arch-peace editorials

One Answer

2009-10-18T22:02:00.012+11:00

In my previous editorial (September 2008) I posed a single question – ‘what role can architects play in improving the lives of the poor?’ I wrote the editorial as I was preparing to coordinate groups of postgraduate architecture working on two community development projects – the first in rural Thailand and the second in Australia’s ‘top-end’.

I stated in my editorial that many architects have worked in the community development field and spoke of their hopes, their shortcomings and of their varying states between. I spoke of cases where communities were reluctant to be involved, where local politics intervened, where architects failed to understand their clients, and of the effects when collective spirit is destroyed. I mentioned that in projects such as these there was much to go wrong. I spoke of the need to look for (and embrace) small victories and have modest aims. What did I do with my two projects and what were the outcomes?

In the last year I have coordinated two projects with Melbourne School of Design students from the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. The first project was in rural Thailand and the second in one of Darwin’s ‘town camps’. In both cases our team consulted with a variety of stakeholders, designed and then built shelters at full-scale alongside local workers. Working with partner organizations we addressed ‘real-world’ problems and engaged with issues of sustainability in their many complex forms – cultural, environmental, economic and technical.

We knew that in projects like this excellent preparation was the key. A series of preliminary exercises had the students conducting research, convening seminars, designing prototypes, documenting the construction process and scheduling and sourcing construction materials. This enabled them to confidently begin prefabricating some building elements in the Faculty workshop. Once the prefabricated components were complete the teams moved to the University’s rural campus at Creswick for on-site construction. Here the students gained confidence, their familiarity with the tools and materials grew and their problem solving skills were put to the test over a three-day period.

Students learning to use construction tools in the workshop

Prototypes under construction at the University's rural campus

These preliminary exercises led towards the main component of each project – students forming partnerships to work outside the university on outreach projects. In both projects the subject coordinators have worked alongside students and community representatives building structures of significant size and complexity.

In 2008 a group of sixteen Melbourne School of Design students worked with students from Bangkok’s Thammasat University, Population and Community Development Association (a Thai NGO) and the Ban Nong Thong Lim community to build a sala (pavilion) for patients waiting at the government health clinic. Community representatives requested that the sala work in the traditional way and be open air and welcoming to the people using the clinic. A wise choice of construction technologies was a key consideration. After so much regional deforestation most contemporary construction in Thailand now uses concrete – but this creates all sorts of environmental problems.

The sala under construction by the health clinic.

The sala nearing completion

Our sala, built with steel framing and composite materials, tested possibilities to link traditional lightweight construction techniques with contemporary construction materials. In a broader sense this was testing possibilities that new housing could be built with traditional ideologies – reducing the need for air-conditioning and maintaining the open-air spaces that enhance community cohesion – as well as using new materials with lower environmental costs. The project will continue with an ongoing research project investigating links between construction technologies, environmental costs and the cultural behaviours that accompany various uses of space. In 2010 a new team of students from both universities will again collaborate with the NGO and Ban Nong Thong Lim community to investigate housing types using lightweight materials.

The second of our on-going projects is located in Australia’s ‘top-end’. Although the climate and need for housing is similar to Thailand there are vastly different cultural contexts. The federal government’s Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) and well-publicised ‘intervention’ program have brought indigenous housing to the attention of mainstream Australia. Whereas the agencies once responsible for indigenous housing in the Northern Territory were criticised for too little consultation the claim today is that there is too much consultation with too little housing being built. Today’s media provides many commentaries speaking of the vast sums allocated by the federal government but with little (or no) housing having been recently built. Paradoxically there are reports from the communities themselves that the consultation process is inadequate. How much consultation with indigenous communities is the ‘right’ amount? How should this consultation process be managed and with what outcomes in mind?

With these questions in mind two groups of Melbourne School of Design student have been involved in subjects that work with two indigenous communities in Darwin’s ‘town camps’. At the community’s request early projects looked at providing design ideas for housing ‘long-grassers’ – generally itinerant young men who have been held responsible for many of the problems facing indigenous communities. However after consultation students were invited to recycle one of the derelict houses in the Gudorrka Community. The steel framed houses (nicknamed ‘chicken coops’ by all concerned) were in appalling condition with no bathroom or cooking facilities and no outdoor shaded areas.

The 'chicken coop' house before renovation

The interior of the 'chicken coop'

With $50,000 funding from a variety of sources the sixteen students, two staff and help from local men and children we ‘blitzed’ the house over a ten day period and recycled it into a respectable house. The new residents – one of whom had been born in the house three decades ago – were eager participants in the process and are delighted with the outcome.

A verandah was added to provide much needed 'indoor/outdoor' space

The new interior

We reclad the interior, enclosed two more bedrooms, built an internal bathroom, tiled the wet areas, installed a new stainless steel kitchen and added louvres to the windows.

The renovated house has significantly less environmental impact than a new house, cost one-tenth as much and was completed in a vastly shorter time-span. It also linked the indoors with outdoors to provide greater levels of comfort and a closer connection with the land. This project did not end there – the students then used their experience to design some further facilities for this community and the neighbouring ‘Knuckies Lagoon’ mob. Their designs are being reviewed by both mobs, and local government funding agencies, before another group of students comes to continue the project in 2010.

The new verandah becomes an ‘oasis’ for people to gather

Have I learned something useful?

These projects revealed their small victories and there was much for us to learn. It seemed – to use the words of one of the local agencies providing the funding – that we worked with the community rather than for it. This is an interesting distinction. The students, and I give them heaps of credit for this, really engaged with the local people of all ages. Unlike building contractors – who are on wages and predetermined schedules – we made the time to consult, get to know the people and involve them in the process. In the indigenous community the kids were really drawn to us and we should make an effort to further include them in the future (alongside their parents). We were also flexible enough to be able to change our plans as we went through the construction phase – buildings were rotated minutes prior to earthworks beginning, additional items were added or deleted as we went along and so on. The construction processes were fluid and dynamic.

These structures, in both Thailand and Darwin, are only parts of a larger process. The intent has been to use the construction processes and outcomes as a way to stimulate further discussions with the community groups involved. Marginalised communities are not well used to making decisions about their environments and their shelter. Traditionally they have had little or no choice. The process of talking, designing and then building together opens up many opportunities for a more useful dialogue which then enriches the ideas, processes and outcomes for the next project and so on.

The bottom line is that I am convinced that there is a need for architects in community development projects such as these. Traditionally projects might have the involvement of bureaucrats, aid workers, engineers, accountants, builders, anthropologists and the like, who do have great skills but remain narrow in focus. Not many can balance the complex and interlinked variety of needs and at the same time produce a tangible outcome. At the same time we are fortunate that we work within the university structure that enables these projects to develop in a ‘laboratory’ (to use a popular word at this time) setting free (or relatively free) from commercial obligations.

David O'Brien
Architects for Peace, October 2009

Yellow Urban Alternatives for a Green and Orange Context—Belfast, Northern Ireland

2009-09-14T21:22:00.009+10:00

Belfast, the home of the Titanic, is a city evolving out of a history of conflict and distress. It is witnessing continuous civil and urban transformations; a transition from a troubled urban entity to a lively vibrant city. When I went to the city about 7 years ago for a short visit, the city was starting to get out of its sleepy, scary, and dark image—from what I felt and was told. Since March 2008 however, I was attracted by Belfast’s new image as a tourist destination with historic depth, unparalleled in many cities. I was also ensnared by the idea that a city I have seen a few years ago has changed beyond recognition and keeps changing for the better.

The Urban Reality of Belfast
Despite the fact that Northern Ireland’s peace process began in the mid 1990’s, the city is still essentially divided between the two dominant communities, Catholic and Protestant. While the east and south of the city are diverse enough, these single-identity communities continue to exist in many parts of the north and west. They are partially separated by ‘peace walls’. Records indicate that the number of these walls has increased since the beginning of the peace process. At the last count there were 41walls or similar such constructions. Here I relate to my earlier editorial of February 2008(1) and insert Robert Frost’s famous Poem: Mending Wall. Frost reminds us of offensive building acts when he says: Before I built a wall I'd ask to know... What I was walling in or walling out... And to whom I was like to give offence. Introducing diversity is thus a critical challenge to Belfast’s urban designers and architects, which keeps posing itself on any urban discourse about the city’s future.

Looking at the urban reality of Belfast, one can argue that the city still suffers the impact of thirty years of civil conflict. Such an impact continues to be felt as much in the current urban growth of the city as it was during periods of contention. Notably, the structure of governance remains centralized—yet locally unaccountable to a great extent —while the development of civil society, especially in the center, north and west of the city, is typically hindered by importunate sectarianism. As well, the economic life of the region continues to be distracted and misrepresented by state financial backing and also by the very recent paramilitary intrusion(2). In parallel to these realities, corporate and business actors dominate the development process, yet security and protection mindsets keep producing urban fragments and in some cases intentional community segregation, admitting and fostering the presence of “single-identity communities.”

The Building Initiative and the Yellow Space Metaphor
In response to these urban and institutional realities, an advocacy group of committed architects and urban designers from the University of Ulster formed the Building Initiative (BI)(2). It is a project by Antje Buchholz, Miriam de Burca, Gregor Harbusch, Orla McKeever, Deirdre McMenamin, Conor Moloney, Jürgen Patzak-Poor and Dougal Sheridan. The BI is supported by the University of Ulster and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Special Initiative for Architecture and the Built Environment.

The BI produced a traveling installation that was first shown in Belfast and was recently packaged in a publication titled “Yellow Space” to explore possibilities for city living as a neutral reality. The BI and its underlying Yellow Space event and activities suggest a critique of current urban design and development strategies by paving the road for introducing a series of ‘Civil Enterprise” sub-initiatives amenable to the creation of accessible, integrated places. The team proposes a balanced approach that integrates both top down instruments and bottom up strategies together with capacity building(3). Remarkably, the BI opposes practices characterized by heavy discourse on identity politics and attempts to introduce the politics of place.

Figure 1:

The Yellow metaphor as an active neutrality

Figure 2:

A traveling installation – a catalyst for yellow urban alternatives

Yellow is utilized as a metaphor for the types of desired spaces the BI calls for. The team argues that Yellow is often used as a sign for shared objects such as the yellow book, the city cabs, and the post-it notes. It represents an active neutrality – a common ground – a common language created through usefulness. It imbibes the qualities of diversity, access, utility, positive dialogue, and consensus—qualities that are under risk in most contemporary cities, not just Belfast.

Color is loaded with meaning…. So was the BI team successful in identifying Yellow for their responsive initiative? One would conceive more qualities of Yellow as a striking color based on research on color and color therapy. As infants, children have a natural preference for Yellow as a luminous color, they start liking it but they grow less fond of it as they mature. Also, Yellow comes as the sixth preferred color in international ranking(4). Yellow was described as a color that demands attention. For Van Gogh, Yellow was an obsession, and he often wrote about seeking the "high yellow note," a quest to paint life in scenes of both health and disease, which indicates ultimate neutrality by utilizing Yellow to express polar qualities.

While the BI team envisioned the multifaceted nature and impact of ‘Yellow,’ I should refer to the Yellow Arches of Belfast, which express another historical depth to the predilections of Yellow. While most cities worldwide have their landmarks in building forms, Belfast has its own and unique landmarks; Samson and Goliath cranes that were built for the construction of battleships and cruise liners. Samson and Goliath are monstrous Yellow arches that stand in the old Harland and Wolff shipyards on the banks of River Lagan. Each crane has a span of 140 meters (459 ft) and can lift loads to a height of 70 meters (230 ft), with a combined lifting capacity of over 1,600 tonnes, one of the largest in the world(5) .

The Yellow Space as one of the important outcomes of the Building Initiative asks two simple yet striking questions: How Yellow is Belfast and how can it become more Yellow? Simply, if cities had a color – would that color be Yellow! While my discussion with many Northern Irish friends tells me that there is no preference for stereotyping, there is a tremendous degree of success in selecting Yellow as an in-between color and a metaphor for urban neutrality, where Orange typically represents the Protestant community and the Green represents the Catholic community.

Initiatives within the BI
A series of events were conducted as part of the overall BI. The installation included a series of photographs that represent urban alternatives from cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, San Diego, and Zurich. Images from these cities were displayed to show how people are taking initiatives through socio-economic and socio-cultural activities that cross the boundaries of identity, income, social class, and ethnicity. The argument is that initiatives in those cities share the idea of creating yellow places. The intention of the BI team is thus to expand possibilities rather than impose ideals, and concomitantly, attempt to apply lessons learned from those cities. Two modes of actions were conceived as the backbone of the initiative; instrumental actions through yellow initiatives including thematic workshops, actions plans among other activities, and communicative actions through constructing yellow objects where the purpose is to demonstrate possible ways in which people can take initiatives. The object was a yellow news stand which distributes free copies of the yellow press, a newspaper that outlines the activities and reports on the projects, workshops, and other related events.

Figure 3:

Yellow is portrayed as urban neutrality that could promote dialogue and engagement, identity within diversity, access and usefulness.

The Yellow Space publication also outlines a number of thematic workshops addressing potential projects and critically analyzes them in terms of challenges, context, opportunities and objectives. Among these projects are a proposal for a new type of public space—a bonfire recycling center, a preservation proposal of the Castle-Court Shopping mall area in the city center, a proposal for the creation of a pathfinder scheme to develop a model for future mixed use developments, and investigating contested spaces without challenging territorial boundaries of different communities. An important outcome is also a website that outlines the thesis of the BI project and how it could be applied to other cities such as Manchester(6).

Figure 4:

Dialogical integration and initiatives across the boundaries of identity

Figure 5:

The Yellow Press: April and Sept 2008 issue covers

The Woodvale Hub—a Park for Everyone and a Community Shared Space
Woodvale Park is an important contribution of the BI. Located in the north west of the city, the park is over 120 years old. As a typical Victorian park, it has a bandstand, flowerbeds, and large trees. A road was proposed through the park involving destruction of many features and demolition of many trees. The ‘Friends of Woodvale Park’ was formed to resist the implementation of the proposal, which was rejected. The group then approached the BI team to engage in discussions on social issues and potentials the park could offer. A series of workshops and exploratory events were carried out in local schools and in the park. They involved gaming techniques, discussions with youth about the values and qualities of the park, then with architecture students at the University of Ulster for generating ideas. These resulted in a design brief and a proposal that accommodated needs and concerns of different parties.

As a citizen-led enterprise (7), the proposed project includes a HUB (Hybrid Use Building), which would be made up of indoor and outdoor spaces for a wide range of events and activities relating to both the park and the wider communities. These could include a new path and gate between the park and the adjacent shopping centre, community gardens, a sheltered outdoor seating space for events like cinema or concerts, an indoor multi-use space, a multi-purpose sports pitch and café or kiosk. Notably, a strategy has been developed so that different parts of the proposal can be added over time based on funding.

Figure 6:

Deirdre McMenamin and Dougal Sheridan of the BI leading a design workshop and a group discussion on the future of Woodvale park.

The “Plug-in Path” is a central design component introduced to provide a short cut and direct connection between the park and the nearby shopping centre. This is to increase the movement of people so that the feeling of safety is enhanced. The Plug-in Path is a programmed surface - i.e. it contains lighting, seating, play equipment, etc as well as an electricity and water supply which can be tapped into as required. It contains everything needed to allow different events to take place including a food market and outdoor concerts. The Plug-in Path connects all the HUB facilities; it is the shared surface that is used by everyone from all age-groups.

“Community Gardens” are an important component of the design concept; plots of land gardened essentially by the local community. They were introduced to imbibe the attitude of sharing, the sense of ownership and partnership. The intention is to grow them collectively, with everyone working together. The BI team, together with different parties involved, conceive these gardens as providing a leisure activity for families, children and adolescents, a place to communicate and to learn about nature and growing food. By offering a self-fulfilling, relaxing, and engaging environment, these community gardens have the capacity to address different types of people including the working class, the unemployed, minority groups, the disabled, children, seniors and the under-represented.

The Future Yellow Culture of Engagement in Belfast
Instilling the culture of collaboration and engagement seems to be one of the important drivers for the activities of the building initiative, the Yellow space events and activities, and other Yellow efforts. In this respect, I argue that techniques of participation and collaboration including gaming simulations, workshops, and public discussions are not new and have emerged since post World War II in many parts of Europe and since the civil rights era in the United States. What is new here is that such efforts are unique to the context of Belfast. Ranging from awareness and public responsiveness, to democratizing planning and design decisions, the BI and its underlying activities address all segments of Belfast society including lay people, school children, youth, architecture students, politicians, and decision makers, photographers, artists, architects-urban designers, and journalists. Through several sub-initiatives, specific events were tailored to these segments.

Figure 7:

Different stages of developing the proposed design scheme for the new Woodvale Park

Simply, the BI manifests the need for new roles that architects, urban designers, and planners can play. It clearly articulates the shift from the ‘Egoist-Architect’ and the ‘I-give-the-people-what-I-want’ syndrome to the enabler-facilitator-advocate-Architect/Planner whose role is not to clearly solve people’s problems, but to create a process that enables people to solve their own problems. I would end by saying that the BI is not about ‘design activism’; it is a conscious endeavor that needs to be celebrated for its mission, scope, and process. Currently, the Woodvale project has been taken over by the city council, which is moving forward with the project in consultation with a committee of community representatives. Still, the outcomes and the impact on the decision making process, and uniting the single identity communities remain a challenge. With these and other similar efforts, the culture of engagement, collaboration, and urban and housing diversity, that continued to be a taboo for three decades, could be rediscovered. Belfast could be more Yellow. Other towns and cities including Armagh, Derry, Portadown could also be Yellow when similar initiatives take place.

Credits
Images presented in this editorial are property of the Building Initiative team, and reproduced from the Yellow Space publication. Thanks are due to Deirdre McMenamin for providing the initial visual and textual material for this editorial.

Bibliography
(1) Salama, A. M. (2008). "What's War/Peace - Construction/Destruction got to do with Architecture?" Editorial: Architects for Peace, February 13, 2008, Melbourne, Australia
(2) Building Initiative, Yellow Space--Belfast: Negotiations for an Open City. School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, Belfast, United Kingdom.
(3) For more discussion on these approaches, please see: Salama, A. M. (2009). Sustainability / Trans-disciplinarity: A concern for people and environments between confusing terminology and outdated approaches http://www.intbau.org/essay20.htm
(4) Barett, J. (-------). The Color of Learning: http://www.excellence.dgs.ca.gov/MaxStPerformance/S4_4-2.htm accessed July 31, 2009.
(5) Bishop, E. (2008). Belfast: Troubles Seem So Far Away http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/citybreaks/3483579/Belfast-Troubles-seem-so-far-away.html Telegraph, 19 Nov 2008
(6) The Building Initiative Website http://www.buildinginitiative.org/
(7) Jennifer Cornell is the main community leader who has driven the project and was a catalyst for attracting attention to the project.

Ashraf M Salama
Architects for Peace, September 2009

Dr. Ashraf M. Salama is member of the editorial board of Architects for Peace. He is an architect, scholar, and professor of architecture, currently holds a reader in architecture position at Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom, the chief editor of Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research, collaborating editor of Open House International-OHI, editorial board member of Time-Based Architecture International, and International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Public Mourning

2009-08-18T08:38:00.001+10:00

Public mourning recently manifest itself in two curious forms in the state of Victoria, Australia. The first was a national day of mourning following the recent bushfires, known as Black Saturday, which killed 173 people. The second was a road side memorial commemorating the death of four teenagers that allegedly caused the death of another person at the same site two weeks later.

Commemorative events and spontaneous memorials gain resonance in the manner in which they appropriate public space. Sites that are used for one function are transformed for a period of time into a place of ceremony. Urban infrastructure becomes a prop for personal shrines. The form which these ceremonies and shrines assume demands respect regardless of the site’s former purpose or the manner in which the memorial is made. However, the location only partially assumes the status of a collective site of memory. Public space remains contested most clearly in matters of death and who can be commemorated, how, where and by whom.

The Premier of Victoria announced that the Federation Bells would be rung at 11 am on Sunday 22 February 2009 to commence the national day of mourning. He invited the ringing of church and town hall bells to join this moment of reflection.

I was unsure how to express my feelings at such a tragic loss of life and decided to be present. I imagined the air filled with the sounds of bells radiating out from the city centre to the suburbs. No words would be needed.

Federation Bells were commissioned as part of an earlier commemoration marking the centenary of the Federation of Australia. Designed by Neil McLachlan and Anton Hassell, the idea behind Federation bells is the question of whether secular society can have meaningful ceremony. In proposing a response to this question, the designer and artist team trace the spatial and sonic history of bell ringing from church spire to clock tower as the signifier of the city's collective ritual – the sound of religious ceremony is surrogated by mechanistic time in architecture and acoustic form that would be the medium of this work of art. Federation Bells is essentially a public artwork as instrument for which compositions are written and it was planned that these would be played daily at specific times or on specific occasions. It is an instrument consisting of 39 inverted bronze bells of various sizes standing at varying heights in Birrurung Marr. Birrarung Marr, the first park to be constructed in Melbourne in 100 years, means 'river of mists' and 'river bank' in the Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri people, and is a symbolic gesture of reconciliation with the original custodians of the land.

On the National Day of Mourning, in this location of historic symbolism, I was the only other person to join a television crew waiting at Federation Bells as 11.00am came and went with not a single bell tolled in the whole of the City of Melbourne. A dirge rose from the nearby Rod Laver arena, possibly the national anthem, marking the commencement of our national day of mourning. The bells to be rung turned out to be another set of much smaller, hand ringing bells and the televised ceremony was held inside the artificially lit and climate controlled sports facility. That the national day of mourning should happen inside a sports stadium and through the televised tears and speeches transmitted into the living rooms and towns across Australia is perhaps understandable from a practical point of view. But public mourning is unmediated and its impacts on the vicariously involved is through sound (or silence) and physical presence in a city or town. However, the capital city of Black Saturday could not be interrupted by even a sound, a moment of pause and involuntary collective reflection. The mourners could not be seen in public except exiting the sports stadium, caught, edited and telecast by the waiting television crew as they made their way into the car park and back home.

The public artwork in the public park, imagined as a place of public ceremony, ringing out through the entire city a mournful toll marking a national day of mourning could not be realized and was never even considered.

The only toll to permeate this car dependent city for its 70 kilometre radius is the road toll. Like the national day of mourning it is telecast into our homes and towns. The nightly news reports the aftermath of mangled vehicles and an endless, escalating and shocking series of advertisements graphically depict full impact, multi car collisions and dramatised reenactments of human tragedy. Bumper stickers feature a white line crucifix under the slogan of “Touched by the Toll” and spontaneous memorials sprout along the extensive and ever expansive road networks of Metropolitan Melbourne.

On the 27 June 2009 four young people were killed in a two car collision in the outer suburb of Lynbrook in metropolitan Melbourne. A memorial was erected by friends of the deceased which grew, scaling a pole to over three metres and strewing over the pavement at an intersection which was the site of the accident. Just two weeks later, a fatality occurred at exactly the same spot with a driver collided with a truck. It was suggested that the shrine either obscured the view or distracted the driver and caused the accident. The shrine was subsequently removed by the authorities to the protests of friends of the first fatalities.

People do not chose where they die. For young people in Victoria between 15 -29 this place is most likely to be on a road, in or hit by a car. Unlike the Lynbrook memorial, most shrines are modest and personal in scale, made as if to be visited and tendered by individuals while signifying a place of mourning to the general public. Made with tremendous care from everyday items, the spontaneous memorials demand acknowledgement for this very reason – they universalize the personal and personalize the collective tragedy of the road toll in a material and present manner. These shrines are defiant in a way that is inspiring and poignant, countering the speed with a shrine to the victim of this very velocity and marking a place in an urban form often described as a non place. These memorials are beginning to feature on freeways where, paradoxically, it is illegal to stop except for an emergency and where pedestrians are banned. I have yet to see one of these memorials on the privately managed tollway where there is no advertising, litter, life or presumably death.

Unlike the public day of mourning without a presence in a public place, the roadside memorial takes possession of space and forces the uninvolved to consider death in the course of our daily life. It cannot be ignored like the enclosed ceremony, shrugged off or generate repulsion like the graphic television advertisements and it is most certainly a citizen initiated action about the one thing we all share - mortality.

Post Script: In the Brazilian city of Puerto Alegre one metre wide, white stencilled butterflies on the black bitumen road mark the site of road fatalities and television advertisements for mental health are based on happiness.

Anthony McInneny
Architects for Peace, August 2009

Climate Change: Building a different future

2009-07-20T20:10:00.005+10:00

When the topic of climate change comes up in conversations with friends, acquaintances and—more and more frequently—with complete strangers, I sometimes find myself making a comment on East Timor. Perhaps all too casually, I like to suggest that Timorese households living in remote rural communities are likely to deal better with climate change than will my family in urban Melbourne. Timorese communities have generations of experience at coping with adversity in a country where crop failure might mean starvation, where a serious injury can lead to a lifetime of penury and where illness all too often results in death. The resilience and joy found in Timorese communities is remarkable to behold. Clearly, no society would aspire to the hardships found in East Timor simply to foster the resilience that it engenders. Nevertheless, I think it is true that if climate change wreaks havoc on the global economy, the difficult life of a rural household in a remote part of East Timor would go on much as it does now. Not so life in Australia and in other over-developed nations of the world. For once, I think to myself, something is going to affect ‘us’ much worse than it will affect those in the developing parts of the globe.

The likelihood that those in the over-developed world may suffer tends to concentrate our collective attention in a dramatic way. The saturation media coverage of the recent swine flu pandemic illustrates this well. Swine flu has proven deadly and the WHO reports that more than 300 have died as a result of catching the disease since the first death was recorded in May. Millions of poor people die every year from preventable diseases but if rich people start to die too, it’s big news amongst the rich people.

Given that, one might expect some cause for optimism when it comes to global warming. The world’s best scientific and economic advisers have confirmed that climate change will indeed wreak havoc on our over-developed economies. Agencies as diverse as Oxfam and the World Bank agree that disastrous impacts also await those in the developing world. Surely, concern for such an outcome would be sufficient cause for us to take action.

Tragically, I don’t believe that the human species—and more specifically, those of us with the power to do so—will cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. I think our current ecosystems are doomed. I believe that we could avoid catastrophic climate change— that point needs to be made very clearly—it’s just that I don’t think we will. It feels dreadful to put that comment in print. Whilst I have become accustomed to thinking that way putting it in writing makes me feel as if I am complicit in a terrible crime.

There are myriad reasons that lead me to this conclusion. Rather than confront these, however, I regularly delude myself by focusing on the potential for change. In Australia we have a government that was elected on a promise to combat climate change; in the state where I live (Victoria), a member of parliament has resigned his position to head a large-scale program to install electric vehicles in Melbourne; China is installing a new wind turbine every two hours and is fast becoming a leader in renewable energy; Germany has a huge solar PV program with millions of systems installed; under Barak Obama a US President has finally acknowledged the severity of global warming and committed the United States to reducing GHG emissions.

The climate change problem, however, appears much bigger than our timid, lagging responses. Aside from the fact that global emissions have swelled since the Kyoto protocol was signed and that we now face an even tougher path to prevent catastrophic climate change, here are three of the reasons why I’m pessimistic about our chances of dealing with global warming—climate change indicators are worse than expected; high profile sceptics continue to press their case; and people like me continue business-as-usual. Firstly, climate change indicators. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides an estimate of trends in climate change indicators with an upper and lower boundary to indicate the band of uncertainty in future years. As climate change modellers have looked back on recent data and compared it to the predictions reported by the IPCC we might expect to see the results spread throughout the range of uncertainty. Contrary to this, however, a synthesis report by leading climate change scientists at the recent Copenhagen Climate Change conference states:

Recent observations show that greenhouse gas emissions and many aspects of the climate are changing near the upper boundary of the IPCC range of projections. Many key climate indicators are already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which contemporary society and economy have developed and thrived. These indicators include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, global ocean temperature, Arctic sea ice extent, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. With unabated emissions, many trends in climate will likely accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.

In other words, our best scientific modelling has tended to underestimate the rate at which climate change is developing. The situation is deteriorating more quickly than we thought. Tim Flannery reports that James Lovelock, the pre-eminent earth systems scientist, believes that ‘the causes of the climatic shift are now so entrenched that they are in all likelihoods irreversible’. For Lovelock, we have already passed the ‘tipping point’ at which climate change moves beyond our ability to control.

Nevertheless, there remain sufficient high-profile sceptics in our societies to create just enough doubt about the problem to dilute the political will to take serious action. In Australia this mantle of high-profile sceptic has passed from our previous Prime Minister, John Howard, to Senator Steve Fielding (a member in the upper house of our Federal Parliament). Senator Fielding was elected ‘accidentally’ with just 0.08% of votes through a preference deal with the Australian Labor Party. Senator Fielding, who now holds the balance of power in the upper house of the Australian parliament, is a climate change sceptic. In an ironic twist, at the same time Barak Obama was committing the United States to dealing with climate change, Senator Fielding was undertaking a ‘fact finding’ tour of the US asking prominent politicians and scientists whether global warming is real or imagined. In his quest to take a ‘balance view’, Senator Fielding has somehow sided with the fringe of society who think that global warming remains an unproven theory and that taking action to reduce GHG emissions will make us all worse off. As a consequence, this person will now vote against legislation that proposes a modest cut in Australian emissions. If the sea level rose by a metre tomorrow no one would be in a position to deny what had happened. Whilst prominent persons such as Senator Fielding, however, publicly deny the signs of climate change too many others will continue to overlook the fact that sea levels are rising by a few millimetres a year.

Perhaps the most compelling cause for my pessimism, however, is my own behaviour. I accept the IPCC’s advice that the climate system is unequivocally warming and that human activity is very likely the cause. I wholeheartedly support local, national and international action to reduce GHG emissions and combat climate change. I would also be quite happy to pay more than my share of the cost to make that happen. Yet, I live in a society addicted to cheap energy and I remain part of the problem. I know that I will take another international plane flight for work (and even for leisure); I will continue to drive my fossil-fuelled car; I will use more fossil fuel to heat my house; I will buy cheese flown in from France, wine shipped in from New Zealand, and bananas trucked down from Queensland; I will buy cheap manufactured goods imported from China, exporting my GHG emissions to the developing world; I will buy a newspaper and so contribute to the pollution associated with printing, transporting and recycling the newsprint; and in a thousand other ways I will continue to stamp my oversized carbon footprint on the planet’s ecology.

And it won’t just be me that continues to pollute. I’ll keep doing these things because 20 million other Australians will join in with me, as will hundreds of millions of other people from the over-developed world. Between us (and our antecedents), we have been responsible for three quarters of GHG emissions. If we haven’t yet changed our ways, how can we possibly expect those in developing nations to take action? As pointed out in a recent Oxfam briefing paper on climate change, ‘the average Australian emits nearly 5 times as much as an average Chinese, and the average Canadian emits 13 times as much as the average Indian’. Those of us in over-developed countries would have to go ‘backwards’ (as many in our society would see it) quickly and significantly if we are to allow developing nations to improve their living conditions and at the same time reduce GHG emissions globally. It’s very hard to see that happening.

Climate change is often discussed at Architects for Peace meetings and our members are regularly involved in rallies and conferences promoting responses to global warming. I have no doubt that as an organisation we will continue such efforts. I hope that they are successful. I also hope that our response to climate change will recognise the right of developing countries to emit carbon pollution as they continue their development and promote responses that are equitable at a national level. If James Lovelock is right—and it is already too late to avoid catastrophic climate change—then in addition to calling on our communities to fight climate change we also need to be planning and building for a very different future.

Matthew Bond
Architects for Peace, July 2009

Learning from Ulaanbaatar

2009-06-22T12:06:00.005+10:00

In May in Vienna, I presented at a symposium on architecture studies in China and Mongolia. Adelaide University’s Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern architecture held such a cross cultural symposium when I was an architecture research masters degree student there, but with my recent year of Mongolian architectural teaching development experience (see arch-peace previously), this year’s Vienna symposium provided an exciting opportunity to meet with central European, Mongolian and Chinese researchers, scholars and architects, in a truly cross cultural and cross-disciplinary meeting with anthropologists, ethnographers, conservationists and architectural historians. The conference was hosted by Vienna University of Technology’s ‘Comparative Architectural Research’ unit, together with Vienna University’s Confucius Institute, and with UNESCO backing. I have previously lived worked and taught in Vienna, and I thought that contributing a story about this conference presentation would make an interesting editorial on cross cultural architectural education for Architects for Peace.

I prepared a report on the architecture teacher training project I had pursued in the peri-urban fringe of Ulaanbaatar in 2007-8, and extended this by reflecting on the work with architecture students at Sheffield University and London Metropolitan University. Sheffield architecture school’s doctoral research group, Lines of Flight,had invited me previously, and I worked with a doctoral planning researcher there to develop the second part of the paper. Supreeya Wungpatcharapon, who is researching participatory processes in urban planning, provided another perspective on the processes developed with Mongolian students, and the resulting conference paper was one which seemed to effectively address the frontier of architectural education in central Asia.

Delegates had come from China, Germany and Austria, and there was a small group from Mongolia. The papers ranged from ethnographical studies of vernacular agricultural building types to analyses of conservation of ancient cities. There was also a very wide range of presenters, from postgraduate students and young professors from Tsinghua University in Beijing to experienced Orient specialists from Pennsylvania, Munich, Würzburg and Hannover.

The session to which I was allocated, ‘Settlement Policy and Cultural Identity in Modern Mongolia’ comprised a paper on the Ethnic Identity of a Mongolian minority group by a Mongolian scholar in Austria, an exhibition of excursion work carried out in Ulaanbaatar tent districts by Austrian students, and my reflections on working with Mongolian architecture students, developing site analysis and brief writing methods.

I briefly presented two live projects – ‘Sanzai Eco-houses’ and ‘Yarmag Children’s Camp’- through which newly trained architects and architecture students aimed to incorporate participatory processes in their design projects, consulting with clients, and exploring options for site analysis.

The first live project, in Sanzai, on the northern periphery of the capital, is a private developer’s proposal to build four houses in an outer suburb, and to market these using an (otherwise dubious and unusual) ecological standard of accommodation, which would be habitable and energy efficient year round, from –30C in winter to 30C in summer. The second live project - another local Mongolian entrepreneur’s proposal - is to develop a nature reserve by introducing a children’s park, hotel and conference centre, in the foothills at the city’s southern edge.

The presentation and the conference session explored possible lessons to be learned from the issues of peri-urban settlement in Mongolia and future work on architecture in development being undertaken in Mongolia and other parts of Asia. A forthcoming research project by Sarah M Bassett on the Ger (the tent Russians called ‘Yurt’) Districts, planned for 2009-10, was also introduced to the conference in the context of sustainability and continuity.

Figure 1 Staff Participation levels in 6 development projects in 2008 – (white = none, grey = moderate, black = full)

First meeting

Figure 2 Staff meeting by G. Cowan

Figure 3 Graduates by G. Cowan. Sanzai - Site Analysis

Figure 4 Sanzai Site Analysis by students photo G Cowan. Learning from Las Vegas

Figure 5 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi et al 1969).

Combining the Mongolia project review with recent work undertaken with students at London Metropolitan University in the area of participatory design and research, Wungpatcharapon and I discussed some lessons we considered might be learned from Ulaanbaatar. Despite the very different environments and resources, the processes of understanding sites and developing design briefs are not altogether different to those in other places.

Formal study of vernacular architecture in the Mongolian college is minimal. ‘Ger’ and ‘Khiid’ (home and monastery) seem to be regarded as cultural artefacts - rather than science or business which would associate them with ‘architecture’. Most students and teachers at the Mongolian college themselves live in peri-urban informal settlements of Ulaanbaatar, and are intimately familiar with the vernacular architecture of the Ger (Tent) and the self-build cottage tradition. These traditions are not formally taught at the college and they are not used as models for teaching, apparently because they are not aspirational to architecture as a modern and international form of building. The modern rituals of going to the ‘Delguur’ and ‘Tsakh’ (Shop and Market) are not studied as architecture subjects. International cultures of architecture (and to a degree Russian songs, Latin dancing etc) are regarded as ‘models’ but the mode of teaching these is didactic rather than exploratory or discursive.

The style of teaching architecture, particularly in vocational training institutions, and from my experience of tertiary colleges and universities in Mongolia, has traditionally been very didactic, rather than discursive or participatory. Therefore, the idea of collaboration in design studio, of participative site analysis and brainstorming design ideas are all unfamiliar to the Mongolian students I worked with. The experiments – with what in other settings might be fairly conventional participatory architectural studio methods - remind us that these are a developmental aspect of architectural practice which help to overcome cultural and language barriers and enable a more rigorous needs assessment for the development of an architectural design brief.

In peri-urban Ulaanbaatar, the notion of rapid deployment does not seem to be raised in architecture, despite the available model presented by the Ger (tent), which is commonplace, and apparently of little interest to Mongolian architecture students. Permanent buildings seemed to be the aspiration of architectural development, and these often take a long time in construction, spanning the seasons, and necessitating suspension of the building site during the bitterly cold winter.
In reference to the childrens’ camp scheme for Yarmag, and also for the live project for Eco-Houses in Sanzai, the notion of sustainability was used as a mere buzz-word. The need for energy efficient construction was recognised, although the amortisation cost of investing in more expensive design and materials worked against it in the view of students who did not have an understanding of life-cycle costing of buildings.

Participatory practice in architecture is a well-established concept in western, late capitalist architecture, and essential to traditional Mongolian Ger (Tent) building and possibly in monasteries. However, it was not an idea familiar to contemporary Mongolian architecture students I met, who are accustomed to more didactic and expert-led models of creating architecture – effectively, as a foreign European practice. Professors with whom I worked, and who had themselves been schooled in the west, in the European soviet capital Moscow or East Germany for example – tended towards didactic teaching styles and modes of design generation – and instructed students to copy patterns provided by them or from textbooks such as the 1965 Russian edition of Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre. There was no sense of engagement in the translation and adaptation of foreign architectural ideas in the MCTC college, although Bat-Od’s locally written and produced architecture text book (Arkhitektur, Ulaanbaatar, 2005, 2007) suggests some ways to do this.

In the two live projects in Sanzai and Yarmag, the Mongolian students took similar approaches to developing analyses and briefs, with the advantage of real clients, real budgets and real potential outcomes. What may have been lacking in ‘academic discourse’ was replaced with actual live project experience; visiting the project sites in the north and south peripheries of the city respectively, and undertaking (apparently for the first time) site analysis, compiling design briefs and generating multiple-option original schematics.

The participatory processes employed in the live design projects here cannot be considered as an advanced level of participative practice that allows the end-users of the projects to make decision towards final design proposals. These live projects, however, allowed the Mongolian architecture students to explore alternative ways of developing architectural schemes as well as creating an open learning system in the academic environment. By opening a more dialogical space of learning together amongst teachers, students and clients (the users), the experience may encourage the students to develop alternative architecture processes and schemes that are appropriate to the Mongolian context, rather than those inspired by foreign or western styles of architectural design.

Conclusion
During the development of the Mongolia teaching work since 2007, there have been many supporters and correspondents who have taken part in critique and encouragement of the work. Colleagues undertook work in many diverse disciplines. For example, my partner Clare Hill undertook work in the textile development sector in Ulaanbaatar and Erdenet, and many other VSO colleagues and local non-government organisations collaborated on various development initiatives. Of many local and international scholars and development workers with whom I discussed developing various initiatives, an art curator and an anthropologist I met in Ulaanbaatar are keen to collaborate on a book, and the previously mentioned Chicago architect-researcher Sarah M Bassett will conduct a project on ‘Transitional Architecture’ in 2009-2010, and invites contact, at sarahmbassett@gmail.com, in regard to ongoing architecture development work in peri-urban Ulaanbaatar.

The work ‘Nomadologist in Ulaanbaatar’ 2007-2008, of an ‘architect teacher trainer’ at a Construction College, was reported in a previous article for Architects for Peace. The conference paper showed what Supreeya Wungpatcharapon and I and students reflected upon as ways of ‘Learning from Ulaanbaatar’, not only in terms of observing the resource limitations and shortcomings relative to our preconceptions, but also the potential of using the studio to develop constructive and open design processes. By reflecting on the training and live projects, and subsequent discussions about the outcomes at architecture schools in the UK, some of the insights on processes and methods can be taken from working in the rapidly changing, resource-poor environment of peri-urban Ulaanbaatar.

Under Construction - New Architecture School

Figure 6 Photo G. Cowan May 2008.

Note 1- Refer to Blog Entry - Site Analysis; initial discussion(http://nomadologist-nomadology.blogspot.com/2008/06/site-analysis-initial-discussion.html dated Sunday, June 29, 2008) photos http://www.flickr.com/groups/1025839@N24/

Note 2 - Refer to Blog Entry - Essential Design Skills(http://nomadologist-nomadology.blogspot.com/2008/06/essential-skills.html dated Wednesday, June 25, 2008)

General Photo Pool:
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/nomadologist/2543151893/in/set-72157602065424017
- higher resolution images available on request from mailto: gregory@cowan.com

References:
- More about the symposium “Along the Great Wall”: http://baugeschichte.tuwien.ac.at/abk/symposium-china-mongolei/index_dt_mauersymp.html
- Participatory Techniques: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1025839@N24/
- Nomadologist blog - http://nomadologist-nomadology.blogspot.com/
- Sheffield University - Lines of Flight - PhD researchers group http://linesofflight.wordpress.com/
- London Met MA Architecture of Rapid Change Scarce Resources http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/pgprospectus/courses/architecture-of-scarce-resources.cfm
- Nomad Research http://www.innerasiaresearch.org/caroline_humphrey.htm
- Sarah Bassett http://www.elkrapidsnews.com/elk-rapids-news-features.php#ER
- Homepage - http://gregorycowan.blogspot.com/ (comments welcome)

Cultural Identity Manifested in Visual Voices and the Public Face of Architecture

2009-05-17T15:26:00.006+10:00

While scholars in architecture as an academic and professional discipline may criticize the interest and tendency to place emphasis on discussing building images and facades, I adopt the principle that since architecture is created for the public then examining the public face of architecture is integral to the understanding of the juxtaposition of those images and what they convey and represent. This editorial interrogates a number of discourses on ways in which cultural identity is manifested by debating selected interventions developed within the Arab world. Still, the discussion on whether building images are created as visual voices that attempt to react to the tidal wave of cultural globalization is open-ended. So, there is no claim here that there is a resolution, but an articulation of identity debate as it is manifested in the public face of architecture.

Preamble
Arab architects are in a continuous process of criticizing their own versions of modern and post modern architecture and the prevailing contemporary practices. Within their criticism, discourses always suggest the recycling of traditional architecture and its elements as a way of establishing and imposing a distinguished character in the contemporary city. Typically, this takes the form of either refurbishing old palaces and public buildings, or establishing visual references—borrowed from the past—and utilized in contemporary/modern buildings. Adopted by governments and officials, there are a considerable number of examples of projects that advocated traditional imaging to impress the society by their origin while boasting the profile of capital and major cities, especially in Egypt and the Arabian Gulf Region. In generic terms, similar to the worldwide tendency, societies in the Arab world tend to re-evaluate the meaning and desirability of building images rapidly. The search for an architectural identity, the rise and fall of ISMS (movements and tendencies), and the continuous debate on symbolism and character issues in architecture are derived from this fact (1,2).

Identity Discourse
In the Arab region, issues that pertain to identity, character, and architectural trends have been in debate for over three decades, more so because of this region’s cultural uniqueness and plurality. However, it is this cultural uniqueness that has made it a tough pursuit and has – in many cases—culminated in a type of symbolism that is painful to behold or comprehend. Some scholars pose the question of the necessity to refer to cultural or religious symbolism in architecture to reflect a specific identity. Others argue for the fact that Arab architecture should embody the collective aspirations of societies in this region. As well, there are many who have questioned the need to debate architectural identity at all, claiming that it merely displays a lack of “self-confidence” as a region or as a group of nations. Reviewing recent practices and debates reveals that we still seem to be at odds with the issue of identity. Images and image making processes do not often address the issue of meaning in relation to the public. This mandates looking at the built environment as a two-way mirror. One way can be seen in the sense that it conveys and transmits non-verbal messages that reflect inner life, activities, and social conceptions of those who live and use the environment. The other way is seen in terms of how it is actually perceived and comprehended by a certain society at a certain time.

Entrances, Concrete Whimsies, and the Conundrum of Context / Content
Can Buildings speak? I argue, yes, they convey silent, non verbal messages, they tell us about themselves almost as if they are speaking. They tell us about what is happening and what ought to happen in them. They may symbolically represent an attitude about what is taking place inside. Building entrances are no exception; they have certain qualities that can evoke a strong image in an observer; they can be inviting or repelling, they really talk but using a different type of language and a different type of grammar. Entrances have the capacity to unleash feelings, trigger emotional reactions, feed the memory, and stimulate the imagination of the public. Thus, the image of the entrance allows the public to anticipate the interior world. In a country like Egypt, there has been a surge in the construction of tourist facilities along the Northern Coast, the Red Sea, and Sinai Peninsula. These facilities are shaping the skyline and waterfront of these areas and examining the characteristics of their entrances is thus paramount.

While the aesthetic qualities of entrances are to be respected, for a complete appreciation one must go beyond the visual appearance and examine meaning and content. The inherent meaning of entrances can stand for the representation of place and/or the representation of the people occupying it. However, entrances of tourist villages have more than that to offer. They have physical variables that carry symbolic meanings that can impart information and enhance legibility in a sense that is not confusing, easy to read, and allows visitors to know their whereabouts (2).

In the entrances examined one can find multiple yet puzzling visual voices within the efforts of their designers to metaphorically reflect certain images or symbols. Some of them simulate the Egyptian culture by reinterpreting the elements of heritage architecture, Pharonic, Arabic, and Islamic, in order to attract tourists. Others simulate classical architecture or introduce images that pertain to the surrounding natural environment. Here, I argue that the designers of these entrances try to use metaphors, identifying relationships between the present and the past, or between the natural and the man-made worlds. These relationships are abstract in nature rather than literal. However, this does not mean they have been successful in addressing the issue of meaning, but they are just offering attempts toward introducing specific visual content for the purpose of tourism.

Traditionalist Approaches
Attempts to translate cultural identity into building images are evident in selected examples in Qatar and Kuwait, where a conservative approach toward the use of traditional imaging is employed. Suq Sharq-Kuwait, as an example of this approach, is a mixed-use development extending 2.4 km along the waterfront, and comprises an entertainment complex, restaurants, a retail complex, speciality arcades, and a new marina (4). An earlier example to establish a local architectural identity against modernism and post modernism was Qatar University campus designed by the late, Paris based Egyptian architect-Ahmed El Kafrawi. The campus is located on an elevated site 7 km north of Doha and 2 km from the Gulf shore. Based on an octagonal unit design idea wind-tower structures are designed to provide cool air and reduce humidity. Towers of light are also introduced and are intended to control the harsh sunlight, and abundant use of mashrabiyas (traditional screened windows) and stained glass. Open and partially covered courtyards, planted and often with fountains, are plentiful throughout the site. The architect placed strong emphasis on natural ventilation, one of the many links in which he relates to traditional architecture of the region. As specific models he used the few still existing wind-tower houses in Doha and modernized the basic principle (5).

Responsive Re-Interpretation of Traditional Images
As the discourse continues on the dialectic relationships between tradition and modernity, the contemporary and the historic, and the high-tech and the environmentally friendly, here I select two important buildings—from the Qatar Education City—that represent physical and intellectual statements: the Liberal Arts and Science Complex designed by Arata Isozaki and the Texas A & M University Engineering College designed by Ricardo Legoretta.

Arata Isozaki is well known for his innovative interventions over the past 30 years and for his deep interpretation of the contexts in which his designs are developed. He designed the Liberal Arts and Sciences building (LAS) which is a focal point for all students in the Education City. Occupying an area of approximately 22000 m2 and developed over a period of 21 months the building is introduced to accommodate the Academic Bridge Program; a preparatory program for enhancing the academic background and experience of high school graduates from Qatar and other countries in the Gulf region. The ABP addresses the universal problem of student academic and cultural transition from high school to the university, but has been designed to specifically address the needs of students in the Gulf region. As a visually striking and architecturally stunning intervention, the building is designed around a theme developed from traditional Arabic mosaics that are evocative of the crystalline structure of sand. This was based on intensive studies to abstract the essential characteristics of the context while introducing new interpretations of geometric patterns derived from widely applied traditional motives (6).

The second statement is by the AIA Gold Medal award winning Ricardo Legoretta who continues in his design of the Engineering College of Texas A & M University to root his work in the application of regional Mexican architecture to a wider global context. Typically, his work is recognizable for its bright colors and the sustained attempts to amalgamate local traditions and contemporary needs. Legorreta uses elements of Mexican regional architecture in his work including bright colors, plays of light and shadow, central patios, courtyards and porticos as well as solid volumes. Over a construction period of 19 months and on an area of 53000 m2 the College was opened in 2007 with a total capacity of 600 users including students, faculty members, and teaching staff. The concept is based on introducing two independent but adjoining masses linked by large atrium; these are named the Academic Quadrangle and the Research Building. The overall expression of the building demonstrates masterful integration of solid geometry and a skillful use of color and tone values.

While these two buildings represent conscious endeavors of two prominent architects toward creating responsive educational environments that meet the aspirations of the founders of the education city and their society, it remains to be seen how the new buildings that are being designed by the two architects in the same campus will fit in harmony—visually, spatially, and functionally—with those already discussed and with the overall master plan of the education city. As well, it remains to be seen how the designs of other world and local architects would contribute to the continuing discourse on global architecture versus the emerging attempts of a culture of resistance (6).

Glocalism Demystified
Another important approach in attempting to reflect cultural identity is in the Center for Environment and Development for Arab Region and Europe, CEDARE, Heliopolis, Cairo. It was established as a non profit institution in 1992, and funded mainly by Arab and European governments. It aims at building the capacity of governments to foster management of environmental resources, and to envision sustainable development policies and strategies.

When looking at the new Headquarters of CEDARE, one can see the practice Glocalism in the sense that it embodies the concepts of global and local and by logic, incorporates a time element, which the two concepts tend to ignore. The design resists immersion in global trends while simultaneously refusing the license to copy and paste from the past. This is clearly reflected in the building image where the façade conveys a message encompassing the positive co-existence of the Arab Region and Europe. This concept is carefully translated as a metaphor into all facades of the building. Two layers of culture exist, the first is the layer of brick that reflects the Arabic culture, and the second is the glass curtain wall that acts as a shell which engulfs the first layer expressing the modern technology of Europe. Notably, the selection of materials defines the possible pattern of relationship between the intended concept and the final building image. The tapestry of interlocking traditional brick layering with glazed blue steel cylinders and the glass curtain wall represents the intersection between traditional/local and modern/global values.

According to CEDARE designers, Ahmed Fahim and Hisham Bahgat, we—Egyptians generally and Caierene particularly—possess multi-architectural heritage that ranges from Pharonic, Coptic-Christian, and Islamic, to the post colonial, socialist, and modern.”(7). Thus, a critical question can be posed here: How to introduce a relatively new functional office environment in the area of Heliopolis that possesses a historic residential urban environment? Would the answer be borrowing and copying from these multi-layers of Heliopolis or Cairo Heritage? Or imitating European architectural trends? Their response to these questions was articulated where the merge of the underlying values of cultures are manifested. This goes along the statement of Charles Correa—which I recall from his speech at the American University of Beirut in 1999 – who warned the architects of the developing world “Do NOT COPY YOUR PAST and DO NOT COPY THE PRESENT OF OTHERS (8).

A Concluding Verbal Voice
Contemporary architecture in the Arab world seems to be a collection of architectural positions that attempt to reflect cultural identity. There are positions that correspond to the history and economy of different localities within the region while many are confused on how to manifest identity in building images. Although there are some honest attempts to tame the urban development process, the overall built environment within this region is increasingly mismanaged. There is hope, found in a few designs, that a solid architectural direction can be created. But I must say that in addition to attempting to establish an identity based on the unique peculiarities of the region in terms of traditional images, it is critical that cultural identity should also emerge and evolve from environmental and socio-economic concerns.

References:

1) Salama, A. M. (2005). Architectural Identity in the Middle East: Hidden Assumptions and Philosophical Perspectives. In D. Mazzoleni et al (eds.), Shores of the Mediterranean: Architecture as a Language of Peace. Intra Moenia, Napoli, Italy. PP. 77-85. ISBN# 88-7421-054X

2) Salama, A. M. (2007). Mediterranean Visual Messages: The Conundrum of Identity, ISMS, and Meaning in Contemporary Egyptian Architecture. Archnet-IJAR- International Journal of Architectural Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, Archnet @ MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, PP. 86-104. ISSN # 1994-6961

3) Salama, A. M. (2006). Symbolism and Identity in the Eyes of Arabia’s Budding Professionals. Layer Magazine, LAYERMAG, New York, United States.
Archnet

4) Al Sharq Waterfront
http://www.archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.jsp?site_id=4125

5) Salama, A. M. (2009). Design Intentions and Users Responses: Assessing Outdoor Spaces of Qatar University Campus. Open House International, Volume 34, Issue 1, Urban International Press, United Kingdom, PP. 82-93. ISSN # 0160-2601

6) Salama, A. M. (2008). Doha: Between Making an Instant City and Skirmishing Globalization. Special Edition of Viewpoints, Middle East Institute, American University, Washington, DC. United States, PP. 40-44.

7) Salama, A. M. (2001). CEDARE Headquarters: Glocalism and the Architecture of Resistance (English and Arabic). Medina Magazine, Issue 17, Medina Publishing, British Virgin Islands, PP. 32-37.

8) Correa, Charles. Lecture. 2004. In Architecture Re-introduced: New Projects in Societies in Change. Jamal Abed (ed). Geneva: The Aga Khan Award for Architecture, based on a regional seminar at the American University of Beirut.

More in-depth discussion about cultural identity and the built environment are outlined in the following publications:

Abel, C. (1997- 2000). Architecture and Identity, Architectural Press, Boston, Mass, USA.

Antoniou, J. (2000). Tradition and Technology, Architectural Review, Middle East, Issue 4, pp. 23-44.

Baker, P. (2004). Architecture and Polyphony: Building in the Islamic World Today, Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom.

Frampton, K. (1983). Prospects for a Critical Regionalism, Perspecta, Issue 20, pp. 148-162

Tzonis, A. & Lefaivre, L. (2003): Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, Prestel, New York, USA.

Ashraf M. Salama
Architects for Peace, May 2009

Convoluted thoughts on the Global Crises, Scientists, Politicians... and

2009-04-23T08:55:00.002+10:00

"Presumably you've never been in business. You're a scientist, you can't tell me about the economics of it (the effects of greenhouse emissions cut)." Senator Ron Boswell (Australian Financial Review, 16 April 2009, p.5)

Who would have thought - the global economic gloom only months after the euphoria of the Beijing Olympics and Barack Obama's election? News from the environmental front isn't any better and Victoria's Black Saturday provided a stark and immediate reminder of our vulnerability. Is there hope?

In the midst of the double global economic and environmental crises, 'valuing the environment right' has been touted as the tool that can, albeit imperfectly, best address both issues concurrently. This involves extending, global society willing, economic practices to mitigate Climate Change through emissions trading and giving value to other environmental 'products' such as the water, air, soil, forests and the flora and fauna that inhabit them, which could result in a more 'Genuine GDP'.

While the benefits sound very attractive, we need to tread very carefully in taking this route when our knowledge of ecological processes and functions, while significantly advanced, is still imperfect. This leaves the likely scenario that the market will be the most influential in 'costing' the environment, which merely continues the profit-oriented hegemony where big businesses collude with Governments to manipulate and narrow societal supply/demand for 'environmental products'. Examples that come immediately to mind are hi-tech, mega-project quick fixes such as nuclear power and/or carbon sequestration plants to address 'demand' for emissions-lite energy, and desalination plants to assuage for the increasing water scarcity. Moreover, our politicians are straitjacketed by the ‘short-termism’ curse, framed by the election cycles that encourage those 'quick-fixes'. Thus, large-scale infrastructure projects that clearly have detrimental impact on the surrounding environment are preferred over finer-scaled, more complex and messier solutions that engage with and respond to the locality (such as VEIL's alternative framework of 'Distributive Systems').

Based on these tendencies it is quite likely, even when environmental products are priced, that the market will still 'assign' higher economic value to mining the minerals than the pristine forest cover above it, which has traditionally been 'valueless'. It is also highly likely that the market will continue to favour urban sprawl into productive and ecologically sensitive landscapes as it will continue to contribute to 'growing' the GDP far more than food production which can always be industrially-produced/GMOed and/or imported more cheaply (even with emissions factored in). The huge irony is that this process of urban sprawl, accelerated over the past decade through ingenious 'financial engineering', has led to the subprime mortgages that precipitated into the current Global Financial Crisis (GFC). It is doubly ironic that this global recession has resulted in less consumption hence decreased economic activities down the line, which translates into lower GHG emissions from all economic sectors!

The dilemmas don't end there. While the environment seems to be temporarily 'benefiting', albeit in the form of slower exploitation, the GFC also result in lower societal uptake of green practices and technologies that often come with higher price tags (at least initially) and also diminished funding for R&D into the technologies. To top things off, we get conflicting messages from economists and Governments on how to get out off the "worse recession since the Great Depression". Essentially, they say, yes, we've been living way beyond our means and that this got us into this mess, but we need to consume more to get out of it! And not to worry if you don't have job security, here are 'tax bonuses' to lubricate the engine of the micro-economy, while awaiting big infrastructure projects (the aforementioned 'quick-fixes') to kick start the macro-economy.

These are indeed baffling times that, for once, have both the intelligentsia and the person on the street scratching their heads on what to expect next. For many hopeful commentators, these extreme uncertain times provide the 'once-in-a-lifetime' opportunity to "reset the compass" (to borrow from the title of Yencken and Wilkinson's prophetic book published a decade ago) at multiple scales. But to whom will we entrust this unenviable job? 'Everyone' is the obvious, but unfortunately too idealistic, answer - as, without a clear set of rules and directions, self interests inevitably kick in by default (as AIG executives sadly demonstrated). Just on the issue of Climate Change alone, as the opening quotation implies, scientists and politicians (advocating for the business world), have been at loggerheads for much of the past decades - in effect, neutralising each other out to the point that there's an emerging consensus that it's already too late to avoid Climate Change. The best 'we' can do now (and 'we' are still not doing much) is mitigating for its worse effects. While not enough has been done to tackle Climate Change (which is only one dimension of ecological issues), it is likely that not enough will be done to regulate the market off its proven excesses (being let off lightly, it will likely re-offend).

I seem to have drawn readers (and myself) deep into the dreariest labyrinths seemingly without any way out of this collective fate. But one has to have faith in human resourcefulness and hope (at least we have Barack Obama, the great entrepreneur of 'hope' [thankfully not Bush/Cheney!] hard at work, plugging holes on the battered Spaceship Earth). And here I look inward and ask: what about us designers? Do we - should we - have any role in this? Do we want to? Arguably we are best equipped to engage with the complexities, bridge differing, often competing multi-scalar variables to synthesise into formal and spatial processes and solutions, hinging and envisioning the issues in real space for real people. No I am not advocating for the Super-Hero designer of yesteryear (admittedly He meant well) nor contemporary Starchitects (purveyors of the spectacular, but on the whole, in the service of the [once] Masters of the Universe - the story of the 'previous era'?) nor the slick imagery conveyed by Hollywood disaster movies (often effective fictionalisation of environmental issues) - these are the 'new designers' who actually listen, empathise and engage with the highly diverse contexts and scales they are working in, establishing meaningful relationships and collaborations with people they are working with and for. Many have already been at work in various groupings such as Architects for Peace, Architects without Borders, VEIL, Urban Village etc...etc... In the times of plenty, they were working in the fringes of practice. In today's hard times, their work potentially provides possible blueprints and precedents that map out alternative pathways for practice (that at least bridge the concerns of 'scientists' and 'politicians'). Sounds like I'm patting like-minded colleagues on the back? I believe not. Design's raison d'etre can no longer be merely rooted in artistic, cosmic and/or commercial ideals. Design has to return to its basest instinct and relearn, to quote Kongjian Yu, "the art of survival"...

Sidh Sintusingha
Architects for Peace, April 2009

Shifting Focus: perceptions of place in a climate of change

2009-03-21T20:09:00.007+11:00

Notwithstanding the occasional mockery from the far left field of the scientific community, we no longer have to endure questions over the reality of human-driven changes to the global climate. The scientific proof is irrefutable and debate among the natural scientists primarily concerns the temporal and physical scale of the impending environmental impacts. What are less certain, however, are the social changes that will occur in response to these impacts. The relationship between global warming and social change is an issue raised by the sociologist Elizabeth Shove from Lancaster University . The question is how and to what extent our habits, or our ritualised and generally unquestioned actions, can be challenged. For Elizabeth Shove these habits are described as a product of our physical environment, and thus the limits imposed by our built infrastructure in turn limit the potential to alter certain habitual practices. One obvious example is the problem that the proliferation of suburban sprawl presents to the habitual practice of private motorised transport.

Of course our physical environment is similarly a product of our cultural habits and collective ideals and thus the potential for altered habits exists not only by reimagining practices within these physical boundaries, but by reimagining the boundaries themselves, and it is here that the architectural imagination takes flight.

As Beatriz Maturana argued in last month’s editorial, the devastating circumstances of the recent bushfires in Victoria present one such ‘sombre opportunity’ to reimagine the morphology of communities on the suburban fringe. The quarter acre block with detached dwelling, double garage and hills hoist represents the quintessential ‘Australian dream’. However, this is a product of the 1950s and more recently it might be argued that the bush block, replete with facilities for a more autonomous existence, is equally if not more desirable. The perpetuation of scattered dwellings amongst a relatively visually untrammelled bush must now be called into question as a consequence of the recent bushfires. There are other, potentially more sustainable international models that we can look to as Beatriz describes in her editorial. These may well support more sustainable habits such as concentrated collective rather than individualised efforts to protect property and lives should a similar bushfire threat present itself. The question is, however, whether current habitualised practices and cultural expectations will permit the reimagination of the urban fringe along radically different lines.

In my own research, I have been looking at the possibility of reimagining the design of infrastructure in natural settings in a very different context. I have been exploring the relationship between architecture and perceptions of place in ecotourism destinations. In particular I aim to challenge the prevalent ‘minimal impact’ approach to building in pristine nature settings. This is driven by the dominant perception of sustainability where nature is viewed as a privileged ‘other’ untouched by humans, or at least by industrialised society. Regenerative design offers an alternative perspective by shifting the frame of reference from minimal to positive impact and questioning the separation of ‘humans’ and ‘nature’. I have written about regenerative design in a previous editorial; however here I would like to briefly discuss a recent research project that explored this issue in relation to the design and construction of built infrastructure on the Overland Track in Tasmania.

The Overland Track is Tasmania’s most iconic and popular walking track, attracting approximately 8,800 walkers annually. The length and popularity of the walk has seen the construction of a large quantity of infrastructure to support the tourist experience and to limit damage to the natural environment. Most significant built interventions are established at five key overnight nodes where huts, tent platforms and toilet facilities are provided for visitors. In addition, all waste, including toilet waste, is flown out by helicopter. Other forms of infrastructure along the Overland Track include various forms of track construction such as timber and stone steps, walkways in local and imported timber, treated pine boardwalks, hardened track junctions, raised earth causeways and a variety of bridges from simple bush timber logs to steel suspension bridges. Limited signage and track markers are also located along the route. Much of the track infrastructure has been implemented in a haphazard fashion and is deemed ‘unsympathetic’ to the environmental context.

The research investigated visitors and rangers’ perceptions of these built interventions by inviting a small sample group to document their perceptions using a disposable camera and journal. They were advised that built interventions could include examples of any type or scale that they liked or disliked or that they thought promoted either a connection or a disconnection with the environment.

The track represents perhaps the most direct relationship with built infrastructure on the walk, engaging the visual as well as acoustic and tactile senses. The varied and uneven surfaces draw the focus of attention from the ‘world out there’ to a more immediate and extremely localised frame of reference. This intimate ‘scale’ of experience provoked a range of comments from participants, from recognising the love, care and ‘artistic’ personality that has been put into the design and construction of the track, to an awareness of water flows, weather patterns, the impact of human occupation, the power and omnipotence of nature and the relationship between body and space. Primarily these experiences were positive, promoting a stronger connection with the environment. However, there were also instances of disconnection, for example the connotation of highways through the use of bitumen-coated planks and the raised boardwalks that construct a direct physical separation from the landscape. These features prompted a mixed response from walkers, representing a conflict between a desire for safety and convenience versus a desire for adventure, as well as a desire for minimum intervention and a simultaneous recognition of the need for intervention to maintain the bushwalkers code of minimal impact.

A similar ambivalence featured in discussions surrounding the toilets, which are one of the more iconic and recognisable built features on the track. These are raised composting toilet structures, similar to those found in many National Parks in Australia. As a low-tech and familiar sustainable technology, these are seen as being appropriate in remote environments. However, the plastic ‘sputnik’ containers, which are used to remove the liquid waste by helicopter, are more confronting, presenting a tangible image of the otherwise generally invisible consequences of human occupation in this sensitive environment (figure 1).

Nevertheless, one of the key findings of the research was that it was the more assertive human interventions, such as the ‘sputniks’ and the track ‘highways’, that prompted the most reflexive engagement with place. These images do not necessarily provoke a negative response, but reveal complexities and ambiguities over the extent to which intervention is seen as necessary and desirable and the value of social versus environmental priorities. Furthermore, ‘alien technologies’ such as the ranger’s ‘escape pod’ have the potential to reinforce the notion of the ‘wilderness experience’ by drawing attention to the reality of the remoteness and reinforcing images of isolation and unfamiliar worlds ‘out there’ (figure 2).

This research reveals the power of the built environment in the construction of meaning of place and identity. I believe it supports the development of an architectural response to the design of infrastructure in wilderness locations that is more assertive and moves beyond the notion of minimal impact. More broadly, I think the research demonstrates how the design of built infrastructure that does not necessarily ‘fit’ with preconceived notions of place facilitates a more reflexive dialogue and opens up the possibility for imagining other cultural habits. While the research context is a long way both physically and conceptually, from the circumstances of the Victorian communities affected by the recent bushfires, it is here that I think certain tentative relationships can be drawn. The image of timber-sheathed dwellings nestling amongst the gum trees in relative visual isolation is a powerful one and one that will not easily be transformed. However, ultimately I hope that the kind of macro-scale changes that Beatriz outlined in last month’s editorial will be seen as a positive, regenerative response to place rather than as a compromise to existing, unsustainable cultural habits.

Ceridwen Owen
Architects for Peace, March 2009

Victoria’s Bushfires: time to reflect new urban strategies

2009-02-17T23:51:00.013+11:00

By now most of you will be familiar with the natural disaster that affected the State of Victoria in Australia. Although it is believed that some of the fires may be the work of arsonists, this is a natural disaster in the sense that it was triggered by an dreadful combination of climatic conditions such as a very dry season, thick and dry native forest (bush) in country Victoria and around Melbourne’s periphery, strong winds and an unprecedented heat of up to 48 degrees Celsius. As these harsh climate conditions with its disastrous consequences become more frequent, Australian authorities and politicians are now quick to name climate change as a contributing factor.[1] In view of a future increasingly exposed to a harsher climate, calls for the review of emergency laws, the upgrading of fire evacuation plans and building regulations are been considered. However, are these expedient responses dealing with the complex issue of suburban and outer suburban living?

While a handful of scientists show caution in declaring that this disaster is due to climate change, others assert that,

There does seem to be a human element to bushfire risk. In terms of human contribution it is clear that most of the global warming since about 1950 is likely due to increases in greenhouse gases. Higher temperatures clearly increase the risk of bushfires.[2]

Reconstructing the same, “brick by brick”

Australia has abundant land and for the 200 years of colonisation settlers have had no need to compromise—not on the size of their houses and land, nor in terms of privacy, material costs or the cost of services such as transport and schools. This uncompromising attitude is part of an entrenched cultural trend that defines our suburbs, outer suburbs and suburbs within rural habitats, with its remarkable nature corridors and bush. While these conditions offer some fine aspects which define the Australian way of life, it also precludes other modes of living, particularly those associated to sharing resources, social equity, accessibility, urban vitality and the chances of achieving environmental sustainability.[3] One example of this is car dependency with all its detrimental effects. Larger pieces of land in the outer suburbs or “suburbs in the bush” are more affordable. As George Megalogenis notes, the population in the worst affected areas lived in an extension of “Mortgageville: communities with more children, and parents with less education, than the national average”.[4] This is an urban periphery foreign to the city skyline, forgotten by the urban professions and their educational institutions. For instance, how often do architectural design studios focus their explorations on the needs of these populations?

Responses as to what should be done to rebuild the destroyed houses and townships vary. While it is perhaps too soon to reflect on how and why this disaster took on such devastating force, reflection is needed. Comments focusing on at least two different dimensions of the problem emerge. Overall, one centres on the upgrading individual structures through better technology and regulations, while the other points at planning issues by questioning the wisdom of reconstructing in the same manner. For example, Victorian Premier John Brumby recommends that building codes need revision. Architect Lindsay Johnston discusses fire resistant houses and the construction of underground bunkers in areas prone to bushfires, while also adding that danger for these communities is exacerbated by urban sprawl.[5] Similarly, scientists such as Professor Andy Pitman suggests that fireproof underground shelters and different building regulations for houses near bush areas should be considered, simultaneously questioning the suitability of rebuilding in the affected areas.[6] Dr Nichols on the other hand warns of the “real chance that some communities may never be rebuilt”, while also noting that “the devastation in Victoria presents a sombre opportunity”.[7]

It is that sombre opportunity that I want to discuss. An opportunity that offers the chance to put in practice what our urban professions, ecologists, educators and members of the general public have been discussing for years. The understanding that devastation brought on by climate change cannot be overcome with yet more technology that reinforces the mindset that generated it. That perhaps it is time to think of collective rather than individual solutions to our predicaments. Promises such as “Together we will rebuild each of these communities — brick by brick, school by school, community hall by community hall”,[8] may offer some needed consolation to the victims and hope that their lives might one day return to some normality. However, in view of the facts it is pertinent to question what should be reconstructed in the context of Australian culture, ecology, climate change and the long term well-being of those affected today.

A collection of scattered buildings don’t make a township

What we witnessed in the last few days were heroic and tragic personal efforts to save the family house. Among those, one case comes to mind, where a group of people in Flowerdale survived thanks to a call for the nearby residents to stay in one building, a pub, while concentrating all efforts on saving that one building. A notion of collective that emerged out of despair.

When you fly across Europe what you will see is a very different urban, suburban and rural morphology to that of Australia. The European landscape is pierced by circles and lines, where the circles are the townships, the communities and the lines the roads or connectors. In Australia, lines connecting sparsely located properties crisscross the earth. Sporadic grouping of buildings such as the post-office, pub, supermarket, sometimes a school and bank, indicate something similar to a centre—but without a centre. What is also peculiar to Australia is that these linear ‘centres’ have very few or no residential buildings whatsoever. While in this morphology a relative sense of community can exist, this is greatly diminished by distance, a resulting car dependency and the placing and function of buildings. If we superimpose the analogy of the pub in Flowerdale, to a slightly more densely populated township in which people also have their residences, it would not be too far fetched to think that this imaginary inhabited township could be more easily protected than a road with spread out buildings and even more scattered houses placed within large to very large properties. In this late example, not only the efforts of residents but also those of emergency services are broken up and weakened. I cannot but to agree with Dr Nichols when he says,

I'd like to think at the end of the day that governments recognise that keeping a community together may well be worth the many millions of dollars it might cost to bring that about.[9]

The morphology of our cities, suburbs and satellite suburbs within rural land follow a planning trend. Rampant urban sprawl and its detrimental effects are well documented. Whether different planning regulations can assist to prevent tragedies such as the one we just witnessed is worth investigating. But planning the future of suburbs, wherever these are located, cannot continue being the result of rushed decisions by politicians, or a privilege reserved to one set of professionals.

Suggestions that focus on building regulations, or on more technology (whether sustainable or not), are part of micro-solutions. These solutions should not obscure or replace the need for a macro-scale debate and revision. It is at the planning and urban levels where community and expert discussion could take place, where questions about what is possible and wise and how should we shape urban, suburban and suburbs in rural communities can be addressed. This is what I would call the sombre opportunity that can and needs to be grasped. This is a collective and too often discounted approach to solving a problem.

Focusing on an armoured building or more disaster prepared individuals is one step in the same old direction—the individual object (building) and the person who does not compromise. Nor are these answers affordable to the social demography described by Megalogenis. These solutions dismiss what we have just learnt through this experience, that together with the destruction of lives and houses, the ecology, food production, water, power supply, public health and communication are also threatened. Other, perhaps vital consequences of these bushfires will not be known to us for a long time. This is a complex situation and while we may aspire to find simple solutions we can no longer afford to be simplistic in the process of finding them.

Rethinking how to live in the local environmental context

Perhaps we now have the opportunity to think about how we live and question whether this is suitable to the environment in which we live. Well thought through large scale strategies offering direction for micro solutions (building design, building code and technology) is an option worth pursuing. This is not a theoretical proposition, it is factual and necessary. The world provides examples that can be used to start the discussion. We can use our creativity to find solutions within the constraints that we now face and to create suitable living environments for the local conditions. Real creativity emerges out of working with the constraints posed by the problem and not when the context and constrains are severed from the problem. If natural local conditions and climate change represent the context—particularly when most scientists agree that human activity is partly to blame—how can we assist in the minimisation of such change? Should we consider compromising some aspects of the way we live? What are the disadvantages and the benefits in view of the recent tragedy? I suggest that these and other questions need to be widely discussed. That the responsibility for finding solutions cannot sit with planners and politicians alone—it needs to involve the large community including an extended professional community. The dimension of this tragedy has given us an unfortunate glimpse into a challenging future in which individually toughened houses will not suffice. Today we have the opportunity to learn from this disaster and to try new approaches.

Beatriz C. Maturana
Architects for Peace

-------
References:

[1] See comments By Victorian Premier John Brumby in, Kerry O'Brien, "Brumby Warns of Worse to Come," ABC News, 7:30 Report (9 February 2009).
[2] Kevin Hennessy from the CSIRO in Jonathan Pearlman, "It will only get worse as climate changes," The Sydney Morning Herald 9 February 2009.
[3] G. Davison discusses Australian cities and its deficiency in regards to social spaces. See Graeme Davison, "The European City in Australia," Journal of Urban History 27, no. 6 (2001). Note that Australia has one of the highest green house emissions per capita in the world.
[4] George Megalogenis, "On the Edge," The Australian 14 February 2009.
[5] Oscar McLaren, "Bushfire Tragedy Rewrites Rules for Architects," ABC News (11 February 2009).
[6] Andy Pitman, co-director of the University of New South Wales' Climate Change Research Centre, in Adam Morton, "Climate change must be 'a factor' in deciding whether to rebuild," The Age 10 February 2009.
[7] David Nichols in McLaren, "Bushfire Tragedy Rewrites Rules for Architects."
[8] Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in, B. Nicholson and D. Rood. “We'll Rebuild Brick by Brick.” The Age 11 February 2009.
[9] D. Nichols in McLaren, "Bushfire Tragedy Rewrites Rules for Architects."

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Worlds Beyond Architecture

2008-11-25T18:17:00.004+11:00

Worlds Beyond Architecture

The 11th Architecture Biennale, "Beyond Architecture", draws to a close this month. What of it? News coverage is generally limited to the pavilion of the newspaper's country. So here in Australia we might read a little about the Australian pavilion. a room painted bright yellow and packed full of tiny unlabelled models from a bevvy of architects.

A lot to look at but what is it saying? – “we have a lot of architects making good models”. The other countries had similar difficulties expressing their country-ness. Whatever the approach, the appointed curator is bound to run into trouble back home It's a time to be reminded that the architectural discussion is international – that certain Sydney architects might have a closer affinity to work in Tokyo than they do to work in Melbourne. (...)

Editorial Nov08

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peter johns

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Too little, too late?

2008-10-17T18:19:00.005+11:00

I recently attended the Sustainable Building 08 conference in Melbourne. This is an international conference held every 3 years that brings together leading thinkers in sustainability in all aspects of design, planning and construction. The conference opened with the ubiquitous addresses from local politicians, the first from Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett and the second from State Environment Minister Gavin Jennings. I have to confess to drifting off during both presentations, distracted by the book of abstracts and the goodies that the conference had to offer; but suffice to say the speeches contained the usual rhetoric, waxing lyrical about the various achievements and future initiatives of both Federal and State Governments. Both Ministers were quick to exit the building following their address and so missed the final opening keynote presentation from Bill Rees (of ‘Our Ecological Footprint’ fame). It was at this point that the mood of the conference drastically changed. The optimistic cheer of the politicians was replaced by a depressingly frank description of the current state of the environment: by 2015 half of all housing stock in China will have been built since 2000; floor space per capita has increased by more than 300% over the last 50 years in the United States; human enterprise exceeds global carrying capacity by 25-30%; we need to reduce ecological footprints by 80% in the developed world for an ‘equitable earth share’…. These ‘facts’ came as no surprise to the educated audience, but strung together they presented a bleak state of affairs. More worryingly, however, was the underlying message that permeated Bill Rees’s presentation and many others at the conference – that we have done too little too late. It seems that the pace of environmental degradation is outstripping even the estimations of the most conservative of scientific models. The question is not whether and how we can avert the devastating consequences of climate change, but rather whether and how we choose to manage the inevitable social and environmental crises that will result from the vast quantities of greenhouse gases that we have already pumped into the atmosphere. How and where should we accommodate climatic refugees? How should we choose to direct economic recession? How shall we reorganise our urban centres to cope with the impending sea level rises and increased temperatures? Bill Rees concluded that efficiency is not the answer and can only ever lead to what he termed ‘quasi sustainability’. In fact, he argued that if anything efficiency is making things worse - the more efficient we become, the more we consume and the really ‘inconvenient truth’ is that we must give up on material growth. This is not a picture that the world’s politicians are ready to hear and the message would doubtless have fallen on deaf ears had the Ministers elected to stay to the end of the session. Personally I have mixed feelings about these ‘truths’. I firmly believe that efficiency is not the answer and can lead us to some highly dubious outcomes (maybe the ‘eco-hummer’ will one day make an appearance?). This might be the way the world is heading and it is easy to give up hope in the face of such overwhelming statistics of consumption despite growing awareness of global environmental issues. Nevertheless, I’m not quite ready to batten down the hatches and settle in to weather the global environmental storm. We have doubtless done too little, and it may be too late, but I have to remain optimistic (after all I have recently brought two children into this world). As a member of the audience of the converted at the conference, the doomsday messages just left me feeling flat. While they weren’t all doom and gloom, I was left wondering whether the next generation of sustainability thinkers would be inspired and spurred into action as I was almost 15 years ago when I attended my first sustainability conference. Most of the leading sustainability thinkers at the conference came into this field thinking that they could make a difference. I hope we can present a bright enough picture so that the next generation feel they can too.

Ceridwen Owen
Architects for Peace, October 2008

One question

2008-09-12T12:39:00.002+10:00

I pose a single question – ‘what role can an architect play in improving the lives of the poor?’ I also ask this question of myself as I work to use my architectural skills in communities beyond my own – in Isaan in rural Thailand and in Australia’s ‘top-end’.

There is much historical evidence of hope, of failure and of varying states between. Many great architects (and some poor ones too) have pondered the same question. Hassan Fathy (mentioned in July’s editorial), was lauded by architects for his famous New Gourna project to help the poor in rural Egypt. However in reality the village was only reluctantly inhabited by its residents – many of whom went on to actively undermine many of his initiatives. Local politics, coupled with his failure to truly understand his clients, led to this mismatch between aims and outcomes.

Le Corbusier’s dreams to house the workers in ‘machines’ led to generations of people living in the most soul destroying conditions. As much as he should be respected as an architect, his vision was subsequently distorted to produce housing that could crush the human spirit.

Even projects based on architects working alongside residents to build houses lead to unmet expectations and compromised outcomes. Christopher Alexander’s Mexicali project combined architecture students with residents to design and build a collective group of houses using his ‘pattern language’ approach (mentioned in the April editorial). However the self-help project faltered when Alexander left and in the following years the collective spirit, with which the project was initiated, was lost and conflicts ensued over resident’s rights to collective space.

There are numerous examples of an architect’s involvement in these sorts of compromised outcomes – not to mention complete failures such as much of the Australian government’s attempts at indigenous housing.

As I ponder this I wonder if we should be reminded to re-evaluate how we measure success and reconsider what architecture can really be about. Many architects (and clients) measure their success with their building’s size and cost. However we are all well aware that many of our favourite places and spaces have never involved architects with formal training and this vernacular can be very powerful.

I believe that architects working with the poor must be prepared to look for (and embrace) small victories, with modest means free from commercial obligations. There is so much to get wrong; money is tight, politics intervene, expectations are almost impossible to quantify and technologies are not always compliant; but there are moments when new understandings are made and solutions found – however modest they might seem.

My involvement with a Thai NGO first revealed to me that the architect’s specialisation at understanding links between form, technology and space plays only a partial role in the overall picture. Outside agendas, politics, and the unknowable aspirations of your client, all conspire to complicate or shut down options that should be explored – particularly when a multitude of sustainability issues are at stake. But the architect is in a unique position to work with this complexity and must contribute.

Have I had any modest success?

Yes I have had small victories. I was invited to critique a prototype house designed for the Thai NGO. These houses were to be mass-produced for factory workers in a hot/humid climate and many of the ideologies driving the project were worthy. I made suggestions to improve the cross-ventilation (reducing the need for air-conditioning), change the planning (to suit local needs) and reduce costs. Upon construction I was pleased these initiatives were successful. However ultimately I believed that the design was compromised by the initial choice of construction technology and made myself unpopular by suggesting it was unsuitable. I was not surprised when production ceased.

I have also critiqued a prototype house designed for an indigenous community in the ‘top-end’ of Australia – and again made myself unpopular with the governing bodies. The house was designed (ironically by a Tasmanian company located in Australia’s deep south) without substantial eaves and without the capacity to cross-ventilate effectively. The poor detailing and poor workmanship of the preceding trades frustrated the contracted builder. The local community stood by and watched – they had never been consulted at any stage. I was amazed that the designers included no suitable public/private spaces – where were the residents going to hang out?

These experiences reinforce the need to take the time to sit and watch the complex mechanisms that govern everyday life in these communities. An architect – trained in methods of observation and with mechanisms to record this – is in a unique position to put in the effort to identify housing patterns distinct to that culture and make the case for their inclusion. We might not get it all right but we might just improve the chances for some small victories.

I’ve also been able to sharpen my questions and see the importance of linking these with a complex sustainability agenda. The actual construction technology plays a significant role with many flow-on effects – economically, environmentally and culturally.

It may seem paradoxical but I also see the value in spontaneous and innovative prototypes – speculations on what housing might be. Constructing basic shelters with collective teams of locals and intruders to challenge the status quo is revealing. (No-one is expected to live in these – they are to provoke ideas and facilitate discussion). But I do believe that the architect has a role in taking steps towards a new architecture that is simple so to enable residents to easily add and modify as required. The house should be lightweight and designed to not require air-conditioning. People should have outside and inside living spaces. They should be arranged so residents have both public and semi-public places to hang out. They should not financially cripple the residents so they compromise education and health. Oh, and did I mention that these houses must meet the community’s aspirations?

Simple heh?

In the next few months I will test this with two projects – one in rural Thailand, the other in Australia’s Northern Territory. It will be fascinating to design and build structures to provoke discussions across both cultures. There is much for me to learn and hopefully some small victories on the way.

David O'Brien
Architects for Peace, September 2008

Olympic Musings

2008-08-23T14:50:00.010+10:00

"The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well." (Olympic creed, Pierre de Coubertin)

By the time this editorial gets posted, the 2008 Beijing Olympics will have been in full swing. I thought why not join the festivities and reflect on the Olympics movement – or join the media (at least English language-based) in bagging the Olympics (poor air quality and terrorism have been popular). I decided to attempt not taking either route and reflect on the Olympics material culture – and Beijing’s is undoubtedly some of the most impressive to date, in ambition, scale, quality and speed of production. This is part of a meticulously choreographed media exercise, by the Chinese government, to impress the world and also its own citizens – providing material evidence to match its superpower aspirations whether economically, militarily or culturally. Judged by the way history is often (and inescapably) materially framed, they are certainly on the right track – as it is empires and their built legacy, remnants from the ancient superpowers such as Egypt, Greece, Rome, China to modern empires such as the British, French, American, that continues to inspire and leave ensuing generations in awe. On the contrary, societies that are more sustainable and operate within their ecological limits often do not leave monuments, culturally inscribing on the earth more lightly.

Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times asked rhetorically “…One wonders if the West will ever catch up?” The answer for him seemed to be a resounding “no” – and on this many others have rationalized in political terms that such achievement is only possible in totalitarian regimes. Maybe that is an irrelevant question as, arguably, the West does not need to catch up (of course, no one should if the broader objective is for a more sustainable world) – Beijing is already embedded within our modern legacy, where it is no longer valid to discriminate into “East” or “West”. At Beijing, we merely taste the latest maturing fruits of the 18th Century Industrial Revolution and the interwoven religion of neoclassical economics. Besides, the designers of most of these mega-projects are Europeans, fully collaborating with the Chinese in their quest for supremacy in the oil and coal fuelled economy – at least in the accumulation of symbolic capital in the case of the Beijing Olympics.

Moreover, the Beijing Olympics in self-proclaiming itself as the “Green Olympics” is only consistent with contemporary public relation best practice in paying lip service to the concept of sustainability. In stark contrast with those self-delusions (the ‘peace’ and, more recently, ‘green’ feeling billions around the world experience together every four years), both China and the world continue to gratify their addiction to oil through drilling in ecologically sensitive landscapes and seascapes, energy intensively extracting oil from tar sands (now that oil prices has been manipulated (?) to make processing dirty oil economically viable) and, in many countries and regions, destabilising politics and societies in the process of extracting oil. Worst environmental practices are also easily shared and transplanted such as large-scale desalination plants that make extreme resource blind developments possible from Victoria (planned) to Dubai.

These issues may never be effectively addressed while Climate Change, in which the entire world’s environmental problems seem to have been reduced into and entrapped, is an almost impenetrable conundrum. It is obvious that emission targets to deal with Climate Change cannot be met if China, India and other developing economies are left out of the equation. Yet, this also raises ethical and moral dilemmas. Developed economies have defined, through two centuries, a hegemonic ecologically disastrous path towards material wellbeing. In asking developing countries to hold back on burning coal and oil that powers economic growth, we are asking the billions living in poverty to defer what they see is their right to a better quality of life that we already take for granted.

Alex Fernside of MCC, having watched the Olympics opening ceremony performances and its implied symbolisms, argued that we have our priorities wrong in our futuristic focus for a sustainable future. We must plan/design for a greener present rather than towards a less certain future. This idea potentially redefines the priorities of “sustainability” – one that calls for a refocus on the here and now and not planning for a sustainable society in 2030 or 2050 – which, in effect, is merely deferring our present responsibilities to future generations (while conveniently deferring critical decisions to future politicians). Besides, if Climate Change and its impact projections prove accurate, it requires radical societal changes now rather than present incremental practices to avoid worse case scenarios. Cities can no longer afford just to accumulate isolated symbolic green icons such as CH2 (a drop in the ocean of unsustainable building stocks in Melbourne), collectively feel good about it, and market it for all its worth. We have to make sure refinement of such practices and experimental attitudes quickly permeate the broader city, whether in new projects or retrofits. Maybe it is through these finer actions where our ‘salvation’, if time permits, lies – in the defining, inventing and practicing alternative paths towards material wellbeing and quickly, unselfishly sharing and disseminating to other societies aspiring to our lifestyles. On that note, one wonders how historians in 3008 will interpret (or misinterpret!) the remnants of the Beijing Olympic monuments.

Sidh Sintusingha

Architects for Peace, August 2008

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Unveiling the Jewels of the Built Environment in the Developing World

2008-07-17T13:09:00.005+10:00

People including main stream professional architects sometimes wonder about the reason of or the need for architectural awards while questioning their validity: Are they necessary? I would say yes. Awards are critical; they validate the achievements of professional architects while making their contributions more widely acknowledged by the public, hence promoting excellence in architecture. Some awards recognise the extraordinary lifetime achievement of an architect
and others praise projects of virtues that offer guidance for changing the status quo toward a positive change. The Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA) continues to centre its interest on these three areas.

In essence, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture-AKAA addresses contexts in which Muslim communities have substantial presence and, in my view, it has contributed at the physical intervention level and at the architectural thought level in the whole developing or non-Western world. The Award's concern and impact is not only expressed in the conservation of architectural heritage or revitalisation of deteriorated communities or stylistic and symbolic interventions. It is about the enduring values of architecture in creating physical and visual manifestations that speak to their communities, relate effectively to their users and their economic and societal realities. In this editorial, I reflect on selected aspects of Award and its contributions.

What is the Aga Khan Award for Architecture?
Established in 1977 the Award is not a typical architectural prize. It aims to identify and reward architectural concepts that successfully address the needs and aspirations of developing communities while addressing the multi-faceted aspects of the built environment; these range from contemporary innovative designs, to social housing and community developments, to adaptive re-use and conservation, landscape design and city re-development. The Award is presented in three-year cycles to multiple projects with prizes totalling up to US$500,000. A unique aspect here is that unlike other architectural awards, it recognises all parties involved including clients, design and planning teams, stakeholders and users.

While it is important to shed light on the process of how projects get awarded, I reflect on some themes under which the major contributions of the Award become more perceptible. These themes continue to represent explicit concerns of the Award while posing themselves on the worldwide map of architectural and urbanism discourse.

A Rigorous Review Process
The process of rewarding a built project is one that undergoes a rigorous jury and review procedures. A new committee is formed with each triennial cycle to establish issues of interest; thematic direction with reference to current concerns. The Steering Committee selects an independent Master Jury appointed for each Award cycle. As a result each cycle introduces fresh thinking for intervening in the environment. The appointed Master Jury selects the Award recipients from the projects it reviews.

Two important aspects of the selection process of Award winners are important to note. On the one hand, the jury is pluri-disciplinary and brings members from fields such as history, engineering, philosophy, architectural conservation and contemporary arts, as well as practicing architects, landscape architects and urban planners. Typically, the Jury reviews the submissions enrolled through the nomination program. They examine the documentation of each project and select approximately twenty-five to thirty projects. During the project short-listing process the boundaries between these disciplines are crossed through discussions and interpretation, thereby leading to advancing architectural discourse.

Secondly, a deep sense of vertical knowledge is involved. Technical reviewers conduct on site assessments to gain textual and visual information about the projects before presenting the results of their visits to the master jury over an intensive week to 10-days jury sessions in similitude to workshops and different from typical jury settings. This process is unique to the Award; no other award program in any part of the world appoints on-site reviewers. On-site technical reviewers bring their expertise to the table coupled with their first-hand observations about the practical realities of the built project and the context within which it was created. In essence, the typical norm in most other award juries rely heavily on photographic images of built works and their selection is based only on their collective vision-sometimes hallucination-of what architectural excellence is about.

Tending Architecture, Taming Urbanism and Enlightening Intellectual Discourse
Over the past three decades, 95 projects from the developing world have received the Award, with other credited projects. In its 10 triennial cycles, it has generated vibrant debates at all levels. The Awards' monographs, written and edited by thinkers, have had a great influence on architectural discourse. Over 25 conference and seminar proceedings were published pointing to how architecture makes the ideals, values, and beliefs of Muslims tangible, causing its input to how urbanism can be controlled to be more reactive to its socio-cultural context evident through upgrading, revitalisation, re-development, participation, and appropriate technology among others.

Not only has new architectural thought resulted from the Award's events and publications, the concerns it supports became integral components of worldwide debates on contemporary and historical architecture. At the international level, the architectural community has become more familiar with issues like social architecture, participation, squatter settlements, environmental and cultural impacts; these were neither celebrated and supported, nor respected and recognised by main-stream architectural practices. At the local level, a dialogue was fostered between professionals, academics and decision makers on crucial progress issues that have usually been of concern to one group but rarely to the other two.

The Chairman Award and the Enduring Values of Architecture between Hasan Fathy, Rifat Chadirji and Geoffrey Bawa
The fact that creating architecture is a complex process that requires talent and critical imagination coupled with a deep interpretation of people and their environments, necessitates a holistic understanding of six elements - people, technology, beauty, time, place and cost - and how they interrelate, to produce a meaningful environment. Such an understanding is reflected in the Chairman Award, which has been awarded on three occasions in 1980, 1986 and 2001.

Hassan Fathy, the Egyptian architect, artist and poet, received the 1st Chairman Award in recognition of his lifetime commitment to architecture in the Muslim world. He perceived that a connection could be made between the continuing viability of mud brick construction and the desperate need of Egypt's poor to be taught once again to build a shelter for themselves. Rifat Chadirji, the Iraqi architect, critic and teacher, received the 2nd Chairman Award. He was able to strike a balance between the givens of the time and heritage as is evident in his work in Baghdad, searching for an appropriate contemporary architectural expression that synthesises elements of the rich Islamic cultural heritage with key principles of 20th Century architecture

Geoffrey Bawa, Sri Lanka's most prolific and influential architect, received the 3rd Chairman Award in 2001. His work has had a remarkable impact upon architecture throughout Asia and has been praised by connoisseurs of architecture worldwide. Bawa was able to express the mixed influences that characterise Sri Lanka: Indian neighbours, Arab traders and European colonists. Thus, his architecture is a delicate blend of tradition and modernity, East and West, formal and picturesque while also addressing the dynamic tension between culture and nature.

Expanding the Scope of Architectural Practice
Right from the beginning, the Award set the stage for expanding the scope of architecture. Architecture went from being understood only as a built artefact to being viewed as a holistic intervention approach integral to development efforts. This is evident in Indonesia's Kampung Improvement Program and Citra Niaga Urban Development, both of which received the Award in 1989. Another example is the Indore Slum Program in India, which received the Award in 1998. Typically, these projects do not qualify for most architectural awards as, it is claimed, the issues they address are of little or no concern to architecture. This tunnel vision of architecture is opened up through an understanding of architecture and its role in the community by recognising the concepts adopted in these projects.

The Kampung Improvement Program is an excellent example of a government-assisted, self-help community-planning program that manifests a wider scope of architectural practice. It provides three levels of infrastructure: paved access roads, bridges and footpaths; water supply, sanitation and drainage canals; schools and health clinics. These improvements are threaded along existing rights-of-way, with little disturbance to the existing housing. The Master Jury of the first cycle argued that this program improved the living conditions, fostered the integration of the informal sector into the city's economy and encouraged individual initiatives to improve housing.

From Restoration to Sustainable Urban Conservation
Efforts for restoring or reusing old religious or cultural structures have been recognised by the Award, including a large number of projects such as Darb Qirmiz Quarter, Egypt (1983), Great Omari Mosque in Sidon, Lebanon (1989) and Al Abbas Mosque, Yemen (2007). These projects are noted for their sensitivity in treating buildings as living fabrics and in creating a partnership between local and outside skill. The idea of restoration has also been expanded to include sustainable urban conservation efforts, in projects like the conservation and /or rehabilitation of Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia (1980), Mostar Old Town, Bosnia and Herzegovina (1986), Asila, Morocco (1989), Bukhara (1995), New Life for Old Structures, Iran (2001), Shibam, Yemen, and the Walled City, Nicosia, Cyprus (2007). These projects present strong messages on ways in which old cities should be reintegrated into new ways of life.

Although architectural and conservation efforts are in essence technical, they represent socio-cultural and socio-political acts. This is apparent in the rehabilitation of the Walled City of Nicosia, which saw close collaboration between the project's Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot participants. In this respect, the Award is promoting peace, tolerance, plurality and the fusion of cultures.

Sustainability and Ecological Architecture
Since the Rio summit in 1992 and the emergence of "sustainability", the award swiftly began to recognise projects with sustainable design strategies. The classic example is Menara Mesiniaga, the IBM headquarters, in Subang Jaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which received the Award in 1995. It is a high-tech, 15-storey corporate showcase on a convenient and visually prominent corner site. It is a result of Kenneth Yeang's ten-year study of bio-climatic principles in the design of medium-to-tall buildings. Its tri-partite structure consists of a raised "green" base, ten circular floors of office space with terraced garden balconies and external louvers for shade. It is roofed by a spectacular sun-roof, arching across the top-floor pool. The distinct columns that project above the pool floor support solar panels. Further reducing the energy use of a naturally cooled building are sun-screens and air-conditioning. The tower has become a landmark. Again, this is a powerful message that speaks to the developing world on the value of integrating sustainable design approaches to multi-story structures.

Sustainability has driven other projects like Datai Hotel, Malaysia (2001) and Moulmein Rise Residential Tower, Singapore (2007) to emphasise ecological approaches to architecture. While Datai Hotel is described by a successful reaction to nature, topography and vegetation, the Moulmein Rise Residential Tower adopts many forgotten low energy strategies like orientation, overhangs, shading and perforation and cross ventilation. Also, instead of treating users as identical, the design responds to the psychological needs of users, manifested in the modular system's flexibility to allow varied units to house diverse needs while simultaneously addressing personalisation and individuality.

Socio-Cultural Aspirations and Special Populations
Needs, wants and aspirations of local communities were addressed by many winning projects since the early eighties. These include the upgrading of Hafsia Quarter in Tunisia and Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre in Egypt (1983) to Demir Holiday Village in Turkey and East Wahdat upgrading in Jordan (1992). The significance of these projects lies in the cultural and socio-economic impacts they have had on their communities. It is unfortunate that these issues remain at the periphery of most architectural practices, which in turn may be seen as the reason why the Award persists in addressing them.

A wide spectrum of awarded projects offers lessons on how to treat specific segments of societies including children, the poor and the under-represented. School projects in poor communities like Gando Primary School, Burkina Faso (2004) and Rudrapur School, Bangladesh (2007) have been vital contributions recognised by the Award. They address local architectonic constraints, instill optimism, instigate delight and initiate learning and progress in unfortunate conditions. Projects like the Cultural Park for Children (1992) and SOS Village in Aqaba (2001) present other manifestations of pleasant and attractive settings amenable to children's needs. Hospitals serving under-represented populations, like Kaédi Regional Hospital, Mauritania (1995) and Lepers' Hospital, Chopda Taluka, India (1998), have also been recognised by the Award for their efficient and effective use of local materials and traditional building technology while treating patients in a pleasant setting.

Between Exploratory Novelties and Multiple Modernities
The Award recognised two important facts; the first is that the Muslim world, occupying a large geographical area, enjoys unique wealth in its cultures and societies. Some projects were awarded not only for their social, cultural and environmental impact, but also for echoing a unique visual identity of a locality and a deep analysis of elements and symbols inherited from the past. These include the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh (1989) and Al Kindi Plaza in Saudi Arabia (1989). Also, The Nubia Museum in Egypt (2001) and Olbia Social Centre in Turkey (2001) embody conscious endeavours in this respect, exhibiting the multiple faces of modernity throughout the Muslim world.

Supporting innovation and fostering the blend of advanced technology in construction systems with local expressions continue to be a key aspect of the Award since its first cycle. The Award recognised projects such as the Intercontinental Hotel and Conference Centre, Makkah (1980) and Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (1983) for their novel approaches in addressing the active link between the technology of the time and tradition. More striking is the credit for innovation at smaller scale manifestations including the B2 House in Ayvacik, Turkey, which embodies a sense of merit and a progressive approach in recognising its physical context, and the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which consciously and poetically merges elements of Dutch architecture with its environs.

This look back at the Aga Khan Award's contributions to architecture and urbanism in the developing world has instilled certain aspects and issues that continue to be supported by the Award. There is still much to be learnt from these and other projects not mentioned here, a lot to be measured, explored,analysed and assessed. By analysing the Award's publications and the projects it has recognised with a critical eye, the lessons they contain will be revealed.

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An expanded version of this editorial appeared this month in Issue 3 of MAGAZ magazine, Cairo, Egypt under the title of The Aga Khan Award for Architecture at a Glance: Glimpses of Three Decades of Contributions to Architecture and Urbanism in the Developing World.

Acknowledgements: Thanks are due to Farroukh Derakhshani, Director of Aga Khan Award Procedures for his insights in developing this article. My thanks go to Karen Stylianoudis for providing all the necessary materials for developing this article.
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Ashraf M. Salama
Architects for Peace, July 2008

Reflections on Brazil

2008-06-17T15:31:00.006+10:00

The following editorial is a reflection on my time spent in Brazil in 2007, during which  I was a university intern, attended the Architecture Biennale and participated in a regional conference of architecture students.

The Sao Paolo Architecture Biennale is held in alternation with the more famous and longer-established Art Biennale. In 2007, I attended along with students and staff from the Universidade Estadual de Maringa at the close of my internship in the Department of Architecture and Urbanism. The theme of the exhibition was “Architecture: the public and the private”.

The Biennale takes place at the Parque de Ibirapuera, naturally inside a building designed by the darling of the Brazilian architecture scene, Oscar Niemeyer. As an architect travelling in Brazil, it’s easy to fall into a sort of Niemeyer pilgrimage. Admittedly, that name composed a significant proportion of the sum total of my Brazilian architecture knowledge prior to my trip, and my expectations were not wholly confounded. It seems that almost every city that takes itself seriously has a piece of Niemeyer; a determined advocate of social justice whose vision has splintered and congealed in monuments scattered all over the country. After celebrating his 100th birthday in December last year, he is apparently not only alive and kicking but still coherent in television interviews and indeed still designing; certainly a force to be reckoned with. Yet I found something unsatisfying about seeing his work up close; something that began to dawn on me somewhere between his eponymous museum in the form of a giant eye in Curitiba and the space-ship like Museo de Niteroi perched spectacularly – if somewhat incongruously – on a rocky coastal outcrop just outside of Rio de Janeiro. True, the manipulation of concrete into breath-taking, curvaceous forms is no mean technical feat. What bothered me was that, while the architect has waxed lyrical for years about social reform, his buildings remain surprisingly tight-lipped on the subject.

Still, in a country so fraught with contradiction, it is perhaps unsurprising that Niemeyer has seduced the nation with his rhetoric but failed to deliver the goods. It is very difficult to generalise about Brazil; the size of the country and indigenous as well as colonial influences have produced distinct regional differences that manifest themselves in speech, music and cultural traditions. Perhaps the only thing that can be safely asserted is the intrinsic presence of contradiction. As an intern at the UEM, I became aware early on that the university system itself is predicated on contradiction. In theory, public universities offer free education. Fantastic, I thought. In reality, all prospective students must sit a comprehensive entrance exam (at each university applied for), whether applying for biology or theatre arts. Passing is really only feasible for young people who have attended private secondary schools or who paid for one or more post-high school years at specialised preparatory schools, meaning that wealthier families end up with free education, while those who can’t afford the upfront preparation costs only have the option of the ongoing costs of the private system. Among public university teaching staff, dissatisfaction with low salaries is widespread, and regular strikes place students at risk of missing semesters.

Not surprising then that university reform should be one of the items on the agenda of the students involved in the FENEA – National Federation of Students of Architecture. The culture of student meetings bringing together universities throughout the country is not exclusive to architecture, but it certainly seems that architecture students have plenty to say. For a start, the name of the course is Architecture AND Urbanism – and this encompasses landscape architecture, urban design, planning and interior design – suggesting that the relationship between the design of buildings and their wider context is established from the outset. Back home, the tendency towards specialisation has generated a myriad of independent built environment disciplines – which can then be dressed up as streamlining services and providing opportunities for collaboration and multi-disciplinary engagement, but risk operating in isolation from one another. The FENEA holds annual conferences at regional, national and Latin America wide levels during which projects are presented, workshops held and relevant issues debated. They are run entirely by students. There is a big element of fun involved; Brazilians like to celebrate and there’s no doubt that drinking sessions and parties motivate plenty of students to take part. This seems to fuel scepticism among students who aren’t involved, with rumours of corruption and mis-use of funds within the student movement. Even so, it’s clear that the organisation required to make these events happen is formidable and more impressive given the already sizeable workload that is the lot of the average architecture student. The organising students are committed to the content of the conferences, politically-minded, articulate and passionate. At the very least, the conferences foster connections between students from different universities and different regions; something that seems to have been strangely absent from my own education, where there was barely a sense of a student community within my own faculty, let alone interaction with other schools in Melbourne.

Student activism is not limited to the FENEA. The non-profit-organisation Um Teto Para Meu Pais (A Shelter for my Country), which has spread from Chile throughout Latin America, started out in Brazil in 2007 almost entirely under the direction of volunteer students from various disciplines at the University of Sao Paolo. The premise is relatively simple: a three stage plan to assist struggling communities in regional and urban areas. Stage 1: constructing a new house for one family, based on a relatively crude model – 5 x 8 metre, one room, pre-fab timber box with two wooden shutters and a door. Stage 2: implementation of training and development programs within the community. Stage 3: construction of long-term, custom-designed complex based on identified community needs.

Currently only stage 1 has been executed in Brazil. The scale of the pre-fab model is such that one can be erected by a team of 4-5 unskilled volunteers in a weekend. Male family members usually help too. It’s hard work. The volunteers stay overnight in the community and alcohol is banned, so unlike the FENEA meetings, there’s no partying incentive. Social consciousness
Signs of this active student scene were disappointingly scarce at the 2007 Biennale. With the exception of a tertiary design competition and some research projects, the host nation’s contribution to the exhibition seemed to focus largely on the professional world. There was of course the ubiquitous section devoted to old Oscar’s imminent birthday, but the rest of the exhibition came across feeling something more like a commercial expo than a critical representation of contemporary architecture and urbanism in Brazil. It is true that the Brazilian government of late has embraced the spirit of progress and perhaps this was simply reflected in the skyscrapers and resorts on public display, while the political and social awareness I had seen demonstrated by student groups must have constituted the ‘private’ part of the theme (so private as to be, in fact, almost invisible). I found myself asking what happened in the transition from the academic to professional world? Was there an organised professional body to provide the platform for dialogue that is available to the student population?

Discussions with students seemed to suggest not, and there was certainly no evidence of such a thing at the Biennale. Perhaps there is more at stake for practicing architects in the real world than for 20-somethings who can argue about the social capacity of the architect during the day then samba the night away. Certainly that seems to be the case here in Australia, where professional reputations and client retention can discourage political involvement.

So Niemeyer, now 100, continues to churn out concrete masterpieces in the name of the greater good, but will he be around for the 2009 Biennale? One wonders who will take the baton from the radical idealist who brought Brazilian architecture to the world stage. It’s unlikely that there is another master designer waiting in the wings, but there are many passionate voices willing to fill the void; to act on unrealised social values and perhaps transcend the concrete legacy that Brazil continues to present to the world.

Meanwhile, back home, a student congress is scheduled to take place in Canberra in 2009. It is being promoted as the first such event to take place since 1981. 28 years is a long time between drinks. Let’s hope there’s a Brazilian on the organising team.

Eleanor Chapman
Architects for Peace, June 2008

development architecture, Mongolian style

2008-05-25T10:09:00.000+10:00

The May editorial is comprised of some of my reflections on development work which may be of interest to - and prompt discussion among - AfP readers. I am now in the ninth month of a placement in a Mongolian Construction College in a poor peri-urban area. I have extended this piece based on a response from Ceridwen Owen, below, and welcome further discussion.

My role as 'architect teacher trainer' in Ulaanbaatar is broad; to develop the architecture staff, students, curriculum and profession. The work is part of a VSO project to develop secure livelihoods, and aims to develop construction jobs, which would help more Mongolians to live above the poverty line. (see UNESCO report).

Mongolia

’s economy, in transition since 1992 from socialism, has been developing, but environmental problems, unemployment, poor literacy, alcohol abuse, and often inadequate sanitation and infrastructure all remain as large problems for the construction sector. Construction professionals and teachers however, seem ill-prepared - or disinclined - to tackle these medium and long-term issues. One of the 'developmental' attractions of the project is that I am also able to work flexibly with stakeholders - without a full load of formal teaching hours, which would potentially only do a Mongolian construction teacher out of their job. Instead I try to work side-by side with teachers, despite the considerable language and resource challenges.

There are very few printed or institutional resources for architectural education available in the Mongolian language, while literacy problems and poor teaching facilities also provide barriers to teaching and learning. The Russian materials and teaching methods commonly used between 1924 and 1989 are now particularly outdated, and English and German language materials (Chinese language materials seem to be culturally taboo) are often even more inaccessible, both financially and linguistically. A quotation from 1989 I read today was a sobering reminder of the after-effects of the Soviet 20th century.

"'They told us we lived in a socialist paradise', the worker said bitterly. 'But the soviets dumped their obsolete equipment on us, and every one of them lorded it over us as experts. Even the Russian truck drivers were experts - who got paid three times more.'" ('Ulan Bator May 1989' (sic) in Jasper Becker 1992 The Lost Country; Mongolia Revealed )

Becker's report of conditions of gaols in 1989 was horrifying. But also the demotivation and aid dependency of organisation still in transition, remains worrying. As a 'foreign expert' and volunteer, I constantly feel I need to draw attention to developing the capacity of local people; teachers, architects, students. Not just "telling about my experience" but trying to develop with people in collaboration.

Yesterday, with a translator, I asked a second year group what they had learned in first year. "The column, the corinthian column." Was it relevant in Mongolia? Students need to learn about art and design, they said. Later, some students expressed concern about the calculations necessary in building technology lessons, and the lack of 'artistic freedom'. They also wanted to know about the pathways to qualification in foreign countries. I assured them that some concerns about the ability of their teachers to "deliver" were also percieved by students in other countries. We discussed some projects, drawn, surrounded by lush vegetation in empty landscapes, but actually meant to be in cities.

The architectural community of this country, which has been in transition from communism since 1992, seems somewhat disconnected from world standards and communication. The elusive Arkitektorjdiin Kholboo (Mongolian Association of Architects) seems to be “dormant”. Gradually the Mongolian Architecture page on Wikipedia is being improved. It is in English, inaccessible to those students mentioned above.

Yet I believe some of the work I have undertaken (what VSO calls skill sharing) has developed the confidence and literacy of architecture teaching staff. Since I have been training here, two teachers have moved on to better-paid jobs. The curriculum is rarely referred to consciously; although it remains on file “at the Ministry”, teachers apparently measure student progress largely by perseverance. I try to demystify the odea of curriculum development.

Soon, the first cohort of diploma students will complete their fourth year. Of these, none to whom I have spoken seems to have been remotely aware of 'the' one Mongolian architecture textbook (Bat-Od, 2005, 2007), let alone basic texts used internationally, like FDK Ching’s ‘Form, Space and Order’, the US Architectural Graphic Standards, or Neufert’s ‘Architects’ Data’ (in 18 languages). Building and planning codes may exist, but are only vaguely known, and seem to be poorly controlled. Physical accessibility to buildings and streets for people without disabilities is difficult enough, but independent living for people with disabilities is almost unheard-of. I have worked with the Mongolian Wheelchairs Citizens, but the teachers have no time or interest. Small steps.

On the other hand, potential exists for future development in the secondary and tertiary Ger districts, (informal settlements beyond those scheduled for replacement by apartments), as well as in the much anticipated new social housing, and in commercial development, so often 'outsourced' to foreign experts and cheap Chinese labour.

On the positive side, there is life in Mongolia beyond work. The apparently barren and dirty environment is not yet as badly polluted as many places, and there are some freedoms in the nomadic tradition. Many people seem to enjoy more time with their families and better access to locally grown food than in the UK. Teachers work long hours, but do not seem stressed. They are concerned about air quality - comparable with London's before the Clean Air Act of 1956 - and about transport congestion, in the oversubscribed capital. Many people I meet would like to contribute to Mongolia’s development without having to go abroad, as so many young people and absent fathers have done in order to earn more money. Mongolians love their culture and customs, and many are rediscovering indigenous music, history, arts, medicine and even calligraphy.

As I prepare for the final few months of the placement and set objectives for the remaining work, I am increasingly comparing this place with others. My young Australian niece, on seeing my photo of a Ger on a verge, asked, "What happens if you put your house on the footpath? No-one can get past.."

As I walk to work I see people collecting their water and I think of her comment upon seeing the Ger district with its urbanscape of felt rooves. "What is that, a circus or something?"

Greg Cowan

Architects for Peace, May 2008

Hi Greg,

Thanks for your editorial - what an incredible experience!

As someone also working in tertiary education in architecture it is particularly interesting for me. I'd love to know more about the architecture school - how long has it been in existence? How many students? Is the course still modeled on the Russian system? What does the curriculum consist of - any similarities to the Australian model? What are your key objectives for your last few months there and will anyone be continuing in your position after you leave? At the University of Tasmania we work on a project with fourth year students every year based in some remote and unfamiliar context to them (not necessarily a developing nation, but that is frequently the case). Might be interesting to do something as a collaborative student project in the future?!

I had a look at the Wikipedia page for Mongolian architecture and it seemed to relate primarily to the traditional yurt. Do you have any references/names for contemporary Mongolian architecture/architects? What does 'the' one Mongolian architecture textbook contain? How many of the teachers at the school are actively practicing architecture as well? It is encouraging that you say that many students are interested in continuing to work in

Mongolia

on graduation rather than move to more lucrative jobs overseas. Nevertheless, I can appreciate how difficult it is to develop a local architectural culture without access to good resources (both global and local) that are accessible both physically and in language. Obviously not a problem that can be 'solved' overnight, but with a long term vision towards this end it seems that at least first positive steps are being taken.

Is there much work that focusses on understanding and documenting the traditional buildings and spatial practices of the Mongolian people? As an aside, there is an excellent organisation in

India

called the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation built around Balkrishna Doshi's architecture practice in

India

. They have done an incredible amount of research into local vernacular buildings such as the pols in Ahmedebad as well as investigating in detail the use of space in urban slums through a series of beautifully illustrated books.

I hope we will be able to see more of your work over there when you return through the Words forum at Architects for Peace.

Regards, Ceridwen

Dear Ceridwen

Thanks for your response to the editorial - I will respond here briefly and update the blog. This college started operating in 2004 as a vocational college and skills training centre with help from GTZ (German Agency for Technical Cooperation) and with about six hundred students and forty staff is now working towards producing its first architecture graduates, with four year diplomas. The college is a privately funded one, established with the aim of addressing the undersupply of skilled Mongolian workers in the construction sector. In the case of this partnership, VSO is specifically addressing the vulnerable occupants of Ulaanbaatar’s peri-urban areas (informal settlements), where many people have relocated in the last few years to find urban work after the demise of their rural / herding businesses, due to climate and other factors. Although it will move to emphasise rural centres in future, the work is part the Secure Livehoods programme in Mongolia, which is training and capacity building as part of the ongoing transition from socialism to market capitalism.

Similarities
There are few similarities to Australian curricula. I was familiar with the latter as a lecturer and examiner with the Architects Accreditation Council in Australia (and their National Programme of Assessment – NprA). Here at CTC, there is a ‘foundation studies area’ and theory and practice streams running through the degree; these ostensibly cover areas such as history and culture, building technology and design. As you suggested, the basis is ‘Russian’ insofar as the curriculum model has been adopted apparently unchanged based on what senior teachers studied under the Russian and state system – building engineering - and then filed away out of sight and out of mind at the Ministry of Education. My interest is to encourage ownership of the curriculum among staff in order that they may initiate ongoing processes of curriculum review.

Links
The international links are very limited, even with Russian colleges and universities, although the University of Science and Technology architecture degree has some forms of cooperation with Japan, Korea and Austria. Vienna University of Technology’s faculty for the study of ‘Non-European architectures’ has established some basic cooperation and there have been some staff exchanges in Europe. There appears to be little encouragement from the profession however, beyond the participation of dedicated semi-volunteer architect-academics.

Wikipedia and Research
As mentioned, the English language Wikipedia page is in draft form, but focuses primarily on history and the traditional Ger (Russian – Yurt). Research such as that I saw at B V Doshi’s Vastu-Shilpa Foundation in Ahmedabad on vernacular and informal architecture forms is aspired to by someone like Purev-Erdene Ershuu. Ershuu is chair of the Centre for Architecture and Design Research at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology, and sits on the Mongolian Architects Association steering committee, however despite the support of international NGOs JAICA and KOICA and Professor Erich Lehner’s above mentioned Viennese Institute, he appears to be almost alone in his work. One hopes that the resources can be developed, and that even recent local literature like A. Bat Od’s 2007 “Architecture..”
(Mongolian) will be noticed. The latter book comprises four sections – the first section, drawing, scale, measurement and technical information systems; second section, practice, sources of planning, building elements, and dimensioning standards; thirdly, classifying housing building types, analysed in detail (from Le Corbusier to SOM, Hejduk, Niemeyer, and Bart Prince); and fourthly, energy efficiency and technical details of materials.

Although it cannot be comprehensive, this book in Mongolian is more transparent to me than any of the curriculum notes or hand-written private teaching outlines I have seen here. In my remaining time at the college, it is one of my aims to pursue a process of developing teaching outlines and techniques. Importantly I will aim to inspire interest in the content and delivery of lessons, by our undervalued and underpaid teachers, who often spread their time thinly between teaching and construction.

Regards, Greg

From Urban Acupuncture to the Megapolis

2008-04-20T16:51:00.005+10:00

For some time I have been interested in the notion of ‘urban acupuncture’. To my knowledge there is no specific body of literature that defines this concept. It is a term that I first heard used at a conference concerning a design approach for a project in India and I regret to say that I have now forgotten the name of the presenter and the details of project. A few years later I find myself returning to this concept in both my practice and teaching in relation to the design of urban environments. My simple definition of urban acupuncture is a design approach that proposes minimum intervention for maximum gain and focuses on connections and settings of social interaction rather than objects. For me it is very much grounded in earlier seminal works such as Rowe and Koetter’s (1978) ‘Collage City’ and Christopher Alexander’s (1975) ‘The Oregon Experiment’.

Rowe and Koetter position themselves in opposition to the grand vision of the ‘master plan’ arguing, “total design can only mean total control” (1978:283). They believe that a ‘final’ and ‘complete’ solution cannot be identified; everything is conjecture, a hypothesis based on particular value judgments and the available ‘facts’ to hand. The danger is that grand utopian visions of urban planning are presented as value-neutral and ‘true’. They suggest that there is never ‘sufficient information’ available to construct an ideal formulation of the future, but we must still act. Our best course of action is to approach urban design as a form of ‘bricolage’ or the recycling of meanings and forms through multiple and diverse means. Urban design thus requires imperfect and incomplete visions created from within rather than grand visions transplanted from without.

Christopher Alexander also argues that urban design should be conceived as a slow process of evolutionary change rather than as a totalitarian ‘quick fix’. In the ‘Oregon Experiment’ he sets out a series of six principles that comprise a generic approach to urban design as a series of ‘local acts’ based on ‘patterns’ derived from participatory design. The implementation of the design is focussed on principles of ‘piecemeal growth’ and ‘coordination’ combined with a process of ‘diagnosis’ in which the health of the built environment is continually assessed on an annual basis.

Urban acupuncture adopts a similar premise. It seeks out the ‘diseased’ places of high urban capacity and inserts catalytic ‘needles’ to stimulate (not dictate) the development of diverse activity. Teddy Cruz, an architect working in the border towns of San Diego and Tijuana employs the concept in his work to create hybrid programs of community housing and services in under-utilised and leftover pockets of the city. As he describes it, “The goal has been to achieve maximum effect with minimal gestures, to take existing patterns of use as a point of departure, and to develop urban solutions with enough persuasive force to change obsolete planning policy and zoning regulations” (Cruz 2005). One of his projects, ‘Living Rooms at the Border’ for Casa Familiar, a local advocacy group, integrates 12 flexible affordable housing units, a community centre and offices, a productive garden and shared communal space. On a site originally zoned for three housing units, Cruz has negotiated the increased density by framing it as ‘social choreography’ rather than ‘bulk’.

Perhaps the most well known exponent of the concept of urban acupuncture, however, is Jaime Lerner, ex mayor of Curitiba in Brazil. For Lerner, the focus of urban acupuncture is on small-scale interventions that can be undertaken within short time frames, producing an immediate and catalytic effect. Under his leadership, Curitiba saw the implementation of a series of highly successful social, educative and urban infrastructure initiatives, many of which have inspired further initiatives in other cities.

At a recent conference in Melbourne, Eco-Edge 2, the former mayor of Bogota in Columbia, Enrique Penalosa, spoke passionately about the transformation of his city through the implementation of initiatives such as the ‘Transmilenio’ bus service based on the Curitiba model, pedestrian streets and urban greenways. At the same conference a series of speakers discussed the urban transformation of China where the Government plans to construct 400 new cities by 2020. The scale of this urbanisation is unprecedented. As Neville Mars, Director of the Dynamic City Foundation in Beijing, noted, it is equivalent to the construction of Europe within 20 years.

In this context, what models of urban design are appropriate? Do principles of evolution, local acts, piecemeal growth and diagnosis have any place in such situations? Frankly, this physical and temporal scale of urbanisation terrifies me. I have no answers, and yet immediate consideration of this issue seems paramount. The consequences for global sustainability are potentially enormous. Indeed, in answer to the question ‘what is the biggest contribution Australia can make to sustainability?’ posed in a discussion session on Government initiatives at the conference, Peter Davidson of LAB Architects simply stated ‘help China’.

Many of the architects and urban designers speaking at the conference proposed alternatives to the mono-functional thinking and urban sprawl that seems to underpin much of the urbanisation in China. Xuemei Bai, Senior Scientist at CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, also noted how the wide-reaching control and influence of the Chinese Government can quickly be turned towards more sustainable practices in a way that is inconceivable in Australia. The interest in environmental initiatives certainly exists as demonstrated by the proposed construction of the world’s first ‘eco-city’ with a zero emission target on an island offshore from Shanghai. Nevertheless, I think the complexities of social sustainability in the city will be harder to come to terms with. As Neville Mars noted, the physical transformation in China is a consequence of an equally fast-paced cultural shift from the ‘collective dream’ of communism to the ‘scattered dream’ of the market. The dreams have barely had time to take root in the mind before they are becoming a physical reality.

Maybe the slow evolutionary process of transformation of these urban environments will take place as the dust begins to settle and the megapolis has been constructed and occupied. New patterns of social networks and spatial practices will emerge and the city will adapt and be adapted to accommodate them. Whether the modern ‘planned’ city is flexible enough to adjust to these shifts is more questionable. Furthermore, the constructed urban fabric will inevitably influence this process of social transformation since both places and people exist in a state of dialectical tension. It seems therefore that some tentative, imperfect and incomplete visions need to be put on the table now.

References

Alexander, C. (1975) The Oregon Experiment, New York, Oxford University Press

Cruz, T. (2005) “Urban acupuncture: a San Diego firm sees new possibilities for healing the housing crisis”, Residential Architect, Jan-Feb 2005. Viewed 05/04/08 at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NTE/is_1_9/ai_n15956823

Rowe, C. & Koetter, F. (1978) Collage City, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Ceridwen Owen

Architects for Peace, April 2008

IDP Camps in East Timor

2008-03-14T16:00:00.009+11:00

Those who have followed the fortunes of independent East Timor in the years since its violent separation from Indonesia in 1999 will no doubt have been dismayed by events of the last eighteen months. Tensions within the armed forces escalated into several violent confrontations including the murder of a group of unarmed police by renegade members of the East Timorese army. Civil society all but collapsed. Police disappeared from the streets, schools and universities shut down, entire government departments were deserted, shops were boarded up and the nights were filled with looting and arson. Shocking as these events were in themselves, they gave rise to an even greater calamity as a dramatic rift was opened in Timorese society, splitting communities along ethnic lines and resulting in 100,000 people fleeing into rural areas and makeshift internally displaced person (IDP) camps.

Camps sprang up all over Dili, East Timor’s capital. There was a clear preference for institutions operated by the Catholic Church—schools, convents, seminaries and churches themselves. In one convent school 13,000 people crammed inside the gates each night, sleeping along corridors and porches, under trees and tarpaulins and occupying every conceivable space. Another 10,000 people squeezed into the car park opposite the main United Nations (UN) compound, a camp sheltering many families of Timorese UN staff. In the days following the arrival of Malaysian and Australian peacekeeping forces in late May 2006, informal camps were established wherever facilities were being protected by soldiers. Tens of thousands of people set up temporary shelter in the park across the road from the port, in the grounds of the national hospital and in open fields adjacent to the airport. A month after the commencement of the ‘crisis’ (as the events were known locally), more than 60 camps had been formally registered by the Timorese government.

Conditions within all the camps were very difficult. There was insufficient space; shelter was improvised and inadequate; food was in short supply because all the shops were closed; people were required to carry water; and toilets were generally shared by several hundred people and regularly broke down. A sense of despair accompanied the physical conditions. People were unable to go to work and children were no longer attending school. Those sheltering in camps spent each night in fear of attack by violent gangs and often woke to learn that their house had been burnt or looted. The camps appeared to be such a difficult environment in which to live that those of us supporting the humanitarian response expected them to disperse as rapidly as they had appeared. We expected that restoration of order by the international peacekeepers would facilitate people returning home in a matter of weeks and that all the major camps would be emptied by the onset of the wet season in November. Although most of the smaller camps have now closed, the larger camps have not. Now, eighteen months after they were spontaneously established these camps are firmly entrenched in Dili’s urban landscape.

Several government proposals to close or relocate camps have faltered in the face of complex motivations for families to remain. Humanitarian agencies continue to provide food to registered IDPs encouraging ongoing involvement with IDP camps; government efforts to rebuild homes burnt during the violence have replaced only a small number of the houses lost; ethnic tensions remain in many communities preventing families returning to their homes even if they were not destroyed; and insecurity of title to land discourages many families from carrying out their own rebuilding efforts (most land title records were destroyed in 1999 and their are often disputes over conflicting Portuguese and Indonesian era titles). The camps present a seemingly intractable problem for the government and it would not be surprising to see people living in tents in the hospital grounds or in the park across the road from the port a generation from now.

From an outsider’s perspective (in my case, that of a foreign humanitarian assistance worker) the camps appear such depressing and unpleasant places to live that one might expect them to have closed long ago without any government prompting. I worked with Oxfam in a dozen of the camps for several months, helping to improve access to water and sanitation, so I knew the physical condition in many camps well. I worked extensively with Timorese camp managers and liaison staff and so also knew something of the management and political structures in operation. I had never spent the night in an IDP camp, however, nor visited one socially so I knew next to nothing of how a resident might view their life there.

An Australian colleague provided me with an insight into the residents’ point of view. She lived with a Timorese family in the Metinaro IDP camp for several days at a time and invited me for a visit. Her host family’s house in Dili had been destroyed and they had built a small palm-leaf hut in the Metinaro camp along with thousands of other families. The roof and walls were constructed from woven palm leaves and the floor was compacted earth. In contrast to nearby Dili, there was no electricity or running water. Up to ten people lived in the family’s two small rooms. When I arrived I was welcomed in and offered coffee. Chairs were improvised from up-turned tins, formerly full of UN-funded protein biscuits. As we drank our coffee and chatted away, life for this family went on around us and they explained why they remained in the Metinaro camp rather than return to Dili. A friend had offered them accommodation in a spare house in Dili but the family was unsure how they might be received in the neighbourhood. Having had their house and possessions destroyed in 1999 and then again in 2006, they were very reluctant to put at risk the few things they had managed to save or acquire again. They also noted that it had been expensive to buy the palm leaves used to build their hut in the IDP camp. They felt they had built up a stake in the camp that they didn’t want to walk out on. I was surprised to see the family living reasonably happily in what I had thought were the wretched condition in the Metinaro IDP camp. It had been difficult to see past my urban Australian perceptions of ‘home’ and understand why this family might choose to crowd into the dirt-floored, windswept, palm leaf hut instead of the modest comfort of their friend’s house in Dili. My visits to IDP camps to ‘help’ people had not provided me with any insight. Only by visiting the camp residents socially, on their terms, had I began to understand why people might chose to remain in the camp.

My Australian colleague has been living in remote parts of East Timor for several years. As in the Metinaro IDP camp, this often requires living in close quarters with a family, sharing a bed with two or three others, living without a toilet, running water and electricity—all the things that those of us living in places like urban Australia might consider basic necessities. Despite that, she says that she feels better/happier/more at ease/more connected living in close communities in East Timor than she does at home in Sydney or Melbourne. As we discussed this concept, we struggled to find just the right adjective for the quality of life she experienced. I might have chosen ‘more at peace’—peace in a broad sense and entirely relevant to those of us at Architects for Peace. The built environment in the Metinaro IDP camp is an important element in providing ‘peace’ for the families still living there. Not for what it so clearly lacks—running water, electricity, roads, sanitation, services—but for what it boasts—security, ownership, self reliance, opportunities for hospitality. This experience demonstrated that for those of us looking to build peace, and not just structures, there are lessons to be learnt and experience to be drawn upon wherever people are living.

Matthew Bond
Architects for Peace, March 2008

"What's War/Peace - Construction/Destruction got to do with Architecture?"

2008-02-13T14:17:00.011+11:00

"What's War/Peace - Construction/Destruction got to do with Architecture?"
Watch any news channel or listen to any news station you will find floods of issues and concerns that refer to human-made destruction caused by conflict and war. Architects and Urbanists seem to join the public in just watching or listening…! Can they have a say? I doubt it. Can they intervene? I am not sure! Can they play a positive role? I hope they do!

This editorial is deeply rooted in the mission of Architects for Peace that simply involves the promotion of peace from architectural, cross-cultural, sociopolitical and socio-economic perspectives. While it might be seen as an article more than an editorial, it attempts to consolidate a number of issues typically oversimplified by the global professional community. In very recent discussions, however, the issues of War, Peace, Destruction, Post War Recovery and their correlation to architecture and urbanism are starting to gain momentum toward shaping a new body of theories or cases on destruction and their underlying applications in terms of recovery efforts. While this is not new, it indicates that architects and planners have important roles to play in this context. Here, I reflect on such a relationship within the scope of some selected writings.

Is Destruction Needed?
The history of architecture and urbanism tells us much about how to design and erect buildings; it typically exhibits the way in which specific cultures lived, expressed their identity, and mediated their environment. However, if we blindly and slavishly followed its basic assumptions, there would be such a huge number of temples, mosques, churches, houses, and all types of buildings that it would be almost impossible to find a place for one more building on earth after millions of years of building buildings and of accumulation of civilizations. In recent years, a new assumption is emerging to shape some new understanding that is "that history of architecture should involve the destruction of buildings as it involves the building of buildings." Some argue that building requires a preceding incident of destruction, a spatial void without which it would not be possible to build new buildings. Interrogating this assumption might be an exhaustive task that needs in-depth investigation.

The Syndrome of Celebrating Destruction!
The preceding assumption goes along the recent issue of VOLUME magazine, where issues of migration and displacement, ‘warchitecture’ and ‘post-warchitecture’, 'counter-heritage', 'cultural interventions' and 'post-conflict reconstruction' strategies are debated. On the basis of what is displayed in terms of construction efforts in different cities such as Kosovo and the southern part of Beirut one would infer that such an assumption is tested and proven valid as Ole Bouman in the introductory statement of VOLUME puts it "…there is a strong correlation between destruction—the unbuilding of cities—and the construction of buildings." Strikingly, Bouman introduces the issue by saying that "…Volume explores the less discussed creative sides of destruction, a realm where architecture and design play an important part…" Here one would wonder if destruction has a creative side, and in what terms. While this issue of VOLUME addresses reconstruction efforts …again one would wonder why destruction is emphasized. And why don't we say 'creative reconstruction efforts.'… Is this for marketability or publicity purposes? Or is it meant just for introducing a new term or buzzword that increases the confusion of the public on the value of architecture and of what architects do? It is bothering to see how the term 'destruction' is ‘celebrated' and very irritating to see its mere acceptance as the 'price of progress.'

Is this 'price of progress' a new face of an old coin? In the wake of the industrial revolution, humankind developed destruction tools and techniques in parallel to the development of different means of industrial production, transportation, simply for progress, civility, and for raising living standards. True, the result was a new way of life. Sadly, it had its severe negatives because while industrial workers lived and died in poor conditions, mines, and slums, the political elite prospered...lived and died in palaces. Many countries were not satisfied with their own growth and needed more resources…, in the process of satisfying those needs…wars were a deterministic result…some were escalated to world wars while others were regional or local. In all cases, architecture…the ultimate form of human material culture was the victim, apart from the sad reality… the loss of millions of lives.

The current claim that societies are now more civilized led to accepting the preceding facts as part of our daily discourses is surely believable. Yet, celebrating 'destruction' leads one to confidently say that many are enticed by the ethics and aesthetics of destruction as a source of regeneration and inspiration, while the enduring values of human culture are oversimplified. And so, the basic fact that human civilization has evolved over time is forgotten and under the slogans of progress, wealth, advancement, quality of life… you name it, many traditional towns are destroyed, many cities are losing their identity, and environments are continuously damaged/degraded. These are not necessarily the results of wars, but of human actions and choices, in essence—of violent actions against architecture and cities' built form. This is not all — the tale of human evolution is being interpreted by many as a deterministic violent history without which human race cannot progress. However, some hopes exist where anthropological research shows that human evolution has essentially to do with creative, constructive, and peaceful activities. In this respect, I refer to the great Arab historian—Ibn Khaldun—the founder of urban sociology—who says "History is the story of human achievements in construction."

A word of caution arises in this context as wars and conflicts involve not only destruction but building too… nevertheless, not all building acts are positive. This is manifested by highway blocks, fences to segregate, isolate, contain… Perhaps East-West Beirut blocks, Bosnia-Serbia-Croatia blocked borders, the segregation wall between Palestinian Territories and Israel, the famous Berlin wall, and even the walls enclosing gated communities around the globe, those are all negative building acts. Robert Frost, the American Poet, in his famous Poem: Mending Wall reminds us of offensive building acts when he says: Before I built a wall I'd ask to know... What I was walling in or walling out... And to whom I was like to give offence.

Wars and Architecture/Reconstruction: 6 Decades of Efforts and Discourses
Reflecting on some correlations between wars and architecture, I refer to three publications that have received very little attention, if any at all. They—while remarkably delineating the amount of reconstruction efforts that have taken and are now taking place around the globe—dramatically indicate a strong correlation between the acts of wars and violence and the acts of building and reconstruction. Notably, while these three publications were developed over a little more than a decade ago, it is evident that they reflect reconstruction efforts since the end of the WWII.

An important publication titled: Reconstruction of War-Torn Cities, edited by Jad Tabet was a result of an international conference organized jointly by the Order of Engineers and Architects in Lebanon and the UIA-International Union of Architects, and took place in 1997. Reconstruction of War Torn Cities encompasses a considerable number of articles that analyze and debate different experiments and experiences in reconstructing cities and villages. Evidently, the correlation of war and architecture is not new, as exhibited in those articles that articulate the experiences of rebuilding London, French cities, Russian cities, and Warsaw after WWII. Other articles delineate that such a correlation was sustained over the past sixty years, those that address reconstruction efforts in Vietnam, the Greek part of Cyprus during mid 1970s and Mostar and Kampala/Uganda during the late 1990s. A common feature in all cases is that all of these efforts are basically preceded by colonial or civil wars.

Another important publication is entitled At War with the City, edited by Paola Somma, 2004. This book assembles a collection of essays that investigate the relationship between war and the city in a comprehensive manner. It goes beyond the case study logic and aims at improving planners’ and designers’ ability to look at and interpret different reconstruction scenarios. Presenting reconstruction as a sociopolitical planning activity, several planning schemes are presented with reference to the economic and social contexts within which they are developed. Notably, reconstruction of Saigon south is linked to emerging new housing typologies; the reconstruction of Sarajevo's Town Hall and library is linked to issues that pertain to memory and identity; the metaphor of looking at Beirut as 'Hearth' is questioned; the strategic urban planning of the Gaza strip is analyzed within the limits of blocked roads; Fragmentation, commodification, and reintegration, are socio-physical aspects explored within the scope of reconstruction efforts in South Africa, Mozambique, and Rwanda. Again, this round of articles in At War with the City, which is published seven years after Reconstruction of War Torn Cities, corroborates that there is a sustained interest in investigating the relationship between war and architecture/reconstruction.

Addressing the specific case of Kabul, Babar Mumtaz and Kaj Noschis have co-edited the seminar book of proceedings on 'Development of Kabul: Reconstruction and Planning Issues.' The book addresses how decisions about housing, transportation, and infrastructure needs are made in an ad-hoc and urgent manner. Discussing the necessity of a consolidated urban planning approach toward the development of the city led to the belief that a typical master planning approach seems not to be favored by the majority of the contributors to the book. The editors argue that the idea of a general Master Plan seemed too much "a reminder of planning practices issued from offices that do not dare nor want to be in contact with the realities of a fast-moving urban fabric such as that of Kabul today." The existing Master Plan of Kabul-developed by the Russians during and after the Soviet Union’s Invasion of Afghanistan has a somewhat ambiguous status, but is currently utilized by the Municipality in considering building permissions and spatial decisions.

Some Lessons Learned – Issues for Continuous Investigation
In light of the above three publications some important issues arise in connection to the roles architects, urbanists and planners could play; some can be looked at in terms of open-ended questions that truly need continuous investigation, while others may allow us to openly debate the re-construction delivery after catastrophes. I briefly reflect in the following context on four major issues.

The first issue concerns itself with 'constructing' and 're-constructing.' Should we reconstruct a destroyed city exactly as it was in order to keep its image in the memory of its inhabitants? Should we build a better environment conceived on the basis of new planning standards? There are specific choices that can be addressed in practical terms. For example: whether to preserve the traces of old transportation routes and land parcels or develop new ones more suited to a city's developmental needs. These choices are often dictated by the pressure of events, urgency or the pace of development. They can be governed by reference to specific urban models, value systems, or cultural codes that reflect the general interest and the prevailing social conditions.

Another issue pertains to the element of utopianism inherited in mass reconstruction of cities. Can we still see destruction caused by war, violence or conflicts as an opportunity that enables new aesthetic values or planning standards to emerge? If we have to preserve the memory of the past of a city, which past should we refer to? In this respect, one may assert that many of the destroyed cities represent an accumulation of different historical eras. The third issue is a terminology related one. Reconstruction can be seen as an ambiguous term which Paola Somma sees as a pretext for struggle and the settlement of scores between local power bases. As well, one would add, it can be manipulated by external interests that typically ignore the needs of those who are most seriously affected, or address them only superficially. In many cases, such interests deal with reconstruction as an exercise in financial techniques utilizing cost/benefit analysis methods.

The fourth issue is social in nature where, after wars, emphasis is placed upon reconstructing the physical environment. However, the transition from the state of war to that of peace involves political, social, economic and cultural processes. Here, the question of whether reconstruction is just getting society—as it was before the war—going again. How are the upheavals of social disorder caused by war perceived? Underlying this issue 'participation' comes in as a determining factor in healing the social organization, creating dialogue between different actors: politicians, decision makers, architects and planners, and the people they are to serve typically in an urgent manner.

Warchitecture! Theorizing War and Architecture
Evidently, the six decades of debating war recovery construction efforts addressed cases, experiments and experiences, and practical solutions; recently however, the relationship between war and architecture is theorized. In a very recent article entitled "Warchitectural Theory" by Andrew Herscher an attempt is made to introduce a new term 'Warchitecture' where such a relationship is addressed in theoretical terms. In drawing relationships between war, architecture, and culture, Herscher states that "The foundational opposition organizing most discourse on war and architecture is that between violence and culture. Before it is targeted by violence, architecture is located within the domain of culture…violence, by contrast tends to be located outside the domain of culture and defined as a phenomenon that destroys that culture…" Perhaps, this reminds us of what happened and still is happening in Iraq where destruction of cultural artifacts is manifested as a result of sectarian conflict produced by war. One would refer here to architecture as a cultural index that takes different forms in different civilizations and political settings. Again, how to protect that index from destruction is in essence a crucial question. Herscher ends his article by suggesting that warchitectural theory accommodates the work of those actors called architects and the product of those activities called constructive, and the range of actors and processes involved with architecture. By this only we "…can do justice to the social facts that could or should concern us."

Final Word
In closing, I argue that wars followed by immediate recovery construction efforts have a lot to do with architecture. Going beyond the very physical world, there are multiple roles architects and planners could play, including mediation, interpretation, and collective decision making on reconstructing war-torn cities. The questions of war and peace, social equity and disruptive justice in war-torn countries should not be seen as abstract concerns anymore. It is not about seizing business opportunities, it is not about seeking opportunities for establishing new sets of planning standards, it is not about introducing new physical masks for expressing power, it is not about establishing means for covering up the harsh realities of inequity and injustice that plague war-torn societies. It is simply about healing the processes of human, societal, and cultural evolution.

Ashraf M. Salama
Architects for Peace, February 2008

Notes

1. My reflection here is partly based on two visits, the first was to Beirut in November 1999 to speak at a regional conference on Recent Architectural Trends in Societies in Change organized by the AUB-American University of Beirut, and the second was to Bosnia and Herzegovina in October 2000 to take part in the International Jury of the UN/UIA Urban Planning Competition on Revitalization of Sarajevo. As well, recent responsive publications on the topic are utilized where indicated in the text.
2. Please refer to these sites for a complete table of contents of VOLUME titled "Un-built Cities" April 2007
http://www.archis.org/email/newsletter_Volume11apr07.html
http://www.archis.org/volume/Volume+%2311/?id=4
3. Ibn Khaldun on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun
4. Tabet, J. (ed.) (1997). Reconstruction of War Torn Cities, UIA and the Order of Engineers and Architects, Beirut, Lebanon.
5. Somma, P. (ed.) (2004). At War with the City. The Urban International Press, Gateshead, UK.
6. Mumtaz, B. and Noschis, K (eds.) (2004). Development of Kabul: Reconstruction and Planning Issues. Comportements, Lausanne, Switzerland.
7. Herscher, A. (2008). Warchitectural Theory, Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 61 (1), pp. 35-43.

Developed – Developing: Dialogical Integration in International Conferences

2008-01-23T21:37:00.004+11:00

I recently came across a question posed by Dr. Ashraf Salama in his website. Dr Salama asks, “Conference Attendance: Do the Developing have Something to Offer the Developed?”[1]

The question is interesting because it may not be possible or prudent to try and answer it without first understanding the conditions imposed by the notion of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’. Can an answer be attempted without questioning this dichotomy? And as Dr Salama rightly points out, if there is more than ‘something’ already offered by poorer countries, what has prevented an even larger contribution and due acknowledgement? Dr Salama illustrates the question by providing some examples. He notes a low level of attendance to international conferences on the part of developing countries. He also notices that when people from poorer countries attend, there is an “implicit assumption that they go to learn”, rather than to share their knowledge or, why not, even teach. Dr Salama however claims that there may indeed be a lot of learning coming from the ‘developing’ world but that it is not appropriately acknowledged. For example, he claims that much is learnt from the developing world in matters of conservation, ecological design practices, historical analysis and education.

I would add to the list: water treatment, emergency housing, disaster management, community planning, alternative building technology such as bamboo, rattan and earth construction, low cost and social housing, desert architecture and public transport (for example Curitiba and the TransMilenio in Bogotá). From theory to practice, to some degree we have embraced the knowledge of scholars such as (to mention a few), Spiro Kostof, Constantino Doxiadis, Ali Madanipour, Necdet Teymur, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, to the social and urban knowledge of Jaime Lerner. Scholars, philosophers and practitioners have in one way or another shared their knowledge. However, it could be argued that while some have achieved a degree of recognition—and in the process references to the geographical origins fade away—what most have in common is that they had made their way through an international, mostly Anglophone institution, for example a British or US university. Something prevents a direct input, one that is not mediated by renowned Anglophone institutions, or by having migrated to richer countries and with that having mastered the English language. In discussing this matter Dr Salama suggested that perhaps different historical conditions to those of today may have determined the path of scholars such as Spiro Kostof and Constantino Doxiadis. If this was the case, it would be important to ask how opportunities for recognition and/or influence may have changed in the last decades. At this point it is pertinent to make a distinction between acknowledgment and influence and to ask whether or not international conferences create equal conditions for dialogue, acknowledgment and for the influencing of the discourse by all and what determines such opportunities.

While commonly used, an established convention on the use of the terms ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ does not exist.[2]

According to The World Bank, some countries (with ‘transition economies’), might fall within either category according to the criteria used to make the judgment. For example The World Bank classifies countries according to income. However, it makes exceptions for, among others, countries such as Israel, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. Within academic circles, the lack of proper definition (if this could ever be reached) is not often accounted for or acknowledged. Instead these terms are used as if they reflected an objective reality and most times used subjectively to validate enormous oversights that, if properly examined, could indeed have enlighten the discussion.

More than a divide across developed and developing—a very poor dichotomy that does nothing to explain rich cultural differences within and which promotes a degree of stagnation among the ‘developed’—I suggest that the divide might lie along the lines of an Anglophone world and the ‘rest’ of the world. The reason why I put forward this untested hypothesis springs from an ongoing research into architectural education, where I have noticed that leading theoreticians in America (a continent with a majority Spanish speaking population), such as Edgar Morin, are virtually unknown in Australia and I assume equally less known in other Anglo speaking countries. Edgar Morin has been translated from French to Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian, but little can be found in English. In a similar case, Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, today one of the most influential books among urbanists and some architects, was originally published in French in 1974, and translated to English almost twenty years later in 1991. Many more could follow in this important list of mostly unknown architects and scholars to the English speaker.

While a degree of unawareness of what others are doing may not be intentional, this is reinforced by architectural institutions and an architectural media, that insists on the architectural achievements of large, mainly European companies and architects, giving no opportunity for an equally great work produced by local architects and companies in poorer countries. For a random example, this month, the electronic newsmail produced by the World Architecture News (Issue No.123 / 04 January 2008) features six projects, all of which, whether in the UK, Dubai or Shangai, are designed by British/European architects and all of which are large, to very large corporate buildings. Within this list of six architects the work of Zaha Hadid is featured—some may want to consider her an exception.

The notion of a conference as an opportunity to advance knowledge and ideas is important. However, too many of them are stifling and costly, making it difficult for those coming from poorer countries to justify the expense. This situation prevents the most needed multiplicity of views while recycling stagnant ideas from a prevailing culture.

Back to the original question, I have no doubt that professionals and scholars from poorer parts of the world have much to offer to the rest of the world—in fact some have already done so, and it is here where Architects for Peace has a great role to play, to be the gateway for direct input of the many forms of contributions and the many unpublished projects happening right now everywhere. It is perhaps in poorer countries where creativity and alternative approaches are the norm and are daily tested.

If there is anything I like about the notion of ‘developing’ it is that it conveys movement, a positive energy used to inspire and to evolve—shouldn’t then we all be developing?

Beatriz C. Maturana
Architects for Peace, January 2008

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[1] See Dr. Ashraf Salama’s website at http://www.arti-arch.org/Ashraf%20Salama-Thoughts.htm
[2] The terms “developed” and “developing” lack proper definition. While commonly used by organisations such as the United Nations, the UN has not defined them. See: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm. See also The World Bank’s glossary: http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/beyond/global/glossary.html#12

Choices

2007-11-18T01:22:00.000+11:00

For Australian voters, the time has come. A chance to vent with a pencil. A pencil is a very blunt instrument in a voting booth though. We are restricted to putting crosses into little boxes, there being nowhere to add a list of comments and provisos to our votes. The crosses require us to simplify complicated and contradictory desires into a 'yes' or 'no'. The vote has to represent our different selves: as global citizens, parents, workers, homeowners, and designers of the built environment. That last one, our chosen career specialty, is often left till the end, partly because it's hard to tell what each party's message is on the built environment, and partly because we're all under such housing / rental / childcare / workplace / global warming stresses that our professional concerns don't rate. Many of us might not consider taking our professional selves into the polling booth at all.

The built environment is everywhere around us, everything ugly and beautiful that we see and touch in a normal day has been sculpted and honed (and destroyed and rebuilt) by a succession of designers, artists, arsonists, planners, builders, sign writers, engineers, activists, and politicians. A random cityscape is a collage of desires and compromises across time, both macro and micro.

The current debates about how a city should be allowed to grow will in years to come become another layer of the city's history, from the residential towers in suburban "transit cities", to the rolling carpets of "green" subdivisions at the city's edge. The city growth debate is intertwined with the sustainable city debate, the housing affordability debate, and the transport debate (among others). Who should pay for the freeway extensions and trains required to service the new suburbs? Is it responsible to encourage first home owners to spend too much money on houses at the edge of the city that are more likely to depreciate? How can a city increase its population and lower its emissions at the same time?

Many of the issues that have kept us thinking on the Architects for Peace forums over the past 3 years have disappeared under the carpet now that it is election time. The main parties are trying to simplify things for the voter. The omissions in their vague published policies are some proof of this: try searching for policies on indigenous land rights, foreign reconstruction aid, illegally-logged timber importation, or collective transport.

The housing affordability 'crisis' is one example of a reduced debate. The parties can't open their mouths about ditching negative gearing or calming skyrocketing house prices without alienating great swathes of the electorate. The affordability debate is restricted to suggesting new ways to top up the wallets of first home buyers, new ways to lower building costs, empty promises on interest rates, and to pressuring state governments to rezone land at the edge of town for new homes.

The responsibility falls to non-governmental groups, academics, the papers, and "think tanks" to expose and discuss the issues that the political parties are unable to consider. Sometimes these think tanks are so close to political parties that they could easily be mistaken for them. The Institute of Public Affairs' Alan Moran released a pro land release book last year entitled "The Tragedy of Planning: Losing the Great Australian Dream." It was introduced by Prime Minister in waiting Peter Costello. The book is not going to win any prizes for balance – here's a sample: "It is only in recent times that opposition to [sprawl] has assumed mystical respectability on a par with saving whales, stopping global warming and preventing GM foods. As with those other goals, opposition to urban sprawl is cloaked in a mantle of moral superiority that pretends to self-denial but is invariably laced with self-interest."

The problem isn't that the IPA has written this entertaining book, but that the government and some newspapers have taken it as gospel. There needs to be an counterbalancing point of view available. Where is it?

The newspapers are swallowing the IPA line along with the hook and sinker. Reports this week on housing affordability, which has zoomed forward to become a key election issue, use graphs and statistics from Demographia, a small St Louis organisation with a website that shouts in red capital letters: "URBAN CONSOLIDATION & SMART GROWTH: DESTROYING THE DREAM OF HOME OWNSERHIP." That typo is theirs. The man behind Demographia, Wendell Cox, is honoured to be at the top of the Sprawlwatch website's list of pro-sprawlers.

Wendell Cox and Alan Moran from the IPA spoke at the Housing Industry Association's conference in Melbourne in 2005, at which the president of the HIA, Bob Day, gave a speech with the familiar sounding title of, "Law of Unintended Consequences – How Urban Planning Policies are Destroying the Great Australian Dream". According to the HIA, Day spoke about, "the successive waves of rules and regulations imposed on the industry as an urban 'planning plague' that must be defeated if affordability is to be restored."

It is unfortunate that one of the key election issues has been framed and scripted by openly libertarian organisations and the HIA. This is an important debate on the built environment but only one of the debating teams has turned up, advocating sprawl.

The quality and quantity of public debate in Australia is low, and a result is that political parties and their proposals don't get grilled like they should. Architects for Peace is trying to address this (in one small corner) by ramping up its op-ed output to address the gaps that appear. Articles are not aligned to any particular party, though it would be true to say that we are not a free market think tank (as the Institute of Public Affairs bills itself). Perhaps we could become a built environment think tank that extends the discourse beyond the market.

Peter Johns
Architects for Peace, November 2007

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Links
Crikey 11 July, 2007 "Why housing mustn't mean cheaper houses." http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20070711-Why-housing-affordability-mustnt-mean-cheaper-houses.html

Institute of Public Affairs – Australia's Leading Free Market Think Tank: Housing http://www.ipa.org.au/units/housing.html

The Age - "A generation's home dream vanishes" 13 Nov 2007 - http://www.theage.com.au/news/federal-election-2007-news/home-dream-vanishes/2007/11/12/1194766590346.html

Demographia - http://www.demographia.com/Sprawlwatch – the list - http://www.sprawlwatch.org/communications.html

HIA conference 2005 - http://hia.com.au/hia/content/HIA%20Policies/classification/Housing%20Affordability/Planning/article/IS/PS/Building%20the%20Nation.aspx

Mongolia's first ever private Construction Technology College

2007-10-15T01:22:00.000+10:00

I am working at what is reported to be Mongolia's first ever private Construction Technology College, in an effort to improve the situation for professional architectural education here. Uniquely for my long established NGO, Voluntary Service Overseas, this posting sets out to share architectural education skills, in order to create sustainable livelihoods and economic development in the rapidly changing construction industry here.

The library in this two-year old school is relatively newly established, and is an example of how different things are here. Part of the problem is the lack of available literature. Of about thirty books on the shelf dedicated to architecture, only three small A5 titles are in Mongolian. These are basic technical drawing textbooks, published about 1995. Very few of the books seem to be dated from after Mongolia's independence in 1992. About twenty of the substantial bound volumes about architecture are in Russian, and there are quite a lot of old professional journals also in Russian. There are several books and magazines in Japanese and Chinese, and none in English or German.

fig.1 teaching tool

There is one specialist book on English for builders and architects. (Translated in 2006 by Nomuundari, Bolor and Enebish from a Russian book by Bezruchko.) There are no books on Mongolian architecture and the one Russian title on Mongolian Architecture I have seen (in a shop at the Choijin Lama Temple) is not in the school's collection.

Fig.2 Souvenirs, State Department Store; State Circus (blue roof) through window in the distance

Our college director promises a list of new books due in the near future, but the list of titles is not available to see. There is no catalogue of the books and the librarian's computer is not attached to a network or printer. She writes the names and numbers of books loaned on the borrower's card.

One of the most potentially practical tites on the shelf is the two part handbook "Stroitelbnoe Projektirobanie" which is the Russian 1965 equivalent of a Neufert's Architect Handbook or an AJ Metric handbook. No contemporary equivalent is said to be available, but I will be interested to see what practitioners in architects offices are using for architects data.

Daily life here is not quite as clockwork as many architecture schools in the minority world where I taught previously. Classrooms have blackboards but few staff use illustrations when teaching design. There are good computer labs, the crowded computers are virus ridden. The drawing studio is full of still life pencil drawings of plaster cast heads. Most of the students here live in the peri-urban ger districts, the informal settlements where people have settled in gers (yurts) and shacks. Electricity is reticulated informally, and water comes by bucket or jerry can from wells and community tanks along unsealed roads. These areas have grown considerably in the last few years after harsh winters decimated livestock herds and many nomads moved to the city. However, the students are very keen to learn. Their practical training is like an apprenticeship and is an important part of the funding model for the private education.

Fig.3

I hope to be able to achieve something helpful over the coming year and welcome readers and correspondents to my blog at http://www.nomadologist-nomadology.blogspot.com/ or via http://www.gregory.cowan.com/

Gregory Cowan
Mongolia
Architects for Peace, October 2007

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See photos "walk to work": http://flickr.com/photos/nomadologist/sets/72157602236377955/

Regenerative Design

2007-09-16T02:44:00.000+10:00

Several months ago I wrote an editorial titled ‘Just Sustainability’ that discussed the emerging social imperative within sustainability discourse. In a similar vein, in this editorial I would like to explore another area of concern that is gaining increasing momentum. ‘Regenerative design’ is founded on the contention that sustainability is insufficient to address the scope and urgency of our current planetary crisis. Sustainability is not tantamount to efficiency. However, the use, misuse and consequent renegotiation of this term has resulted in a reduction of its potency. In particular, its connection with the conceptually divergent goals of economic growth and production under the popularised Brundtland definition of ‘sustainable development’ has led to scepticism of the value and meaning of this term. Furthermore, the framework of minimising impacts, or perhaps even more problematically offsetting impacts, is seen as both ineffective and presumptuous since it continues to grant indulgences on behalf of the planet.

A variety of terms, including regeneration, resilience and symbiosis, have emerged to challenge the perceived inadequacies and stasis inherent in the concept of sustainability. This is not a particularly new approach. William McDonough has been championing this approach for well over a decade. In his 1998 article ‘Declaration of Interdependence’ he describes sustainability as a ‘shibboleth’ arguing that it is pointless trying to do a bad thing better.[1] Janis Birkeland echoes this concern in her critique of building environmental rating systems when she argues, “If we labelled cigarettes the way we label buildings, people might smoke more ‘lite’ cigarettes to improve their health.”[2]

Birkeland is attempting to lift the bar even higher than McDonough’s popularised ‘Cradle to Cradle’ approach. She contends that the abolishment of the concept of ‘waste’ through closed loop cycles does not go far enough and what is required is a reverse linear system in which ‘wastes’ become resources. Scientists may dismiss such assertions as naïve, with the mighty weight of the second law of thermodynamics to bolster their resolve. However, I think the point raised by Birkeland and other proponents of a regenerative approach to design is not so much the application of intentions and their end results, but rather the framework within which those intentions are conceived. The shift in thinking from sustainable to regenerative design is subtle, yet significant. To appease the scientists, we might cite Einstein’s well-known insight that we can’t use the same thinking that got us into the problem in the first place.

So what is ‘regenerative design’? There is no definitive answer or universally agreed definition. As with ‘sustainability’, regenerative design is a contested concept with a common horizon of intent underpinned by a diversity of meanings and applications. From my own perspective, regenerative design diverges from sustainability in three key ways. Firstly, it shifts the frame of reference from minimal to positive impact. Secondly, it questions human/environment relations based on the Cartesian separation of subject and object. Thirdly it attempts to reconnect environmentalism with a socio-political dimension, which has been lacking in much sustainability discourse.

It is perhaps only the first of these three points of difference that is universally shared amongst all proponents of regenerative design. The premise is simple – that our actions should result in net benefits to our ecological and social environments. The application is more complicated, but it is based on what Bill Reed has described as building capacity rather than things. It requires us to think along Isaiah Berlin’s terms as foxes rather than hedgehogs; the latter being an endearing, but nonetheless critical term for the single-minded thinking typical of much urban planning.

Regenerative design looks for inspiration in the complexity and symbiosis of nature. However, it is necessarily more than biomimicry. Herein lays the second point of difference to sustainability in which regenerative design attempts to reconcile the historically constructed division between humans and nature. It is interesting to contemplate that the word ‘nature’ can have such multiple meanings that extend from our intrinsic characteristics and our relationships towards things to a concept that is premised on our very separation from the ‘natural’ world.

Many proponents of regenerative design invoke an ethic of care and a connection with the spirit of place as a necessary condition to challenge our current position. Not everyone is comfortable with embracing this perspective for fear of being labelled a new age hippy and dismissed as ‘flaky eco-la-la’, to use Murray Bookchin’s condemning term. But then again, the dominant mechanistic and reductionist attitude towards our world is something that regenerative design seeks to challenge. Of course, much of this thinking has aided the environmental movement by providing scientific ‘proof’ of planetary changes such as global warming. However, sometimes I am shocked by the extension of this attitude to the way we act in the world. If the Great Climate Change Swindle that was aired recently on national television wasn’t bad enough, the ensuing debate in which an Australian scientist dismissed the entire precautionary principle on the basis of our inability to adequately and accurately determine risk was astounding.

However, there are so many things for which science cannot account. In particular, the socio-political dimension, which is the focus of the third point of difference and the subject of my previous editorial on ‘just sustainability’, requires value judgements which can never be quantified. Sustainability does not exclude the socio-political dimension, but it defines it as a distinct realm; one of the four ‘pillars’ or three ‘legs’ depending on how the pie is sliced. Conversely, regenerative design is concerned with the complex web of relationships that form an integrated whole that cannot so easily be dissected. This is an aspiration rather than a reality and unfortunately social relationships are too readily glossed over or presented as universal and homogenous. One notable point of difference is Steven Moore’s treatise on regenerative design through an analysis of the Laredo Blueprint Farm in Texas.[3] It takes some resolve to wade through all the academic lingo, but Moore makes some really good points about the inter-relationships between the success of environmental initiatives and the politics of ownership, production and education.

Regenerative design is still evolving and maturing in its ideas and applications. Unlike sustainability it is not premised on an idealised end point but rather recognises the necessity of the process of development along variously divergent and convergent paths. Who knows exactly where these paths will lead, but with so many of the pioneers of sustainable design now working in this area, expect to hear more in the future ……

Dr Ceridwen Owen
Architects for Peace, September 2007

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References:

[1] McDonough, W. (1998) ‘Declaration of Interdependence’ in Scott, A. (ed.) Dimensions of Sustainability, London: E & F Spon.
[2] Birkeland, J. EDG (2007) ‘Positive Development’, Building Design Practitioners Environment Design Guide, Melbourne: RAIA (in publication).
[3] Moore, S.A. (2001) Technology and Place: Sustainable architecture and the Blueprint Farm, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Scavenging for Survival

2007-08-10T09:22:00.000+10:00

Dear Fellow Members:

This editorial comes from Bekasi, an industrial city in a Less Developed Country (LDC), Indonesia. It’s a bit ironic that Indonesia is called ‘less developed’ because the country’s culture, although under heavy assault from western-style popular entertainment, is a lot richer than that in many “first world” countries. However, in the infrastructure and services area – in this case solid waste management – the editorial shows how the city is firmly in the LDC category. It also shows how a rescue might be at hand from a wealthy European country. The editorial also questions some of the motives behind the ‘rescue’ and leaves it up to the reader to decide whether the advantages of the scheme outweigh its mercenary qualities.

First, some background. At present only 30% of Bekasi’s solid waste is picked up by the city administration. It is delivered to the city’s landfill at Sumur Batu. Organic material constitutes about 75% of the incoming load and that remains at the landfill where it composts down into potentially useful soil amendments.

What happens to the other 70% that isn’t collected? That’s where scavenging comes in. They comb the streets, mainly men, looking for PET and HDPE, cans, glass bottles and paper and cardboard and stuff them into a large sack on their back. Then the scavenger takes his ‘load’ to a consolidator where he is paid for the recycled ‘loot’. But there’s another breed of scavengers, too. They inhabit the landfill, literally (permanent and semi-permanent) as you can see from the two photos. As new loads of solid waste are delivered, it is met by an army of scavengers who remove recyclable and saleable items.

There are several issues here. One is that the scavengers frequently work in a high-risk environment within the radius of the swinging arm of an excavator. Another is the total lack of concern for health and hygiene in highly unsanitary working surroundings. Neither the scavengers care nor the city administration. Photo 1, for example, shows a small food and drink stall with a blue awning perched on the garbage amongst flies, rats, stench and disease. Photo 2 shows several blue roofed wahrung in the same landfill ‘cell’. A third and crucial issue is the methane which is being emitted at high rates from the decomposing organic material in the landfill. Methane is a greenhouse gas, 20 times more potent than CO2. It simply escapes into the atmosphere as it does at thousands of landfills in Indonesia (and other countries, too). And that brings me to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Photo 1: Excavator, swarms of people scavenging as new material is revealed and the wahrung or food and drink stall on the landfill itself.

CDM is a scheme jointly run by the World Bank and countries that signed AND ratified the Kyoto Protocol. The scheme allows high (per capita) CO2e

[1] emitters in wealthy Europe, Canada and Japan to gain carbon credits by implementing projects that perceptibly reduce GHG emissions. The World Bank acts as the Trustee for the money that the wealthy countries contribute to projects in order to buy emission credits, so allowing them to meet their Kyoto pledges. The credits are bought from Indonesia in this example but there are many projects throughout SE Asia and China. Almost all of the projects are in LDCs. In addition, a few individual, generally large companies in non-ratifying countries have joint venture arrangements with agribusinesses in SE Asia to conduct CDM projects.

So the CDM mechanism is a wholly COMMERCIAL approach to combating global climate change. The localized environment is likely to improve as a result of a CDM and social conditions in and around a project site, too. The commercial aspects are that:

CDM projects use CO2e as a tradable commodity;
Certificates are issued called Certified Emissions Reductions or CERs;
The current market price for Asian certificates of CO2e is about €7/ tonne. Price per tonne of CO2e depends on “project risk” – high risk earns more and vice versa, as well as supply and demand;
Most CDM projects only go ahead because of the flow of CER money to the investor(s). A high rate of return is needed to compensate for what is seen as an unusual and/or high risk

CERs are only awarded after the project is approved by the World Bank. Approval and validation is quite rigorous and is succeeded by strict monitoring and careful verification. In addition, full environmental and social impact statements and community consultation efforts are required for CDM projects.

Photo 2: Several warhung, and a scavenger with a bamboo basket for his ‘loot’.

What does all this mean for the City of Bekasi? The city administration recently signed agreements with a European donor, the World Bank as trustee and a private business in Jakarta to cap the landfill, initially flare the methane and gain revenue from the carbon credits. Three private companies will submit proposals to construct and manage the project. They will provide all the front-end investment costs. The City of Bekasi will receive about 15-17% of the CER income. The revenue stream for Bekasi will be a sizeable addition to its budget – about US$60,000 per year diverted from the CER flow to the private company. Potholes on some arterial roads are so bad they cause traffic jams and increased pollution. They’ll be repaired.

The new tradable commodity – methane – means that garbage management will improve dramatically as well: Part of the revenue going to the City of Bekasi from the private company must be diverted to solid waste management. And of course it is in the City’s interests to get as much garbage into the landfill for recycling and decomposition as possible. It is even more in the interests of the private business to do the same. And a little of the city’s share of the CER income must be diverted to improve health and safety conditions for the scavengers in a (slightly) more formal recycling operation, at least for those who work at the landfill. The street scavengers will not find much material in the future and will lose their livelihood. On the other hand, there will be more jobs in safer and healthier conditions at the landfill so there may be balance in that direction.

So are there any downsides to what looks like a win/win situation? Maybe not but firstly, it is interesting that the wealthy countries cannot achieve their Kyoto targets within their own countries. This is probably for socio-political reasons. They have to rely on obtaining reductions by picking the easier, “low hanging fruit” in less developed countries. My cynical side says desperately defend your footprint and don’t rock the boat by improving conditions in other countries! Second, private companies will not get involved in GHG reduction, even if the raw materials ie GHGs come from their own processes, unless the internal rate of return is 20 – 25% or more. Altruism is meaningless. And so is environmental responsibility to a large degree. If the rate of return slips below that threshold, the project is unlikely to be done under current circumstances. That tends to look mercenary.

Having said that, the cost of up-front infrastructure is certainly high. For the small Pontianak landfill (in Kalimantan, Indonesia) the cost of the methane flare alone (including transportation from Jakarta) was US$390,000. The total cost of preparation, capping and trapping was more than double that amount. No city government in Indonesia can afford that kind of investment unless it can obtain up-front money from the trustee and that is only likely to happen for a very low risk project. So the consultants who manage the project processes and do the impact assessments benefit from CDM. But it is the private sector that has become the main beneficiary of CERs. They’ve seen the potential of a new international business opportunity and are exploiting it vigorously. In the Pontianak example 17% of CER revenues are diverted by the company to improving the city’s waste management (another slightly sceptical exclamation mark there) and to improving conditions for scavengers and their children at the landfill. Does this satisfy the requirements of corporate social responsibility or is it merely commercial opportunism? Or is it a mixture of both? I’m eager to know what you think.

John Blair
Indonesia,
Architects for Peace, August 2007

[1] CO2equiv simply means a GHG measured in CO2 terms. Thus methane (CH4) is 21 times more potent than CO2 and therefore gains 21 times the CERs that CO2 does.

Public transport, a shamble and a missed opportunity in the State post-election budget

2007-07-15T00:37:00.001+10:00

In the Minister's message for the launch of Melbourne 2030, Peter Batchelor stated: "Not surprisingly, in the consultation process for Melbourne 2030, transport emerged as a dominant theme. It also proved to be the feature Melburnians liked most and least about their city."[1]

A few years later, Treasurer John Brumby's post-election budget (representing the same political party), has allocated a dismal amount for the improvement of our public transport system—and it is not beginning this year, but sometime in 2009. A newspaper article published in May this year claims that, "In a tacit acknowledgement that the extent of overcrowding on Melbourne's trains has taken the Government by surprise, Mr Brumby has also brought forward the purchase of 10 trains and the training of 22 drivers."[2]

Melbourne's suburbs and its periphery continue to be dormitories connected by car to large shopping malls—this is not a city in any urban sense. Walking in much of the outer suburbs is hindered by the excessive traffic and unappealing car oriented roads. The train system has imposed a legacy of level crossings that are not only dangerous and outdated but add to traffic delays. It is a vicious circle: the more our public transport fails, the more we rely on the car. Thus, there is less incentive for people to walk on the streets, less opportunities for socialising, less opportunities for milk bars and small convenience stores to thrive—all in all, this means less health for the individual and the environment. This situation also hinders the economic and business opportunities for those large sections of the city.

Links between social exclusion and access to public transport have been well established. The Brotherhood of St Laurence has produced valuable research on this topic, the following paragraph reflects this concern: "Throughout the focus group discussions, transport was constantly identified as essential in terms of accessing many of the things identified as key elements of a decent standard of living, as some of the comments already cited illustrate. Lack of adequate transport was also seen as a constant problem that caused many to miss out on a decent life".[3]

Compared to other developed cities in the world Melbourne’s public transport is substandard in its connectivity at all levels: to the city centre, within and across other neighbourhoods, to culture and services.[4]

In cities such as Santiago, Lisbon, Barcelona, Stockholm and others, the underground (Metro) is not viewed only as a backdrop for commercial billboards. The authorities have had the vision to turn the public space they generate into an opportunity for artistic and cultural expressions. Painted and ceramic murals adorn the stations of these cities. In Stockholm, stations located in areas with high levels of migrant populations, display artworks incorporating various languages and meaningful designs, while in Santiago, the stations also provide space for transient and permanent exhibitions.[5]

It is true that Melbourne has a low-density population, and this situation adds to our environmental problem. However, as demonstrated in the following comparison by the PTUA (Public Transport Users Association), Melbourne has a higher population density as compared to Vancouver and similar to that of Toronto—both cities with much better public transport systems that are cheaper than ours. Conversely, density is another issue that we must address and public transport should assist in this regard. Cities (in that order):

Melbourne (Keysborough), Toronto (New York), and Vancouver (Surrey).[6]

Distance from the city: 25k, 25k, 30k
Population density per hectare: 32, 34, 11
Bus service frequency (peak, in minutes): 60min, 2.5min, 15min
Bus service frequency (off-peak, in minutes): 60min, 6min, 15min
Evening: no service, 7.5 min, 15 min.
Fare (bus+ train): $9.2, $3, $6.

In these cities, public transport services exist to respond to commuter demands in terms of transport options and waiting times. More importantly, these services are not necessarily tied to population size or community affluence. The claim—often used by our politicians and bureaucrats—that Melbourne’s population is too small for a “high response” public transport is not correct. Neither is the view that we cannot afford the costs of major transport infrastructure—Australia, with an annual budget surplus can certainly afford this.

In a recent article, Royce Miller discusses the possibility of "people-friendly transport tunnels" for Melbourne. These tunnels aim to solve congestion, and opens up more holistic considerations regarding the upgrading of the rail system, connectivity, and the notion of a pedestrian friendly city.[7]

Efficient public transport needs investment. It does not rely on 'coercing' or 'educating' people into using it—people opt for public transport when it is a real option. Underground tunnels, assuming these included good public transport service, could assist cities in becoming pedestrian friendly, as the traffic above is reduced. Public transport, in my view, should be deemed as a right, an integral part of what Lefebvre defined as "the right to the city".

Our governments, State and Federal, have not yet understood the importance of public transport in relation to environmental issues, health and the liveability of our city. Public transport should act as a network of interconnections to link the Melbourne CBD and the majority of Melbournians who live in suburbs and the periphery.

In sum, we have the required population and density to justify a real public transport system. If poorer countries can have efficient, reliable, clean and modern public transport systems, we, with a constant budget surplus can afford all that and more. If cities with 2,000 years of urban heritage can build metros (underground), our 200 year-old cities can also retrofit a metro and other forms of collective transportation.

While I am not an expert on transport, as an architect and urban designer my interest focuses on the quality of the city and I am interested to know why our public transport is of such a low standard. We need educated bureaucrats, professionals and politicians, with a judicious sense of priorities, a real commitment to environmental sustainability and social justice. It is for this reason that our 2007 Forum, Transported, will discuss transport options for a connected city. You are all invited to participate.

Beatriz C. Maturana
Architects for Peace, July 2007

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References:

1: Refer to: Melbourne 2030, Minister's messages: Sustainable transport. http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/melbourne2030online/content/introduction/01c_transport.html

2: Austin, Paul. Brumby's big spending spree. The Age, May 2, 2007. Available from http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/brumbys-big-spending-spree/2007/05/01/1177788141341.html?s_cid=rss_age

3: For a community perspective on the current state of our transport system, my colleague Kally Vakras pointed me to a recent article on The Age, April 27, 2007. "Commuters tired of playing squash". http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/04/26/1177459880045.html

4. See section on Transport in P. Saunders, K. Sutherland, P. Davidson, A. Hampshire, S. King and J. Taylor. Experiencing Poverty: The Voices of Low-Income Australians. Social Policy Research Centre, Brotherhood of St Laurence, March 2006 [cited 30 April 2007]. Available from: http://www.bsl.org.au/pdfs/SPRC_experiencing_poverty__new_indicators_of_disadvantage_focus_group_outcomes_report.pdf

5. For more information see:
Metro de Santiago (Metro Cultura-Art): http://www.metrosantiago.cl/metro_arte.php
Metropolitano de Lisboa: http://www.metrolisboa.pt
Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona: http://www.tmb.net/en_US/home.jsp
Stockholm Transport: http://www.sl.se/Templates/SubStart.aspx?id=1906

6. See PTUA: http://www.ptua.org.au/melbourne/better-service

7. Miller, Royce. Council backs people-friendly transport tunnels. The Age, June 15, 2007 [cited June 16 2007]. Available from http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/council-backs-peoplefriendly-transport-tunnels/2007/06/14/1181414466876.html

Images:

First image: Exhibition space in the underground displaying artefacts found during excavation works in a Metro station, Santiago, Chile.
Second image: Artwork mural in a Metro station, Stockholm, Sweden

Find PDF file here