Handmade

Handmade describes something made by hand or by a hand process, not by machine, especially with care or craftsmanship, and typically therefore of superior quality. Handmade urbanism is the way of providing urban change carried out by local residents in their own neighborhoods or communities, with their own hands and means. It starts with the residents recognizing a problem, followed by the active realization of an idea to solve that immediate issue. Community initiatives evolve from those active gestures and support the citizens active participation at the local scale. Their acts recognize chances in challenges, make creative use of existing resources, and forge partnerships and relationships to achieve predefined goals that address their daily needs and, eventually, ensure an improved quality of life for communities. The actions of handmade urbanism are unique, each shaped by the individuals and the field of operations that define them. They are carried out at the local scale, as products of culture and environment, and deal as much with soft infrastructurephysical and emotional wellbeing, education, etc.as with the reshaping of the built environment. The study of handmade urbanism acknowledges that large parts of cities have been built by the residents themselves, without help from governments, planners or designers. It suggests alternative ways to approach planning other than the traditional methods currently employed. At a global level, handmade urbanism reveals overlaps in the characteristic ways of life of urban societies, clarifying common threads and differences among them. These provide us with opportunities to learn from the ways needs and problems have been addressed. The operative modes of handmade urbanism contribute to the discussion around participatory models. Its creation and appreciation is transformative to individuals and communities.

Acknowledgements

Since 2007, the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award has been organized by the Alfred Herrhausen Society as an outcome of the Urban Age conference series, jointly organized with the London School of Economics, and initiated by Wolfgang Nowak (AHS) and Ricky Burdett (LSE). For five years, Ute E. Weiland has coordinated all of the awards in five cities, organizing the content and compilation with the local researchers chosen to carry out the communication, organization, and fieldwork in each city. Jessica Barthel and Anja Fritzsch have also made valuable contributions in the organization of the award. We would like to acknowledge the work of our local researchers, who have coordinated the DBUAA in each of the cities: Priya Shankar in Mumbai (2007), Marcos L. Rosa in So Paulo (2008), Demet Mutman in Istanbul (2009), Ana Alvarez in Mexico City (2010), and Lindsay Bush in Cape Town (2012). They have worked on the ground, rediscovering their own cities and unveiling networks of local practices that have been built throughout a year of fieldwork. To a great extent, these are the researchers that kept in contact with the local projects, giving continuity to the work that started with our compilation, through the development of their own research and work. And they have collaborated on this publication, a project coordinated by Marcos L. Rosa, by participating in a critical review of the findings. In this review, we look back at the developments and current status of the projects that are showcased, conduct a comparative analysis, and suggest common points among all of the five cities. Specifically, we would like to acknowledge the critical input of Priya Shankar, who organized the first award in Mumbai and made a valuable contribution to this book, and the constant support and discussions with Lindsay Bush, who has influenced the format of this publication, as well as the debates with Ana Alvarez who reviewed our ideas and contributed with insightful concepts.

This book compiles twenty-five interviewsor, five for each one of the five citiesgiving voice to different stakeholders who have played an important role in the rebuilding of these cities on a local scale. Each interviewee generously shared their knowledgeunveiling subjects that are key to understanding how the projects are organized, the mechanisms behind them, as well as providing arguments for the importance of small-scale developments to face important challenges posed by each one of these cities. All of the voices intertwine and organize layers that allow a complex understanding of the projects, highlighting their potential for the city at large. This publication has also benefited from the invaluable support of four people who had the chance to see the projects in all five cities. Ricky Burdett, Olaf Jacobs, Wolfgang Nowak, and Anthony Williams share their point of view in interviews, helping us trace common threads among the showcased community initiatives. Olaf Jacobs produced the documentary Zukunft der Stdte (The Future of Cities), which brings us stories from the community projects presented in this book, allowing the general public to experience these projects closely. Richard Sennett and his writings and lectures on cooperation and the open city, as well as his reflections about some of the projects in So Paulo and Istanbul, have strongly influenced the work on this publication from the beginning. His contribution serves as a theoretical background for considering these projects. We also highly appreciate his generous comments and advice in the process of producing this book. Paulo Ayres, who visualized each of the showcased projects in illustrations created with Marcos L. Rosa and Lindsay Bush and informed by all of the local researchers. Working with him has been a delightful experience. He has employed his expertise in graphic drawings that illustrate the processes, mechanisms, operational modes, as well as the impact and changes in each one of them.

Tom Unverzagt, who carefully conceived the graphic design that structures all of these ideas. Inez Templeton who greatly refined the text through her review and proofreading. We graciously thank all of the photographers who contributed to our image archive, which has been growing over the years. Jochen Visscher and Philipp Sperrle have supported the idea of this publication from the beginning and have given us guidance throughout the production process. We thank them for their constant support, discussions, and critical input. Most importantly, none of this would exist without the courage and entrepreneurship of those individuals, active in their own cities, who have shown other ways to fight against shortages and urgencies of all kinds. Their pioneerism transforms challenges into opportunities making use of available resources, identifying potentials, and employing them in proactive ways that generate benefits to the built environment and, especially, to the users and residents. Finally, we are grateful for those who have provided guidance and for every partner in each city. We would also like to thank all of the institutions, organizations, and associations that took part in the initiative during these five years.

INDEX

Introduction
10 Introductory Interview Returning to the Roots
Wolfgang Nowak

59

So Paulo

Marcos L. Rosa

127

Mexico City

Common Points
197 Four Interviews: Five Cities, One Gaze 198 The Significance of Space in Urban Society
Ricky Burdett

Ana lvarez

Initiatives 68 Union Building 72 ACAIA Institute 76 Biourban Interviews

Initiatives 136 Miravalle Community Council 140 Cultural Center Consejo Agrarista 144 Recovering Spaces for Life Interviews 148 Weaving Efforts: Working for the Common Good
Francisco Javier Conde Gonzlez

12 Initial Thoughts Make the Invisible Visible

Ute E. Weiland

2 00 Reporting from Local Initiatives

Olaf Jacobs

14 Foreword The Community

Richard Sennett

80 Workshops as a Communication Facilitator:

202 Cities are an Expression of Human Needs

Wolfgang Nowak

Understanding Community Needs

Ana Cristina Cintra Camargo

2 04 Focus on Results: Attention to Real Needs

Anthony Williams

18 Editorial An Urban Trend: Residents Taking Ownership of their Environment

Marcos L. Rosa, Ute E. Weiland, with Ana lvarez, Lindsay Bush, Demet Mutman, Priya Shankar

82 Preexistence in Socially Vulnerable Areas

Elisabete Frana

150 Reality Surpasses Us: We Need to Be More Flexible and Porous

Felipe Leal

2 06 Project Categories, Programs and Common Clouds 212 Final Considerations

Marcos L. Rosa and Ute E. Weiland

84 Scaling Up Micro Actions

Fernando de Mello Franco

152 Unfolding New Professional Profiles for Bottom-up Urban Planning

Arturo Mier y Tern

86 How to Live Together

Lisette Lagnado

221 Credits

Five Cities
23 Introduction to Five Cities 25

88 The Challenge of Derelict and Residual Spaces. Is Anyone Thinking on the Local Level?
Nevoral Alves Bucheroni

154 Cultural Acupuncture over the City

Argel Gmez and Benjamn Gonzlez

156 Braiding the Physical and the Social: A New Social Contract for the City
Jose Castillo

Mumbai

93

Istanbul

Priya Shankar

Demet Mutman

Initiatives 34 Mumbai Waterfronts Center 38 Triratna Prerana Mandal 42 Urban Design Research Institute Interviews 46 Dreams, Dignity and Changing Realities: The Story of a Community Toilet
Dilip Kadam, Dayanand Jadhav, Dayanand Mohite

Initiatives 102 Music for Peace 106 Nurtepe First Step Cooperative 110 Children of HopeYouth House Interviews 114 Presence and Vision of a Grass Roots Initiative
Yeliz Yaln Baki

161

Cape Town

Lindsay Bush

Initiatives 170 Mothers Unite 174 Rocklands Urban Abundance Center 178 Thrive Interviews 182 Incidental Urban Acupuncture
Carol Jacobs

116 New Planning Approaches for Building Up Cities

Erhan Demirdizen

48 Network, Intermediate, Integrate: Reaching out to the Grassroots

Seema Redkar

118 Action and Participation in Planning

zlem nsal

184 Breaking it Down to Build it Up

Michael Krause

50 Elastic Urbanism: Sustainability and Informality in the City

Rahul Mehrotra

120 Curating Artists and Cultural Practices

Behi Ak

186 Reimagining the City from a Different Viewpoint

Edgar Pieterse

122 Advocating Sustainable and Participatory Models

Asl Kyak Ingin

188 Lighting the Fire within Us

Malika Ndlovu

52 Making Voices Heard: Art and Activism

Shabama Azmi

190 Going Local: The Lavender Hill Area

Councilor Shaun August

54 Democratizing Public Space

P. K. Das

10

Introductory Interview

Returning to the Roots

Wolfgang Nowak was the initiator of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award

What inspired the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award? The idea for the award goes back to February 2006, when we hosted an Urban Age conference in Mexico City. I had an opportunity to visit a slum. Despite being a really awful crime-ridden neighborhood, its inhabitants had nonetheless created a marketplace and a school. They had tried to improve their own situation, creating a new city inside a situation of hopelessness. You find the same thing in Mumbai and So Paulo, people resisting their environment by building something. This is what prompted us to create the Urban Age Award. The aim of the award is to enable people to find better solutions and become active citizens. I am not one of these people, like a Florence Nightingale, who stands and gives soup to the poor. What we want is to enable the poor no longer to accept soup queues and produce their own soup. We encourage citizens to take forward their projects, and sometimes we even enable mayors and citizens to meet. We honor alliances that improve the quality of life in cities and the prize celebrates the shared responsibility between residents, companies, NGOs, universities, public bodies, etc. We remember that after coming back from Cape Town earlier this year your first words were Dj vu. Can you tell us that story? This is a fascinating story about Cape Town and about all of the other cities. People start building their own city centers inside big deserts of agglomerated houses, they start building these oases based on the same pattern: it is the tree in the center and around this tree there are benches and gardens, and they plant some crops and then there is the spiritual center, which might be a library, or a school or some teaching or health facility, and the kitchen, where one learns how to prepare a good meal. They also have small places, squares, playgrounds where there is entertainment. These are safe environments where people can meet.

What fascinated me, if you start in Mumbais Triratna Prerna Mandal, and then go to Mexico Citys Miravalle, or even to the Sao Paulos Instituto Acaia, or to any other of these five cities, you can find a center with a facility, the square, an area that is somehow protected, secured not by a fence, but by the common will that collectively does something. Today, if you travel from the center outside of the city, which does not have clear borders, suddenly the city becomes just an agglomeration of houses, there is nothing else of what makes a citythere is nothing. And if you look at a famous picture of Mexico City that depicts the endless city, it looks like a horror vision of the city that started to sprawl and is not a village but an ocean of hopelessness where people live. My idea and what fascinated me is that inside this ocean of dwellings, people started to build what could be the beginning of a new city. And you could see this, for instance, in Indias slum of Khotwadi, inside of which a community project started building a city. In Miravalle, another initiative looks like the center of a village. We like Paris because if you go away from the large boulevards you will find little centers, with markets, trees and restaurants, and these cities are cities with different centers. This is also the charm of Berlin. In that sense, the vision of that endless city is not a vision of horror. If you look carefully, you see that people are starting to build their own cities or centers. It is different from the faceless cities being built by star architects and investors, with the skyscrapers and shopping centers. These small centers are surrounded by people who build their own city within the city, one that is surrounded by several others centers alike. They are the reinvention of cities inside of areas that we call slums, favelas, gecekondus, barrios, townships. Indeed, their efforts make sense, because they do not destroy the existing, but build on it.

Why go to five cities to award best practices such as the ones we can see in this book? What can we do with what we found? I think the most urgent problem we face is our cities it is a global problem. You cannot rethink cities without acknowledging the experience of grassroots projects that are designed by the people, not urban planners and architects. The award allows us to compare all these projects. We found that there is a variety of creative initiatives indicating the different ways in which people forge partnerships to create a better urban environment and, as a result, a better life for themselves and their communities. The Award looks for projects that bring together partners and visions in the organization of a better environment in some of the largest cities in the world. Along with that, it is intended to serve as a platform that organizes a network of urban initiatives at the grass roots level. I think we can encourage mayors and urban planners to look around their environment to see if there is something happening. For me, it was interesting to see that whenever we told mayors about these initiatives in their cities, they were surprised. They were astonished about how many of these initiatives existed. City leaders should link these initiatives together. Such initiatives and those who manage them should be part of urban planning and not excluded. If we want to reinvent cities in the twenty-first century, this means returning to the roots, linking urban planning with community initiatives in order to learn from each other. I think we can learn a lot from the grassroots level.
The Alfred Herrhausen Society Named after Alfred Herrhausen, a German banker and former chairman of Deutsche Bank who was assassinated in a roadside bomb attack in 1989, the non-profit Alfred Herrhausen Society (AHS) is a corporate social responsibility initiative of Deutsche Bank. Founded in 1992, its work focuses on new forms of governance as a response to the challenges of the 21st century. The Urban Age conference series and award program is one of three major initiatives supported by AHS. Broadly speaking, the AHS seeks traces of the future in the present, and working with partners in government, academia and business, aims to conceptualize relevant themes for analysis and debate globally. Wolfgang Nowak is Director of the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International Forum of Deutsche Bank. Wolfgang Nowak initiated the Urban Age program, an international investigation into the future of the worlds mega-cities in the twenty-first century jointly organized with the London School of Economics. He has held various senior positions in Germanys state and federal governments, Frances Centre national de la recherche scientifique (French National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris, and UNESCO. After unification, he was State Secretary of Education in Saxony from 1990 to 1994. In addition, he was Director-General for Political Analysis and Planning at the German Federal Chancellery from 1999 to 2002. He lectures and publishes widely on academic issues and is a regular commentator for German television and newspapers. He is honorary Vice President of the British think tank Policy Network, Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington, and Fellow at the NRW-School of Governance at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

12

Initial Thoughts

Make the Invisible Visible

Ute E. Weiland has coordinated the award process in all five cities

Citiesand megacities in particularhave become way too complex to be governed from a centrally located city hall. Nowadays, successful urban politics are largely based on temporary alliances, created for the solution of concrete challenges. With different stakeholders partaking, they prevent the alienation of citizens from one another. Alienation has already seized whole living districts of this worlds megacities; suggesting they form part of the city by labeling them city districts would certainly be wrong. They are isolated from the traditional quarters, not only geographically but also through sordid living conditions, high crime rates, and inadequate housing situations. With the Urban Age conferences, organized jointly with the London School of Economics, Alfred Herrhausen Society has established a network of architects, urban planners, mayors, scientists, and NGOs, in order to find solutions for the cities of the twenty-first century. With the help of the Urban Age Award, this network from the top is supposed to be complemented by a network from the bottom to merge these to a better overall picture of the respective urban region. Starting in 2007, the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award distinguishes partnerships of shared responsibility between citizens, politicians, the economy, and NGOs, which contribute to an improved quality of living in their cities. The award was designed to encourage people to assume responsibility for their living environment. It is awarded annually, usually in the city that hosts the Urban Age conference of that year. After an open application process, an independent international jury awards the prize, which is worth 100,000 USD, to the winning project. The overall aim of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award is to make the invisible visible, to show what potential there is in the slums, townships, barrios, gecekondus, or favelas of this world, and to constitute a lobby for those who have never had one. For the implementation of the project, a local Award Manager (from the field of political science, architec-

ture, or urban planning) is assigned for the fieldwork in each city. Their overall function has been to trace projects in which people proactively improve their environment by forging partnerships and sharing responsibilities. While coordinating the award, each Manager has been in constant contact with those initiatives, learning about their aims and methods, visiting their sites, and documenting their work. Their first task has always been to communicate the award to a network of different stakeholderslocal authorities and administration, academia, journalists, artists and designers, NGOs, community associations, etc. In a second step, they created a platform for networks of different societal parts that are active in shaping the urban environment. These platforms were designed to mobilize the civil society of the respective city as well as to circulate the call for initiatives. The Award Managers were sent on the ground in order to be in direct contact with a network of local actors involved in collective practices. The whole process of organizing the award provides an enormous potential for field research, as it allows exploring a number of projects in the urban local sphere. By the immediate observation of these initiatives, the researcher no longer contemplates the world passively; he or she rather starts to experience it actively through the contact with people active in their own environment. In every city, the fieldwork continued with the search for local leadership immersed in their realities, or in the scale of their own neighborhoods. In So Paulo in 2008, corresponding projects were located by systemic mapping, and subsequently related to the dimensions of the city as a whole for the first time. Furthermore, the intensive investigation of the local projects started to produce actual knowledge; the amount of information gathered from there was unforeseen until that moment. It opened up opportunities to reveal practices, to pinpoint fields of opportunity for actions, and to highlight their importance to the

construction of the city, as well as to document and to share it. These activities received considerable media coverage, which informed the civil society about the potential of those initiatives and about their impact on citizens lives. The mapping has taken place ever since. Even though most of the projects are modest in size, the procedure organizes a network that reveals innovative modes of spatial organization and disseminates this information to other stakeholders. On a critical note, it is important to remember that the award has been successfully communicated through public relations activities and extensive documentation; to reach and induce local authorities to get involved, however, it requires a strong network between decision-makers and active citizens, a temporal alliance to make use of the dedication that was experienced in desperate environments. In other words, it needs urban planning that is willing to benefit from the open spaces that the participating projects have created despite adverse circumstances. This was accomplished in Cape Town for the first time, where a vigorous Governor, an interested municipality, and the Cape Town Partnership were willing to interlink the 250 applying projects not only with each other, but also with the City of Cape Town and the Provincial Government. The result was an alliance that connects in a sustainable way what had not been connected before. The Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award is designed to initiate such developments; it can make visible that the borders between historical urban quarters and slums do not symbolize walls between citizens and slum dwellers. Active citizenship exists even where the concept itself is unknown. After five cities, five awards, and hundreds of projects documented during these years, the compiled material allows us to critically reflect on commonalities between the projects, about their exemplariness, their potential, as well as about their impact and innovation.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen. (Robert Bresson, director)

Ute Elisabeth Weiland has been the Deputy Director of the Alfred Herrhausen Society, Deutsche Banks international forum since 2007, a member of the Executive Board of the Urban Age conference series at the London School of Economics since 2004, and since 1 January 2010 member of the Governing Board of LSE Cities. In 1997, she co-founded the Erich Pommer Institute for Media Law and Media Management at the University of Potsdam and was its deputy managing director until 2003. Born in the former German Democratic Republic, she graduated from the Academy of Music in Weimar. After unification, she became chief of staff to the Secretary of State for education in Saxony. Ute E. Weiland is a member of the German-Israeli Young Leaders Exchange of the Bertelsmann Foundation and young leader of the Atlantik Brcke.

14

Foreword

The Community
Richard Sennett is Professor of Sociology at LSE and New York University and author of The Craftsman

Practising Commitment I would like to visit the scene of a settlement house in Chicago where informal cooperation helped provide a social anchor for poor children like myself. Cooperations difficulties, pleasures and consequences appeared among the people who passed through this dilapidated, bustling building on the citys Near West Side. Or so it seemed to me, when decades later I returned to share a weekend, sponsored by the settlement house, with thirty or so African-American adults who had grown up in this small corner of the Chicago ghetto.1 Memory played the same trick on my childhood neighbours that it does on everyone; the experience of years of change can be compressed in the memory of a face or a room. The black children I grew up with had a compelling reason to remember in this way. They were survivors. Their childhoods disorganized by poverty, doubting as adolescents that they had much of value in themselves to offer the larger world, they puzzled later in life about why they survived while so many of their childhood mates had succumbed to addiction, crime or lives lived on the margins. So they singled out a person, place or event as a transforming experience for themselves, as a talisman. The settlement house became a talisman, as did the strict local Catholic school and the sports club run by an organization called the Police Athletic League. My childhood companions were not heroic; they did not rise from rags to riches, becoming racial exemplars of the American Dream. Only a few made it to university; most steadied themselves enough to get through secondary school, thereafter taking jobs as secretaries, firemen, store-keepers or functionaries in local government. Their gains, which might seem modest to an outsider, were to them enormous. Over the four days of our reunion, I went to visit some of their homes, and recognized domestic signs of the journey we had all taken: tidy backyards with well-tended plants, unlike the broken-bottle-strewn play areas surrounded by chain-link fences we had known as

children; domestic interiors stuffed with knick-knacks and carefully brushed furniture, again a contrast to the bare, scuffed interiors which before had counted for us as home. At the settlement-house reunion, people spoke with wonder at what had happened to the neighbourhood since we had all left. It had sunk further than any of us could have imagined, and was now a vast archipelago of abandoned houses, isolated apartment towers in which the elevators stank of urine and shit, a place where no policemen responded to telephone calls for help and most adolescents carried knives or guns. The magic talismans of a place or a face seemed even more required to explain the luck of escape. The administrators of the settlement house, like the elderly cop representing the Police Athletic League, were of course happy to hear these testimonials to their saving presence, but too realistic to believe entirely in their own transforming potency: many kids who banged on instruments in the settlement house or played basketball on a nearby paved court eventually wound up in jail. And the past remained unfinished business for the survivors; issues they faced as children they continued to face as adults. That unfinished business falls under three headings. The first concerns morale, the matter of keeping ones spirits up in difficult circumstances. So simple to state, morale was less clear to explain in practice, since my neighbours had every rational reason to succumb to low spirits as children, and even now could still wake up at night, when worried about an unpaid bill or a problem at work, thinking the whole edifice of their adult lives might suddenly collapse like a house of cards. The second issue concerns conviction. At our gathering, people declared they had survived thanks to strong, guiding convictionsall were devoted churchgoers, and all had faith in family writ large. Though the African-American adults had passed through, and benefited from, the American civil rights upheavals of

the 1960s, those political gains didnt figure so much in their own thinking about their personal survival; if a door opens, you do not automatically walk through it. Yet when we got down to the grit of discussing our own childrens adolescent angst, few people applied Scripture to that perennial, particular hard case. So too at work; rather than moralizing, people think flexibly and adaptively about concrete behaviour. On the job, for the first time, many of these young African-Americans were working side by side with whites, and they had to feel their way. Even twenty years later they had to do so, as when my childhood next-door neighbour became the supervisor of a group of mostly white subordinates in the motor bureau of Chicago. And then there was the matter of cooperation. As children, the fuck you version of cooperation dominated our lives, since all gangs in the community subscribed to it, and the gangs were powerful. In the immediate post-Second World War era, gangs dealt in petty theft rather than in drugs, as they would a generation later; small children were sent to front shoplifting, since, if these children were caught, they could not be sent to jail. To avoid being sucked into gang life, kids had to find other ways of associating with one another, ways that flew under the radar-screen, as it were, of the gangs control. This meant hanging out in bus shelters or other places than those marked out as gang turf, or staying late at school, or heading directly to the settlement house. A place of refuge meant somewhere you could talk about parents, do homework together, or play checkers, all intermissions from fuck you aggression. These intermissions in retrospect seemed enormously important, since the experiences planted the seed for the kind of behaviour, open rather than defensive, which had served people to make their way outside the community. Now some of those who had survived by leaving wanted to give something back, in the words of a childhood neighbour, a foreman in the citys sanitation

department, but the youngsters in the project a generation later were hostile to people who offered themselves as helping hands, as role models. As always, the message If I can do it, so can you can be turned around: If I made good, why arent you succeeding? Whats wrong with you? So the role models offer to give something back to the community, to reach out, was rejected by the young people in the community who most needed help. All three of these issuesthe fragility of morale, conviction, cooperationwere familiar to me, but for me as a white boy they cut a different way. My mother and I moved to the housing project when my father left in my infancy and left us penniless, but we lived there only about seven years; as soon as our family fortunes returned, we moved out. The community posed dangers for me but not mortal dangers. Perhaps thanks to this distance, the reunion sparked in me the desire to understand how the three pieces of unfinished business among my childhood friends might be seen in a larger context. Vocation Self-sacrificing, long-term, wilful and so fragile: these measures of commitment make it an experience inseparable from the ways we understand ourselves. We might want to reframe these experiences by saying that strong commitment entails a duty to oneself. And then shift again the oppressive weight of that word duty by thinking of commitment as a road map, the map of what you should do with your life. Max Weber sought to explain this kind of sustaining commitment by the single German word Beruf, which roughly translates into English as a vocation or a calling. These English words are saturated with religious overtones from the time of the Great Unsettling. The medieval Catholic imagined a religious vocation as the monks decision to withdraw from the world; for others, remaining engaged in society, choice didnt enter the picture in the same way; faith was natural-

18

Editorial

An Urban Trend: Residents Taking Ownership of their Environment

Marcos L. Rosa, Ute E. Weiland, with Ana lvarez, Lindsay Bush, Demet Mutman, Priya Shankar

Increasingly, people across the globe are engaging in improving the urban environments they live in. They act in response to urgent issues and compelling needs such as shelter, security, employment, health, and education. Community-based initiatives indicate the ability of citizens to present solutions to challenges posed by everyday life, and use creativity to transform and multiply existing resources. Inadvertently political by nature, these initiatives are a response to the incapability of todays cities to cope with urban challenges via traditional planning culture and its instruments. They invite different actors to cooperate towards a new urban scheme driven by participation and a proactive attitude. They build collective space, collectively. They reveal a shared layer of the city that is complex, incremental and difficult to articulate, as it does not organize systems, but rather operates on a local level, fulfilling micro-agendas through direct action. Community Initiatives This book investigates a series of grassroots initiatives that provide social infrastructures to neighborhoods with shortages of all kinds. It is the product of a fiveyear program (2007 to 2012) that used the platform of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award to compile and map out community projects in five cities in emerging countries: Mumbai, So Paulo, Istanbul, Mexico City, and Cape Town. In each one of the five cities, the award called for existing projects that: were already implemented and functioning, and demonstrated engagement and innovation shared responsibility for building collective space proved their ability to forge partnerships with different stakeholders: local and cultural associations, community leaders, residents, users, NGOs, artists, architects, activists, government, planning institutes, businesses, academia, etc.

benefited communities, improving quality of life and the urban environment in their neighborhoods and cities. The 741 initiatives that applied for consideration cross every sector. Projects deal with collective built space, the recovery of public space, communal cleaning of garbage dumps, sanitation programs, slum upgrade, and housing retrofit. A large proportion relates to the environment, through waste management programs, recycling, greening, and urban agriculture practices that make available high-quality, fresh, affordable produce in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Some are of an economic nature, through shared entrepreneurial activities that work to reduce unemployment. Many projects activate public or collective space by promoting leisure activities such as sports, recreational, and cultural eventssometimes leading to the improvement of these spaces and the construction of new facilities. By creating local startups, services, and infrastructures, these initiatives have a positive impact on their neighborhoods, enhancing social cohesion. Local organization often gives rise to a community center, a collective kitchen, or a social enterprisestructures that work as focal points within existing social networks. They offer classes, courses, skills training, child care, and health programs that address the symptoms of poor urban environments (poverty, substance abuse, violence, and crime), and support and empower individuals to study, find work, and become active and enterprising in their daily lives. Not all of these categories, programs and mechanisms are necessarily obvious at first glance. For example, a peaceful meeting space with a tree and a bench can hide a great complexity. This simple arrangement of objects can host a number of overlapping programs, actions that change and adapt according to local demands, populating an open framework.

This publication intends to make the mechanisms of these projects legible, to draft their complexity systematically and clarify their strategies and operational modes: In response to what do projects start? Which partnerships were created? What are the main challenges in implementing a collaborative project? Was there a desire to improve the urban environment? How did these improvements take shape? The Spirit of Entrepreneurship With these questions in mind, this publication allows one to dive into some of the projects showcased for each city. Analysis of the projects is intended to reveal the driving logics of problematic urban environments as they are read by their residents and users. What some may describe as naive gestures, simple measures employed to fight serious problems prove highly effective in using existing minimal resources to catalyze social and economic gains. As Arturo Mier y Tern says, referring to Mexico City, In the places where these projects are being carried out, one can clearly see a change. Without aiming to romanticize the contexts where the projects take place, we understand that, as modest as some of these initiatives may be, they are successfully improving residents lives and transforming collective space in cities. This book consists of a collection of photographs, the documentation of these initiatives, an action protocol depicted through illustrations, and a set of interviews drawing out different perspectives on the subject. The mode of enquiry was systematically repeated in each city, from Mumbai to Cape Town. It showcases fifteen projects, three from each of the five cities. This gives us a wider perspective that allows us to compare these cities. Detailed illustrations made individually for each project depict their operational modes, reveal the ac-

tors involved, and the organizational steps that were taken. These drawings extract commonalities through the reoccurrence of similar programs, organized differently according to local challenges and overlapping each other in interesting schemes. The situations arising out of these actions are resourceful experiments in city-shaping that demonstrate the power of our shared humanness and its capacity to cut across physical, cultural, and geographical differences. The Capacity of Negotiating and Building Alliances More than just narrating the stories of these projects, this book intends to organize a platform for discussion that engages different stakeholders in conceptualizing the impact of local initiatives at various levels: What is the importance of bottom-up urbanism and what are its operational mechanisms at this scale? What is the attitude of municipalities towards urban improvement and the redressing of inequality? Can grassroots complement the efforts of the public sector to integrate the city and improve livability in all areas? Is there a move towards integrating bottom-up with top-down planning initiatives? What are the long-term prospects for bottom-up practices? What future scenarios might be envisaged? Having started responding to urgent needs, these community initiatives had become evident in the nineteen-eighties and nineties and later evolved from independent to negotiating and demanding co-responsibility to institutions and the government. A series of interviews deepens the discussion, inviting representatives in each city to reflect on these practices and bringing different perspectives to the table: grassroots projects and local leaderships, the government, academia and researchers, artists and cultural figures, and individuals connected to the local challenges of each city.

20

Editorial

Five Cities
Embedded Productive Capacities We are recognizing what an immense natural resource is right there to help the transformation, to generate income and shared entrepreneurship. (Malika) Despite their geographic and temporal distinctions, all of these actions rely on a collaborative process that is, in each case, dominant and fundamental. They explore the capacity for production within urban settlements, contesting the model of urban vs. rural, or agricultural vs. industrial vs. service economies. These projects demonstrate how the agricultural, industrial, and service economies that historically divide the evolution of our cities, nowadays coexist in urban areas. Incorporating these initiatives into mainstream planning would require a drastic change in the conception of city. In this new form of planning, metropolitan systems would need to not only support the service economy, but also allow for production: urban farming, small-scale manufacturing, social enterprises, creative practices, informal economies, and so on. How can we make efficient use of what we have? How do we engineer a future based on the productive capacities of our cities? How can we build a framework accessible enough to enable and encourage people to take part? How might a developed scenario look? Are these temporary projects, and how might they develop over time? Can they impact upon the urban fabric in the future? What is their collective productive capacity to generate change? Participatory Modes for Future Scenarios The book outlines existing operations, identifies innovative tools and planning instruments, and seeks to shape grammars of action. Based on this, it aims to explore possible future scenarios that could emerge from these localized practices. Could they be scaled up? Might they make a larger and more systemic impact? Investigating small-scale and sometimes invisible urban processes can reveal not only opportunities for action, but methods of operation that could be relevant to others. This approach suggests a transversal way of thinking about planning, one that acknowledges the equal importance of all the different voices compiled here. It drafts arguments that might lead to participatory models, and envisages a scenario where the knowledge and findings compiled from these real world experiences can begin to feed back into planning and policy. It is not a finished work, but rather an open process of investigation that gives rise to further inquiry.

24

Five Cities

Introduction

5 x 3 Initiatives Three projects from each city are presented here through photography, a text-based portrait, and an illustration. We explain why these projects began and what inspired them, illustrate where they are located, what they do (programs and activities), and what situations they generate, how they developed and how their outcomes have impacted upon the community. These snapshots aim to make visible the mechanisms through which these projects operate: how they mobilize the community to contribute, how they create partnerships and leverage support, how they built on existing capacity to sustain themselves, and how they benefitboth directly and indirectlythe users, residents, and the urban environment itself. The illustration organizes a systematic comparison among different initiatives in different cities, making use of common elements through which civil society improves the living conditions and upgrades spaces. In the drawings, one can find these elements be rearticulated differently in every project, thus generating diverse urban situations, making use of local potential. 5 x 5 Voices | Interviews A set of interviews intends to unveil key aspects in the process of implementing the initiatives and to draft common threads among them. The interviews reveal different perspectives on the same topics for every city, not only organizing local voices around a common platform, but also prompting for similarities in the ways our citiesand citizensare evolving to address urban challenges. The five voices are: Community: insiders, local activists and leaderships, local residents, non-governmental and non-profit organizations, cultural agents, and activators Government: governmental agencies, public offices, official secretaries, municipal representatives and their agents Academia: teachers, theorists, architects, planners, and researchers who investigate and plan cities Arts and culture: curators, artists, and cultural agents involved with local projects. Intermediaries: those operating at the middle level (between top-down and bottom-up interventions), intermediating scales and different layers of knowledge and action

Compilation The last part of each citys chapter is a photo essay that showcases some of the other initiatives compiled in that city. These images illustrate a much broader range of projects of similar nature, suggesting further commonalities between community initiatives in the five metropolitan regions.

Mumbai
Priya Shankar

26

Mumbai

Profile

Population [metro/city]

20.75 12.4
km2

Average density [metro/city]

million

million

17,637 20,038
Diversity

Inhabitants/km2 Inhabitants/km2

1,176 438 209

Area occupied [metro/city] km2

Maharashtrians, North Indians, South Indians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis

Gross domestic product (GDP) [$bn at PPPs]

30

Mumbai

Overview

Participatory Developments in Mumbai

Projects compiled in Mumbai demonstrate the remarkable initiative, creativity, and tenacity of citizens from different walks of life to address the challenges in their city. These initiatives respond to the nature of the city in particular, to the large degree of informality and the constraints of space due to its specific geography. The seventy-four submissions are concentrated primarily in the city of Mumbai rather than in the wider metropolitan region, although they are spread across different parts of the city. They reflect a variety of concerns, but the most prevalent are public space, housing, education, and sanitation. They demonstrate the involvement of multiple stakeholdersfrom local communities to the city government to private actors. Much of the city has grown informally; and it shows a mixed geography with rich and poor settlements existing side by side in various parts of the city. The nature of both the growth and governance of the city has made even basic public service delivery difficult in many areas. Therefore, a number of projects are concerned with cleaning, waste management, and recycling. At the same time, the geography of the city has prevented outward expansion, leading to incredible levels of density and limited open space. As a result, several initiatives are concerned with public and community spaces.

Triratna Prerana Mandal is a community toilet that evolved into a comprehensive community center, providing educational and entrepreneurial activities.
2

Mumbai Waterfronts Center reclaims the citys waterfronts by constructing promenades and improving beaches, making them usable as open, public spaces for all.
3

Urban Design Research Institute has worked to preserve and improve the citys historic downtown core as a quality urban space and cultural hub.

1 2

3 km

38

Mumbai

INITIATIVES

Triratna Prerana Mandal

In the Khotwadi informal settlement in Mumbais Santa Cruz district, an area not far from the airport, Triratna Prerana Mandal (TPM) began as just a group of boys hanging out together and playing cricket. In 2002, it transformed into a community-body organization, which in Mumbai parlance means a residents association of slum-dwellers that partners with the local government in civic activities. Community toilets were constructed in the area as part of the Slum Sanitation Program, which was funded by the World Bank, led by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), and implemented by SPARC (a major NGO). TPM was meant to maintain the toilets constructed for the residents in its local shantytown. But TPM didnt just maintain toilets. The group utilized the toilet premises to set up its office, from where it started a range of activities. The first floor of the toilet complex was made into a space for a computer lab, where computer classes were run and English language instruction provided. The space is also used as a kitchen where women cook for schoolchildren as part of a government-related employment program. TPM has now adopted a local derelict building in the area, where it has established a gym, yoga classes, dance classes, and expanded its womens self-help and skill groups. It has installed solar panels on its community toilet building, generating its own electricity, and has also set aside space for rainwater harvesting. It is involved in a number of recycling, waste sorting, and gardening activities, improving the environment in its neighborhood. In an area that many would dismiss as a slum, the project demonstrates the ingenuity, capacities, and capability of the local community to improve its environment and circumstances through partnerships and alliances. It shows how even basic infrastructure and limited space (the community toilet building) can provide an impetus for much wider community activism and urban change.

46

Mumbai

INTERVIEW

Community

Dreams, Dignity, and Changing Realities: The Story of a Community Toilet

Dilip Kadam and Dayanand Jadhav and Dayanand Mohite are involved in Triratna Prerana Mandal, a communitybased organization

How did the project start? What motivated you to become engaged? We started out as a cricket club. Later, we began other activities such as cleaning the area. This slum is our neighborhood. We are living in it and we found it wrong to be in such a dirty environment. We realized that illnesses and diseases spread through filth, so we started to work on it ourselves. After a while, it became a habit to keep things clean. We wanted to improve the area and take pride in it. When the slum sanitation program started in Mumbai, people from large NGOs and the municipal corporation (BMC) came to visit us and we got involved in providing a community toilet for the area because this matched well with our aims. Which partnerships were created to strengthen your project? What needs did they fulfill and when were they formed? Although we had existed as an informal group for a while, the community toilet project started as a result of partnerships. The World Bank provided funding for the slum sanitation program and the BMC implemented it on a citywide basis. Major NGOs such as SPARC were involved. For us, the most significant partnerships have been with the local community and the BMC. They have made the project feasible. As we have progressed, we have also sought out new partners for specific needs, such as for our computer lab or for womens training activities. Was community support important to the setup and continuation of the project and how was it mobilized? What challenges did you face and how were they overcome? Even when we were just a cricket club, people would help us, and community support was significant for our work in cleaning the area. When we started the toilet

project, community support became essential because all of the maintenance would be through contributions from the local community. We needed to make the project sustainable and we needed to convince people that it would be beneficial for them. Ten to fifteen of us worked on it at the start. Everyday, after our daily jobs, we would each visit five to six households to talk to people. We would explain the impacts of bad sanitation on health and what the benefits of the project would be. Through this outreach, we usually managed to convince three to four families each on a regular basis. But many were opposed to this. They had seen too many projects fail and were also used to getting things for free. But once the toilet was built and they saw how clean it was, even those who had earlier resisted began to use it and realized what a difference it made. Did the desire to improve the urban environment play a role from the outset? How do you assess this achievement? From the start, we thought about improving our living environment but we werent able to focus on it. This only became concrete later on. We would clean aspects of the area; we began planting some trees and plants. We tried to remove garbage. The support of our partners has been vital in what weve achieved. But there were also frustrations along the way. For example, when we first started using the space above the toilet for other activities, this was considered illegal. The idea came to us because we never had space for our meetings and an office atop the toilet was symbolically important in demonstrating its cleanliness. We faced difficulties with this but now the use of the top room has been legalized and even been turned into a policy for other areas. What weve realized is that what is more important than the person who builds the toilet is the person who maintains the toilet. And its also important to find out what people want and respond

to their needs and demands rather than designing abstract projects. But this is only the start and we have to go ahead and do many more things. How has the project changed or grown? What are the next goals? Where do you envision the project five years from now? The award was vital in helping us achieve recognition and visibility, and in helping us reach out to other new partners and figures to support our activities. We have expanded our work a lot since then. We now have solar energy panels and a stronger rainwater harvesting system, making our project more sustainable. Our waste segregation center has expanded so that we can help with much more recycling and waste management. Partly due to the recognition from the award, the BMC agreed to let us adopt the neighboring park and derelict building there. We have revitalized this building and set up a gym, yoga classes, dance classes, tailoring classes, and a table tennis and sports center in the space. Our womens self-help group has also increased its activities, which now include tailoring and grinding flour, in addition to its earlier cooking for schools project. We have a better-equipped computer lab now and are working on setting up a library. Since the refurbishment, the toilets are also better. We would like to improve the park and building to become a really nice community area. Although we have done some work on it, theres still much to be doneboth in terms of gardening and renovating the building. We would also like to use our experience to help create successful community toilets in other areas, especially near the railway lands. Weve been thinking about a biogas plant but need to explore the technology and get support. Weve also been thinking about collaborating more with the local municipal school on educational activities. It was the space that provided us the inspiration to start this work (the womens self-help group). In our homes in the slum, in this neighborhood, there was no space to start any work. We have this space above the toilet so we thought we need to utilize it. We women had so many problemsgoing to bad toilets or having no access to toilets. And not having any finances, always struggling. We thought we women could get together and do something, so we founded our womens organization. We help each other and have more confidence now. And dignity. People respect our work and they respect us. We have made our own society, our own community.
Deepa Mohite is part of the Triratna Mahila Kalyan Sarva Seva Sanstha, a womens self-help group affiliated with Triratna Prerana Mandal

58

Mumbai

biographies

Dilip Kadam is President of Triratna Prerna Mandal (TPM), Dayanand Jadhav is Executive President of TPM, and Dayanand Mohite is Secretary of TPM. Dilip Kadam studied until the tenth grade and does occasional work in the certificate office of Mumbai University. Dayanand Jadhav also studied until the tenth grade and now works as an electrical contractor. Dayanand Mohite graduated from high school and works with Jet Airways at the Mumbai airport. They all grew up and live in the Khotwadi informal settlement in Mumbai and together, along with other members of the local community, founded Triratna Prerna Mandal. Seema Redkar is an Officer on Special Duty, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM.) She is working with the Solid Waste Management department, in charge of a program called Advance Locality Management (ALM), which focuses on good governance and increased citizen participation. She has worked with the slum upgradation program and slum sanitation program, funded by the World Bank for MCGM. She has been involved in community development work with a focus on education and urban poverty alleviation and is also committed to voluntary work, mentoring several local community organizations. Rahul Mehrotra is a practicing architect and his firm, RMA Architects, which was founded in 1990 in Mumbai, has executed many architectural projects in India. He has also written extensively on issues to do with architecture, conservation, and urbanism in India. His latest book is Architecture in India Since 1990 (2011). He has taught at the University of Michigan and at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Currently, Rahul Mehrotra is Professor and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He was a member of the jury for the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award in 2007. Shabana Azmi is a renowned actress and social activist committed to womens rights, housing rights, and inter-religious dialogue. Nivarra Hakk in Mumbai and the Mijwan Welfare Society in rural Northern India are two major social initiatives that she has been involved in. She was a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament and has also been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNFPA. Her latest films are Kalvpriksh, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Midnights Children. She was on the jury for the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award in 2007.

P. K. Das is an architect and activist. He has aimed to establish connections between architecture and people by involving them in a participatory planning process. His work includes organizing slum dwellers for better living and evolving affordable housing models, engaging in policy framework for mass housing, reclaiming public space in Mumbai by developing the waterfronts, urban planning, architectural and interior design projects. He is Chairperson of the Mumbai Waterfronts Center and founder of P.K. Das & Associates architectural practice. He has written and lectured widely and recently curated the Open Mumbai exhibition. Chapter author and interviewer Priya Shankar is a sociopolitical researcher, writer, and commentator. She is currently Senior Researcher and Project Developer at the Alfred Herrhausen Society. She helped conceptualize, frame, and initiate the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award as well as the Foresight project on the rise of the BRICS. Her research interests are centered on issues of governance, globalization, and development. She has edited a series of Foresight readers and contributed to other publications. Her writings have appeared in New Statesman, Global Policy, Internationale Politik, Estadao So Paulo, Times of India, India Today and others. She worked at the think tank, Policy Network and with the Urban Age project at the London School of Economics. She previously worked with educational projects in informal settlements and youth NGOs in Delhi. She holds an undergraduate degree from Delhi University and a postgraduate degree from Oxford University, both in history. Members of the Jury for the Award in Mumbai Richard Burdett Director, Urban Age & Centennial Professor in Architecture and Urbanism, London School of Economics Shabana Azmi Rahul Mehrotra Actor and social activist Architect and Professor of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard University Suketu Mehta Enrique Norten Author and Associate Professor, New York University Founder, TEN Arquitectos, New York and Mexico City & Miler Chair of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania Anthony Williams Former Mayor of Washington, DC and is the Executive Director of the Global Government

So Paulo
Marcos L. Rosa

60

So Paulo

Profile

Population [metro/city]

19.9 10.8

Average density [metro/city]

million million

2,420 7,139
Diversity

Inhabitants/km2 Inhabitants/km2

8,000 1,500 388

Area occupied [metro/city] km2 km2

Indigenous, Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, Japanese, African,Lebanese, Syria, Korean, South Americans, Brazilian

Gross domestic product (GDP) [$bn at PPPs]

64

So Paulo

Overview

Urban Creative Practices in So Paulo

Projects compiled in So Paulo show how self-organization responds to urgent needs, generating quality collective spaces that encourage community participation. We found 133 initiatives concentrated primarily in the central area, but spread over the whole metropolitan area. They test the collective use of space through cultural, arts, and education production, as well as the creation of recreational opportunities, recycling alternatives, social housing, etc. The rapid urbanization process, experienced the late twentieth century, faced major problems related to the lack of infrastructurefrom electricity and water to education and culture. This is still an ongoing process, which has fragmented the city, producing urban wastelands and residual spaces of different natures; it has also polarized wealth. This urbanization process has created both a verifiable lack of quality spaces for human coexistence, and unused space with the potential to host urban creative practices. In So Paulo, these are drivers to a restructuring of the urban environment committed to the level of the user.
3 2 1

Edificio Unio (Union Building) is a formerly occupied high-rise in the center of the city, which has been successfully converted into residences for forty-two families, including a communal space.

1 2

Instituto Acaia is a cultural facility, with a nursery and a workshop, which has carved a common space within the dense slum tissue.

Biourban transformed the pathways of the Mauro slum, stimulating inhabitants to activate unused spaces and upgrade them.

5 km

76

So Paulo

INITIATIVES

Biourban

Pioneered by the young sociology student Jeff Anderson, the initiative intended to improve life in slums, through social action and do-it-yourself measures, in which he and members of the community were involved. The project engaged in a series of aesthetic measures that have transformed the spatial quality of the neighborhood within a short period of time. They include the cleaning up of small spaces and areas in front of peoples homes, creating flower beds in place of concrete curbs, using color and recycled materials to humanize the faades of buildings and exposed infrastructures, creating public artworks, and the staging of collective activities such as painting sessions. All materials used in the project come from waste and garbage found in the neighborhood. The project spread throughout the entire Mauro favelaa compact and dense slum in an inner-city area of So Paulowith mixed use and typologies, suffering from socioenvironmental degradation and violence. Hailing from a nearby neighborhood, Jeff Anderson moved to a small house in the slum to carry out a residency research project. The collective activity began with the installation of a library open to the residents, and followed with the organization of workshops that transformed waste into objects that supported daily activities and beautified the paths and alleys. The activities have led to a stronger sense of community and to an intense use of the open space (street and alleys), which gave rise to new situations created by the articulation of the created objects and daily activities. The use of open space and the collective contacts has had a positive impact on the built environment and its safety.

80

So Paulo

INTERVIEW

community

Workshops as a Communication Facilitator: Understanding Community Needs

Ana Cristina Cintra Camargo, Director of the ACAIA Institute

How did the project start? What motivated you to become engaged? The project began with the sculptor Elisa Bracher, who had her workshop in Vila Leopoldina, which was on the way of children who lived in wooden shacks near the CEAGESP. The project began in response to the great sociocultural and economic discrepancy that exists in So Paulo. In 1997, Elisa opened the gates of her studio, offering a carpentry workshop for these children. Which partnerships were created to strengthen your project? What needs did these partnerships fulfill and how/when were they formed? You can only propose a project to a municipal secretary or to a major funder after youve struggled about four to five years for the work to gain consistency, and get the numbers to present the project. In our case, the first five years were financed by Elisas family, which gave us ample freedom to work. And then came the partnership with the Secretary of Participation and Partnership and later with the Secretary of Education, for example. Another important thing is that the projects themselves define what to do, and are not created to fit the interests of a sponsor. We are not flexible in that, since it could jeopardize the work. Was community support important to the setup and continuation of the project, and how was this mobilized? Which challenges did you face and how were they overcome? In the early years, we had little support from the community and many years later, having lunch with a community agent, she explained something important to me: it is believed that when people go to the communities, they think they know what the community needs. I think we have a very respectful relationship with the community. We do not know, and we are always learning. Action is always caused by observation

and a demand that does not come from us, but from the process. Thats what we learned and continue learning here. Their support is crucial, since the work only exists if it is aligned with community interests, with their desire, and that makes sense. Your project creates a small plaza in the middle of a dense slum in So Paulo, offering diverse activities, such as playground, tree shadow, benches, etc. Did the desire to improve the urban environment play a role from the outset? How do you assess this achievement? The work was born here at the Institute, with the children coming to the atelier, where we received them. In 2004, a boy arrived with a message from the community saying that from that moment on we could enter the favela (slum). In 2005, the work began weekly in a small area in the favela. We spread a cloth on the floor and took a basket with graphic material. This happened where the atelier shack is located today. That was the only space where the narrow alleys widened, allowing the activity to take place without disturbing their routine. In the first contact, some children and mothers joined and eventually those meetings started to take place three times a week. Back then, that space was not built, but was full of garbage. We started cleaning it very slowly, until one day we organized the population in a collective effort, which filled two garbage containers. Twice a week we also offered nursing, a different approach to the atelier, because there are many people who do not have access or who are not authorized to the use of the public health system. The improvements followed with the purchase and renovation of the shackexpanding with permission from whoever owned the plaza. The playground came when they wanted a space for children, and disappeared when it no longer made sense. Today, there is a big bench where they sit. The laundry appeared

in a similar manner: there was a demand, particularly for drying clothes, since there is a shortage of space to do this. How has the project changed or grown? What are the next goals? Where do you envision the project five years from now? Realizing the unpreparedness of older youthaged fourteen and olderto face the world, we decided to increase the educational classes after the workshops. We also increased the cultural repertoire on Fridays, offering pocket cinema and concerts open to the community, in an effort to get people to mix. In addition, the Santa Cruz School (a private school) developed a partnership, in which the ethics and citizenship class happens here; however, they do not come to offer something for students, but come learn by working side by side with studentsone loses the fear of the other. Is there a dialogue with other stakeholders (municipality, for instance)? What impact does this dialogue have on the project? The Secretary of Social Housing maintains the policy of removing these slums. We are aware of how this happens. In the case of the slum da Linha, there were improvements, but the city intends to remove them, not to urbanize the existing settlement. The architect responsible visited to understand what works, to get acquainted with the laundries, the local atelier, so that work remains if the slum is removed or redeveloped in a new settlement. The idea of the laundry was very good. It generates movement, people are closer to each other you know, for me it makes my body shake, I like to work and I am busy then. I do the laundry, run the daily errands at home and come back to dry them. It helped to organize my life.
Soraia Alves de Oliveira, 33, lives at Favela da Linha and runs the new laundry, which is part of the initiative.

86

So Paulo

INTERVIEW

Arts & culture

How to Live Together

Lisette Lagnado is an independent curator, professor at Santa Marcelina Faculty

Do you think it is possible that art and culture (artistic & cultural production), in some form, provide the spark for beginning a grassroots initiative? In which form? Yes, but only as a kickoff, because once it configures a daily and repetitive practice, we are leaving the sphere of the investigative art and entering the field of the crystallization of forms, a phenomena that has other names such as tradition, folklore, etc. What I understand as culture is an amalgam of different practices. How does the artist/cultural activist play a role as a communicator, bridging different parts and intermediating conversations and negotiations that would otherwise rarely take place? It is desirable that the artist does not let himself be domesticated by the institutional rules. Grassroots, for me, makes more sense when I think of musical manifestations (such as samba and rap), than the artist who express himself through images. This is the difference between the street graffiti, which effectively has political and social connotations, and does not allow itself to become institutionalized, and the other graffiti, which today has became a product as any other, to serve the frivolous and aestheticizing embellishment. My generation did not use the word negotiation, but an institutional critique that marked my formation was done in the dead of night because they were times of military regime. The group 3Ns3 covered public monuments without negotiating anything with those in power! Other artists that influenced me when I started working were Julio Plaza and Jos Resende, whose ideological statement has always been anti-communicative. To show, to point out, and to comment are ways to intervene. One must understand that there is artwork of more direct interventionsuch as Jamac on the outskirts of So Paulo, presented at the 27th Biennial of So Paulo in 2006)but also films and cartoons play a role in addressing urban problems.

Many projects count on artists to identify urban challenges and present creative responses to them. What is your personal experience of how arts and culture can improve urban life? How to Live Together, title of the 27th So Paulo Art Biennale, involved artists dealing with urban problems and challenges. The work of Renata Lucas (Matemtica Rpida), though almost imperceptible because it mimicked existing elements of the urban situation, was the one closest to urban intervention. She shed light on local problems (the uneven pavement, poor lighting, lack of green), and managed simultaneously with much simplicity to also bring a solution, albeit on a microscale. In the case of artists in residence, I think the gain was of another kind: artists like Marjetica Potrc (Acre), Francesco Iodice and Shimabuku (in So Paulo) produced works inspired so strongly in the context, that when exposed abroad contribute to the dissemination of symbolic content. They operate outside of their places of origin. This is also part of an economy that reverberates about reality. Do you think there is something particular about the culture of So Paulo that contributes to the nature of the projects? Only later, I was in contact with practices outside So Paulo, where it seems that the formalist Greenbergian tradition have dominated the scene for too long. In cities such as Vienna, Berlin, and New York, I learned about artistic practices aimed at local communities. Characteristically, So Paulo is overly market-oriented. Thats changing, although it is still a city that has the most powerful galleries, which nowadays excessively participate in art fairs, formatting the back to the object, for the collector.

How can the impact of grassroots projects be maximized? How might artists and cultural practitioners contribute to this? For me, the best cooperation should take place in the educational field. Ill explain: the artist can teach workshops, give lectures, present their work, and expose themselves as subject and participative citizen. He must know his place at the wheel. I imagine their ideas fertilizing projects like the CEU (Unified Educational Centers), with creative workshops linked to the municipal education program, making regular visits to museums.

We urgently need to learn how to work with conflict and to keep these tensions in the public space, to learn how to make them agencies, update them and incorporate them into theories, urban practices; and critical artthe sensitive experience as micro-resistance on or in public spacemight indeed be a big help. Perhaps artists, who already work critically with these hotspots, can effectively help us to invent to arrive at a more incorporated, dissenting and vivacious urbanism.
Paola Berenstein Jacques, architect and urbanist, is a professor at the Architecture Faculty of the UFBA, coordinator of the Urban Laboratory (http://www.laboratoriourbano.ufba.br) and coorganizer of the platform Corpocidade (http://www.corpocidade. dan.ufba.br).

92

So Paulo

Biographies

Ana Cristina Cintra Camargo is currently one of the directors of the Ateli ACAIA. She has been in the atelier since the beginning of its activities in 1997, when the artist Elisa Bracher decided to open her workshop space to some children from surrounding poor communities. Initially working as a psychologist, she engaged in thinking forms of therapeutic work out of the traditional settings, and in the organization of the physical and psychical space of ACAIA, aiming to listen to and train the group of educators from the beginning Elisabete Frana is an architect and urbanist, and has twenty-five years of experience in urban planning, social housing, slum upgrading, and management of participatory projects. Her PhD thesis is on the slums of So Paulo (19802008). She was the Social Housing Superintendent and Deputy Secretary of the Municipality of So Paulo until 2012, where she coordinated the activities of the Slum Upgrading programs, Water Source Program, Cortio (Slum Tenement) Requalification Program, Social Renting, among others, assisting more than 160, 000 families. Frana is author and editor of several publications on architecture and urbanism. Fernando de Mello Franco is an architect and PhD at Facudade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de So Paulo. He was professor at USP So Carlos, USJT, Mackenzie, and Harvard. He is founding partner at MMBB Architects in So Paulo. Currently, he is Curator at URBEMInstituto de Estudos e Urbanismo para a Metrpole, based in So Paulo. Lisette Lagnado has her PhD in philosophy from the University of So Paulo. She was the general curator of the 27a So Paulo Biennale (2006) and of Drifts and Derivations at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madri (2010). She coordinated the Leonilson Project (199396) and the Hlio Oiticica Project (19992002), initiatives that systematize the artists archives. She has written several articles and essays. In 2013, she will present the curatory of the 33a edition at the Panorama of the Museum of Modern Art of So Paulo. Nevoral Alves Bucheroni is the Deputy mayor (Subprefeito) of the S district, one of So Paulos thirty-one administrative districts, subordinate to the Secretary of coordination of Subprefeituras. He worked on the Coordination of Urban Safety City Hall (Coordenadoria de Segurana Urbana da Prefeitura, 200508). He is colonel in the Reserve Military Police and formerly served in diverse units of the Military Police. He graduated with a degree in electric engineering and business administration, with extra training in the Police Academy, with extensions in technical, operational, and community police.

Chapter author and interviewer Marcos L. Rosa received his diploma in architecture and urban planning from the University of So Paulo. He received a scholarship from the European Union for his PhD thesis at the TU Munich. He has been a guest lecturer and researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning. Marcos organized the DBUA Award in So Paulo, in 2008, when he set up a research platform based on the 133 compiled projects. He is the author of a publication of that research entitled Microplanning, Urban Creative Practices (So Paulo, 2011). He exhibited worldwide, among which, in the Rotterdam International Architecture Biennale 2010 and in the International Biennale in So Paulo 2011. He wrote and contributed to several international publications. He was awarded the Young Architects Award from the Brazilian Architects Institute for Microplanning. He works as an independent designer and won the first prize for Collective Retrofit at the 2009 Alcoa Design Prize and the Prestes Maia Award for Urban Parangol, among others. Both his practical work and research studies stand for an interdisciplinary and integrative approach in the fields of architecture, urban design, and urban planning. His current research focuses on the operational mechanisms embedded in these projects and their scaling potential within existing and proposed urban infrastructural networks. Members of the Jury for the Award in So Paulo: Richard Burdett Director, Urban Age & Centennial Professor in Architecture and Urbanism, London School of Economics Tata Amaral Lisette Lagnado Fernando de Mello Franco Ra Souza Vieira de Oliveira Brazilian filmmaker Art critic and professor at Faculdade Santa Marcelina Founder MMBB Architects Former soccer player, co-founder and director of the Foundation Gol de Letra, a UNESCO model for supporting at-risk children worldwide Anthony Williams Former Mayor of Washington, DC and is the Executive Director of the Global Government

Istanbul
Demet Mutman

94

Istanbul

Profile

Population [city]

12.5

Average density [metro/city]

million

2,622
Diversity

Inhabitants/km2

5,343 182

Area occupied [city] km2

Romans, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, Gypsies, Caucasian, Balkans, Turks

Gross domestic product (GDP) [$bn at PPPs]

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Navigation INITIATIVES Istanbul X

Nurtepe First Step Cooperative

2004 2012

Headline
AUThORs Name Authors position in the project etc.

Functions / program: womens capacity building and community center, skills training, income generation, workshop activities, child care, recreational activities, and leisure. Benefits to the Community: offers a cultural facility with workshops, child care space, a small backyard, garden, and mural; fosters interaction in a learning environment and increases solidarity Positive impact on the built environment: visibility of the community and attachment to the neighborhood via the physical presence of the center; users feel safer in their neighborhood. People involved: cooperative is run by a group of community women and the neighborhoods families.

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Istanbul

INTERVIEW

Academia

Action and Participation in Planning

zlem nsal works closely with Istanbul-based civil initiatives and neighborhood organizations

What trends dis you recognize in the grassroots projects in Istanbul? Do you think they unveil fields of opportunity for urban design? Grassroots initiatives tend to differ as resistance and local (working with women and children) organizations, and their impact differs depending on their objectives. Their biggest problems are raising funds and having their statements heard by the ruling mechanisms. Despite that, various civil organizations focus and embrace the citys current needs. I believe that this approach has potential, however, the critical missing ingredient is the reliable legal base, which would enable the realization of such formations. The needs and requirements of a participatory community, which is formed by diverse crowds and actors, have to be brought to life through an implementable project. Negotiation in fact, embodies all these concepts. Some of the projects are directly having an impact on the built environment and create new spatial qualities. Would you identify these as potential planning tools? How do you think they could inspire or give feedback into architectural/ urban planning practices? And policy? Of course it is possible to enable the local initiatives impact on the built environment; however, rather than seeing them as a tool, local initiatives should become a subject and actor, within a well-defined system. Mixing these actors in the planning process and making their needs a part of the urban planning might guarantee and improve the quality of life and the environment in the city. Small-scale interventions indeed have potential, however, in order to achieve sustainable interventions, we need two things: a revolution in the governmental system, and a civil community that is determined and persistent regarding its demands. Even though its tools might not necessarily be equally strong as the governmental mechanisms, urban community has to develop pressure mechanisms, which are as strong as possible.

The urban community, the governmental mechanisms, and the cities of today are trying to catch up with new strategies. Interventionist decisions are being made, new tools and units are brought to life, and the power difference among the actors during this process increases rapidly. The increasing pressure creates even more fragments, which in turn breaks down the resistance, inevitably diminishing the collective movement. Do solutions germinating in the communities contribute to livability in some areas? To which pressing issues do they respond? If so, how? It is important to emphasize that their action responds to the lack of participation in planning. If these kinds of initiatives start to become a compulsory element of the urban planning process, and if such a transformation indeed happens, then, the citizen not only embraces a key element to improve his/her life quality, but also takes on responsibility to achieve quality of life. When the fulfilling of citizen demands is guaranteed, the form of his/her existence in the city will inevitably improve as well. Which projects would you say have good potential for replicability? What features should they exhibit in order to be replicable? In order for the local projects to be replicable, their success has to be proven. This does not only rely on civil initiative. The goals have to be realized. An initiative can feed on another initiatives experience successful or notand reshape itself. This, in turn, can create some sort of database. This kind of experience transfer is actually a type of mobility, a state of experience transforming itself for repetition; something that should be able to make the governmental mechanisms content. This kind of exchange requires the existence of a platform where different actors can put forward their diverse experiences on diverse grounds. For that to happen, the problems in the systems methodology must be fixed in the context of governmental culture.

How do you see these projects impacting on the urban fabric in the next five to ten years? Do they have the capacity to make a difference? I am drawn to pessimism based on a dark scenario, where the city is shaped by the persistent, oppressive methods that eventually destroy all civil initiatives. On the other hand, I would base my optimistic prediction on non-government initiatives, which are realized through encouraging local projects, learning from various accomplishments, and strengthened by international connections. Small initiatives, which act for their own rights, can do more consciously regarding their communal needs, eventually leading the way to healthier cities. Ten years ahead, I would wish to see that these small initiatives, which are born today, are still alive, with their motivational resources strengthened, their strategies sharpened, and having secured a firm and well-defined place inside the governmental frame. In Turkey, a mayors use of authority is not always transparent. Meanwhile, the demands on behalf of civic groups for increased municipal authority in the name of national decentralization and participatory democracy have at times exacerbated this misuse of discretionary powers. This is because Turkeys city administrations have not been completely democratized yet, and strong municipal authority has created, in most cases, local fiefdoms rather than widespread civic engagement.
Ilhan Tekeli, city and regional planner at the Middle East Technical University and member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences

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Istanbul

INTERVIEW

mediation

nity to its system. Yet, it is highly critical for the local statement and micro-visions to increase, unite, and transform into a powerful and single voice.

Advocating Sustainable and Participatory Models

Asl Kyak Ingin is architect, designer, and activist

What is your role in combining the missing  links of top to down or bottom up? How do you proceed? There are many missing links. Primarily, there is a communication gap and unawareness between the institutions. At this point, our mission is to closely monitor the processes in order to inform the institutions. More importantly, I spend time with the commu-

What is the role of culture, art, economy, politics, politicians, stakeholders, and citizens for rebuilding a city? Politicians must transform this debate into a broad participatory public platform. An open system would enable culture and arts to provide an integrationist impact, shaped by both the environment and the community. The community, on the other hand, must come out of its passive position to generate its own statement and put forward its own vision on the reconstruction of their city. Rather than the generic solutions imposed and executed by the authorities, original and local approaches developed by civil initiatives must be supported. The existence of a sustainable economy must be composed of a system that has close relationships with the local dynamics inside the city and supports the existence of smaller production units. There is also the need for an economic vision, which takes into consideration the micro-dynamics and relates and supports them with the macro-dynamics. You are one of the main actors causing an  impact on the built environment, what is your role? Basically, my duty is to actively stand against the ongoing transformation in the city and try to show the decision-maker mechanisms alternative solutions. In other words, I try to make the invisible, visible, or to reveal that the cities own dynamics can suggest alternatives to the current transformation. From an architects perspective, I try to expose the architectural identity and the economic, social, and physical life forms that exist during the urbanization process. I also concentrate on how existing macro and micro settlements can be supported by those existing dynamics.

How do you think civil initiatives could feed  back into the planning process? Civil initiatives and the meetings/workshops we take part in as individual participants progress too slowly. The community still does not perceive its own value; and the people are not aware that they have the power to make a statement. Thus, at this point, it is still not easy for urban awareness to take shape. While the top-down systems progress rapidly with the impact of the decisions that are being taken, the impact of bottom-up systems is unfortunately not as efficient. Even though micro-scale approaches are more implementable and sustainable, a participatory planning is still not possible regardless of many strategies that have been tried to clear the way for such an action. In order for the participatory action to have an impact on urban and strategic planning, administrative traditions have to change and the administrative mechanisms have to be redesigned for enabling it. In that sense, are there any policies being  developed to merge top-down and bottom-up practices to any extent? Unfortunately, there is no such merging or reconciling political moves at the moment. However, at the Sulukule Platform, we worked very hard to create such reconciliation during the Sulukule demolition process. We did our best to ensure the solution would be achieved through the participation of the residents, but unfortunately, it did not happen. There is a very powerful vertical relationship between the higher authorities and the local authority during the process, where the decisions are executed from the top down. While the local authority is expected to represent a diverse and multifaceted community, it inevitably becomes a mere reflection of the ruling party. The ruling party, in turn, cannot incorporate and mix the dynamism coming from the commu-

nity, in order to better understand the spatial, social, and economic infrastructures, and to cooperate with them in order to achieve participatory resolution to the existing problems. My intention is to make the existing visible; to conduct participatory meetings; to cultivate new visions through these meetings; to support and even improve the participation of diverse social fragments; and to reach to a larger audience through these newly cultivated visions. How would you define a good planning model  for the city of Istanbul? What is the difference from todays practice? When considering urban practices, it is not only the plans that come to mind, but also field management, heritage zoning plans, hierarchy, and inter-institutional relationships. These, in turn, transform into a more intricate and sophisticated system. Most of the time, the community cannot understand nor perceive the patterns in-between these non-transparent and sophisticated relationships; thus, decisions are made under ambiguity. The mechanisms have to be simplified and made transparent so that the local communities can understand these patterns, decisions, and their implications. At this very point, my role is, in fact to expose these gaps and disconnections. New steps should be taken in light of the feedback and lessons learned from existing actions. In other words, the subject, objective and method of a project should be created and underlined through participative action. How do we gain participation? We do try to get attention through press releases and Hasanpasa Gaswork festivals. Through these small-scale interventions, the initiation would possibly develop however there are absolute facts that are cutting the sustainability of the process. If there is a political issue, such as strategic planning included among the process, then an obstacle appears on the road. We aim to work with the politicians, however, we are seen as competitors for a plot of the city.
Nesrin Uar, volunteer for the Revitalization of Hasanpasa Gasworks Neighborhood Initiative, private interview by D. Mutman, April, 2010.

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Istanbul

biographies

Yeliz Yaln Baki is co-founder of Bars Iin Mzik (Music for Peace), which is a privately financed social project of Mehmet Selim Baki. As a devoted volunteer and an academician, she supported the initiative from 2004 to 2011. In 2012, the initiative became the Bars Iin Mzik Foundation, and she has been its manager since then. Erhan Demirdizen is an urban planner and lecturer, with a Masters degree in urban policy planning and local governments. He has worked at several sections of the Ministry of Public Works and Settlement, as well as at several local authorities. Besides being a board member of the Chamber of Urban Planners in Ankara, he was respectively a member, general secretary and head of the Chamber of Urban Planners, Istanbul branch. He was also a member of a publishing board for several urban, planning and city related journals. zlem nsal is a PhD candidate at City University of London, Department of Sociology. Among her main research interests are neoliberal urban policies, grassroots resistance movements, and rights to the city. Her thesis focuses on neighborhood movements, originating from the inner-city poverty and conservation zones of Istanbul. As part of her doctoral research, she works closely with the volunteers for Istanbul-based civil initiatives and neighborhood organizations, critical of current urban change. Behi Ak is a cartoon artist, playwright, childrens book author, director, and architect. His childrens books and cartoons have been published in Turkey, Germany, Japan, Korea, and China, and featured in several exhibitions worldwide. His documentary film, The History of Banning in Turkish CinemaThe Black Curtain, won the best documentary film award in Ankara in 1994. He also received an honorary award in 2012 for Contribution to Architecture, from the Chamber of Architects for his cartoons, writings, plays, and his position on environmental and architectural issues. Asl Kyak Ingin architect, designer, and activist. She works in various fields such as design, architecture, city, production and artwith a focus on social, cultural, and economic aspects. She is also active in the city where urban regeneration or gentrification developments take place, by advocating sustainable and participatory models for the alternative visions. She is the president of the NGO, Human Settlement Association; and also developed the concept of the Made in S is hane project and initiative, as well as participatory and sustainable practices in order to stop the demolishment of Sulukule.

Chapter author and interviewer Demet Mutman is an architect who focuses on cities, urban development strategies, and possibilities of alternative spatial transformations by using short-term activities. She has a PhD from Istanbul Technical University, where she researched alternative models of urban transformation by examining short-term activities and designs as spatial catalysts. In 2009, she was responsible for the management of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award Istanbul. She is part of the Archis Interventions Divided Cities Network, which concentrates on the politics of space within divided regions that do not necessarily have visible borderlines. Mutman currently works at T.C. Maltepe University Faculty of Architecture in Istanbul and focuses on architectural and urban design, alternative readings of the city, and public spaces. Members of the Jury for the Award in Istanbul: Richard Burdett Director, Urban Age & Centennial Professor in Architecture and Urbanism, London School of Economics Arzuhan Dog an Yalindag Chair, Turkish Industrialists and Businessmens Association (TUSIAD) ag lar Keyder Behi Ak Enrique Norten Professor of Sociology, Bosphorus University Cartoonist, author, architect Founder, TEN Arquitectos, New York and Mexico City & Miler Chair of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania Anthony Williams Former Mayor of Washington, DC and is the Executive Director of the Global Government Han Tmertekin Architect, Mimarlar Design, & Visiting Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Mexico City
Ana lvarez

128

Mexico City

Profile

Population [metro/city]

20.4 11.2

Average density [metro/city]

million million

9,300 5,937
Diversity

Inhabitants/km2 Inhabitants/km2

7,854 1,495 390

Area occupied [metro/city] km2 km2

Indigenous, Spanish, British, Irish, Italian,German, French, Dutch, Syria, Lebanon, Chinese, Korean, South and Central American, Mexican

Gross domestic product (GDP) [$bn at PPPs]

144

Mexico City

INITIATIVES

Recovering Spaces for Life

Santa Fe is a neighborhood on the west side of Mexico City characterized by extreme socioeconomic contrasts: one can find an edge city with office towers that embody Mexicos participation in the global economy and shanty towns over ravines existing side by side. In 2005, Iberoamericana Universitya private institution located in Santa Fecreated the Coordination of Social Responsibility to build a bridge of cooperation between the different university departments and the marginalized areas of the surroundings. Among other initiatives, they fostered the project Recovering Spaces for Life, which focuses on the recovery of public spaces in the neighboring ravines, through different activities that create a sense of belonging in dwellers and promotes the leadership of community members. Under the guidance of the university, different local groups worked together to recover the riverbank, which was previously used as a sewer. They fixed the faades of houses along one kilometer of the river and built a green pedestrian corridor that goes from the riverbank to a formerly abandoned alley uphill, now accessible to disabled people and featuring a playground. They also built a greenhouse for growing tomatoes in what used to be a garbage dump, and transformed a residual space in a corner street with stairs into an open cultural forum. They also run programs for psychosocial risks prevention, technological literacy, job training; and they created a network that allows the people from those marginalized neighborhoods to find jobs at the business area of Santa Fe. Recovering Spaces for Life shows how in highly segregated societies, such as Mexico City, bridges among apparently untouchable sectors can be built and used to transform reality.

150

Mexico City

INTERVIEW

Government

Reality Surpasses Us: We Need to Be more Flexible and Porous

Felipe Leal is Head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development

Can you summarize the current attitude/policy of the municipality towards urban improvement and the redressing of inequality? Stop the city expansion over conservation land and give all the normative elements to make it grow inward. We are working for a compact, vertical, shared, inclusive, and extroverted city, improving the existing infrastructure and offering social housing in the central city to take people out of risk zones and give them property certainty. We are also broadening the concept of the public realm, looking at it in a more holistic way, with high-quality infrastructure as a priority. Do you think grassroots can complement the efforts of the public sector to integrate the city and improve livability in all areas? If so, how? I think we should overcome the extremely formal vision about public policies connected with urban planning. Almost all cities have their urban development departments and programs, but in most cases, they are a set of charters and norms consolidated within the institutional policies and the limits of government action. That is not bad, but we shouldnt miss the other perspective that comes from a more refined observer, which is the specific citizen. The problem with those general programs is that they standardize the physical and social conditions of cities, when it is really not like that, not even in developed cities. And those who live in physical or social marginalization are in many cases the ones who find new non-formal or non-traditional ways of organizing space. In Mexico City we have incorporated roundtables or committees that serve local proposals from all kinds of organizations. It all has to be based on dialogue, on understanding the other side, on acknowledging that there is a degree of specificity that doesnt allow us to do things mechanically.

Which governmental agencies/programs recognize the importance of community-led initiatives? At the borough level it varies a lot, for it depends to a great extent on the sensibility of the authorities. But at the citys central government level, there are several entities: the Social Development Department, which supports initiatives from vulnerable groups; the Institute of Housing serves many such initiatives, because there is a lot of housing in risk zones; and finally us, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which in many cases has to legalize or relocate informal settlements. How does this recognition affect the planning process in these areas? Can you give an example? Citizens proposed to us a very interesting legal status of family condominium. In Mexico City, the condominium generally consists of a building divided into clearly defined spaces with several owners. However, it is common to have a property for a family of fifteen members with three or four couples and where each uses a room or set of rooms. Land use would say it is single-family property, but it is not, because it is a subdivided family. So now family condominium is recognized as a subdivided property and this helps in services and credits for house improvements. Do you see scope for change to current planning methods based on the experiences of such projects? Do you think that there is a move in government towards integrating bottom-up with top-down planning initiatives? Most of the urban planning is still based on the nineteen-eighties urban zoning, without an understanding of social problems. But it is not enough to draw things on a map, because reality always surpasses us and we

need to have flexible tools to adapt. I am quite selfcritical about most of the borough and partial programs because they become so rigid that they tend to complicate rather than rationalize the problems, often pushing people towards informality. I think we need to become more porous in those programs to allow grassroots initiatives to find their place in official planning. On the other hand, the authority has missed the opportunity to communicate its vision for urban development. And for better or worse, it is the authority that has the panoramic vision and technical knowledge. Local projects can greatly enrich urban development with their timely and deeper sight, but they might not have the complete overview. How do you see the development of local bottom-up initiatives in the long term? What possible development scenarios might be envisaged for the future? All of these initiativesMiravalle, Codecosuggest that Mexico City is like an hydraulic system with many rusty closed valves, which only need to be oiled and opened for an amazing flow to come. We have to use the local culture and look at the everyday citythe little square, the garden, the remaining corner, the basketball courtto dignify them and create activities. I think we need to work on that scale. Public infrastructure is gaining a new role in how we design and envision the future of our city. I think that historically, Mexico City has been a place of neighborhoods and we should move back to that. For instance, something we have lost and should try to recover, are the markets. We have 325 public markets built during the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, which were created for many reasons; of course economic and supply reasons, but also to build community. These are big opportunities: 325 markets organized all around the territory. These spaces have an amazing potential to be transformed into real public spaces, they can be more permeable, grow, have parallel services. That is the kind of infrastructure that brings communities together, because those are places where many things happen.
Laura Janka is an Advisor for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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Mexico City

INTERVIEW

mediation

Braiding the Physical and the Social: A New Social Contract for the City
Jose Castillo is an architect, principal of Arquitectura 911SC, and visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design

Did the set of grassroots projects compiled by the award open another perspective over the city? I think that the range, scope, and geography of the proposals showed the multiplicities of the city: multiple geographies, topics, and groupsboth highly organized and sometimes less organizedbut above all multiple stakeholders involved in the definition and production of what an urban project means. In a way, the award showed how many Mexico Cities there are and this diversity talks about a vitality that was not present twenty or thirty years ago. What was the most remarkable thing about the award process? When one goes below the radar, one finds and discovers that there are many narratives already taking place in the city, some of them supported by social programs of the local governments and in some cases by the federal government, but also other narratives taking place by NGOs that we do not necessarily associate with the visible urban actions. I find this incredibly refreshing in the context of Mexico. It is fundamental to assume that the production of politics, the production of citizenship, the production of the polis, of the discussion of conflicts and resolutions in the city can involve many diverse agents, and not only traditional ones. The other remarkable thing is that all these projects have strong physical componentsa school over here, a set of steps going down to a ravine, a shed that it is used to cover a plaza and next to a communal kitchenthat produce social relationships. And I dont mean to minimize other forms of social transformation, but to go back to some of the arguments of the Urban Age project: space matters and sometimes it matters more than we give credit for.

To what extent do these grassroots initiatives have a role in creating new citizenship besides having physical impact? I think that as much as space produces new kind of citizenship, new citizens produce a different kind of space, and it is not a causality. It is not a chicken or egg dilemma, it is truly a correlation between how new, informed citizens can create new and better forms of city. And in that regard, those kind of new spaces of the citylet us think of a community kitchen, of a PET recycling facilities, of a plaza that is now used for dancing lessonsthose forms of occupation empower citizens in different ways: from nutrition and fitness to social and leisure activities, from economic retribution to learning. And I like this relationship in which it is not the physical that precedes the social, but is actually more of a braid. In braiding the two is that a new kind of citizenship is being created. Mexico City has a strong tradition of bottom-up initiatives, partly because it is pretty much a self-made city, but also because after the 1985 earthquake civil society became very active. What was new about the projects compiled in 2010? I would say there is a new social contract when it comes to urban projects and this social contract involves different forms of resistance but also different forms of engagement. If I have to say, the big shift from the nineteen-sixties, seventies, and eighties to the transformation of the city today has to do with when the stakeholders have determined it is important to resist, and when it is important to engage. I think it was quite emblematic that the final projects were not projects created in absolute autonomy. They were projects that shift from autonomy to engagement. They showed different levels of maturity, but the oldest projects have a learning curve, which includes not only

a broadening of the stakeholders, but also a broadening of topicsunderstanding that urbanity and the experience of the city happen in many arenas. When one looks at these successful grassroots initiatives it is inevitable to think about replicating them. How should replicability be understood? I believe that replicability can mean many things. It can mean the enthusiasm for social engagement and the possibility of transformation. It is also about finding the way in which the scale of different programs gets played out physically. And it is not a matter of just identifying a successful formulathink of el Faro de Orienteand sort of using it as a cookie-cutter but about actually finding the specific contingencies of groups, site, geographies, and problems and redefining what an urban action and urban intervention means today. The other issue of replicability has to do with the rapport of different stakeholders. I would say the form social projects take in the next few years will have to do with ingenuity in finding new social relationships. Many of these projects are in the fringes of the marginalized areas of the cityin suburbs with severe access restrictions. So if they were able to develop themselves separately from the center, I think their potential is very large; they have a great power. And the problems throughout the city are similar, so solutions can also be similar, however they must be created within communities; they cannot come or be imposed from the outside. Expansion cannot come from the top, because horizontal structures are what make these projects deeply rooted in communities. In fact, the most consolidated projects, the ones that have been able to expand beyond basic needs and open the social tissue to incorporate other actors, are the projects with long trajectories, but also with horizontal and open structures.
Betsabe Romero is a visual artist and jury member Deutsche Bank Urban Age AwardMexico City 2012

160

Mexico City

biographies

Francisco Javier Conde Gonzlez Doctorate in Education from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Conde has been working for the Miravalles Marist School for thirteen years and has promoted educational environment programs and social development in the area. Founding member of Miravalle Community Council, created in 2007.

in Mexico City and visiting professor at Harvard Universitys Graduate School of Design. Since 2005, Castillo has been curator of various international exhibitions. He is a member of the Advisory board of SCIFI at SCI-Arc and of the advisory board of Urban Age. Chapter Author and Interviewer:

Cape Town
Lindsay Bush

Felipe Leal Degree in Architecture from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Mexico City. First Public Space Authority in the Federal District. Honorary member of the National Academy of Architecture. Coordinator of Special Projects at UNAM, an area that fostered the inclusion of the Central University Campus in UNESCOs World Heritage List and that created a new transport system within the university campus. Principal of the School of Architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 19972005. Broadcaster of the radio program Architecture in Space and Time. Arturo Mier y Tern Degree in Architecture from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with a Masters in Urban Design and Regional Planning from the University of Edinburgh, and PhD candidate in urban planning at UNAM. Researcher, professor, and lecturer at different national and international universities. Since 1990, Director of Technology and Habitat in Large Cities, HABITEC. He is currently a technical advisor on various projects of the Federal District Government Housing Improvement Program and Community Program for Neighborhood Improvement. Argel Gmez Visual artist, graphic designer, and cultural promoter. Current coordinator of Central del Pueblo, a new cultural space in downtown Mexico City. He managed the arts and handcrafts workshops at Faro de Oriente, a cultural center in Mexico City, which has become a referent for cultural public policies. At the Faro, Gmez edited six books about cultural policies and teaching experiences in the art field. He studied a postgraduate curse of cultural policies given by Organization of Ibero-American States. Benjamn Gonzlez Cultural manager. Cofounder and former principal of Faro de Oriente Cultural Center. Former director of Culture at the Greater Metropolitan Municipality of Ecatepec and current principal of Central del Pueblo Cultural Center. Jose Castillo Degree in Architecture from the Universidad Iberoamericana and Doctorate in Design from Harvard University. With Saidee Springall, he is the principal of Arquitectura 911sc, a practice based in Mexico City. His writings have been published extensively in international journals and publications. He is a professor at the Universidad Iberoamericanas School of Architecture

Ana lvarez Researcher, editor, curator, and manager of interdisciplinary projects, focusing on the urban and cultural contemporary life of Mexico City. She graduated with a degree in Mathematics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, but since 2003 has been engaged in exploring, portraying, and narrating her hometown. Founding member of Citmbulos, an interdisciplinary collective of urban researchers formed by Fionn Petch, Valentina Rojas Loa, Christian von Wissel. With a special focus on daily life and street-level urban phenomena, the collective first published Citamblers: the Incidence of the Remarkable, Guide to the Marvels of Mexico City and has since then produced several national and international publications, exhibitions, workshops, drives, urban interventions, reaching a wide variety of audiences and spacesincluding the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, the German Center of Architecture in Berlin, and the Swiss Museum of Architecture in Basel. She also worked as coordinator and curatorial advisor in Mexico City for the international exhibition Our Cities, Ourselves, which was sponsored by the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy. She was the coordinator of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award in Mexico City. Members of the Jury for the Award in Mexico City: Vanessa Bauche Richard Burdett Actress and social activist Director, Urban Age & Centennial Professor in Architecture and Urbanism, London School of Economics Jose Castillo Architect, co-founder of arquitectura 911sc, professor at School of Architecture, Universidad Iberoamericana Denise Dresser Writer, political anaylist and academic, professor of political science at Instituto Tecnolgico Autnomo de Mxico Enrique Norten Founder, TEN Arquitectos, New York and Mexico City & Miler Chair of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania Betsabe Romero Anthony Williams Visual artist Former Mayor of Washington, DC and is the Executive Director of the Global Government Han Tmertekin Architect, Mimarlar Design, & Visiting Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Design

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Cape Town

Profile

Population [city]

3.74

Average density [metro/city]

million

1,425
Diversity

Inhabitants/km2

2,454 103

Area occupied [city] km2

Khoisan, Dutch, English, French, Madagascar, Mauritius, Ceylon, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Germans, Portuguese, Italians, Chinese, Xhosa, Zulu, Other Africans, South Africans,

Gross domestic product (GDP) [$bn at PPPs]

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Cape Town

TIME LINE AND population growth

20

10

1600
1652 Jan van Riebeeck establishes a way-station for ships. Town laid out on a Dutch grid pattern and farmlands established. 1688 French Huguenots arrive. 16601806 40,000 slaves are imported from West Africa, Madagascar, India, Ceylon, Malaya, and Indonesia to work on farms. 18651905 Immigration: workingclass immigrants arrive from all over Europe to settle in the city. German farmers develop Philippi for market gardening. 1814 Capital of the British Cape Colony. Urban growth continues haphazardly at the hands of developers. 1836 The Great Trek: 10,000 Dutch families leave the Colony to travel north.

1700
1870s80s Trade to the port is increased by Highveld gold rush. Segregation begins, as native Africans are moved to Ndabeni. 1930s-40s 1910 Legislative capital of the Union of South Africa is Cape Town. 19101941 Suburban development along racial lines is influenced by the British garden city movement, and the oversized, zoned planning of Modernism. Foreshore reclamation begins, linking harbor to the central city. 1950s 1924 Growth of planned townships on the Cape Flats: slums Act allows for forced removals in the inner city. 1948

1800
1960s Large industrial areas grow up on the outskirts of the city. Railway lines and roads are used to strategically separate areas. 1965 District Six declared a whites-only region and 60,000 forcibly removed, many to Lavender Hill and surroundings. Slum clearance accelerates, forcing thousands into hostels and tented emergency camps.

1900
1970s80s Steady growth of Cape Flats townships and informal settlements, most notably Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain. Violent clashes and forced removals continue. 1988 Touristic development of the V&A Waterfront. It becomes the countrys most popular tourist destination with 1.5 million visitors monthly. 1990s Urban sprawl: end of influx control leads to rural migration and rapid growth of underserviced, overcrowded Cape Flats settlements. Informal economy and violence levels boom due to unemployment and inequality. Gated communities for the rich spring up in response to widespread lawlessness. 201011 1990 Abolishment of the last of the Apartheid laws by President F.W. De Klerk. 1994 First democratic election in South Africa sees Nelson Mandela elected president. 2000s

2000

Urban planning aims for complete separate development: National Party elected on a platform of Apartheid, leading to the Group Areas Act.

Central City Improvement District (CCID) established with a focus on safety and urban maintenance. Integrated Development Plan (IDP), a 5-year government plan, lays solid framework for urban improvement.

Soccer World Cup builds on infrastructure and public space improvements underway in the city. World Design Capital 2014 bid won by Cape Town.

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Cape Town

INITIATIVEs

Mothers Unite

Born in a mothers home in 2007, Mothers Unite provides an alternative for children aged three to fifteen: a safe haven from the gangs, drugs, and violence characterizing street and home environments in the Lavender Hill area. A core volunteer staff of six mothers from the neighborhood provides 120 kids with educational programs and healthy meals, three afternoons a week. Programs include storytelling, literacy, computers, and art therapy. Operating on the grounds of the municipal Seawinds Multipurpose Hall, they have built an infrastructure village from donated shipping containers, arranged around the perimeter to create an oasis-like space. Facilities include a number of activity rooms, a library, kitchen, office, sheltered area, playground, and vegetable gardens. Mothers Unite have partnered with a range of organizations: securing donations-in-kind from international aid agencies, corporations, and the Church; working with other NGOs to train gardeners and plant trees, and with universities to start training in emergency first aid response. Their newest additions are a wendy house training and yoga center, and a retrofitted container with toilets. In an area suffering from high levels of unemployment, poverty, and domestic violence, the projects success lies in the way it addresses the family unit. Through providing a safe place for children to play, explore, and develop, the mothers reach out to families to encourage a commitment to community development, and children have shown great improvements in both social interaction and school performance.

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Cape Town

INTERVIEW

government

Breaking it Down to Build it Up

Michael Krause is team leader of the Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (VPUU) program

Can you summarize the current attitude/policy of the municipality towards urban improvement and the redressing of inequality? We are seeing a big shift from a sectoral focus to an area-based focus. Most of the project entries were around people making a change in a particular small area in their neighborhood. The city has understood this as a positive thing, and it becomes apparent in their strategy document, the IDP. The VPUU is a good example as its neighborhoods are still manageable for the city, yet the level of detail makes it possible for people to understand and influence the process. Do you think grassroots can complement the efforts of the public sector to integrate the city and improve livability in all areas? If so, how? From my perspective certainly, grassroots initiatives are important. Again its a question of a scale that people understand and feel comfortable working with. Most of these programs have tried to combine strategy with implementation, and thats often the missing link within the City: the IDP tries to do it, but its often very difficult because line departments work in sectoral areas. We have to recognize the value of cross-pollinating between strategy and local knowledge. Which governmental agencies/programs recognize the importance of community-led initiatives? How does this affect the planning process in these areas? Can you give an example? With the shift in approach, funding is increasingly allocated on a local-area basis according to need. The city has gained the support of Province and National Treasury to work in transversal teams and follow proper methodology, so they begin with a baseline survey followed by a Community Action Plan, and then seek funding accordinglythats a positive move. An example is the Neighborhood Development Partnership grantswhere the city seeks national funding for focus areasand international funding as with the VPUU.

We need to establish who the intermediary is between government, the public sector, and the community, because in practice they are often unable to communicate. A forum where different stakeholders can talk to each other is key to any development strategy. Do you see scope for change to current planning methods based on the experience of such projects? Do you think there is a move towards integrating bottom-up with top-down planning initiatives? A current international trend is the peoples budget, translated in Cape Town as Ward allocations. VPUU, for example, uses a Social Development Fund thats linked to a local development strategy (the Community Action Plan) and to the broader IDP, opening up many more possibilities. Again, it is about scale. Government favors large-scale projects, and bottom-up initiatives require small, localized interventions and investments. That vehicle needs to be found and the Ward allocation is a good start. As 99% of these projects sit within the framework of the IDP, they certainly play an important role.

In Cape Town, most of the land occupied by projects belongs to the public sector. Many who take the initiative to just do it start out as lawbreakers, yet support from the government has generally followed. What is your opinion on this? With nearly a third of people living in informal settlements, its almost the norm that you have to begin as a lawbreaker. Within any government framework, it is very difficult to move change, so you need to have those champions change always requires action. Government is realizing that their policies are not always applicable on the ground and that people have needed to embark on a detour to get things done, however criminal or violent activities cannot be seen as a solution to our current problems.

Government organizations face grave difficultiessuch How do you see the development of local bottom-up initiatives in the long term? What possible development scenarios might be envisaged for the future? I believe the bottom-up approach is the best way to embed democracy in South Africa and fulfill the mandate of the Constitution. We are moving from a closed system in the past into a society that is much more open and equal, and the bottom-up approach is part of this shift. What is difficult is for the public sector to be open enough to allow these initiatives to flourish. However, I do think there are many opportunities to be found in the IDP, especially if we focus on that intermediary between government and grassroots. as lack of capacity and finance, politicization of service delivery, vexed inter-governmental relations, cumbersome decision-making processes, and lack of flexibilitywhich inhibit cross-cutting analysis and decision making. While there is a strong argument for civil society organizations to become more involved in local development processes, many have been demobilized, have few resources, or are themselves divided. Private sector organizations have resources, but are often out of touch with the complexities of community and city needs. In many cities, cross-sector partnerships are becoming increasingly popular in areas of policy making and implementation that were previously the primary domain of the state. Partnerships, it is argued, can be seen as a new model of governance.
Andrew Boraine, CEO of the Cape Town Partnership and DBUAA 2012 jury member

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Cape Town

Biographies

Carol Jacobs Carol is a proud single mother of three who lives in an RDP house in Seawinds, a neighborhood in the Lavender Hill area. She finished grade seven and went on to initiate Mothers Unite, an inspiring, award-winning organization that is gaining increasing recognition for rebuilding a community through the hearts and minds of its children. Michael Krause Michael is a place-maker who believes in negotiating solutions to shape urban environments. He grew up in East Germany, studied Urban Design and Spatial Planning, and relocated to South Africa in 1995. Since 2006, he has led a highly dedicated transversal team of people to implement and develop the VPUU program, which has had significant impact on crime in parts of Khayelitsha, creating safe, vibrant public spaces in one of the citys poorest areas. Edgar Pieterse Director of the African Center for Cities at UCT, Edgar is a native Capetonian whose research and publications cover such themes as African urbanism, cultural planning, regional and macro development, and governance. He fills several teaching and advisory roles and holds the DST/NRF SA Chair in Urban Policy. Malika Ndlovu Malika is an internationally published South African poet, playwright, performer, and arts activist. She has lived most of her adult life in Cape Town, has wide range of experience in arts management and currently operates as an independent artist under the brand New Moon Ventures, working towards healing through creativity. Councilor Shaun August Shaun August grew up playing on the streets of Lavender Hill. His strong organizational skills, discipline, and familiarity with the criminal element come from ten years as a warden at Pollsmoor prison. A committed family man, he is well known in the community and was elected as the Democratic Alliance Councilor for his very own Ward 67.

Chapter Author and Interviewer: Lindsay Bush Lindsay is an architect and urban designer who recently relocated to Cape Town to manage the 2012 DBUA Award. Born, raised, and educated in Durban, her family emigrated to Australia in the mid-nineteen-nineties and she chose to stay behind. She has traveled widely, working and studying in numerous places around the world. Her professional interests include urban regeneration, housing, community and educational spaces, and the in-situ upgrade of informal settlements. Lindsays work has been profiled in several local publications and her most recent contribution was to the book Building Brazil compiled by the MAS Urban Design researchers at the ETH in Zrich. Since the award, she has been living in Cape Town, setting up a legacy network called Urban Agents, and in the coming years will be applying her skillset to the facilitation of the World Design Capital 2014 Ward projects. Lindsay is passionate, energetic, and fiercely optimistic about the future of her beloved country. Members of the Jury for the Award in Cape Town Andrew Boraine Chief executive of the Cape Town Partnership, adjunct professor at African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town Richard Burdett Director Urban Age & Centennial Professor in Architecture and Urbanism, London School of Economics Malika Ndlovu Enrique Norten Poet, playwright, performer and arts consultant Founder, TEN Arquitectos, New York and Mexico City & Miler Chair of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania Edgar Pieterse Nonfundo Walaza Director of African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town Civil rights campaigner and clinical psychologist, chief executive of Desmond Tutu Peace Center Anthony Williams Former Mayor of Washington, DC and is the Executive Director of the Global Government

Common Points

202

common points

Interview

Cities Are an Expression of Human Needs

Wolfgang Nowak was the initiator of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award

In your view, what do the projects associated with the DBUA Award achieve? What similarities and differences stood out between the projects in different cities? These projects are very similar. There is always a meeting place, a garden, a kitchen, an educational facility; a place where people come together to learn, to teach, to share and exchange experiences and ideas, and to be citizens. In most of the cities, we found these similar formations. In my opinion, the only difference was in Istanbul, where these spaces seemed to be introverted; there we found a music school for young students that learn how to play an instrument. If we look back to the first settlements in human history, it has always been about providing residents with safety, food, a spiritual center; and one might also notice the similarity of their plans. I think cities are the expression of human needs and that we have a plan of what a city should be inside us. Overall, do you think these initiatives have been successful? If so, what key lessons might we learn from them? Cities are no longer built for humans, they are built for investors. They have become like machines, not to house people and to create an environment that enables them to live a better quality of life. They consist of iconic buildings designed by star architects but are in the danger of becoming as boring as shopping malls. Every mayor seems to be happy to have these superstars designing cities, but they are only designing skylines. Instead of concentrating on skylines, we should be building cities thinking of human needs and ground realities. It is not only the investor and the architect who should participate in planning. It is important to engage and involve the people who live there as well. Finally, we should have an assessment of what is being built by the inhabitants themselves. We should ask: is this environment enabling people to have a better life or is it only creating static monument-like buildings

and urban environments? This is the lesson learned from these initiatives, the tremendous power and capability of what local residents and ordinary people can do and achieve. How do you see the potential for the development of such projects impacting cities in the future? Are they scalable and/or replicable? Or, which features that you recognize as being specific to the nature of these projects have the potential to develop further? We should not replicate them. (We have replicated shopping malls!) I imagine we should have a thousand different centers, like in the jungle where we find a diversity of beautiful new plants. These initiatives are a great experiment of people finding out what a better city can be. They imply the argument that we should enable people to initiate and build something, not exactly replicating them, but encouraging their participation within a framework. I think we should protect those community initiatives, which keep cities livable and enrich them. We should protect them from investors. We should take these initiatives as a reference and learn from them. Can you envision possible future scenarios resulting from the pioneerism displayed in these projects? If we want to be successful, the city of the twenty-first century cannot, for instance, have only one center. These cities can be enriched by having multiple, different centers built by a multitude of people with different backgrounds. I dont mean to build ghettos, but many centers where different communities and ethnicities can mix and thus foster diversity. In this scenario, we should have a multitude of city centers created by citizens. This could look a bit like the different markets in different neighborhoodswhich are all very attractive, as we know from London, Paris, Berlin or So Paulothat greatly enrich a city. See Cape

Towns Mothers Unite, for example. It could become an aflourishing, fantastic center for that area, which is secure, inviting, and has something to offer through an educational project hosted in a civic space. That is the vision of one center, which would also be connected to other centers throughout that city.

Wolfgang Nowak is Director of the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International Forum of Deutsche Bank. Wolfgang Nowak initiated the Urban Age program, an international investigation into the future of the worlds mega-cities in the twenty-first century jointly organized with the London School of Economics. He has held various senior positions in Germanys state and federal governments, Frances Centre national de la recherche scientifique (French National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris, and UNESCO. After unification, he was State Secretary of Education in Saxony from 1990 to 1994. In addition, he was Director-General for Political Analysis and Planning at the German Federal Chancellery from 1999 to 2002. He lectures and publishes widely on academic issues and is a regular commentator for German television and newspapers. He is honorary Vice President of the British think tank Policy Network, Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington, and Fellow at the NRW-School of Governance at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

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common points

Final Considerations
Marcos L. Rosa and Ute E. Weiland, editors

and facilities. The social mechanisms behind these initiatives reveal new modes of negotiation, participation, and cooperation. Spatially, they reveal fields: the spaces they occupy, in which they install or take place. Their tactical nature produces operational knowledge through the design of strategies that change specific spots, applied over short or longer timeframes. They

Based on the material compiled for each of the five cities, we would like to draft some conclusions that might point out pathways towards the planning and construction of this open, inclusive, participatory city. We aim to identify and pull together common threads, assess the potential of their combined efforts and findings, and indicate actors that might lead the way in developing possible new scenarios.

Participation The discussion around participatory processes in urban planning is by no means a new one. In recent decades however, we notice an increasingly humanistic approach towards the revindication of cities. It can be seen in the work of art collectives with local communities during the nineteen-nineties (Bourriaud, 1998; Kester, 2004; Bishop, 2006), and more pronouncedly in the last decade in architecture, urban design, and urbanism: community initiatives, Do-ityourself building, and other means by which tactical knowledge is implemented and tested on site (Smith, 2007; Borasi and Zardini, 2008; Christiaanse, 2010; Sejima, 2010; Lepik, 2010; Ho, 2012). These processes allow for direct and proactive participation in the construction and adaptation of cities according to local needs. For a whole host of reasons, governments have been unable to provide for large portions of their cities inhabitants. Imbalances are rife: some have too much, while others have too little, and the latter can justifiably become distrustful of or lose faith in governance, its policies, and plans. Does this motivate people to participate, to make their voices heard and be actively involved in the inherently political process of city-making? Both in spite of poor relationships, and because of sound partnerships with municipal governments, citizens are becoming active. When we talk about active participation, civil society is becoming increasingly engaged in actions that aim to improve the common urban environment. The nineteen-sixties was a decade in which a participatory culture was marked by radical political moments and demonstrations that made a call for participation (Debord, 1961), focused in the everyday (Lefebvre, 1947, 1961,1981; de Certeau, 1980), and this gave rise to participatory urban design and planning. Concepts of open frameworks that invite interaction have been translated in visions such as Constant Nieuwenhuys New Babylon (195954), and in Yona Friedmans La Ville

Spatiale (1960), among many others. Authors such as Jane Jacobs were dedicated to the study of the neighborhood scale and diversity in local design (1961). Jan Gehls work in Copenhagen demonstrates the success of cities designed for people, (1987, 2010) and participatory experiences and processes have also found fertile ground in developing countries such as Brazil (Lagnado, 2006; Frana, 2012). Yet, with a few exceptions, participatory planning has, to a great extent, remained in the realm of theory. In light of a growing culture of participation, could we then propose that we are moving from a theoretical discourse to a practical approach? Small-scale, self-driven community initiatives provide immediate solutions to urgent, everyday problems, in the form of social innovation. Do they also contribute towards a better scenario? Can they effect positive transformation? Will these initiatives remain local, or will they be incorporated by governmental frameworks and policies? Should these innovations influence the rules that determine the way we act in, educate, govern, plan, and build our cities? The innovation here is not necessarily about a final product, or about physical built space. These are important pioneer testing grounds, where process is paramount. They uncover inventive ways of reading and responding to urban realities, and present learning opportunities by way of exchange in observing other cultures, experiences, and cities. They reveal the fragility of a deterministic urban model that relies on aged instruments and regulations that fail to respond to the complexity inherent in our cities. What kind of planning knowledge might we draft from these projects? We might start by questioning the importance of these initiatives to the adaptation of urban space. Politically, they are fundamental to unveil real demands and make legible flaws in current policy, a prerequisite to moving forward. Socially, they act as soft infrastructure, working with the city at a local level to provide neighborhoods with much-needed services

rarely design to determine, tending rather to arrange open, flexible frameworks that can evolve over time and accommodate several overlapping programs. These three aspects introduce perspectives that give us clues as to how we may begin to approach modifying the planning status quo.

1. The Social Mechanisms and Operational Modes of Community Initiatives

Recognizing Problems, Unveiling Potential,

Making Community Initiatives Visible A marked improvement can be seen to result from each of the initiatives profiled in this book. They remove garbage, plant new trees and gardens, organize community meeting places, upgrade open spaces for activities, construct clean toilets, build playgrounds, libraries, and classrooms for workshops and skills training. They have added value to the built environment, whether by conscious acts or by experimental evolution over time. They upgrade derelict spaces into more harmonious and beautiful places, creating qualities that forge encounters and coexistence, and transform residents perceptions of everyday life. We are interested in understanding how these processes take place, how the operative notion of the common is generated. It is our intention to make the processes visible, document them and share the compiled knowledge. The community initiatives showcased in this book present enormous potential to catalyze urban change, based not only on their accomplishments, but also on what they can teach us. Their mechanisms and operational models have the potential to feed back into the architecture and urban planning disciplines, augmenting the palette of tools with which they shape the city. A new culture of planning and design informed by grassroots initiatives would involve assembling a more inclusive, transversal, transparent, and porous framework inside which these projects could flourish. These initiatives also have potential to impact upon urban policy, and can provide valuable lessons for governance, not least around strategies for community engagement.

Inspiring Solutions Projects start in response to issues that directly affect peoples lives. The nature and intensity of problems varies from city to city, as do the projects and programs implemented to solve them. In Mumbai, the lack of sanitation, the prevalence of disease, and the lack of communal space and services in slums are the sort of problems that act as strong motivators for community projects. As observed, sanitation and recovery programs often start by cleaning an area with the help of a community, an important step as it tackles not only the problem of waste, but also the culture of littering and dumping on the citys streets and vacant lots. Jeff Anderson who started Biourban (p. 76) in So Paulo explains how the cleaning of those garbage dumps represents a sudden change in attitude towards collective space; a change that fosters community organization and further translates into physical improvements such as the addition of plants, urban furniture and playgroundsnew meeting spaces that are used by residents like small, open-air living rooms. In Cape Town, Carol Jacobs of Mothers Unite (p. 182) explains how the reality of hungry kids playing in the street with nowhere to do homework or research, inspired her to make the first move. A high number of education and skills training programs, often combined with urban farming, address the citys most pressing issues. Problems of similar nature have inspired action in Mexico City. Communities realized they were losing areas for much-needed public space and services, and reacted by defending and appropriating existing derelict land to create facilities for health, food, work,

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