Gaza - cities under siege and under attack

Architects for Peace calls for the immediate cessation of attacks on civilians, the immediate relaxation of supply blockades to Gaza, the reopening of borders to provide access to Egyptian hospitals, and immediate investment in basic services to assist in restoring human dignity and relative peace to the people of the region.

Credit: Joe Catron in Shujaya in Gaza City, Sunday July 20th 2014. See the set.

All eyes should be on Gaza at the moment, but understandably many are focused on unfolding events in the damp fields of Eastern Ukraine. The Gaza Strip is small and densely populated with over 5,000 people per square kilometre. It is tense and under siege. Borders to Israel and Egypt have been closed to the general population, offering no means of escape from the conflict. The underground supply tunnels used for civilian supplies are considered illegal by Israel and are further threatened by their secondary use as conduits for weaponry. Israel's defence force has them in their sights, and Egypt recently announced the closure of 1,370 tunnels to the South.

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Public housing in Australia - selling out?

Keppel St, Carlton public/private housing development on a former hospital site.

Over the last decade, the concept of what public housing is in Melbourne has been rewritten, again. Perhaps it has been lost altogether. Once it was a backstop, there to ensure that manufacturing workers had somewhere to live that was secure and socially-connected and close to work. By the '90s the mix changed with a wave of deinstitutionalisations almost doubling the number of people in these flats with special needs. In 2012, urban public housing provision has deteriorated to the point that it's a token gesture, ill-coordinated and incremental. If you sell it with enough spin, no one will realise that the new public housing development contains no new public housing.

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The death and possible life of a street

A couple of hundred years back, in The Enlightenment, main roads were arteries and veins, vital to the healthy functioning of the city body. They alleviated the unhealthy and congested state of cities at the time. Thoroughfares were inlaid to create airy, healthy swathes through un-sewered slums permeated by dysentery and pollution. With the advent of the motor car and suburban living, things have flipped somewhat. Inner city arteries have become unhealthy conduits for internal combustion-driven private transportation, serving the detached driver rather than the residents and businesses along them. The slums between them have been gentrified and reticulated, but arterial roads are now commonly referred to as “traffic sewers”, and this sewerage is casting its scum onto the immediate environs. Because we all use these roads, most of us are blind to alternatives – it is just the necessary price of progress and convenience.

“City gentlemen, driving home in the evening, scarcely glimpsed the squeeze and squalor of working class life behind the prosperous shop fronts of Johnston Street and Bridge Road.” (1)

Johnston Street forum, 13th August 2011. Photo: I. Woodcock

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Play Time

This editorial takes a cue from the recent editorial on design play, and Superstudio – a 24 hour design competition involving the participation of most Australasian architecture schools.(i) Working as one of Architects for Peace's tutors at the Melbourne University venue last week, I was intrigued by what the students came up with. The theme for the competition was:

In individual groups, students are to enliven and activate their ‘found’ Place X (an invisible space/ series of spaces) through the idea and functions of play to appeal to a chosen demographic/s.

Play was defined in the brief as, “a voluntary activity, never a physical necessity or a moral duty. It is not only a matter of leisure and free time, it is freedom" (Leisure theory and Practice).

As clues as to what this might mean, students were given a sound recording and an excerpt from George Orwell's “1984” emphasising the difference between ownlife, (a man talking time out to wander randomly on his own) and organised play (sport and games). The site was to be an 'invisible space' – which I took to mean a space that is visible but unnoticed – an interstitial space. This space was to be located in another transitional space – the blurred line between city and suburb – a space of transit.

The subtext was that we need ownlife play and we're not getting enough of it in the city. It was surprising to see how the students were defining play in their quickly developing schemes. Traits and features included varied widely:

game spaces, motion sensors, cute spaces, systems for encouraging communication between strangers, lookout platforms, spaces for drivers to make cups of teas, dance events, art installations, spaces for yoga, pedestrian bridges.

Superstudio Presentation [1]

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The property problem

A recent poll gathered that, give or take, just over half of all home owners in Australia are intending to install solar panels of some sort within the next two years.(1) Tim Flannery thinks this is great news, and that maybe we can start to lower the shoe size of the average home's carbon footprint. “Electric water heaters are a major contributor to the problem, accounting for roughly a quarter of household energy consumption. By comparison, using a solar water heater saves about 3 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year.” Great for some I thought.

This age of sustainable design makes certain assumptions. First, that the person wanting to be green owns the abode they want to green. Second, that they have the permission to alter it.

My semi-detached flat has a fifty square metre roof sloping at about 32 degrees due North. My flat is also on a strata title managed by a body corporate (now “owners corporation” in Victoria). In 2007 a power company made me an attractive government-subsidised offer to install a solar water panel and heater. I almost said sure, go ahead, but thought I'd better have a word to the body corp at the upcoming AGM. Response #1.

• no one is permitted to put anything on their roofs as they do not own them. The body corporate must maintain the tiles and solar gizmos will complicate that and may damage the tiles.

Oh well. I continued with my action list – here are the responses in a nutshell:

• No we can't get a water tank for common areas. That's too hard and there's nowhere to put one.
• No we can't put a water tank on one of the 40 plus unused car spaces under the building. The body corporate is not in the business of buying car spaces from owners.
• No you can't use your sunfilled carspace under your flat for anything other than a car.
• No the complex can't get gas like the neighbours. It's too hard, it's been looked at.
• No you can't put an external sunshade or blind up. It would change the look of the place.
• No we can't get green power for the common electricity. It would cost an extra $2.65 a week for 25%, which is unjustifiable... and green electricity is dubious.
• No we can't get individual water metering for each flat so that you know what you use, you must continue to pay an equal share (360 litres per day), whether you're in a bedsit or a three bedroom flat.

And so on. Underlining these responses was the fact that most of the flats are rented, and there is no benefit to the owner to increase the sustainability of a unit, unless there is a short term cost-saving.

Armed with this new wisdom, I returned to the AGM this year with new suggestions. Instead of calling them sustainability initiatives, I introduced them as potential cost-saving or cost neutral items that could improve the sustainability of the complex. The atmosphere was more receptive as the body corporate manager had just been to a sustainability seminar and warned the AGM of massive upcoming hikes in electricity and water charges.

• Yes we can look at motion detection and voltage reduction units for the 24/7 lighting of the common areas and car parks.
• Yes we could request VOC paints for this year’s $37,000 painting contract if the cost difference is negligible.

This year I was accepted onto the owners corporation committee. If you can't beat them, join them.

Back to that poll. 55% of Queensland home owners want solar power and don't have it. 8% already have it. That's 2.9M(2) homes Australia-wide eager to catch rays. How many can get it? 95% of owner occupiers are free to install solar goodness to their heart's delight.

But that leaves 145,000 owner occupied flats, and 2.1M rented houses and flats where we are having to make do with green power and door snakes(3). That's almost a third of all abodes in Australia. Assuming renters are at least as eager for solar power as homeowners, over a million households would like solar but can't get it anytime soon. These are the households for which the government solar power and insulation rebates are out of bounds for the foreseeable future.

Flats are a good thing. They are compact, reduce commuting times for all, have party walls and ceilings which act as insulation, and let the grasslands at the city edge hang on a few years longer. But a building owned by many people, most who don't live in it, is stuck in time. Investors will pay to upgrade it when they absolutely have to. Last year our complex spent $30,000 on roof anchor points, because we had to. The government has stringent new regulations for keeping people who walk on roofs safe. One day the government might decide that safety extends to the people living in the buildings too. Safety from species extinction.

One of the more progressive local councils in Melbourne, the city of Moreland, recently surveyed over 500 households for energy efficiency.(4) They had to reframe the survey after realising that many people had little control over their home's sustainability because they were within body corporates or renting.

“the project found that the barriers to retrofitting Class 2 buildings (that is, flats, apartments and units) were so great that solar hot water systems could not, literally, be given away....Greater focus is needed on the technical and administrative barriers to installing solar hot water systems and other energy efficiency options in Class 2 buildings”

Renting in Australia is still viewed as a short-term relationship between a tenant and a landlord they may never have met. Rental contracts tend to either be one year long, or month by month. There is no incentive for the tenant or landlord to make any improvements until the unit is to be sold on. Under Victorian law, so much as changing a showerhead (or even a lightbulb) can be deemed illegal as they are fixtures.(3) Under Victorian law, even if improvements are made with the landlord's consent, the landlord can insist that their property be returned to its original state at the end of the lease, or be reimbursed for the cost of doing so.

The number of apartments is increasing relative to detached housing, and the proportion of renters is slowly increasing. Legal frameworks need to take into account the sustainable retrofitting of these apartments by empowering tenants, encouraging landlords, and reviewing body corporate law. Sadly the new Owners Corporation Act in Victoria (2007) makes no mention of sustainability.(6)

Queensland is leading the way this year with new regulations requiring sustainability declarations at the sale of flats, and preventing body corporates from automatically rejecting owner sustainability initiatives.(5) This law acknowledges that sustainability improvements may add value to an apartment, so can be in everyone's best interests.

References
1. October 26th Fifth Estate, “Solar hot water is go, says new poll” http://www.thefifthestate.com.au/archives/6840
2. Australian census 2006, ABS Yearbook 2008, http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/0/37171EAC4F4F016ECA2573D20010F849?opendocument
3. While the options are fewer and have less impact, there are things apartment dwellers can do – from cleaning down the coils on the back of fridges, to indoor composting. More information is available in Environment Victoria's Green Renters' Guide. http://environmentvictoria.org.au/rentersguide
4. Sustainability Victoria and Moreland Energy Foundation: 'Take Action on Electric Hot Water and Air-Conditioning' (Take Action) Survey 2007-2009. http://mefl.com.au/news/178
5. Summary of 2009 law changes for bodies corporate in Queensland. Allens Arthur Robinson, 4/11/09. http://www.aar.com.au/pubs/fmres/forenov09.htm
6. Owner's Corporations Act (2006). Summary at Consumer Affairs Victoria. http://bit.ly/4sI5YY

Peter Johns
Architects for Peace, November 2009

Worlds Beyond Architecture

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

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Other Research Education

peter johns

Download PDF file here

Choices

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

Architectural theory and war

Architectural theory and war
August 2006

Architectural and urban theory questions, disputes, analyses and critiques so that we might improve the state of things. In recent years its influence has seemed to decline as theory and practice move apart. The sharp edge of practising architecture has been more concerned with formalism, icons, and sustainability than fractals, string theory, and event cities. Are academics losing their audience? It appears not, but the audience has shifted.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s The French Situationists sought to rediscover the playfulness of the pre-modern city, staging dérives (or ‘drifts’) through cities. These were game-like events using arbitrary rules that could lead to random discoveries. They resisted logical and predictability in their traversals of the city.

A recent essay(1) by daring Israeli architect Eyal Weizman describes the conflict 4 years ago in Nablus, Gaza. The Israeli incursion created havoc within the city, yet to the photographer on the street, there wasn’t a lot to shoot. These stealthy manoeuvres took place off the streets, behind closed doors. The invading army splintered into small cells, avoiding a classical linear progression through dangerous streets. Instead they entered through the sides of buildings and progressed in a violent ‘fractal’ manner through internal walls, ceilings and floors. Using heat sensors, they would plot their course as they went along - they were “swarming” independently rather than referring to a central command. Internal rooms became ‘streets’ while exposed external streets became ‘walls’. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) stormed through half the buildings in the casbah of Nablus, but from the outside this violence to the private domain wasn’t apparent.

“Imagine it - you’re sitting in your living room that you know so well, this is the room where the family watches TV together after the evening meal, that sofa is worn, but it’s too comfy to get rid of, this is your chair, that’s your partner’s, on that wall the same old pictures have been hanging for years on end.

And suddenly, that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders, you have no idea if they’re after you, if they’ve come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else, the children are screaming, panicking.” Sune Segal, November 2002 (2)
The military’s Operational Theory Research Institute openly admitted that they were interpreting the texts of Deleuze and Guattari, Debord and Tschumi, even Christopher Alexander. All for, “the pursuit and development of knowledge necessary for military commanders to think critically, systemically and methodologically about war fighting.”(3) If there are Architects for Peace, then there are also Architects for War. “Operational architects” within OTRI to be specific. OTRI’s former head, Shimon Naveh, explains: “We were looking for new modes of thinking that could be suitable to military strategy… The Americans were looking for technological solutions; we wanted to understand the whole depth of the problem. It struck us that architecture could be a very helpful metaphor." Weizman speculates that the city is no longer just the site for urban warfare, it is the medium. There is much evidence of defensive strategies for building in the city, but what form will offensive architecture take? Ines Weizman recently spoke of an, “architectural arms race”, in which cities would race one another to achieve mental and physical supremacy in built form.(4)

OTRI has lost influence in the IDF in the last few months, but their work lives on. In June The Jerusalem Post noted that the U.S. is showing keen interest. “The US Marine Corps has commissioned a study of design that will result in a Marine Corps Concept of Design that is based heavily on Shimon [Naveh]'s [work]. One can hardly attend a military conference in the US without a discussion of Shimon or [OTRI's] System of Operational Design.”(5) Weizman (and others) describe a “shadow-world” of military academics, with a reading list not dissimilar to architecture post-grads.

Lebanon 2006

If 2002 in Gaza saw the deployment of force in a hidden, fractal manner, this last month’s war in Lebanon appears hot-headed. It looks dangerously imprecise and disproportionate to the crime. The San Francisco Chronicle revealed last week(6) that the IDF’s attack on Southern Lebanon has been fully planned since 2004. The kidnapped soldiers were a trigger for a war that both sides were waiting for. It is worse that it was considered - that this level of infrastructural destruction has been planned for years. According to the report, the IDF bargained on three weeks of attacks to do what they had to - remove Hezbollah and “set Lebanon back 20 years”.(7) The IDF has had to extend the three weeks. Already, southern Lebanon is without major road links, power or airports. Almost a thousand are dead on both sides of the border. 800,000 Lebanese are without homes, impoverished and alienated.

What could be the theory driving this? Surely much blunter ideas drive aerial bombardments. Whatever the lineage of this operational design, one intended result appears to be the emptying of one end of southern Lebanon. In the last few days the nature of the damage shows that cluster bombs have been used by the IDF (and ball bearing bombs by Hezbollah in Northern Israel).(8) Cluster bombs contain smaller bombs, commonly called sub munitions, bomblets, grenades, or mines. Cluster bombs, and ball bearing bombs should never be lobbed into civilian areas - they are too indiscriminate and they leave unexploded ordnance in the fields. Unfortunately the civilians remaining in Southern Lebanon are the ones least able to leave. The International Laws of War state that civilians should not be targeted or used as ‘human shields’(9) but, as Robert Fisk writes, “extraordinary precedents are being set in this Lebanon war.”(10)

The blurring of the enemy and the civilian population is complete, to the point that traditional words of habitation are being exchanged for more loaded terminology. “These places are not villages. They are military bases in which Hezbollah people are hiding and from which they are operating,” said Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon the other day.(11) As in Gaza in 2002, the private domestic domain is the victim as everywhere becomes militarised. Soon homes may not even exist in southern Lebanon, if we read between the lines of Haim Ramon: “All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah.”

At a distance, it is hard to know where the truth lies - if there is a truth. What we could do is watch it all like hawks, to debate, to defend those forced out of homes, and to become at least as educated in the urban theories of the military as they are familiar with our own.

Peter Johns


1. Log, Issue 7 2006, p53-77. “Lethal Theory” by Eyal Weizman. A short version is available online here: frieze.com/feature_single.asp?f=1165
2. June Segal, Palestine Monitor, November 2002
3. Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post, Jun 8th 2006
4. dictionaryofwar.org/en-dict/taxonomy/term/30 Ines Weizman, video footage, June 2, 2006 “Dictionary of War is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts on the issue of war, to be invented, arranged and presented by scientists, artists, theorists and activists at four public, two-day [in 2006/2007]. The aim is to create key concepts that either play a significant role in current discussions of war, have so far been neglected, or have yet to be created.”
5. Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post, Jun 8th 2006
6.San Francisco Chronicle, July 21st, 2006
7.2o years quote: Maj. Gen. [res.] Yaacov Amidror talking to Kenneth R. Timmerman, NewsMax.com, Aug. 4, 2006
8. Human Rights Watch, 05.08.06 http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/05/lebano13921.htm
9. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_war
10. The Independent August 5th, 2006 news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1214522.ece
11. Globe and Mail July 28th, 2006