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Reintegration of Squatter Settlements into Urban Networks in South America Bottom-Up Tactical Urbanism through Network Decentralization
Nikolas Koschany, 500 524 631 Ryerson University, School of Urban and Regional Planning Field Research Project, PLG 730 Professor Lawrence Altrows October 3rd, 2015
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Disclaimer: I unapologetically and provocatively use the word “slums” to refer to the illegal and quasi-legal squatter settlements that contain much of today and tomorrow’s world population. In using such an umbrella term to refer to extremely different urban fabrics, I hope to highlight the inherent contradiction of painting every slum as being somehow the same. Slums today are not the same, just as European cities in the Middle Ages were not the same. To suggest otherwise is to discount the very idea that slums are and will continue to be a legitimate urban form in the future, as countless research before this has shown. Introduction By 2030, over seventy percent of the world is expected to be urbanized, yet a quarter of the world’s population is anticipated to live in urban slums (MOMA, 2015, p.12). Displacement drives against the poor, often exacerbated by beautification drives in cities, physically isolate slum dwellers from the very urban fabrics that surround them, while neoliberal trends and the lack of cohesive government structures in slums prevents top-down methods of promoting social mobility. The outcome of these structures is the emergence of informal urbanization, commonly manifested through squatter settlements. The settlements in question often have their own informal economies and social structures, devoid of government influence (Turner, 1972); as such, the informal nature of these settlements prevents traditional top down service provision, hence trapping many slum dwellers in chronic poverty, representing the failure of government to provide. Nowhere is this truer than in South America. The heavy privatization agenda promoted in the 1980s by organisations including the World Bank and the IMF (Cruz, 2015) has done little but shift a top-down agenda from government hands to corporate ones, while furthering forces of globalization and inner-city gentrification through an increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor. Meanwhile, the obsession with beautifying cities which stretches as far back as the Law of the Indies, signed in 1573 (Hodge, 2003), has only furthered these displacement drives while promoting slum clearance in the name of aesthetics. All of this, the paper will argue, discredits
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the very notion of top-down planning in informal human settlements. Top down services cannot be expected to evenly allocate themselves upon populations that lack both formal distribution methods, and a constantly expanding urban poor, yet insist on doing so anyways. A bottom up process must instead be used, that harnesses the aforementioned informal networks, and a “do it yourself” attitude. Examples of more successful slums in locales like Bogota and Medellin echo this process; they have grown not through master plans that clear slums, but through incremental tactical maneuvers, (such as gondola transit lines), that embrace them. Significant barriers exist within establishing this process, however, including the lack of property rights and urban connections, and the propensity for master plans and slum clearance strategies that are based in 1930s modernism1. But slum clearance strategies in South America have been no more successful than modernism’s failure to eradicate poverty in North America. Clearly, as with modernism, a new approach has to be taken. The era of master planning is over: it’s time for tactical urbanism.
Tactical Urbanism as a Response to Neoliberalism and Space Constraints Tactical urbanism is largely defined as a collection of bottom-up planning processes including guerilla urbanism, the mobilization of community forces and resources, the rethinking of how we define property rights, and inclusive models of political representation for marginalized communities (Cruz, p.54). Cruz defines the movement largely as a response to a “cultural crisis” of individual and corporate greed facilitated by neoliberalism, which has resulted in dramatic urban marginalization of the poor and the creation of a new transient “global 1 Modernism was notorious for its destruction of history, culture, and built form in search of a “new beginning” under the delusion that physical determinism would solve everything including poverty, which Corbusier associated with crowding (Jacobs, 1965; McCartney, 2009).
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oligarchy” (p.49-51). On an urban scale, this divide is most apparent through an urbanization boom which is increasingly gentrifying pre-established neighbourhoods. In Cruz’s own words, the boom “has little to do with meeting the needs of people.” Instead, despite a chronic shortage of affordable housing, “skylines are littered with empty condos for the ultra-rich, whose main interest is in speculating in property values, rather than in constructing a settled life” (p. 29). Architecture as a profession, more often than facilitating redistributive justice through design, is increasingly sacrificing human needs for the chance to build glass castles for the new global oligarchy. Architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas argues in his book The Reinvention of the City (2012), that buildings are indicative of the culture they are built in. As a result of the corporate culture that started in the 1980s, architectural interventions are no longer seen as part of a public network, but a series of icons that do little to further the public interest. Consequentially, architecture, according to Cruz, remains a “decorative tool to camouflage the neoconservative politics…that have eroded the primacy of public infrastructure world wide.” As urban growth becomes privatized, so too do urban networks, therefore marginalizing the people who cannot afford to use them. As Saez and Piketty have shown, this dependence on top-down private investment creates uneven rates of urbanization, as development is constricted to the rich (figure 1). More important in this illustration, however, is the correlation between uneven urbanization, income inequality, and low taxation on the wealthy. This points to the fact that, the urban divide must be viewed from a socio-economic perspective, rather than an architectural one.
Figure 1 - A diagram from MOMA's Book on Tactical Urbanism, based on the works of Saez and Piketty, showing the dramatic shrink in a public urban agenda.
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With a top-down paradigm rooted in corporate culture which seeks to preserve the status quo of its own design “the most relevant urban policies will not emerge from sites of power, but from sites of scarcity” (Cruz, page number). With architecture and urban form reflecting a socio-economic system that provides Figure 2 - Shelly Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation
little benefits for the poor, the population continually withdraws from public consultations (ibid). If looking at Shelly Arnstein’s Ladder of citizen participation (figure 2), existing methods of topdown planning are little more than “informing” by the state, and “manipulation” by corporations. Statism operates under the guise of knowing what is best for its citizens, and as John Turner shows in his seminal work Freedom to Build (1972), many of the slums that are eventually demolished, are given no input into either the planning of new settlements, or the relocation of their populations during redevelopment. Likewise, neoliberalism facilitates the same top-down tokenism, under the guise that trickle down economics will make everyone rich eventually (a claim that has been thoroughly debunked by Piketty in his own seminal work, Capital). Arguably, according to Cruz, the very notion of trickle down economics has facilitated an urban fabric that promotes democracy as “the right to be left alone” (p, 50). Rather than working collectively, the individual mindset associated with these policies further harm any attempt at community consultation.
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In the absence of meaningful dialogue then, it comes as no surprise that tactical urbanism is arising as an alternative model of development, from the base point of citizen control. Neil Brenner of MOMA has called tactical urbanism a replacement for traditional neo-liberal models that eclipsed modernist-statist models. He writes that “tactical urbanism arises in the context of a broader government crisis in which both states and markets have failed systematically to deliver basic public goods (such as housing, transportation and public space) to rapidly expanding urban populations” (2015). At the centre of this idea is a fluidity of politics that leaves decision making open ended, and specific to individuals in the communities they are a part of, rather than permanent and closed to higher governmental or corporate-market entities. Some argue, however, that tactical urbanism cannot eclipse neoliberalism by itself because it merely alleviates disruptive social effects, without interrupting the global markets which cause these effects in the first place. Nader Tehrani, architect and designer, argues that we should not “trivialize the challenges of the mega-city with the scale of tactical jewels” (p.60), by promoting bottom-up urbanism, without a cohesive top-down framework that challenges inequalities on an institutional level. Comparing the top-down process to the “host” and the bottom-up a “parasite” (p.61), Tehrani goes on to argue that tactical urbanism largely arose as a reactionary movement, but to keep it defined as such is to risk real progress by focusing only on the conflict between bottom-up and top-down processes: “techniques of warfare do not always work once peace has been achieved” (p.62). If urban marginalization is defined as a socioeconomic problem, then, according to Tehrani, a change in policies must take place from the top to facilitate this. As he eloquently puts, “bad design can be overcome with tactical altercations, but bad polies form a labyrinth of pre-conditions that defy the mobilization of the very social conditions we aim to challenge” (p.60). In other words, according to this view, tactical urbanism
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must only facilitate changes in design at the bottom, while real change in socio-economic policy must come from the top. Tehrani, is only half right. While Tactical urbanism is mainly a design based approach, there is little to suggest that the conversation around design is separate from the one on policy. Strides in a centralized policy do need to be made from the top, however there is no reason why tactical urbanism cannot facilitate this from the bottom at the same time. As Cruz (2015) argues, tactical urbanism when applied to policy can represent the intersection between bottom up and top down planning, whereby bottom-up processes facilitate institutional change, before this change percolates back into local communities. To assume that an institutional change can only be made through forces at the top of the governmental hierarchy is to return to the statist principals that ignore community values. The assumption is flawed in one other way. While socio-economic changes may help stem future marginalization of the urban poor, they do nothing to help those already living in slums to begin with, as “most are largely immune to planning [and] top down policy making� (Burdett, p.33). The illegality of many squatter settlements serves to prove this point. As John Turner (1972), writes, most lower-income slum dwellers are isolated enough from urban and legal fabrics that they do not realise institutions such as the government actually exist. This represents a failure of democratic rights, that cannot be solved through policy changes alone. Rather, if tactical urbanism is to inform changes at the top through a bottom up process, efforts must be made to connect as many people to this process as possible. Hence, while the problem of urban marginalization must be defined through socio-economics and solved through socioeconomic changes, the means to achieve that change must be through integrated design methods.
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Obviously, this focus on design this has not been the case in the past. Previous slum clearance projects constantly developed modernist towers that respected neither the physical nor cultural landscapes of the communities they were replacing, and an abundance of research shows these projects to discourage socialization of even the most remote kind (see: Jacobs). In the same vein, Saskia Sugsen (2015) argues that tactical urbanism by its very nature involves occupying space for slums to even exist. In her own words, “to occupy is to remake,” thereby empowering slum dwellers because collectively they are remaking a piece of land that respects their own cultural and physical landscapes. Therefore, to remove a slum is not only to relocate those dwelling within it, but to destroy the design that helps facilitate a bottom-up process to begin with.
The Power of Networks All of the above goes to show that aforementioned bottom-up processes have been driven in large part not by rugged individuals, but communities that have formed small micro-networks. Urban Sociologist, Dr. Manuel Castells (2010), writes extensively on what he deems “fourth world” societies2, and their marginalization from the networks that make up flows of capital information and communications within so called ‘global cities’. His argument is that if marginalized communities are connected to networks, they will be able to inform the decisions that occur within a top down process. Without these network connections, he notes the “absence of active social demands and social movements” will force the mega-node to “impose the logic of the global over the local” (p.2744). Hence, these networks are central to tactical urbanism’s ability to inform policy decisions, not just within slums, but in neighbourhoods that are being 2 Fourth World populations are defined by Castells as people living in third world conditions who are in close proximity to those living in first world conditions.
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gentrified as well. These networks are facilitated through things like communication infrastructure, public transit, and things like micro-banking. In this sense, Castells solution lies not in fundamental redistributive justice, but in connecting individuals to global networks. The solution highly resembles the “regional equity approach” used by Pastor and Benner (2011), whereby social equity is defined by equal access rather than equal development. While the network approach is used by the aforementioned transient global oligarchy, the populations within micro-networks are not transient but rooted in place. In other words, while micro-networks use the process of globalization, the results and determination are highly localized. Sassen (2015) argues that as slums are integrated into their respective urban networks world-wide, regardless of their inherently local conditions, the process of resistance has become a global one. All of this results in communities that are not only resilient, but communicable as well. Castells notes there is “is an increasing contradiction between the space of flows, and the space of places,” (2010, p.2744). The difference is, the slums harness their networks to improve a particular community, while those in the global oligarchy use their networks to improve only themselves. The future of urbanity will rest not in the emergence of new placeless glass boxes, but those with communities that have built themselves up using a bottom-up process.
Conclusion Urbanization is occurring across the planet like no other period in history, yet the inequalities created by a global neoliberal agenda have manifested themselves in the urban form at the same time, causing perpetual marginalization of the poor and lower-middle class amidst an
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urban population boom. Tactical urbanism, originally a resistant movement to the failures of neoliberal and statist models of development, has quickly transformed itself into a new, if informal, planning paradigm. Like modernism’s failed attempts to recreate the city in a utopian perfection, the slum clearance programs, along with traditional redistribution networks, have failed to provide for the poorest in society, amidst a growing population that casts the re-distribution net too thin. Rather than plan for slums within this framework, a bottom-up approach must be harnessed that plans with these settlements instead. Though the problem of urban marginalization is, at its core, a socio-economic one, the initial solution must be design oriented in order to facilitate the conditions for social change from a bottom-up process. Only when tactical urbanism has acted on the urban scale can it act on socio-economic policy, and only with the creation of micronetworks in slums, can meaningful consultations and redistributive justice take place. To rewind the clocks and go back to slum clearance is to destroy a planning paradigm that promotes a planning framework that all can use, including those in slums, not just the transient global oligarchy. The urban tsunami cannot be stopped. We must either find new and innovative ways to address the constant population growth in slums, or drown in the rising tide.
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References Brenner, Neil. (2015). Is “Tactical Urbanism” an Alternative to Neoliberal Urbanism? Online Essay. http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/587-is-tactical-urbanism-an-alternative-toneoliberal-urbanism
Burdett, Ricky. (2015). “Accretion and Rupture in the Global City.” Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanism for Expanding Megacities. New York: MOMA. Castells, M. (2010). “Globalisation, Networking, Urbanisation: Reflections on the Spatial Dynamics of the Information Age.” Urban Studies, 47(13), 2737-2745. doi:10.1177/0042098010377365 Cruz, Teddy. (2015). “Rethinking Uneven Growth: It’s About Inequality Stupid.” Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanism for Expanding Megacities. New York: MOMA. Hodge, Gerald. (2003). Planning Canadian Communities: Fifth Edition. Toronto: Nelson College. Jacobs, Jane. (1965). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House.
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Sassen, Saskia. (2015). “Complex and Incomplete: Spaces for Tactical Urbanism.” Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanism for Expanding Megacities. New York: MOMA. Tehrani, Nader. (2015). “Urban Challenges; Specifications of Form and the Indeterminacy of Public Reception.” Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanism for Expanding Megacities. New York: MOMA. Turner, John. (1972). Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process. New York: Macmillan.