An Urbanism driven by Conflict By Solachi Ramanathan
I 04 April 2014
Abstract In search of a more inclusive form of planning, I turn to ‘agonistic conflict’ as a democratic and dynamic driver of development. Modernist masterplanning in its utopian mode has exacerbated the very conditions of inequality and informality it sought to eradicate. There is a need to develop a different social imagination-one that is not modernist but that nevertheless reinvents modernism’s activist commitments to the invention of society and to the construction of the state (Holston, 1995). Sources of this new imaginary lie in the spaces of insurgency, which are in opposition to modernist spaces. Since transgressive practices exist outside the rule of law, can we then transform it into a new set of citizen rights and rules that protect citizenship through the logic of empowerment? How can we develop an urbanism driven by conflict to create a democratic city building process? Keywords: agonistic conflict, insurgent urbanism, conflict driven urbanism, insurgent
practices, insurgent citizenship, democratic cities, inclusive cities
Table of Contents Introduction 02
Insurgent Urbanism and New Citizenship Rights02
Alternate forms of planning – A New Hybrid04
Articulating a Wider Impact07
Conclusion 08
Reference List 09
INTRODUCTION
In the light of conflict and coexistence in cities, democracy becomes an important system to engage with conflict in a constructive manner. This is best illustrated through Chantal Mouffe’s theories about ‘Agonistic conflict’. According to Mouffe the ‘agonistic conflict’ model of democracy is important because the dimension of the political is inevitably linked with the dimension of conflict (antagonistic) that exists in human societies. However, in order to turn these conflicts (antagonistic) into agonistic conflicts we need to create institutions that can manage it. On the contrary, the Right wing populism that is developing in many countries for the lack of an alternative to neo-liberal globalization is dangerous. The recent political or anti-political uprisings worldwide are an outcome of this fundamental problem of lack of channels to manifest ones voice. ‘The solution however is not simply to abandon representative democracy but to transform it to make it really agonistic by contesting the existing institutions. When confrontation takes a form that is agonistic there is a possibility of life in common’ (Mouffe,2013). The objective of such a democracy is one of ‘conflictual consensus’. It is works on the premise that it takes place between adversaries rather than enemies who ultimately share a symbolic space in the form of common objectives. While total reconciliation is not possible, since relations of power play an important role in determining the outcome of any type of conflict including agonistic conflicts, the ultimate aim is towards a more equitable society that will not be subject to a homogenous logic. As a physical manifestation of this process, public spaces in cities become rather important. It facilitates the expression of conflict or dissent evident in movements like the occupy movement of wall street (2011) or anti government movements in Takshim Square (2013). The ensuing discourse about conflict and urbanism is deeply rooted in the socio cultural and political dimension of cities, be it a conflict between diverse sections of our society or a conflict between different institutions governing the planning of our cities (Mouffe,2006).
INSURGENT URBANISM AND NEW CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS As new forms of social diversity (ethnic and economic) dominate the city, the notion of forming territorial based communities is challenged. What constitutes the direct sense of community membership in cities? Both national participation and community have become difficult notions for citizenship in the context of the urban and global politics of difference, multiculturalism and racism. There is a conflict between the substantive and formal citizenship rights. One indication of this problem is that formal citizenship is neither a necessary right nor a sufficient condition for substantive citizenship. In theory full access to rights depends on membership, in practice that which constitutes citizenship substantively (rights and duties) is often independent of its formal status. It is often inaccessible to those who are formal citizens (eg: the native poor), yet available to those who are not (eg:legally resident “aliens”). ‘The problems challenge the dominant notion of citizenship as national identity and the historic role of the nation state as the preeminent form of modern political community. In doing so, they indicate a new possibility that could become an important focus for urban planning; the possibility of multiple citizenships based on the local, regional,
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and transnational affiliations that aggregate in contemporary urban experience.’ (Holston,1995:51) Social movements of the urban poor like slum associations and NGO’s are representative of efforts to reconstitute citizenship in cities. They expand citizenship to new bases, create new sources of citizenship and new forms of self rule or ‘insurgent citizenship’. They engage with the formal world, bureaucracy and existing institutional framework while mediating the inherent contradictions of issues of legality and informality (Mehrotra, undated). When the expansion or erosion of citizenship focuses on urban experience, they constitute an insurgent urbanism. ‘In their localism and strategic particularism, these debates valorize the constitutive role of conflict and ambiguity in shaping the multiplicity of contemporary urban life.’ (Holston,1995:53) Insurgent urbanism plays an important role in the development of cities rooted in the heterogeneity of contemporary urban life, providing an alternative to the modernist project based on building societies through homogeneous logic of planning. The modernist project grew out of a social ambition of transforming societies and building cities on an unprecedented scale. It posed the urban questions of our time by advancing planning and architecture as solutions to the social crisis of industrial capitalism. ‘It derives from the model city of the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne. CIAM’s manifestos called for the state to assert the priority of collective interests over private interests by imposing a new type of city based on masterplans. But the pervasive ideal of modernity is that the state usually in the form of a national government, can change society and manage the social by imposing an alternative future embodied in plans’ (Holston, 1995:41). The embedded logic was to subvert and regenerate surrounding fabric of denatured social life. It uses techniques of shock to force a subjective appropriation of the new social order inherent in its plans. The techniques emphasize decontextualization, demaliariaization, and dehistoricization. ‘The failure of modernist urbanism becomes explicit in the empty noman’d spaces and privatized interiors against the actual intentions of revitalizing urban public spaces and rendering it more egalitarian. This can be seen as a direct entailment of design principles like the solid/void, figure/ground conventions of modernist spatial logic’ (Holston, 1989:101104). By imposing new spatial and social logic in order to transform society there is no attempt to work with the embedded logic. The necessity of having to use what exists to achieve what is imagined destroys the utopian difference between the two that is the projects premise. It remains without substance and disconnected from the conditions that generate a desire for it. As a result of its failure, it exacerbates the issues it intends to negate. ‘It attempts to be a plan without contradiction, without conflict’ (Holston, 1995:46). In doing so it fails to include the multiplicity and multidimensionality of society. If modernist planning builds up the state, a counter agent or a complementary perspective is necessary that addresses the formation of insurgent citizenship. Spaces of insurgent citizenship constitute new metropolitan forms of the social like the realm of homeless, networks of migration, constructed peripheries in which the poor build their own homes in precarious material and legal conditions, ganglands, fortified
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condominiums, employee-owned factories, squatter settlements, suburban migrant labor camps, sweatshops, and the zones of the so called new racism (Holston, 1995:49). They are sites of insurgence because they introduce into the city new identities and practices that disturb established histories. They embody possible alternative futures. By working at the fault lines between the privileged and insurgent, formal and informal, we can perceive the dynamism of society today. Dynamism as an objective of a planning linked to insurgent forms of the social differs from the modernist objectives of planning because it aims to understand society as a continual reinvention of the social, the present, and the modern.
ALTERNATE FORMS OF PLANNING – A NEW HYBRID Transgressive urbanism is ultimately to do with reshaping the city and its political framework, modifying relations of power that are often conflictive. The process is driven by the ambition of creating cities that recognize the embedded heterogeneity of societies, to accommodate diversity without fragmentation. It is only by engaging with the conflictis, that we can challenge existing relations of power and construct new ones through logic of empowerment. This ‘defacto rule’ evident in spaces of insurgent citizenship becomes a useful tool to reconstruct the standardized top down processes. Quite obviously, it does not come from the rule of law and state rather constructed bottom up transforming into a new set of citizen rights and frameworks that protect different forms of citizenship. This model produces and enables communities to engage with more powerful agencies-urban, regional, national and multicultural-thereby restructuring the city making process. The challenge for architects and planners lies in articulating an appropriate spatial strategy with the political and social processes of transforming institutions. It is in this new hybrid, which involves negotiating bottom up strategies with top down political framework, that a new social imagination exists that is dynamic, heterogeneous and equitable. Central to achieving the new ‘hybrid form of planning’ are projects that have the capacity to mediate the multiple forces that shape the policies of the territory or to resolve the tensions between the top down urban strategies of official development and the bottom up tactics of community activism. There are several architectural practices, especially in the developing world, that work across areas of conflict and insurgency to rethink urbanism and politics. I have chosen two practices, Estudio Teddy Cruz and Urban think tank, that have made significant contributions in this regard-to develop this concept further. Conflict between the formal and informal sectors of the city has been driving the work of Urban Think Tank. Through the restructuring of the city making process, their work engages with the formal and the informal and their physical adjascencies. In San Augustin, Venezuela, the cable car project (2010) exemplifies their intentions of new ways of thinking about the city though the informal. 60% of the population in the city lives in Shantytowns on precarious hilly terrains like the one of San Augustin. The project emerged from several inherent conflicts – Conflict between the nature of the slum upgradation program (Missiones Program) and its implementation, between the contradictory nature of two programs for the same neighborhood-one of slum upgradation and the other of constructing highways through San Augustin and lastly between the terrain of the informal settlements and the formal city.
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Introducing structure and mobility into the unplanned developments of the Shanty Town was the first step towards transformation of the neighborhood to enable effective implementation of healthcare and education. Facilitating connections and networks between the informal and formal city was one way to facilitate synergetic dependencies. The goal was to develop a system with minimum interruption to the existing fabric because if the intervention was too big people would feel excluded from the project and not recognize their own neighborhood. Community participation was central to the development of the project. The cable car project intrudes minimally as opposed to a network of streets that would erase 30% of the housing. It directly plugs into the transit system connecting the neighborhood with the city centre. Since the project is implemented through the Missiones Program, the station buildings were integrated with spaces for education, healthcare and cultural activity. This layering of programs with the mobility system has a multi-scalar impact on the neighborhood and the city at large. Like Urban Think Tank, Teddy Cruz of Estudio Teddy Cruz is interested in new experimental practices of intervention of collaboration that emerge from zones of conflict and from the margins, however in a more explicit manner. According to him, it is in the periphery where conditions of social emergency are transforming our ways of thinking about urban matters and the matters of concern about the city. His goal is to make large scale interventions by beginning the process of transformation at the neighborhood level. By practicing what he calls ‘neighborhood urbanism’ which involves radicalization of the local in order to generate new readings of the global, he transforms the neighborhood-not the city-into the urban laboratory of our time. Through the logic of the neighborhood dynamics, he identifies new rules that can transform existing ones. Cruz works across the “critical thresholds” in the Americas includes border zones and sectors of conflict generated by discriminatory politics of zoning and economic development. Moving into the specificity of his project that is based in the San Diego-Tijuana border, one oscillates back and forth between two radically different ways of constructing the city. Expensive real estate on the edges of San Diego’s sprawl that exists twenty minutes away from the poorest settlements in Latin America manifested by the many slums. Critical observation of the border territory through a tangential cross-section exposes ’60 linear miles of trans-border conflict’-a compendium of moments where we find a conflict of ecologies where top-down forces of urbanization clash with bottom up natural systems and social systems. For instance, take the conflict between military bases and environmental zones of the protected estuary, or the conflict between the powerful downtowns of Sandiego and the neighborhoods of marginalization (Cruz, undated). The project has many interventions across various areas of conflict at the border including that of the suburbs of Sandiego. By documenting the transgressive practices of the immigrants in Sandiego, Cruz establishes a complex and interesting process of rethinking and ultimately problematizing the relationship of the social and the formal. Many concepts emerge from here, as the process opens up many sites of contestations, he begins to rethink the idea of density, zoning and land ownership. When immigrants of Tijuana occupy in large numbers the inner periphery of suburban homes, they transform the neighborhood to
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suit their sociocultural needs. These households generate non-conforming uses and high densities that reshape the fabric of the residential neighborhoods where they settle. The micro hetropias that emerge in the form of informal spatial and entrepreneurial practices define a different idea of density and land use - one that transcends the reductive understanding of density as an abstract amount of units/inhabitants per acre, and instead, reaffirm it as an amount of ‘social interactions and economic exchanges’ per acre(Cruz, undated). This becomes a way of producing a new political language and a device to rethink housing and infrastructure in these border-zones. In the immigrant neighborhoods of Sandiego, Cruz in collaboration with a non profit organization ‘Casa Familiar’1 institutes a new micro policy that can act as an informal land use and economic framework for development of the neighborhood, and empower the neighborhood to become developer of its own housing stock (fig 1). This involves transforming the NGO from a social service provider into an affordable housing provider to facilitate construction permits and alternative mixed used and densities and to be a facilitator of micro loans by managing the brake up of large construction loans and subsidies. It identifies mixed uses, which can be formalized through the new policy and can authorize its reconstruction. The NGO is empowered to manage the process and its financing. As a consequence of this empowerment the neighborhood not only has autonomy but also responsibility in engaging the natural and economic resources. Empowerment here signifies an act of translation and political representation at the scale of neighborhood.
Fig 1: Micro policy instituted by Teddy Cruz in collaboration with Casa Familiar
Teddy Cruz advocates the important role of architects and planners as facilitators of this process by collaborating across conflictive institutions and jurisdictions. Cruz is interested in the role of mediating agencies, church groups, NGO’s working with the specifities of neighborhood dynamics to become the translators, interpreters, agencies that bundle the invisible energies, invisible socioeconomic entrepreneurship that transforms the small parcels into micro socioeconomic systems. He sees these mediating agencies as spaces of intervention and collaboration. However, this also raises some skeptism about the
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unpredictable nature of his work. This model of urbanism, will fail in the absence of this external agency or will not be effective without a capable agency. This indicates a crisis that there is a gap between the institutions of community development, the reality of entrepreneurial energies and the top down institutions of zoning and lending. These communities, in their current form, often lack the conceptual devices to understand their own everyday procedures and how their neighborhood agency can trickle up to produce new institutional transformations, shaping alternative politics and economies at the scale of their own everyday needs. There is an urgent necessity to imagine new interfaces between the institutions and the public.
ARTICULATING A WIDER IMPACT
Fig 2: Cruz juxtaposes the political equator with climatic equator to establish the consistencies and conflicts
In order to alter the policies and institutions shaping the territory and reengage with the city making process at large, Cruz seeks back to apply his research based on the neighborhood to the larger border between the global south and the global north to find that it resonates with conditions within his project (fig 2). On juxtaposing the political equator with the climatic equator, it was clear that no conversation about the future of cities could begin without understanding the conflicts that arose between geopolitical borders, marginal communities and natural resources. The project was expanded to resolve the cross border conflicts around natural resources. By encroaching into sites of contestation, the poor shantytown in Mexico was to become the protector of the rich estuary in Sandiego. In this negotiation of encroachment into institutional protocols by amplifying the conflicts embedded in the territory, rethinking the nature of citizenship becomes an important act in the border. Here he is inspired by Chantal Mouffe’s notion that public space is a battle ground where the hegemony of political and economic powers is visualized and confronted,
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reenacted by engaging a very different conversation that is important in forming new interfaces. There are several dangers that are apparent in Cruz’s work. Firstly, the complex process that he engages with is a slow one and requires a lot of commitment from many different stakeholders. Secondly, excessive attention to the local has its own dangers-it can be paradoxical. For example, it is common to find homeowner associations trying to use the powers and privileges of democratic organization to exclude and discriminate. The lesson of this paradox is that planning needs to engage not only the development of insurgent forms of the social but also the resources of the state to define it and occasionally impose a more encompassing conception of right than is sometimes possible to find at the local level. ‘Planning needs to encourage complementary antagonism between these two engagements, maintaining a productive tension. This difference amounts to a reconceptualization of the fields. Methods of tracing, observing, decoding, and tagging, at one moment of the investigation, and those of reconstructing, identifying, presenting, and rearticulating, at another’ (Holston, 1995:53-54).
CONCLUSION Considering all of the above, practices such as those of Estudio Teddy Cruz and Urban Think Tank are an indicator of how development and transformation of cities can take place in a democratic way. Common to such practices is central the ambition of engaging the spatial, political, environmental and socio-cultural conditions across critical thresholds to develop tools that challenge the rigidity of institutional thinking. Cruz’s work emerges on the premise that ‘without altering the backward exclusionary policies constructing the territory, the socio-political ground-our profession-will continue to be subordinated to the visionless environments defined by bottom-line urbanism of the developers spreadsheet.’ However it is crucial to keep in mind the challenges of such practices and the need for an altered set of legal conditions to overcome these challenges. To develop processes of insurgent urbanism that is efficient and effective, there is a need for new interfaces between the authorities and public to encourage and channel conflict into mediating institutions on the one hand, while protecting against abuses of the power they create. It currently exists in the form of NGO’s and other associations that are also capable of instituting new citizenship rights in cities.. Insurgent practices are important to the project of rethinking the social in planning because it reveals a realm of the possible that is rooted in the heterogeneity of lived experience, in the ethnographic present and not in utopian futures. This process is key to preserving the diversity and integrity of cities without causing fragmentation and emphasizes the important role of architects as designers of not just form but socio-political processes and collaboration across institutions and jurisdiction.
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Notes Casa familiar is a NGO working in the border city of San Ysidro. Since the empowerment of the NGO to function as an affordable housing provider, 2 new housing projects in the neighborhood have been developed. The first project "Living Rooms at the Border", is a mixed-use high-density 14,000-squarefoot plan built around an old church. It will be transformed into a community center–including an office for Casa Familiar in the attic. There will also be 12 housing units, a community garden, and a central market. The second, for senior housing and child care, is connected by an alleyway and includes a semi-public lobby, a restaurant counter, and small private living spaces. Both projects are derive from the embedded logic of mixed use, density and socio economic activity. Bibliography Balbo, Marcello (1993) Urban Planning and the Fragmented City in Developing Countries Reference List Cruz Teddy (undated) Mapping Non-Conformity: Post Bubble Urban Strategies published in Emisferica Unsettling Visuality, 2010
Holston, James (1989) The Modernist City:An Anthropological Critique of Brazilia. Chicago. University of Chicago Press Holston, James (1995) Spaces of Insurgent citizenship published in Planning Theory Mehrotra, Rahul (undated) Mumbai:Planning Challenges for the Compact City Reference List (Webpage) Cruz Teddy (2013) Communique 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ktM4j0VCfs viewed on 24 march 2014
Cruz, Teddy (2009) in conversation with Caleb Waldorf, Learning from Tijuana cited in Triple Canopy http://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/learning_from_tijuana viewed on 24 march 2014 Mouffe Chantal (2013) Interview with Chantal Mouffe, Text Biljana Đorđević. A vibrant democracy needs agonistic confrontation' - an interview with chantal mouffe. viewed on 19 march 2013 Mouffe Chantal (2006) in conversation with Markus Miessen, Articulated Power Relations cited in Centre for Research Architecture http://roundtable.kein.org/node/545 viewed on 19 March 2013 Mouffe Chantal (undated) Interview with Chantal Mouffe:Pluralism is linked to the acceptance of conflict” Text Enrique Díaz Álvarez http://w2.bcn.cat/bcnmetropolis/arxiu/en/page238b.html?id=21&ui=438 Bibliography (case studies) Casa Familiar: Livingrooms at the Border and Senior Housing with Childcare (undated) cited in California Architects, Office Profiles Architects http://www.california-architects.com/en/estudio 02 April 2014 Casa Familiar- Livingrooms at the border and senior housing with childcare (undated) cited in Small Scale Big Change, Moma. http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/smallscalebigchange/projects/casa_familiar 02 April 2014 Cable Car Project-A Life Line for Caracas: Interview With Urban-Think Tank (undated) cited in Polis http://www.thepolisblog.org/2010/10/interview-life-line-for-caracas.html Illustration Credits Fig 1. P6. Teddy Cruz Fig 2. P7. Teddy Cruz
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