PROLOG UE
NIRMAL KI S HNANI
in these metropolises can be packed with as much as 100,000 people/sq. km. Here, many do not have access to running water or toilet facilities.
Asia must cope on a daily basis with rifts between social and economic systems that precipitate conflicts over land use. Several binaries dominate the narrative: urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, private vs. public, formal vs. informal. Unresolved and festering, these binaries induce destabilising tension amongst parts within a whole, triggering systemic fragmentation.
The conflict is visible as an outright struggle in which one group or species thrives at the expense of others, and appears in turbulent boundaries, or edge conditions, where skirmishes flare up. In some places, neighbourhoods become enclaves with hardened edges where space becomes exclusive to certain groups. In most cities, this is accompanied by a loss of ecosystem services where natural systems such as rivers are degraded to the point that they are unable to support life. In Bandung, Indonesia, urban and suburban precincts within the Upper Citarum Basin, where the city is located, tripled in size between 1983 and 2002. Industrial areas surged almost one hundred fold. This period of change also saw forest cover halved from 85,138 to 39,150 ha.22 Of the 2,500 factories in the basin, most discharge untreated waste water directly into the river and its tributaries.23 A recent study found faecal coliform levels in the River Citarum up to 5,000 times the mandatory limit. 24 Pesticides have contaminated nearby groundwater that serves farming communities, posing a public health hazard.25 The population of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) is less than 2% of India’s total and yet it accounts for 5% of the country’s national gross domestic product and 33% of its income tax.26 Following the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the early nineteen nineties, Mumbai witnessed an influx of migrant labour. Population
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in the metropolitan region increased almost 60% in just two decades, from 14.8 million in 1991 to 23.5 million in 2011. 27 Growth has not been equitable. In 2001, Greater Mumbai had 6.25 million people living in slums, approximately 54% of the total population; by 2017, this figure was nine million or 62%.28 As the city grew, 36% of its forests and green cover were lost, water bodies shrank by 12%, wetlands by 31% and open spaces and croplands by 40%.29 The degradation of ecosystems came sharply into focus in 2005, when a devastating flood paralysed the city and caused the death of over 1,000 people.30 These cities illustrate how the production of financial capital is often at the expense of natural capital, and how this, in turn, affects social capital. Eventually, the two loop back to undercut financial capital. The Mumbai flood, for instance, damaged 200,000 homes, 40,000 commercial buildings and 30,000 vehicles. Capitals are inextricably linked; focus on one is at the expense of others. How can designers address this level of complexity?
‘What Kind of Problem the City Is’ The first challenge facing the design community is cognitive dissonance. We are desensitised to contradictions around us; consequently, we continue as we have always done, with impunity. Let’s consider Mumbai again again: despite its problems, it’s been called the greenest city in India because it has the largest number of green buildings, many of which were built at a time when the city’s systems were being degraded. 31 The term green here refers to compliance with a checklist that stipulates what a development should do within site-and-shell. The resulting dichotomy of scales, architectural vs. urban, allows us to celebrate the success of one and ignore the failure of the other. This tendency to compartmentalise can be traced back to our framing of the problem. Author Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), famously asked ‘(what) kind of problem the city is’.32
In science, there are several problem types that apply to the built environment; each must be tackled with the appropriate ‘methods of analysis and discovery (and) strategies for thinking.’ Otherwise, solutions may be meaningless and could even exacerbate the situation. 33
The city, Jacobs reckoned, is a problem in complexity, for which there are two subtypes. Disorganised complexity seems random by virtue of the vast number of interacting variables. A metropolis comprises thousands of buildings, hundreds of thousands of air conditioners and lights, and millions of inhabitants. The energy behaviour of the city as a whole cannot be predicted from the efficiency of its parts – there are just too many interactions, each contingent on several others. The whole, however, can be estimated with tools of statistical analysis that map the relationship of one system to another. A problem of organised complexity (e.g., a neighbourhood) operates with fewer variables and yet, paradoxically, is harder to generalise. The number of variables is not substantial enough to be probed statistically; the interactions, too many to model independently. Confounding the situation is human behaviour that can cause the whole to act in unpredictable, non-linear ways. The working definition of green today does not contemplate complexity. Instead, a green building is presented as a sum of simple and complicated problems, governed by laws of physical science and open to cause-effect analyses. Each element – say, envelopes, cooling systems, lights – is evaluated, quantified and optimised. The performance of the whole is the sum of its parts; one plus one equals two, always. When simple and complicated p roblem-solving techniques are applied to complex problems, the outcomes can be, at best, ineffective. Donella Meadows, pioneering American environmental scientist, posited that the way to tackle real-world complexity is to frame it as multiple interacting systems.34 A system is an agglomeration of elements and connectors within a boundary
condition, and whose collective behaviour cannot be deduced from that of its subsystems. ‘Systems can change, adapt, respond to events, seek goals, mend injuries, and attend to their own survival in lifelike ways, although they may contain or consist of non-living things. Systems can be self-organizing, and often are self-repairing over at least some range of disruptions. They are resilient, and many of them are evolutionary. Out of one system other completely new, never- before imagined systems could arise.’ Donella Meadows 35
A network of spatial connectors – say, sidewalks – is a system with characteristics that set it apart from others with the same elements and inter connections, i.e., every sidewalk is different, depending on its combination of residents and visitors. They have an organic and spontaneous order, wherein ‘the parts generate the whole . . . while the whole organises the parts’. 36 There are several takeaways from this part-whole hypothesis. Firstly, the parts must be context ualised against a whole and vice versa. A system cannot exist in isolation. This is, in effect, a position on scale, for instance how a building is embedded within a neighbourhood or a neighbourhood within a city. Here, design moves from arranging objects to crafting relationships, focusing on edge conditions and connectors that regulate flows and exchanges. Secondly, systems adapt and change in unpredictable ways. It is impossible to conceptualise the end state of a city, thirty to forty years from now, therefore the goal must be to formulate a framework for change: mechanisms for growth, feedback loops and cycles. Thirdly, the proposition allows us to conceptualise the links between human-made and natural. Cities operate within ecosystems and since both tap into similar resource flows, designers can target pathways and seek out partnerships. Systems are inherently difficult to visualise. To operationalise the thinking for the drawing board, architect and design-theorist Christopher Alexander postulated that systems have forms that give rise to patterns.37
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