is it that such restrictions placed by the traditional model of practice become more apparent when investigating the role of architects in disaster scenarios? To refer back to my experience in the Haitian displaced camp, where international agencies and nongovernmental organizations had been privately contracted to provide temporary housing and other services, the market economy determined the success of service provisions.23 There was a blurred distinction between the chronic nature of the disasters produced by market mechanisms and fractured responses, the blatant dependency on sustained suffering in order to continue to provide relief, and the moral obligations inherent to humanitarian practice. If our current moment is similarly

Foucault notes, “the problem of neoliberalism was not to cut out or contrive a free space of the market within an already given political society…the problem of neoliberalism is rather how the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of the market economy.” Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics Lectures, 131.

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representative of state service decline as protector of the public good, and private actors, large nongovernmental organizations, or international agencies are to become both client and the biopolity, valuing basic services alongside profit-mechanisms, is it then that the client-architect model and methods of valuing practice must be reimagined?24 Medical anthropologist Vincanne Adams writes on this reversed logic of marketized governance in post-Katrina New Orleans, which public policy enables for the disadvantaged to become a site for the production of capital: “Who is authorized to care for those in need, who determines how much money a company should be able to make doing so, and what outcome indices are used to determine whether or not the company has done the job well are all forms of political power in which notions of fiscal enterprise should be measured against the persistence of need. But what we see today is that market-driven governance turns the persistence of need into an engine of disaster capitalism.

Measures of fiscal success are inversely tied to the job of eradicating need in part because need is itself a source for further subcontracting opportunities...”25

What if the architect’s services, which again remains heavily focused on the production of construction documents and drawing, also included research methods in evaluation and assessment to better understand project impacts beyond economic reasoning? What would a form of practice look like that promoted the mobilization of new models of practice and expertise geared toward moral/political change and community mobilization? Instead of simply rendering the world’s issues technical, thus rendering our moral and political being technical, can architects otherwise promote the extension of our services to also proactively engage in the rights associated with urban life to provide the platform for those impacted by disaster to define their own recovery? Can the profession of architecture as a whole encompass more than architectural design reactive to socio-political movements and the flow of capital? Just as planners have both urban design and urban planning, can there not also be a concentration in architecture that encompasses the proactive engagement in political economy through basic and applied research intersecting with the social sciences, public health, and policy (see diagrams 04 and 05)? Other public-interest

In “Medieval Modernity: On Citizenship and Urbanism in a Global Era”, Alsayyad and Roy support the arguments of Agamben: “The camp is a post-city space. It calls into question the normative relationship between cities and citizenship. As Agamben argues (1995, p. 181), the camp throws a sinister light on the models by which social sciences, sociology, urban studies and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their very centre lies the same bare life (even if it has been transformed and rendered apparently more human) that define the biopolitics of the great totalitarian states of the 21st century.” Pp.13 25 pg9, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith 24

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design advocates, such as Thomas Fisher, Bryan Bell, and Jeremy Till have also advocated for such a movement in the profession in collaborative books such as Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism and Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture.

Unlike construction and project management sectors, which also focus solely on market demands, the engineering scale, and finance, architects are skilled across a wider variety of disciplines and scales. In particular, architects are trained in basic engineering, construction, and design principles ranging up to the urban in order to address how such principles and complex systems impact people. We are capable of taking multifaceted and multi scalar issues and providing a number of alternatives at any number of scales that also respond to local environmental and cultural contexts, both in consideration and beyond the influence of, capital. If in our educational training, architects were also provided the opportunity to investigate how political economy shaped place and impacted environmental health issues, for instance, might we then be capable of embedding ourselves within a community of users in order to set indicators to value the efficacy of our services beyond monetary influence? Might we regain increased legitimacy and agency amongst broader society and the building professions by placing the standard for architectural services to set a use-value in sites where urban policy and planning have otherwise privileged growth and is in need of a place-based model of community driven development?26

In “Neighborhood Economics: Local Communities and Regional Markets”, Teitz promotes the need for community mobilization resulting from the negative effects of regional markets. “But neighborhoods themselves are unlikely to constitute economic entities around which economic development policy can be constructed. Although they are strongly influenced by economic conditions, neighborhoods are best seen as social communities. Their economic dependence on city and regional labor, capital, and real estate markets makes neighborhoods vulnerable to economically motivated forces of change. Efforts to resist or shape this change at the neighborhood level are more likely to work if they are directed at political mobilization and access of residents to urban labor markets, rather than a direct job creation within the neighborhood itself.”

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(Left) Diagram 04: Updated version of Eric’s diagram showing the architect’s relation to other professions, including public health and public policy.

(Right) Diagram 05: The extended scope of influence in practice provided by extending our skills into basic and applied research. The influence of the project management/construction industries are left unchanged to suggest that architecture would act in mediation with such practices and forces guided by global capital.

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Ethics in Architecture “Although architecture is inherently a place-bound activity that manifests in tangible buildings in specific locations, it has become increasingly enmeshed in global forces. Particularly glaring evidence of this relationship is provided by the global banking crisis triggered in September 2008 in large part by the collapse of subprime real estate loans. While it is easy enough to dismiss such financing issues as outside the proper realm of architectural concern, I propose that the economic systems that underlie decisions about what does and does not get built are in fact endemic to the context and ethics within which architecture operates. This is particularly apparent when we look at architecture in the context of globalization and its catalysts; mobile capital and digital media. If we also consider this trio under the umbrella of the postindustrial economy and post-industrial culture, we can begin to recognize better both the limitations and the potential opportunities architectural decisions at the local scale have to impact these larger, global systems.”

–Graham Owen in Architecture, Ethics, and Globalization p17 “The ethical responsibility of an architect involves doing the best building possible, meeting the client’s needs within the budget and schedule, while also attending to the health, safety, and welfare of those who will use or inhabit the structure. Yet it seems disingenuous not to acknowledge the larger social and political context within which we build, especially when it is clear that a client has commissioned a project as much for its symbolic importance as for its service accommodations.”

–Thomas Fisher, Ethics for Architects, p24 (kindle)

Mainstream practice and education continues to focus on promoting an ethics of responsibility to clients and their users through de politicized practices. As argued by Fisher, Owen, and several others, the narrowing of the profession towards this ethic has in part limited the scope of the profession in a moment when our world is redefining notions of justice intrinsically tied to place. In dismissing the post-political, or recent history in which theory and critique has since the 1980s fully embraced the de politicization of practice, other theories have emerged in disavowal to this standard ethical order.27 Amid the range of discourse critiquing the post-political, this thesis is directly interested in engaging with Agonistics, or the work of Chantal Mouffe. In using agonism as ethic, which emphasizes the role of the architect to act as on the ground community organizer and mediator whom engages with institutional bodies, i.e. the bio politic, architecture is then used to bring about a different hegemony, promote accountability, and meet the needs of people subject to injustice.

See Lahiji’s introductory piece in Architecture Against the Post-Political, pp. 1-7. In this piece, he argues that current post-political thought focuses on “expert management and administration allowing for bio politics to designate regulation”.

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Diagram 06 above: As policy and decision-making becomes distant from the ground and the level of crisis magnifies, the role of the architect is challenged to transition from an ethics of responsibility towards one of accountability, mediation, and engagement with institutional actors in order to bring about a new hegemonic order that takes into account the needs of people subject to injustices tied to space. If they choose, the architect then takes part in diagnosing such inequalities with other professions and people. Finally, through the use of gathered evidence, the architect engages in the formation of policy to advocate for alternate means of intervention in aim of lessening risks on the ground.

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III: Sites of Disaster and Inequality

I took this photo of the Kyotokumaru ship in the city of Kesennuma eighteen months following the 3.11 Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami. In this moment, it was narrated to me that the tsunami had carried the vessel back and forth three times from the sea and through the town, splitting apart foundations, pavement, and earth. A group of Japanese architects and I observed as people prayed and left flowers, took photographs, and tours were led for outsiders to witness the ship amongst ruin. We too were there on a site visit for one of the architect’s recovery projects and in part to observe what had been labeled as the symbol of 3.11.

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Just after taking the photo, the man pictured came to speak to our group.28 Angered, he expressed the injustices over space that was tied to the ship’s presence. It had landed on his home, his neighborhood, yet he expressed that he had no voice in deciding whether or not it would be Japan’s next museum and now epicenter for disaster tourism. He insisted that the rest of Japan, the rest of the world really, had been deciding the fate of his neighborhood, not the residents whom endured the loss and continued crises that took affect following March 11, 2011.29 I begin this section with the narrative of the man and ship in Kesennuma because it again reinforces in practice that space, and in particular spaces of crisis, are highly politicized. It is often because of the increased visibility from crisis that external forces will often dampen the voices of people whom are often most knowledgeable about place. More importantly, such outside noise further troubles the capacity for locals to uphold notions of citizenship that are tied to reorganizing the institutional practices tied to space. The individuals often silenced are those, like the man beneath the ship, whom are informed of history, environment, and ultimately hazards on the ground. It is in sites of crisis, like that surrounding the Kyotokumaru, which the use of space is fought over and claimed amid the politicization of local vulnerability and shock. Was the ship to remain as symbol or museum to generate capital? Or, should it be destroyed so the area could be used as neighborhood or environmental protection against the next tsunami? More importantly, who will take part in deciding this? Who has the right to participate in deciding the healing process, re design, and shaping of the future of Kessennuma? Who has the agency to take part in producing the future of the town?

This section is broken up into three selected phases of disaster, or preparedness, grey space, and recovery. There are three narrated provocations and one personal narrative, which are based on fieldwork experiences in Japan, Peru, and Kenya. The provocations seek to demonstrate a few of the personal encounters that challenged the role of the architect for me to shift away from traditional modes of practice in sites of disaster and inequality. Such encounters were re collected and narrated to directly trouble existing methods for rendering poverty, inequality, and disaster in architectural discourse as matters in need of technical design solution alone. Instead, the

Unfortunately, I had forgotten to write down the man’s name in my sketchbook while in conversation with him.

To the local’s benefit, a year later there had been a democratic poll as a result of collective transgression against keeping the ship as symbol for 3.11, which, contrary to the desires of local municipalities, had led to the Kyotokumaru to be destroyed. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/kesennuma-fishing-boat-japan-tsunami_n_3748618.html 28 29

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narratives are intended to promote why the architect must act as mediator between such outside forces and residents in order to use their agency and technical skills to empower locals and take part in shaping the decision making processes that directly impact human and environmental risk over time. Again, in deploying architects into sites of disaster to act as mediator, this thesis promotes for architects to become that of a “translator� between technocrats and local people in highly politicized space in order to mobilize instrumental expertise and knowledge in aim of transforming top-down decision making processes through bottom up acts of transgression.

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Provocation #1

Context: Minamisanriku, Tohoku, Japan 2012.

Pictured: Ancient stone engraving marking the origins of Minamisanriku above the tsunami-line in Minamisanriku, Japan; October 2012.

The client, a large international foundation, commissions an architect to redesign an urban strategy for a small village and a community center within the tsunami-devastated area of Japan 18 months after the 3.11 Triple Disaster. The architect has never been to or heard of the town until the tsunami devastated the area and mass media popularized the location. Likewise, the funding organization is from afar, and has set project restrictions based on operation constraints within the organization. Like several other organizations, the Japanese government had sub-contracted the foundation to provide planning and housing services in aim to deliver more efficient and sustainable solutions. In aim of getting a better sense of the context, the architect decides to make a site visit. She/he tours the village in order to seek design inspiration and to gain a deeper understanding of the cultural and environmental conditions prior to and after the event.

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While taking site photos of the affected areas atop a mountainside, the architect stumbles upon a series of historic stone engravings, encounters a few residents, and an elder by an old Shinto shrine.

Engraved in the stones are a series of old tales, notes, and markings regarding the origins of the town and the tales of tsunamis throughout history. Each of the stones is located a few meters above the tsunami line, where none had been washed away. They mark the town’s origins prior to the recent economic development and urban policies that prioritized building closer to the water.

One of the engraved tales narrated the story of the three men overlooking the tsunami from the point of the stone a top the mountainside. Another conveyed tales of fisherman riding their boats into the wave in order to preserve their livelihood while the women and children would stand by the markings.

While searching for more stone engravings, the architect came across an elder man tending to a shrine higher up in the mountain. Kudo, now approaching age 86, had lived in the town his entire life. He was one of the few to survive the tsunami and had watched his hometown be washed away while a top a large building next to the broken sea wall. Kudo was keen on sharing his loses and making visible the true narratives of the town and reoccurring mega tsunamis that were passed down by his relatives.

Kudo whom was tending to the old Shinto shrine

“Many lives were lost. The town believed sea walls and man would stop the tsunami. We have become so distant from nature. When I was growing up, the town knew the tsunami line and was one with nature. Our escape routes were paths up the mountain, where today escape routes are seen as highways parallel to the water. Many died because they were washed away by the tsunami from the side while trying to escape by car. They built the highways in parallel to the water.”

After speaking to Kudo, the architect goes and searches for historic maps of the town to look for more evidence of the town’s origins. While speaking to more locals, the architect is presented a map of Minamisanriku from 1600 AD. What the map showed was that the existing water line of the ocean was once at the same line as that of the 2011 tsunami.

Photo of a decimated highway in Minamisanriku (Oct 2012).

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After the site visit, the architect felt inclined to have her/his designs to reflect this new way of seeing she/he acquired from the narratives of locals, old maps, and engraved markings. The design included a major environmental proposition that embraced the possibility of another tsunami and positioned the community center atop the mountainside. But, to the architect’s surprise, the client turned down their proposal. Instead, the client insisted that they should focus on designing the town next to the new sea wall that recently had been approved for construction. The central government, in partnership with international funders and large construction companies, had passed with local authorities a major project to put up another sea wall and raise the town with concrete.

Maps from left to right (Image 02): (left) Historic Map of Minamisanriku from 1600AD, (middle) Devastated areas of the 2011 tsunami in red, (right) The Environmental Proposition by the Architect Do not reproduce or use without direct permission of the author. Actual imagery provided by locals in Minamisanriku, map of devastated town in local news reports, and proposition by architects and landscape architects were created in MIT 3.11 Japan Initiative I took part in during October of 2012.

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Preparedness The provocation of Minamisanriku exemplifies some of the main the challenges still faced by architects in the Tohoku region today. I placed this narrative under preparedness because it troubles the common illusion that more affluent and/or technologically advanced societies, like Japan, are the least vulnerable and are the most prepared to avoid the causes leading to urbanscale disasters. It also challenges the notion that man-made technologies, like the construction of sea walls, should be treated as solution to environmental realities. Although many life saving preparedness measures did save thousands from the tsunami, it was in large part due to the lack of historical consideration, environmental protection measures, and the bypassing of local knowledge in recent history—pertaining directly to economic development practices and urban planning zoning policies favoring rapid urbanization further into tsunami-prone areas beginning in the 1970s—which directly amplified and led to world’s costliest catastrophe to date. 30 The development of towns and villages, adjacent to seawalls insufficient in holding up against L2 tsunamis historically proven to occur in the region, led to 15,829 casualties, 3,679 missing, 5,943 injuries, and 341,411 displaced people.3132 As stated, the events that occurred on March 11, 2011 were directly tied to changes in the urban landscape driven by policy and development that occurred from 1962 until the late 1980s.

For example, many of the larger infrastructure networks, escape routes, and high-speed transportation systems, such as the main routes connecting to the Tohoku Expressway completed in 1975 and the Tohoku Shinkansen completed in 1982, had also been constructed along the Pacific Ocean side during this time. This is mentioned not to pin point each of the failed scenarios that were revealed on 3.11, but to otherwise suggest that the processes aligned with deciding the location of highways, heights and use of sea walls, and areas of ‘tsunami risk zones’ in urban zoning had at some point failed to consider local knowledge in towns such as Minamisanriku. This is history and knowledge that was in many ways was and continues to be erased, both by the

See The Geography of the Changes in Agricultural Land Use in the Sendai Metropolitan Area , Japan : an Examination of the Topo-Graphic Characteristics Using the Geographical Information System by Yuzuru Isoda, Doo-chul Kim, and Keigo Matsuoka 31 Oskin, Becky. “Japan Earthquake & Tsunami of 2011: Facts and Information.“ LiveScience. TechMedia Network, 22 Aug. 2013.

Web. 4 Nov. 2014.

32 Many sources and municipalities argue in Japan that mega-tsunamis like that of 3.11 only occur every 1000 years. Contrary to this, on the ground observations, interactions with locals, etcetera proved otherwise.

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(Image 03) Town before (above image) and after (below image) the 3.11 tsunami. Images provided by a Japanese text that displays before and after photos of the event.

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tsunami and now through the displacement and associated chronic disasters faced by residents following the event resulting from particular areas of response.33 To refer back to the provocation, it was clear that many architects were confronted with this tension between an ability to consider many scales and aspects pertaining to environment, history, and culture of people on the ground, while also struggling to navigate the global, national, and regional economic and political forces that were otherwise determining and re shaping the future of Tohoku. In light of this, many people I encountered throughout my travels had also argued that preparedness was not simply how locations prepare for future events via environmental or man-made defense systems, retrofits, etc., but more importantly, is about who was involved in the processes in deciding those outcomes. Those who took part in shaping the towns also took part in producing its vulnerabilities. As central authorities and municipalities continue to push for the approval of the construction of sea walls, referred to now as the “Great Wall of Japan”, I cannot help but think of the residents, like Kudo in Minamisanriku, whose knowledge has been overlooked while both he and his future relatives will be at risk for a future 3.11.34

Similar to what Vincanne Adams describes as chronic disaster syndrome in Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith regarding post Katrina New Orleans, many displaced residents were placed into temporary housing units throughout the region, which such housing solutions were led via private companies that were sub contracted by municipal government, and in many ways are known play into the additional suffering that has occurred since 3.11. For instance, in Fukushima, more residents have died in temporary housing units than in the tsunami, which is directly tied to suicide, health issues tied to the inadequacy of unit insulation, the nuclear meltdown, as well as crime. See: http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/post-tsunami-deaths-due-to-stress-illnessoutnumber-disaster-toll-in-fukushima 34 Yale graduate and freelance Journalist Winifred Bird writes on this dilemma in Yale Environment 360: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/in_post-tsunami_japan_a_push_to_rebuild_coast_in_concrete/2651/ 33

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Provocation #2 Context: Pisco, Peru

It is 2008 and an American architecture student wins a competition call for post-disaster housing ideas and is awarded a small grant to deploy her/his shelter design to respond to the 2007 Pisco earthquake in Peru. She/he chose to engage with Pisco’s recovery because it directly impacted the lives of close friends and their family members living there whom were struggling to recover after the event. As part of the research, the student is also awarded travel to Pisco in order to apply their ideas to the ground in order to adapt her/his strategy.

Once the student arrives in Pisco, she/he is toured through the devastated town alongside their close friend, the friend’s relatives who live there, and other locals. To the student’s surprise, the residents narrate that the outside help that arrived after event had in many ways overshadowed and allowed for the continuation of sustained crisis that had been plaguing the town since the earthquake. Although the family had been appreciative of the student’s will to improve the conditions of Pisco in providing shelter, they made it clear that for every deployed house that came into Pisco, a local builder had lost some form of business. For every temporary service provided from afar, the government was known to have walked away with funds that could have otherwise been used for longer-term solutions. It was a common narrative for outsiders to come to Pisco, drop down their particular solution, take a few photographs, and leave. Over eight months had passed and there still had been no plans to repair formal water access, sewerage systems, or to provide longer-term housing strategies. Piecing together such fragmented assistance in order to sustain survival alongside the blatant government corruption of aid funds was at the epicenter of their sustained crisis. Because everyone in Pisco was struggling to survive the day to day, it was difficult to mobilize and hold the government accountable for either their accused actions or apparent inaction. The family and other locals suggested to the student that the only way they could help was to tell their story. To not simply romanticize the town’s struggle as happenstance to be solved by technology, but as crisis produced and sustained by failed mechanisms of power.

When the student returned home, they decided to make visible the need for architects to use their skills to empower local builders and businesses through design strategy on the ground. Instead of deploying their designs into Pisco, she/he otherwise chose to deploy their ideas into academia and practice, making visible the need for locally driven housing strategies and alternatives.

The only residents whom were provided any governmental housing assistance had been those whose entire house had crumbled. Only then would those families receive a temporary 9 x 12 foot wooden shelter pictured above.

The student’s revised design strategy for housing centered on local available materials bought and sold in Pisco.

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Grey Space “Action is a precondition for the emergence of truth.”-Walden Bello

In the provocation, the metrics/indicators defined by the call would not only value the architecture student’s design, but would also validate, through outside truths, that the scenario and need following the earthquake was a matter to be defined as a lack of housing. On the contrary, the architect discovered on the ground that the truth had otherwise regarded a cyclical system of disempowerment, generated by and further perpetuated through societal mechanisms and structures, which continued to oppress the locals and their ability to recover.35 Not only did residents define recovery as more than simply a step towards accessing housing, but they also described it as a process towards generating local socioeconomic practices and longer-term services. As a consequence of government neglect, disaster capitalism, and the sustained presence of short-term services, residents were denied the ability to recover and instead endured the chronic affects of a disastrous response.

This sustained system of oppression, which promotes the dependency on affect generated relief in the absence of longer-term possibility toward recovery within an uncertain period of time, is the platform that generates the stage in-between response and reconstruction informally referred to by those on the ground as grey space.36

Grey space holds similarity to Agamben’s description of the camp, which is referenced as paradigmatic spatial type where normal order is de facto suspended and the state of emergency becomes law (Agamben, 1998: Homo Sacer). Unlike the condition of the camp, which time and space are bound by an order tied to bare life and reoccurring crisis, the stage of grey space is seemingly unbound, where through shock there is an open opportunity for policy to shift. Grey space is indicative of when, to quote Freidman via Klein, “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” In Grey space, definitions of truth, need, and thus what is ethically just are malleable. The architect engaging in sites of disaster directly takes part in shaping truth, as depicted in diagram 06 on next page.

36 In recognition of such disastrous affects of relief dependency, the World Bank’s publication Safer Homes, Stronger Communities emphasizes the truth that community driven reconstruction efforts must begin the day of the disaster.

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As stated previously, it is in Grey space where definitions of truth, need, and thus what is ethically just are malleable. The architect engaging in sites of disaster directly takes part in shaping truth, as depicted in diagram 06 above. In the diagram, it is suggested that through engaging with communities, agencies, and professionals, the architect can act as mediator to provide the platform for communities to engage in mediation with institutional systems of power in aim of longerterm recovery.

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Provocation #3

Context: Mathare Valley, Nairobi, Kenya

An architect is commissioned to take part in providing design strategies for an infrastructureupgrading project in one of Nairobi’s largest slums. The project involves stakeholders from a local slum federation, the Nairobi Water Company, international funders, to several universities around the world. The objective of the collaboration, originally driven by the community, is to extend water, sewer, and later housing services to the poor.

Those involved in the project range from city planners, public health professionals, economists, to politicians. As the only architect/artist, she/he is the main person trained to relate and communicate ideas through the mapping and visualization of engineering to urban scale concepts for future implemented proposals. As the project begins, the architect realizes that each actor is defining problems within the site in ways that are separate to one another, based on individual expertise and political interests. The driving factor regarding how services will be provided and who will have access to such amenities is directly tied to how problems are outlined. As the process continues, it becomes increasingly clear that the overabundance of outside influence is beginning to set more indicators to value the success of the project beyond that of community needs.

As the architect continued to produce visuals and mapping strategies, this power imbalance becomes more and more visible. While speaking to a community member about the design proposition, it also becomes clear that the proposal might otherwise reproduce risks on the ground.

The community member narrates to the architect why and how the proposal will displace more than it will service, the ways in which the water lines are proposed to run through violent gang territory known for destroying property, and points out the main water points that are located in the center of an open space where the community gathers for weekly soccer tournaments. While speaking to members of the slum federation during a community meeting on site, it was narrated to the architect that past scenarios of outside decision-making processes bypassing community needs had displaced more people rather than providing extended services for those such outside forces were attempting to serve. It was likely that the implementation of sewerage and water, if the needs of the people living there were not integrated into how problems were defined, would generate riots by those at risk of displacement and possibly result in the newly implemented infrastructure to be destroyed.

Broken sewerage line next to a community member’s market.

Open space where weekly tournaments are played.

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Recovery The provocation of the Mathare Valley slum exemplifies a scenario in a constant state of attempted recovery. Although mega-events, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, rarely strike the area, the residents of Mathare face daily crises as a result of living in areas of great environmental risk without access to proper housing tenure and/or formal water or sewerage services. Today, the conditions within Mathare are a consequence of the explicit illegalities imposed on the residents over recent decades that are tied to the denied access to basic services spurred through tribal conflict, which were later exacerbated by failed policies and development AID.37 Alongside this complex history, there now exists an intensified presence of the bio politic, which in the provocation the architect is part of, whom will validate through metrics and indicators how included biopolitical actors will manage and administer the regulation and security of welfare in Mathare based on defined need. As narrated in the provocation, these metrics and indicators are otherwise a result of competing truths, which often have the tendency to be succumbed to and guided by outside influence. As in the case narrated, the ability for residents to recover comes down to and is otherwise described by the member of the slum federation as the ability for the architect to use their skill sets to reposition power dynamics and allow for truths to be guided by those historically disempowered.

The provocation is narrated in such a way to emphasize that recovery, similar to preparedness and/or grey space, is defined and achieved not simply through physical implementation but through the transference of knowledge and truths defining need from the hands of oppressor to that of the oppressed.

See my travel stie, www.synergeticaid.net, on a brief history of Kenya and Dambisa Moyo’s book entitled “Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa” for more information on how Development AID has impacted large portions of Africa.

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The Architect as Mediator

This photo was taken over three years ago during my first trip to the Mathare Valley Slum in Nairobi. It is a place stereotyped as one of the most violent and disease ridden slums in all of Kenya. Just as I was about to faint from over-dehydration, Mumm (pictured) came out from one of the communities, grabbed my hand, sat me on a bench, and brought me a bottle of water and a Fanta. Everyone else in the studio I was participating in had been engaged in the site visit and had not noticed I was collapsing.

After a few bottles of water and the Fanta, I needed to use the restroom. Mumm, three other women, and I then proceeded on a very particular path to the bathroom and back. The path was more like a zigzag, took over thirty minutes each way over open sewerage and garbage, and had several female check points along the way in order to ensure we all made it there and back safely.

At its core, that is what this research has been about. It was never about envisioning some utopic future. Instead, it has been about engaging with one’s knowledge and resources to act in response to others in need, whilst responding to those needs in a very particular way, and simply acknowledging that this is a starting point in understanding who we are as human beings. Although architects are expert designers, builders, and systems thinkers, we too are also people.

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Over my years of fieldwork in displaced settlements and sites of disaster, I have repeatedly witnessed the ways in which the lack of community engagement, environmental consideration, and repeated histories of difference and/or inequality associated with decision-making processes in producing the built environment often create the platform for much larger longer-term consequences. It is through these experiences that I would argue that preparing for, responding to, or recovering from disaster can never simply be about enlisting some set of metrics, but is instead about transferring ones own skills, knowledge, and power to otherwise provide platform to empower those one is seeking to serve. With this awareness, the expert identifies disaster and/or poverty as not simply a moment of happenstance and/or a community’s lack of access to resources, but as a part of a cyclical system of disempowerment that has been perpetuated through societal mechanisms and structures.38 To act in solidarity and truly service those affected by disaster, architects must be reflexive in enlisting their own agency to engage with the systems in which their professional merit operates under. With this stated, the next section examples architects whom I would argue have begun to operate under this ethic of accountability and are attempting to act as mediators between institutional actors and affected communities in sites of disaster.

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See Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood’s piece, “Encountering Poverty: Space, Class, and Poverty Politics”.

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IV: Case Studies: Architects in Sites of Disaster As highlighted in the previous section, disaster response and development actors provide and value their services through a particular set of given methods, metrics, and constraints.

These indicators attempt to guide actors to most affectively and efficiently act towards the alleviation of human suffering and/or the lessening of risk for future environments. Such groups will often seek out existing indicators, reports, and examples written and experienced from afar in order to pursue the most appropriate models for recovery and reconstruction. But what are the impacts of defining needs on the ground through indicators from afar? What if the systems and rules used for response and recovery, when combined with local realities, sets the platform for additional suffering and guides second-ordered crises? What if aid, when offered as solution and ultimately guided from the outside, otherwise deepens vulnerabilities on the ground and further increases risk for future catastrophe?

This section reveals how architects, when they attempt to provide services beyond the traditional client-architect model, have been able to balance external forces with complex local realities in order to lessen risk in sites experiencing an imbalance of truths, grey space, and/or chronic disasters. Through exampling four case studies focused on architects working in sites of disaster, this section displays how focusing on influencing the decision-making processes associated with producing built space can make visible local needs as well as directly lessen future environmental risks in urban environments.

Diagrams 07 and 08 above depict the architect’s extended engagement in discourse surrounding political economy in order to mediate with institutional actors to bring decision-making processes to locals

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Tohoku, Japan As mentioned in the first provocation, the Great Eastern Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami has several multi-dimensional aspects that encompass both the event that took place on March 11, 2011 as well as the recovery process that is still taking place in the Tohoku region.

Since 3.11, a network of architects entitled Archi+Aid have been taking part in community engagement, building and urban design, and have been utilizing design thinking and communication skills to influence and directly shape the decision-making processes within Tohoku’s recovery. 39 Two projects in particular, “Project Lost Homes” and an Interactive Evacuation Mapping Project, exist as examples to how architectural communication and design thinking skills are pertinent, beyond taking part in construction and physical designs, in lessening human and environment risk.

Above: Photo of Minamisanriku taken Oct 2012. Note the concrete structure near the water where Kudo, in the provocation, stood a top of on 3.11.

39

See Archi+Aid’s website: http://archiaid.org/english/

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“Project Lost Homes”

The first example, or “Project Lost Homes”, is a collaborative effort by Kobe University professor Osamu Tsukihashi + Tsukihashi Laboratory, many professors, and architecture students from all over Japan, which utilized community engagement strategies to encourage exercises for residents to utilize a space to mourn their lost towns within the Tohoku region as part of the recovery and healing process.40 As apposed to promoting the re-implementation of the towns as they once were, referred to as fukkyu (the same), Archi + Aid members chose to promote the recovery healing processes with and for the survivors in order to create fukkou (new change).

According to locals and members of Archi + Aid, fukkyu was the process that had been promoted by municipalities in aim of more efficient resiliency in order to recover more quickly. Instead of re implementing what once was, the architects led in a process that allowed displaced community members to come together to speak about both the histories of the town. The aim of the project

See http://www.archdaily.com/379195/lost-homes-project-restoring-by-models-architects-teehouse-tsukihashi-laboratory-at-kobeuniversity/

40

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was to allow residents to take part in recovering from the past as was well as to create a platform for them to take part in re envisioning the future of their villages throughout Tohoku.

Since 2011, the project has focused on restoring damaged towns and villages devastated by the tsunami through the use of maps and 1:500 scale physical site models that engage tsunami affected residents in the recovery process. In this project, the residents identified preexisting landmarks, community centers, homes, etc. through memory markers. Each memory marker correlates to a memory narrative provided by a resident that is later logged by the architecture students. This process brought forth a way to identify pre-existing community networks, a platform to reflect on and cope with the tragedies associated with 3.11, and brought media and notice to the importance of including locals in the rebuilding process. The project also provided the platform for communication of what risks, human and environmental, could be visible in each village as narrated by the people who lived there. The scale models and their markings act as archival references for future construction and planning strategies for the towns.

Above: 1:500 scale model of one of a tsunami-devastate village.

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“Evacuation Mapping Project” The second project that focuses on lessening the risk of future crisis through community engagement practices is an Interactive Evacuation Mapping Project led by architects at Nikken Sekkei, whom are also involved in the Archi+Aid network.41 In many areas throughout the Tohoku region, the locals only had around 30 minutes to escape from the tsunami. The goal of the project was to compare the costs and benefits of rerouting smaller-scaled roads versus that of building a larger scaled highway for preparedness in the case of another event.

To carry on the cost-benefit analysis, the architects chose to go to the village and began engaging residents in searching for the quickest and most efficient escape routes. What was learned from their hands on mapping experience was that the locals really had a sense of what trails were safe, still accessible, and most efficient. The local knowledge had been information that Google Earth and their own footsteps alone would never provide. For example, locals began to highlight many areas that had ill-equipped surface paving for wheelchairs, which limited the paths for handicapped and elders.

As more residents began participating in the project, one of the architecture employees, who had several computer computational skills, then scripted a program to collect the line data the residents were drawing on the maps. He replaced the ink and paper from the community meetings with an object sensitive pen tool and built a small to-scale model of the town for residents to draw lines on top of. The lines were picked up digitally by the pen tool and inserted into a databank of information on his computer that created an interactive visualization map of all the possible escape routes relative to time and place. The interactive mapping tool was then used to make evidence-based decisions on where to place evacuation towers and reroute road systems in the area. As a result of this project, the local authorities approved the connecting of existing roads, versus implementing the large highway, which in the end also saved on reconstruction costs.

41

See Japan Architecture and Urbanism’s August 2012 special issue entitled “Face to Face with Nature”

Image: https://www.japlusu.com/news/faceface-nature

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Kenya Kounkuey Design Initiative, Kibera Slum, Nairobi, Kenya Kibera Public Space Projects “Designers think in terms of systems. As a result, we cannot conceive of small-scale projects like latrines or trash bins without also considering the sustainability of these elements and the roles they play in larger urban, regional, and global systems. In the traditional design world, successful design depends upon a deep understanding of a client’s needs, sensitivity to physical context, practical knowledge of the resources available to complete the project, and strategies for creatively relating the three. When these criteria are applied to a design challenge in a slum, in partnership with local residents, the result is a solution that is rooted in the community, contextually appropriate, technologically sustainable, and innovative in approach.”

“Kounkuey Design Initiative is an innovative partnership specializing in the practice of architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, and urban planning in areas where environmental degradation compromises quality of life. Our work brings together diverse participants—residents, local design students, private sector experts and government officials—to implement scalable, context-appropriate design interventions that improve the physical, social, and economic health of a community.”

Image of community clean up found here: blog.kounkuey.org/communitycleanupPPS4

When community centered building professionals are inserted into a place with a variety of complex interconnected issues and risk, the result is often the creation of multiple longer-term locally driven solutions that work together to create a sustainable and much brighter whole. The third example of the Kounkuey Design Initiative’s Kibera Public Space Projects examples this fact.

As a collaboration between the building professions, residents, local design students, private sector experts, and government officials, KDI has developed their own network of people in order to bridge the gap between larger outside forces and local residents to assist in the creation of a healthier and more sustainable Kibera.

Today, there are over 2.5 million people, or 60% of Nairobi’s population, who live on 6% of the land in slum settlements throughout the city center. One million of those residents live in Kibera on a site less than ¾ the size of New York’s Central Park, without access to basic services, i.e. formal water and sewerage system connections, electricity, or garbage pick up. The government

Image taken of Productive Public Space 1 and playground project in August 2012

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owns the land and the majority of the population are tenants with no rights.42 Several polluted rivers run through Kibera and into the Nairobi Dam. The rivers act as open sewerage drainage and contain both garbage and human excreta. Several human health issues, including typhoid and cholera are directly related to the lack of basic services and ownership.

In order to address the social, health, and environmental issues directly, KDI is utilizing participatory planning methods to engage with local residents to design, build, and manage what they call Productive Public Spaces (PPS). There are six principles that correlate with each of the PPS’s: “A Productive Public Space: -transforms an environmental liability to usable public space -is authored and operated by its end-users collaborating with outside groups -integrates income-generating, socially constructive uses to ensure its sustainability -adds value to a space without alienating the original community.

-is designed to address needs unmet through traditional channels -introduces strong design concepts to create beautiful places”43 In the summer of 2011, while on a site visit with the Nairobi Studio, I had visited the first Productive Public Space project shortly after its completion. By the time I visited during the Branner fellowship in September 2012, the PPS1 had become completely managed, owned, and operated by local Kibera residents and much had also been accomplished with the two other sites. During this visit in 2012, a mass community clean up had also cleared a forth site. Step by step, KDI continues to assist several Kibera residents and community groups in obtaining land rights, lessening risks through providing residents with the technical skill and knowledge to realize their own place, while also engaging and employing local designers in the process.

Image taken of Productive Public Space 1 and community garden in August 2012

Image taken of Productive Public Space 1 and community center in August 2012

See KDI website, http://www.kounkuey.org/Kibera_PPS1.html#, for the brochure and information regarding the context of Kibera, Nairobi's Urban Informal Settlements, etc.

43 Ibid 42

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Diagram 09 (left) corresponding to that of Diagram 07 (below): Image displays how KDI, through provided services via PPS projects, balances outside forces with local residents and groups.

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Dadaab Refugee Camp, Kenya Child Friendly Space Project The last project, which examples how architects can expand their role to lessen environmental and human risk tied to place through community engagement practice, can be found in one of the world’s oldest and largest refugee camps. The Dadaab Refugee Camp, located on the border of Kenya and Somalia, hosted over 474,000 people in 2011. The camp originated in the early 1990s after the civil war in Somalia. In this context, where environmental health risks and crisis re occur on a daily basis, is the location of a “Child Friendly Spaces” project led by Save the Children in 2012.44 Wesley Gideyi, an architect working for the organization during the height of the 2011 East African Famine, had been an integral part of the project.45 While working with the refugees and relief actors on the ground, it became clear that there had been heightened violence within the camps blocks of greatest density. After speaking to community leaders, it became clear that the tension was connected to the lack of open space within the camp blocks tied to camp management policies that guide the allocation of space. In short, there had been no public space constructed for an outlet for the youth to get a break from the daily stresses of the camp. In response to this, Wesley, community leaders, and other relief actors took part in creating a child playground and a multipurpose hall for Early Childhood Development and Education. The architect’s role in this was to engage with those living in the camp blocks, using drawing and mapping techniques to identify the environmental health risks, i.e. violence associated with camp density, and to respond to those risks with design thinking, strategy, and built space. For this project to take place, Wesley had to directly obtain permits for building projects typically prohibited in Kenyan camps. In order to meet the needs of those living inside the camp blocks, he needed to be deployed on the ground himself to organize others, identify environmental health risks, and communicate such issues to Kenyan officials to have the project to be completed.

Images above of completed playground and community centers provided by Gideyi, taken in August 2012.

See http://www.thinkup.org/index.php/projects/view/save-the-children-kenyan-playgrounds/ The author interviewed Wesley and other relief actors in Nairobi in 2012 during a yearlong research fellowship studying the Dadaab Refugee Camp. See www.synergeticaid.net for more information.

44 45

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Outcomes and Observations Beyond the use of graphics or media to display information gained through others, there is no existing impact assessment tool or method for architects to clearly display, both to locals and policy makers, the impact of design on risk tied to the built environment. If such a method were to emerge, it would help guide architects on the ground interested in engaging with policymakers in sites of inequality and disaster in order to utilize their skillsets and knowledge to address structured environmental and human risks tied to the built environment.

The next part of the thesis, entitled Deploy Yourself, Not Your Designs, considers such reflections previously presented in Part one and demonstrates how community engagement, mediation with institutional actors, and collaborative design amongst groups on the ground can address environmental health issues within my selected main case study in the Dadaab Refugee Camp. Although outcomes regarding design impact are simply imagined, such hypotheses of community-centered collaboration leading to lessened human and environmental risk are meant to exhibit the need for extended discourse both on ethics and the profession’s relationship to political economy in architecture.

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Part Two_

Deploy Yourself, Not Your Designs

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I: Introduction and Main Case Study_ Dadaab Refugee Camp, Dadaab, Kenya Thus far, this research has reflected on the need and current demand for architects to participate both in building as well as in the formation of policy in sites of disaster. To further demonstrate this need, the main case study for this thesis centers on Dadaab, or one of the world’s largest refugee camps on the Kenya-Somali border. Overall, the design proposition for demonstration will entail a strategy for infrastructure and engaging water to facilitate a process for sheltering inside the camp. Such a strategy and process, as will be explained in detail, is only made possible through the architect’s engagement in shaping policy, or with the existing United Nation’s High Commissioner for Refugee’s Handbook for Emergencies, through evidence and community organizing practices.

The Dadaab Refugee Camp is chosen as main case study because it exemplifies the most straightforward case of how distanced urban policy and decision-making, when privileging short-term funding mechanisms or private relief contracts, can directly produce human and environmental catastrophe. The case shows how disaster capitalism coupled with a donor-driven response generated by affect can produce chronic disaster syndrome, which the presence of suffering and death becomes necessary to sustain operation. Or, to put simply, it demonstrates the parametric relationship that exists between political economy, place, and health. In attempt clearly narrate this relationship; the first section is broken into four themes, or history, policy and economics, people and environment, and health and safety. The second section following these themes responds to the particular place-based injustices presented and demonstrates the role of the architect under an ethics of mediation and thus reveals architecture as agonistic practice.

Photo taken in Dadaab by Wesley Gideyi, August 2012.

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History

Photo Above: See Dadaab’s Facebook page www.facebook.com/therefugee?ref=ts

Dadaab, located on the Kenya-Somali border was home to over 474,000 people in 2011.

The camp originated after the civil war in Somila in the early 1990s. Since its origins, the environmental footprint of Dadaab has transitioned from marshland to harsh desert, which will be shown as a direct consequence of the dependency on immediate relief, the lack of resources, and the inadequacy of the relief tarpaulin. Over the years, the residents would venture out of the camps in order to search for water and wood for shelter, which resulted in desertification. Every year it rains in Dadaab. When it rains the camp floods. When it floods disease spreads and additional deaths occur.

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Policy and Economics This suspended state of emergency, in the case of Dadaab, is a direct result of structural forces, i.e. the combination of International Humanitarian Law, Kenya’s 2006 de facto encampment policy and constantly evolving policies of forced refugee encampment/displacement, as well as a series of unlawful disincentives regarding refugee’s freedom of movement by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR (Human Rights Watch, 2013). These acts combined create a zone where continuing the state of emergency becomes law. More specifically, International Humanitarian Laws leave the host country responsible for upholding the 1967 Protocol and Universal Rights of Refugees, which passes accountability and protection laws onto the Department of Refugee Affairs in Kenya. The country’s de facto host law from 2006 essentially states for all services provided by international actors to be restricted to encampment on the outskirts of the country and away from Kenyan cities (see image 08 on next page).1 Because Kenya’s 2006 de facto encampment policy simply states that refugees can only receive services in camps, authorized rights protection and assistances are then left to UNHCR relief operations inside Dadaab. The UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies is the policy by the camp’s governing body, or the UNHCR, which guides all camp management and service regulations. To fund the operation, the camp is then subsidized through short-term contracts, from donors ranging from philanthropic organizations to corporations like IKEA, which guide and set indicators for relief operations and determine the success of the operation.

Above: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee’s Handbook for Emergencies and Policy applied to refugee camps around the world.

1

See Human Rights Watch publication: “Welcome to Kenya”: Police Abuse of Somali Refugees

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Above: Image 08

The Map of Kenya (image 08) depicts the spatial allocation of refugees within the country are based on the following refugee ordinances: International Humanitarian Law: Through the 1967 Protocol, which Kenya participated in, states all refugees have the right to seek protection within Kenyan borders and be assisted by international bodies, i.e. the UNHCR. 2006 Kenyan Refugee Act: This act states that all refugees can only receive basic service provisions by international organizations in camps on the outskirts of the country. Refugees are sent to camps based on their ethic origin (Dadaab is the Somali camp, whereas Kakuma is mainly Southern Sudanese).

UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies: The Handbook for Emergencies guides all relief operations, deployed services, and articles on the ground.

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The UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies scripts how each sector (Basic Needs, Security, Logistics, etc.) and department (WATSAN, Shelter, etc.) will carry out operations. In aim of creating the most efficient services to provide humanitarian relief, the Handbook creates a fractured response where each sector is placed in silos. The issue with the structure of this response is that it affords for each of the departments to only focus on their particular task while they each compete with each other for funding and short-term contracts. As for the building professions engagement in operations, experiences on the ground have shown that there are engineers providing services within the silos and specific departments while urban planners engage in overseeing each sector and the operation as a whole. Architects, because of the nature of our traditional practice model, commonly attempt to address matters of shelter provision, at the scale of engineering design, within the shelter and logistics department and/or silo.

Diagram 10 above depicts the silo structure of relief operations guided by the UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies, which breaks each sector into silos for departments such as shelter operate within.

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Diagram 11 above depicts the order of operations within camp management that is based on the individual family unit as stated in the UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies.

In addition to the silo issue, the Handbook for Emergencies scripts a particular urban pattern from afar and does not call for environmentally sustainable practices on site. As depicted in the diagrams above, the explicit instructions in the handbook state for the entire operation to be based on the individual family unit leaving the search for water sources and environmental consideration as a final stage in camp management.

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The costs tied to the structure of this response are tremendous, as over time the ways people have adapted to the handbook rules over time impacted their environment in such a way that there continues to be an increase in both short and longer-term catastrophes over time. Such crises on the ground are also directly tied to the cost limitations associated with donation-based relief coupled with the policy restrictions that focus on operations and camp management to be based off of deploying shelter units and subsequent services into the camp. As a consequence, environmental degradation from shelter and fencing protection adaptation has led to on site flooding every rainy season, which has directly produced increased risks in health, safety, and often-additional death cases.

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People and Environment As mentioned, the site where the camp now operates had transitioned from marshland to harsh desert over the decades of operation. Displayed in the 1986 versus 2007 satellite imagery, one can see the large-scale environmental impact from the camps. In addition to this degradation, the camps are located downward in elevation from the Lagh Dera River, which is connected to one of the main river systems in the horn of East Africa. From the Lagh Dera to the first camp, there is an estimated 2-3 meter shift in elevation.2 As a result of the camp having been set up in an impromptu fashion and original aimed to be temporary, such site considerations of elevation and flooding where not taken into account.

UNESCO Satellite Image 1986

Lagh Dera River

UNESCO Satellite Image 2007

Lagh Dera River

Downward Elevation Shift

Environmental Costs l Desertification Over Time

2 See World Bank publication, “In Search of Protection and Livelihoods: Socio-economic and Environmental Impacts of Dadaab Refugee Camps on Host Communities.”

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Image above provided by GoogleEarth

In observing the camp more closely, one can see how the urban pattern, scripted by the Handbook for Emergencies, is applied on the ground and how people have adapted to such policies. Inside the camp, shrubbery is often used for shelter adaptation as well as for fencing protection.3 Because the tarpaulin dissipates from usage and environmental exposure within a year’s time, people are forced to seek other alternatives for protection and break out of the camp into host community lands in search of resources. With limited funding, it is also often difficult for agencies to provide enough shelters or tarps for the refugees as the camp is overpopulated.

As a result of these issues regarding resource scarcity, camp overpopulation, and environmental impact, there remains a heightened tension between the host community, agencies, and refugees. Displaced by the camp in the early 1990s, the socio-economic impacts on the host community have also been directly influenced by this UNHCR operation.4

See UNHCR’s report on searching for firewood: http://www.unhcr.org/53c53bb26.html See article, “In Search of Protection and Livelihoods: Socio-economic and Environmental Impacts of Dadaab Refugee Camps on Host communities”.

3 4

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Health and Safety

Image 04 taken by Doctors Without Borders

Pictured above is the consequence of such factors on the ground. As stated previously, there is a direct correlation between the order of place (territorial order), form and understanding (environmental and human conditions), and health. The combination of limited funding, fractured and silo-ed response mechanisms, and the particular environmental and human adaptation scenarios have directly impacted the health and safety of both the refugees and agencies on the ground. In the case of Dadaab, the common community stressors or risks are water born disease, malnutrition, and violence.5

5

See data.unhcr.org for data and statistics on Dadaab.

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Photo top left: Reports through UNHCR reiterate that frequent flooding produces great risks for agencies and workers, often making it harder to service populations on the ground.

Photo bottom left: Agencies are unable to fund for every family to have adequate shelter. Also, latrines are left located in footpaths where water often floods, carrying contaminated water throughout the camp.

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III. Proposition for Demonstration In attempt to address these issues, a proposed strategy is to engage the Lagh Dera River and existing water sources on site in order to undergo a process for sheltering to guide a community-driven infrastructure network in aim to provide the platform to lessen environmental health risks over time. In order for this process to take place, my joint thesis proposition also entails a complementary handbook to the existing UNHCR Handbook, which focuses on the added deployment of community-based architects, building professionals, and other health-related experts whom will work alongside existing relief agencies in a multi-sectoral and multi-scalar approach towards improving environmental health conditions. Deployed architects would take part in mobilizing communities and mediating with affected agencies, environmental health professionals, and people on the ground in order to first diagnose limitations of the existing operation that directly take part in producing added health and safety risks. After prompting a need for intervention, geared towards identifying refugee needs, the architect later addresses such stressors through community mobilization and the empowerment of existing refugee social structures while undergoing the process for sheltering.

Diagram 08 revisited

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Architect The role of the architect involves the re engagement in community organizing practices, the creation of project impact assessment on environmental health/safety, the guiding of physical intervention, as well as the consistent engagement with policy through application of on the ground assessment and evidence. Such practices are meant to hold the architect’s services accountable to both the users and the clients they serve. Different from that of engineers or planners in development practice, architects, through their design thinking process and by nature of their interventions ranging from the engineering to urban scale, can otherwise cross silos on the ground.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

Community Empowerment and Self-Reliance

Community Services

Livelihood

Security

Basic Needs

Favorable Protection Environment

Protection

Environment

Education

WATSAN

Health

Nutrition

HIV/AIDS

Shelter

Gender-Based Violence

Fair Protection Processes

Logistics and Operations Support

Registration

Logistics

Food Security

Core Relief Items

Again, Diagram 10 above depicting the silo structure of relief operations guided by the UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies, which breaks each sector into silos for departments such as shelter operate within.

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Diagram 11 Below: The yellow is representative of the role of the architect in this extended mode of practice.

Diagram of multi-sectoral operation system:

YEAR 2024

To address these issues, a proposed strategy is Lagh Dera river and existing water sources on site in order process for sheltering and guide a community-driven infrastru in aim to lessen environmental health risks over time. In process to take place, my joint thesis proposition also entails tary Handbook to the existing UNHCR Handbook, which fo added deployment of community-based architects and other professionals whom will work alongside existing relief a multi-sectoral and multi-scalar approach towards improvin health conditions. Deployed architects would service in coll affected agencies, environmental health professionals, and ground in order to first diagnose limitations in the existing ope that directly take part in producing added health and safety r While engaging with the community, an architect w make visible both the opportunities (existing community grou etc.) and risks (safety issues, water-born disease, malnutrit on a variety of scales at any given time. The combination factors would prompt programs for additional spatial cat fields, health clinics, etc.) in attempt to empower the commun stage for the process of sheltering and infrastructure networ a longer term (not permanent) alternative. In this, the architect’s services are defined by ethics and their ability to risks over time.

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Architecture In this example, the role of the architect is not confined by the existing system to operate solely within the shelter departments and/or silos. Instead, the architect’s practices are valued and defined both by a community of users and outside clients via direct community mobilization, project impact assessment, and mediation practices made possible through the engagement with policy mechanisms. This re-conceptualization of shelter humanitarian aid towards the process of sheltering requires focus on both technical construction and service management issues at all levels and scales of engagement and implementation. Such scalar shifts would directly call for multi-sector collaboration and local authority engagement with both refugee and host communities. Under these frameworks, this research focuses on three matters common to longer-term refugee and internally displaced persons scenarios: (01) Host community land tenure and service program ownership regarding the process of sheltering; (02) Environmental impacts of camp services; (03) Shelter to neighborhood level disaster risk management.

In operation, the process for sheltering begins at the scale of the community and encompasses the guidance of both refugee and host community mobilization and identification of existing environmental health and safety risks in parallel with existing social networks and programs. In other words, project and design impact assessments couple with community engagement practices in order to provide the platform for refugees and host communities to identify both existing stressors and valued programs on site. After identifying these factors, the architect takes part in navigating all actors involved in a negotiation process to allow for on the ground needs, directly regarding the lessening of environmental health risk, to be met through empowering and mediating between refugee and host community social structures and on site programs.

For example, in order to construct shelter made of earthen-based materials, both the Kenyan host community and refugees must be involved in the process. Because Kenyan policies do not allow for the use of cement in materials used for building within Dadaab, any longer-term material solution would need to be coupled with Kenyan host community ownership processes.

During my travels, it was presented to me that practices are taking place in the other Kenyan camp, or the Kakuma refugee camp, today. In Kakuma, the host tribes, alongside Kenyan ministry actors negotiate with refugees inside Kakuma in order to rent out longer-term housing options

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where the refugees are considered renters. Agencies oversee this process and have suggested that such mediation techniques with actors have lessened tensions between the refugees and host community and also have led to the lessening of health risks on site.67 This sort of negotiation process that identifies and mediates with the political realities prohibiting for longer-term locally driven alternatives in aim of providing alternate possibilities is what the thesis proposition is aiming to demonstrate. Such processes also recognize the Dadaab Refugee Camps as longer-term settlement and place character to urban conditions.8 It is assumed that in order to address re-occurring immediate challenges, the process of sheltering must also look toward host community and authority-led management in order to tackle both current and longer-term realities. Program ownership, environmental impact, and risk management are perceived as inherently connected and ultimately demand a holistic, multi-sector, and highly collaborative effort from all response mechanisms, including those within the refugee and host community.

Images A-D display this procedure of engaging water to undergo the process of sheltering at the community scale, while Images E and F demonstrate the block scale, and G and H demonstrate the urban scale of the camp over time. As illustrated, on the ground actors are encouraged to use the earth on site in trenching the informal infrastructure network.9 Going community-by-community, block-by-block, over time the network is managed, created, and sustained by the refugees, agencies, and professionals on site. The role of the architect, in this sense, is therefore to take part in navigating this process to assure that the rules that make possible the production of space are guided by on the ground realities and not simply from afar.

Such practices are only possible if architecture also includes the formation of alternate forms of policy that make possible on the ground adaptations on site.

See the “Unite for Sight” article on the tensions between host communities and refugees in camps like Kakuma and Dadaab.

See the International Refugee Council’s report, “Reducing Malnutrition in Hagadera and Kakuma Camps”, on engaging in practices between host communities and refugees for longer-term healthier solutions.

8 This argument is in support of Michael Agier’s work, “Between War and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps”.

9Material on site in Dadaab consists of volcanic soils, loams, and clays suitable for building. See the report by cartographers and landscape specialists Alain Beaudou, Luc Cambrezy, and Marc Souris from their October 1999 Impact Assessment report on Dadaab’s landscape.

6 7

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YEAR 2014 80% Cholera Rate 50% Malnourished 92% Reported Violence

Image A above depicts a particular community that agreed to take part in the process of sheltering. After engaging with residents, it is made clear that the rates of cholera, malnutrition and violence are high. It is also made visible that those living in the community are both a part of a women’s group and play soccer every weekend in the only open space found a few meters from the camp block.

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YEAR 2016 45% Cholera Rate 45% Malnourished 70% Reported Violence

Image B above: After negotiating between the Kenyan host community, the Kenyan ministry, and other refugee groups on site, three refugee families work alongside the departments in WATSAN, shelter, and protection, as well as the host community in beginning to trench the infrastructure network while creating longer-term shelter and program alternatives. During this process, funds for the project are collected from multiple groups and are used to hire both refugee and host community members to use traditional building technique, agricultural practices, and to manage, own, and operate such programs.

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Image C above: Five years later environmental risks have lessened, meanwhile on site alternatives continue to expand and range from housing to agricultural programs.

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YEAR 2024 10% Cholera Rate 20% Malnourished 30% Reported Violence Image D above: Ten years later environmental risks have lessened significantly, as host community members and refugees have taken the initiative to adapt space, alongside the guidance of agencies and professionals.

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Image E above: The process at the block scale, which considers the collective impacts of communities and identifies where block stressors and social networks are located.

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Image F above: The yellow depicts the interventions guided by the architect led through community mobilization and engagement with policy. As shown, the infrastructure network navigates through the camp blocks and provides housing, agricultural, and added social service programs along the construction path.

For example, in lessening violence rates at the camp block scale, a community leader identified that the absence of light along footpaths made walking to the bathroom at night more dangerous for women and noted a few on site technologies that could provide solution. In response, the architect, WATSAN and Protection sectors, and women’s group on site generate the possibility for a new project. In this project, the groups found recycled water canteens, filled them with water, and attached small flashlights found in one of the Protection warehouses. In doing this, they created lighting along main footpaths that led both to the community center and main restrooms. In this, the makeshift lights are to be identified as the engineering innovation of the camp leader, whereas both the technical and the decision-making processes guiding the location of light posts is considered here as architectural innovation of both the leader and the community as a whole.

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Image G and H above: Over time, it is suggested that the level of environmental and human risk will be significantly lessened and the implementation of the process for sheltering will allow for the transferring of refugee and agency presence with that of local host community ownership in the chance that Somalia regains political stability. In the other case that the camp remains for decades to come, the presence of the community driven network promotes for bio composition practices of waste and traditional agricultural practice common to Kenyan Ogaden and Somali tribes. It is through this process, which the overall aim is to also allow for the transition of the environmental footprint of Dadaab to go from harsh desert back to marshland.

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The following images depict the process of sheltering at the human scale within each silo.

As displayed, when the architect promotes such processes, each silo inherently crosses that of other departments. Unlike that of engineering or construction professions, it is argued here that architecture demands the participation of multiple parties, scale of services, and programs to produce built space.

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Community Services

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Health

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WATSAN

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Core Relief Items

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Food Security

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Protection

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Logistics

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V: Continuing‌

Towards the end of my Branner travels, I joined in on a workshop with a Japanese professor and a few other students from around the world whom were engaging in the reconstruction efforts of Minamisanriku. A few days into the program, a Japanese student confronted me a top a broken sea wall. She told me that she had been observing my interactions with others and had been thinking about my experiences in past locations that I had shared with her days prior. She asked how one could be on the ground in sites of crisis for such a long period of time and still continue to sympathize with others. She inquired about my background and how I could so intimately empathize with those who were experiencing loss.

Never before had the personal become so political than in that conversation. Although there were several moments, like my engagements with family friends in Peru or in the Haitian camp, where my ethics had been questioned, never before had someone made it so clear that it had been my own personal experiences that were prompting how I was choosing to engage with the world. Like several others who also identify with difference, poverty, and hardship, my own experiences, although undeniably relational, have tailored for me a particular lens in seeing and interacting with the world around me. It is because of my experiences, training, and other such

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privileges, which I hold this tremendous sense of responsibility to acquire the tools to act on matters of injustice and to hold myself accountable to those who have been denied their right to assist themselves.

As stated previously, this research has been about both a personal and larger political shift in architecture. It is about transitioning from the post-political to discovering the ways architecture can be used as tool to dismantle the institutional mechanisms that produce injustices tied to place.

In continuation towards an empirical architecture, this work will seek avenues to promote such practices grounded in expanding practice in order to not solely have our services be used as deployable tool for forces that often produce disaster. It will provide for emerging architects, whom are undeniably entering into a more unequal and globalized world, the ability to see how politicaleconomy shapes place. In doing so, it will push for architects to be given the ability to take part in creating the platform to also engage in research-based practices that are using evidence to shape policy.

But, alongside such promotions I am also gravely hesitant. Providing architects with more research-based skills could simply lead to added means for interpreting the world’s problems technical and increase the risk in producing additional means for injustice. If one truly aims to use their professional merits to create a more equitable world, I would argue that this is only possible through self-critique. In identifying our relationship to the systems that produce both personal merit and political realism, we are often presented with the ethical confrontation to choose how we define both our services and ultimately ourselves.

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