Cultural Perceptions and the Built Environment

In understanding the relationship between the built environment and technology integration/dependency, the component parts of individual "culture" ought to be understood as autonomous input that individually inform the collective expression that we ultimately classify as "culture." Understanding the distinctions in cultural values and perceptions towards technology use, innovation and society is an important value in working towards bridging the formal and conceptual gap between the modern and developing sectors. Considering social expressions of culture (represented along the "Abstractness" Axis), individual or vernacular environments tend to respond to the greatest range of familial and social networks. These types of social systems have been studied and quantified by anthropologists so that data can be applied and related to the corresponding built environments, as cultural landscapes, nomads, agriculturalists, and urban contexts. These relationships and distinctions become clearer by contrast with one another and are also related to the nature of "groups." For example, seen cross-culturally all contemporary groups tend to conform, perhaps with slight differences, but the groups observed in smaller vernacular environments can be expected to conform much more closely. This clarifies the role of social norms and the importance of tradition in understanding cultural identity and its expression in both built form and the use of socially appropriate tools and practices.

The diagram above compares the cultural factors of the formal sector with those of the informal sector to illustrate the discrepancies in cultural input that contribute to the development of the built environment. The diagram applies the same standards of quantifying cultural expression and input as the definition model above, but applies it lineally to coincident models.

Notes:

Lindsay Asquith and Marcel Vellinga. Vernacular Architecture in the Twenty First Century: Theory, Education and Practice. 2006

Society and Urban Infrastrucutre in the "Information Age"

The theme of technology dependency in urban theory today can be easily located in the design and redevelopment of metropolitan infrastructures over the past twenty years. The increasingly complicated interface between physical layouts, social organization, and electronic networks has come to direct the formal development of urban design and planning, and has impeded the effectiveness of classical models of planning in contemporary culture. It is in this interface that “new” urban forms have evolved in both the formal and informal sectors. That is, as urban infrastructures have complexified, they have splintered into smaller and often times redundant networks, configured by the new electronic pipelines of modern urban civilization. This progression of thinking opens up an all together new perspective of understanding the city not only as systems of communication, but also as "machines of deliberate segmentation," and to an extreme extent, often marginalization. The contradictory and complementary relationship between metropolitan centrality and the electronic and digital systems required to enable both traditional and communicative forms of infrastructure has in many ways created a virtual wall around modern cities beyond which "formal" growth is not possible. Beyond these technological corsets, modern systems and technologies are not effective in their formal applications and are perceived as unprescriptive objects used to sustain an entirely different model of urban development.

In the urban rendering at the top of the page, New Delhi is presented as a city where modern infrastructure has been retrofit with increasing frequency into a formal nineteenth century design, with peri-urban growth metastasizing around the city-proper where the infrastructure networks end. In the model below, Brasilia is representative of a "modern" city where architecture, society, economics and infrastructure where conceived of simultaneously, and conflated into a singular, prescriptive vision, where urban amendment is limited and peripheral development is similarly quarantined to beyond the extents of central infrastructure. The third model, Abu Dahbi with the Foster proposal for Masdar City, is a startling representation of a new twenty-first century theory of urbanism, where infrastructure, architecture, society and communications are embodied in an autonomous, packaged urban unit. In this model, the desert climate of Abu Dahbi cannot sustain any significant type of peri-urban settlement and growth beyond the city-proper has developed in the form of walled “cyborg cities” or hybrid cities, made up of an indistinguishable intertwining of “flows and places.”

Notes:

Manuel Castells, Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age. 2004

Jyoti Hosagrahar. Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism. 2005

From Refuse to Reuse: Systems Integration and User Interaction

The technological optimism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could not be destroyed or even shaken by such catastrophic events as the sinking of the Titanic, the Hindenburg or even the devastation wrought by two World Wars. Even the era’s satires of technology were optimistic and affectionate. In the 1880s, the French illustrator Albert Robida produced what has now turned out to be stunningly accurate visions of what the technology of the future would come to look like. Robida’s fantastical illustrations, depicted often as tongue-in-cheek episodes of absurd dreams and time-travel journeys, were amazingly prophetic in their depiction of the chemical warfare, flat screen TV’s, and test tube babies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Compare these images on the other hand with the mechanical visions of Rube Goldberg-- the famous inventor of bizarre and convoluted thought experiments represented in notoriously gratuitous and redundant contraptions. Goldberg’s work is a tribute to the importance of empirical system construction and represents thought provoking ways of executing simple procedures in unnecessarily complicated ways. While Rube Goldberg contraptions are usually benign and very tightly coupled in their choreography, the greater implications of Goldberg’s constructions may be mildly sobering in their critique of the formal devices we often use so regularly. That is, Goldberg’s apparatuses represent, albeit very playfully, our culture’s compulsion to devise overly complicated ways of performing typically very simple procedures. Electronic calendars for instance, electric knives and even mechanical pens and pencils are just a few modest examples of sophisticated and overly complicated iterations of traditionally very simple instruments. The apparatuses included here are illustrations of devices that are both simple in their construction and their performances but represent the limits of sophisticated material and engineering to accomplish relatively unremarkable ends. The contraptions describe important distinctions in the way the “user” interfaces with different types of devices as well, while offering an equally as satirical counter-illustration of the less fantastical realities of Robida’s predictions.

Technology, Production, and Local Innovation in the Twenty-First Century City

From the earliest days of the industrial age, the greatest artists and scientists of the times have had their focus locked skeptically on the recalcitrance and even malevolence of new technologies. In fact one of industrial and postindustrial humanity’s perennial grievances is the prototype or the procedure that passes from stubbornness to unequivocal rebellion in its developmental stages. From time immemorial, romanticized episodes of experimental failures or of the “happy accident” have been the pervasive lifeblood of human progress that has inspired our appreciation for and misgivings about technology. However most developmental studies focusing on science and technology concentrate either on the actual production of the technology by established “professionals,” or on the cultural and economic consequences of the technology. Often times, the idea of the lay-person or the “user” as the producer of the technology is either overlooked or dismissed as anomaly. Yet history has shown time and again that people outside the centers of scientific authority regularly defy the perception that they are merely passive recipients of scientific knowledge and technology, by reinventing products and rethinking knowledge systems in ways that represent a critique, resistance or even rejection of them. Despite being so frequently overlooked, developing this type of anthropological awareness of the way people and groups use, reuse and reject technologies is a critical element in understanding how both cultures and economies develop. The explicit importance of technology in developing economies has emerged as part of a broader rubric of sustainable development theory for the global south. Yet curiously, many of the most renowned aid organizations are either unwilling or unable to seriously encourage the kind of nuanced thinking that is required to develop appropriate technology programs, because such strategies are simply too difficult to monitor and nearly impossible to regulate. The result of course has been a prolific and ineffective style of development aid characterized by technology or aid “transfers” and program contingencies that compel third world populations into roles of submissive recipients of technologies instead of rallying them to be active creators of it. Yet, as ineffective as these approaches to development may be, they are understandable in their economic rationale and perhaps even inevitable in considering the cultural pedagogy that has validated them. The perception of “new” technologies as the natural solution to improving daily life has been the propulsive hallmark of Western evolution for over two centuries, and it in fact does seem logical at first glance to assume that the “products” we have come to rely on everyday to function productively in our world would naturally have similarly beneficial applications in “less-fortunate” regions as well. However both history and present ventures have proven that the technological dream of a “self-correcting world” is in actuality a misleading illusion, no more prophetic than John Van Neumann’s 1955 prediction of energy so cheap that it would be un-economical to meter it by the 1980s.[i] The romantic, twentieth century social objective of machine-sustained societies of streamlined leisure has proven to be nothing more than a noble mirage, as technologies today have come to demand more human labor to function, not less, and has aided in the rapid disenfranchisement of countless millions from entering into the modern sector, reducing earlier predictions of the promise of future technology to mere science-fiction fodder. The French poet Paul Valery clearly seems to have been right when he wrote in 1944 that:

“Unpredictability in every field is the result of the conquest of the whole of the present world by scientific power. This invasion by active knowledge tends to transform man’s environment and man himself -- to what extent, with what risks, what deviations from the basic conditions of existence and of the preservation of life we simply do not know. Life has become, in short, the object of an experiment of which we can say only one thing -- that it tends to estrange us more and more from what we were, or what we think we are, and that it is leading us…we do not know and can by no means imagine where.[ii]

When he wrote this, Valery was evoking the errors that the best thinkers of the late nineteenth century would have made in trying to predict the progress of the next fifty years. While a pointed and cautionary analysis, Valery could not have predicted the extent to which hyper techno-evolution would come to dominate our lives or the extent to which our understanding and misunderstanding of it would come to both help and hurt us.

Western Perceptions and Global Realities

Rod Serling’s 1961 short story, “A Thing About Machines,” is an incisive and haunting account of the ill-fatted, do-it-yourselfer Lord Finchley whose household appliances violently come to life and turn against him in murderous protest. As absurd a premise as it seems, what Serling was commenting on was not so much technology, or the “fickleness” of our technologies, but the sarcasm and arrogance we have all come to express in the face of technology and technology malfunction. However, Serling may also have more subliminally been tapping into our modern misgivings of industrial society--that is, the doubts and fears that have swelled to burgeoning proportions as we hear daily about promising and dangerous new breakthroughs in electronics technology, bio-medical discoveries and energy production. While Serling’s protagonist may have been a hysterical, waspish caricature of suburban American culture, he was beautifully created in that he expressed very real American misgivings about our technology. The United States may be home to the most renowned science and technology institutes in the world but is also the irrefutable birthplace of Lemon Laws. New Jersey and Pennsylvania for instance have officially defined a “lemon” as “a new car with a substantial defect that cannot be repaired after three attempts, or is out of service for a total of twenty to thirty days.”[iii] The creation of Lemon Laws in the United States is an important and paradoxical comment on our culture’s attitude towards technological development. That is, while we notoriously and proudly boast of our unparalleled technological prowess, we have unapologetically come to believe that things can sometimes simply be no good-- that certain products are just anomalously and categorically irreparable and unusable. Admittedly, many products in the United States and elsewhere are simply poorly designed and badly built, but the curious problem of certain devices just going bad is part of different problem that is unique to Western culture and characteristic of American society, and it has informed and directed our relationship with technology since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution.

In fact Mary Shelly’s horror story Frankenstein, first published in 1818, during the midst of the Industrial Revolution, may be the earliest deliberate account of the unintended consequences of unfettered technological invention. While Shelly may have been pointing to a dilemma latent in all science-based technology, at a time when the institutional sciences were only beginning to formally influence technological practice, she wrote prophetically about the inevitability of “technological systems” thinking.[iv] She does not describe the monster as a machine, but she is careful not to treat it as human either, despite its very personable characteristics. Still less however, is it an animal, lacking any proper name of its own-- the monster is simply a haunting personification of a sophisticated integration of exogenous systems. The implication is merely that a machine cannot be endowed with a will of its own in the way that Serling dramatized, unless it is a “system,” not merely an absolute device. Most technologies before Shelly’s time however were not systems based. Well into the nineteenth century, most tools, especially tools used in agriculture and manufacturing were designed and used as extensions of the users’ body. In many central European regions for instance, a scythe was a custom-tailored piece of equipment that was proportioned to the cultivator’s body to maximize the tool’s performance. [v] Still more suggestively, the simple concept of a workbench changed the relationship between the workers’ body and his tools. The employment of a solid table on which to operate tools, for the first time allowed craftsmen to anchor materials and tools with vices and pegs in repeatabley accurate ways. In this way, the tools became programmed to certain extent with the worker’s intelligence and skill. Planes for instance need to be mastered, adzes and drawknives demand a high level of proficiency as well, yet once a job is set up properly, even an inexperienced worker can craft an elaborate piece. What something as seemingly unremarkable as the workbench evidences is a dramatic and unstoppable change in how the human and the instrument interface with each other. At this point, people are no longer users of tools, but rather they become managers of them, in the exact same way that we have become managers of the high-tech equipment we keep on our desks and in our pockets everyday. That is, we have come to direct and control the processes that take place, rather than actively shape them for ourselves.[vi]Of course the precision of the managed tool has a price, and while it may be less robust as it becomes more complex, it also becomes increasingly unpredictable. This inevitable trade-off between precision and reliability is understood by most users of high-tech equipment, but it is nonetheless a key factor in the creation of our modern Western mentality that certain technological problems are simply in “the area of metaphysics,” and that “strange things happen in electronics for which there is no reason.” [vii] Because of this culturally accepted reasoning, many of our “good products that go bad” are simply disposed of out of frustration or retired to a more obscure use by “informal” users. The indignation of nineteenth-century producers and the irritation of twentieth-century consumers as created a techno-evolutionary paradigm that is violently disruptive at times, but also necessarily inspirational in its critique of new products and technologies. This is the contentious and dismaying mentality that has proven both the importance of pyramidal structures and centralized technologies in our world, while illustrating there ineffectiveness in others.

The Paradox of Appropriate Technologies and Housing

Failure to understand and respond to essential differences in the perception of issues and tools, and between principles and practices has exacerbated the dissonance between “the West and the rest” for centuries. The West’s cultural certainty in its centralized, regulated economic and technology programs has overshadowed smaller, self-governing initiatives, fostering a development paradigm that purports a limited set of preferred modern strategies as the most effective means for achieving immediate ends. That is, while corporate organizations generally employ heavy centralizing technologies, they have completely different benefits and capabilities than local, autonomous organizations which typically employ light, decentralized technologies. For instance, while there may certainly be strong and important arguments to consider in favor of the small-scale production of high-quality cars, it is unlikely and in fact simply bad business to think that it could compete with the mass-production that has so successfully come to dominate the industry. Alternatively, consider the mass-production of housing, which is intrinsically uneconomical as well as socially and ecologically damaging. To distill the car/house analogy further, it is obvious that car manufacturing needs to be highly standardized because it is assumed, and to a point guaranteed, that car owners will be using their cars in the same general ways. That is, all car owners will drive their cars, obey the same traffic laws, and operate their vehicles in the same designated areas -- hence cars can and should be designed as complete products and used as tools. The same cannot be said of housing projects. Contractors, planners and architects will be unable to invest their resources or mine the full “use-value” from the end “products” unless they are free to use the resources available to them, in their own ways that do not limit the freedom of others or harm future generations.[viii] This is the enduring and divisive inconsistency between formal sector production and innovation and informal sector use and innovation that has come increasingly to be defined as a conflict between “heteronomy” and “autonomy.”[ix] In considering the extremes between heteronomy and autonomy a clear illustration can be observed in the distinctions between modern public housing and local housing initiatives. Tenants of modern public housing for instance have little if any control over where they live or what kinds of dwellings and local amenities they have access to, and they have no control over the way in which the structures are built and managed. Alternatively, most peasants and pavement dwellers are forced to do all of these things for themselves, within the often narrow limits of what they are in fact free to do. Their autonomy in short is limited only in the control they have over the resources around them.

Countless modern examples of local, autonomous construction and self-directed strategies for survival have illustrated the marked discrepancy between the effectiveness of heteronymous goods and autonomous goods, and it has been romanticized and celebrated by Western observers often in the form of escapist fiction like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Turneir’s Friday. Yet what these famous examples of survivalist ingenuity in fact also come to represent, is the ineffectiveness of “modern” products in “un-modern” contexts. That is, “products” or tools that are often designed to be “managed” and not necessarily proactively wielded are often rendered unusable in any sort of off-hand application because they are designed as absolute devices that are packaged and marketed for a limited and specific type of use. Consider for instance what good a cell phone or a computer or a desk lamp would be for someone marooned on an island today if there is no infrastructure to make those tools operable. This perception of our products as complete, packaged devices that we need only call upon to operate is in fact the most effective and fatal way of depriving people of control over their own lives and of alienating the products themselves. This occurs because of two general factors in the production of modern products. The first is that most manufactured products are supplied in mysterious and opaque forms, often veiled behind shiny covers and booby-trapped. These sorts of devices are the instruments that we often dismiss as just plain bad or useless when they malfunction. In many instances it is often cheaper and easier to buy a new one instead of diagnosing and fixing the problem. Packaged foods are not very different and illustrate an equally as compelling point. That is, not only are consumers paying a high price for the containers the food is packaged in, but more and more foods are processed to the point where they are only usable or edible in a highly unique way-- try for instance using a cake mix to bake another type of cake. Packaged housing and “transferred technologies” can be seen in much the same way. They are notoriously inflexible, they typically consume far more energy and resources and they almost always have shorter life-spans than housing built by small, local builders who employ local materials and resources, and respond to specific demand cycles and locations. This type of practice exemplifies the autonomous model of development that is so desperately needed to inspire more appropriate initiatives today in both “formal” and “informal” communities, and while many examples of effective self-sustainability remain all too obscure, there is valuable inspiration to be gained from the notable exemplars that we do have.

The Importance of Collective Will in Appropriate Development Solutions

The viability of any technology system (or housing system for that matter) depends in the long run on the efforts of the users to interface with the product and by extension on their will to invest those efforts, and not merely on their capacity to do so. To illustrate just how crucial a point this assertion is, a more specific case study ought to be discussed to categorically prove the irrefutable effectiveness of self-directed, autonomous development. The community in Gaviotas Columbia is perhaps the most palpable example of this type of development paradigm, and it occupies a unique area in the greater discourse of development theory, situated tentatively between formal policy-based initiatives and unfettered, informal innovation. The community, in what might has matured over the past six decades to prove in no uncertain terms the extent to which technology and local innovation can “free people more than subjugate them,”[x] and help create opportunities for people to improve their individual utility as well as the utility of the collective. While Gaviotas may not have originally been envisioned exclusively as a model for Third World development, the ingenuity and vision of the community have provided invaluable examples of how even the most remote, disenfranchised regions can not only survive, but thrive and grow to make substantive global contributions. The powerful success of Gaviotas and of its founder Paolo Lugari, cannot be attributable to one, single causative factor, but there can be no doubt that much of its prosperity is owed to a uniquely serendipitous mentality that put a premium on collective empiricism and rejected the standard conventions of past design and financing models. Gaviotas exists today as a sterling example of how self-directed and circumstantially appropriate technological development can propel a community from a status of relative destitution to an engaged, contributing society, and it is a mentality that would do well to be incorporated into a more mainstream development paradigm.

Born in rejection of the conventional industrialization model of the past, Gaviotas has heralded a new era of development based on a refusal to accept Western precedent, and countless examples of the community’s experiments illustrate this attitude in ways both modest and revolutionary. Allen Weisman’s narrative account of the community’s development in his book Gaviotas: a Village to Reinvent the World, provides a variety of examples of the propulsive nature of the Gaviotan mentality. Weisman’s description for instance of Jaime Davila and Alonso Guitierrez’s collaboration on the design of a solar hot-water heater, speaks very clearly to the Gaviotan’s skepticism of Western certainty and their drive to achieve self-reliance. In a trip to London to investigate the effectiveness of solar hot water systems in dreary climates, Davila and Guitierrez are told that the systems used throughout London are dependent on sophisticated computer main-frames and precisely calibrated components to make them operable. However, once Davila and Alonso leave London, they not only conclude that they can reappropriate the British idea into a system that will perform without a computer infrastructure but they declare that theirs “will be even better without one.”[xi] Their refusal to merely adopt or transfer the developed technologies of the West should be distinctly observed, however their ability and their eagerness to reinvent for themselves the technologies they need is the granite bedrock of any sustainable development initiative. Not only does the local development of technology ensure its appropriate implementation within the community, but the process of developing it provides the community with information, ideas and a sense of pride they would have never enjoyed otherwise had they resigned themselves to be passive recipients of already developed technologies. Gaviotas’s unique appreciation for engaging technology design for themselves and their ability to revel in their failures is the powerful source of the community’s stamina, and it has allowed them to demonstrate to the world just how important independent technology development is in enriching the lives of its users.

However Gaviotas’ technological pedagogy is perhaps best embodied in the renowned hospital the community built for itself. Considered by some to be one of the fifty most significant buildings in the world, the Gaviotan hospital was constructed as an artful “maze of angles rising above the savanna, formed by white walls, glass awnings…and a sense of warmth and well-being.”[xii] The hospital was designed out of “what looked like machine parts,” to create an incomparable environment of human healing. The building represents both formally and literally the community’s belief that technology is “an enrichment of human existence, not a steamroller that turn[s] on its inventors and crush[es] them.”[xiii] The design of the hospital and the subsequent technologies that the building would come to house, including a legendary “solar kitchen,” is both a demonstrative and symbolic work that reconciles Promethean technology with practical necessity. In fact the hospital in many ways is the penultimate embodiment of Lugari’s original vision for a self-reliant city. The building is able to condition itself, power itself and sustain itself without required human intervention or oversight, and the successful integration of technology systems in a single building belies the previously assumed claim that all technologies require “compulsive maintenance.” The economist Albert Hirschman coined the theorem of “maintenance compulsion” after observing that all great technological progress required some sort of great catastrophe during its development, and that regular and “compulsive” human monitoring of systems is required to assure effective operations and prevent any further catastrophe.[xiv] Yet while Gaviotas owes its success to the failures that preceded it, the Gaviotans’ ingenuity and passion congealed in this project to produce a work that will likely continue to be operable well into the future and will always and forever represent the importance of self-directed technology innovation for sustainable development.

Despite its inspiring innovation and phenomenal engineering accomplishments, the unfortunate shortcoming of Lugari’s grand model for the world is its failure to gain appreciable, global traction. Policy-based development programs or initiatives that develop and transfer products are widely known within both professional and non-clerical venues, yet localized examples of self-induced development like Gaviotas seem to be overlooked because they are perceived as “unmarketable.” What Gaviotas’ shortcoming has proven is that effective development programs cannot be perceived of or designed as exportable “products” to be implemented at the will of an individual or an institution. Development ought to be inspired not mandated, and if Gaviotas offers us anything it is demonstrative proof that powerful inspiration is the most important ingredient in creating any type of lasting vision. Contrary to Lugari’s shortsighted belief that the spirit of Gaviotas cannot be replicated somewhere else[xv], it is actually the Gaviotan spirit that is the community’s most important and useful export. While the technology the community was able to invent could be enormously useful in other places, Lugari didn’t found Gaviotas as a manufacturing plant of exportable technology, rather he founded it as an example of how a remote, disenfranchised village can will itself to survive by developing new ways of thinking and uniquely tailored innovations. When Lugari expressed frustration over the community’s financial situation in the late 1980s, he bemoaned that they were struggling because while “a lot of [their] innovations [were] beautiful, they [were] beautiful failures.”[xvi] However, these failures are “products” that are just as valuable as solar kettles, or wind scoops, and they are important commodities that formal development programs would do well to study and purport themselves. What Lugari has provided the world, unwittingly or not, is a set of exemplary values that can “show the world how to be environmentally aware, creative, egalitarian and still make a decent living,”[xvii] and it is inestimably more valuable than any packaged, UN approved product they could have ever deployed. This is the fundamental distinction between what Gaviotas has contributed to the discourse of global development and what other communities in the “formal sector” like Brasilia have contributed, and their discrepant perceptions of what Third World populations need in order to develop will unfortunately be a contentious difference for many years to come.

If the minds in Gaviotas teach us anything, it is that we should all learn to revel in our foibles. The “setbacks” and mishaps experienced universally by the engineers and designers at Gaviotas, is something everyone can identify closely with. The story of Alfonso, weaving copper into their homemade photovoltaic grids to make them less corrosive and to save solder is only a modest example of the kind of invention that is often born of failure. After all, Murphy’s Law as originally mumbled by the frustrated military physicist was expressed not as a fatalistic, defeatist principle, but rather as a call for adaptation, alertness and understanding. Developing this type of nuanced understanding of the way individuals and institutions alike make decisions and respond to their circumstances will go a long way in helping to meaningfully identify more enduring solutions to development problems. Debates over the effectiveness and appropriateness of technology transfer programs, public housing initiatives and product packaging is only a small and integrated part of a greater, multifarious unease about responsibly engaging those who are simply tragic victims of geography. These debates do not belong to the realm of any single profession or discipline and are not only sustained by committed technophiles and determined technophobes. These issues are in fact accessible and relevant to the great majority of laypeople who are merely stumbling through a Rube Goldberg world and participating, at times unwittingly, in a dizzying and empirical process of engineering upsets and economic stops and starts. These debates touch on a limitless variety of subjects and disciplines and are in fact significant to anyone who has every marveled at the brimming recycling bins in our electronically networked offices, or to those who have ever expressed frustration about not being able to repair their own cars, or for anyone who has ever watched in helpless frustration at a city contract into social and physical indigence -- but most of all these issues are for those who want to face the future head on, but with an informed and benevolent grin.

Notes:

[i] Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, New York, NY, 1996, pg. xi
[ii] Paul Valery. “Unpredictability.” History and Politics. Translated by Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews. New York, 1962, pg. 71.
[iii] Tenner. Pg. 4
[iv] Tenner, Pg. 12
[v] Tenner, Pg. 13
[vi] Tenner, Pg. 14
[vii] Edward Sandberg Diment. Quoted in Tenner, pg 4.
[viii] Turner pg. 105.
[ix] Turner, pg. 105
[x] Weisman, Pg. 172
[xi] Weisman pg. 96
[xii] Weisman pg. 110
[xiii] Weisman pg. 110
[xiv] Tenner pg. 20.
[xv] Weisman pg. 142
[xvi] Weisman pg. 145
[xvii] Weisman pg. 127

Product Life Cycles in a Globalized Century

In understanding the distinctions between "formal" and "informal" peri-urban growth, the mechanisms that govern resource accessibility and decision making patterns ought to first be observed. While the patterns of decision and control describing the development systems within the formal and informal sectors appear to follow similar general progressions, they are actually representative of completely opposite modes of behavior. In the formal model above, decisions and resources flow from a peak of authority down through divisions of labor at successive levels to the base. The formal model is logically and rigidly linear and concludes at a determinate lower level where the "product(s)" are supplied as categorical goods or services to separate parties. That is, categories of institutionally designed products are made available to institutionally defined categories of consumers. However, in the absence of centralized authority, there is no linear mechanism of decision making, and an entirely different production/supply network emerges -- that is a "non-hierarchic" network of autonomous decision makers is created where participants are free to combine as they will so long as they operate exclusively within their designated sector.

These two types of socio-economic systems are important mechanisms in understanding how goods and products are built, supplied, used and reused by both makers and consumers, and frame an important theoretical framework that describes the limits of growth as a conflict between proscriptive law (i.e. "thou shalt not...") and prescriptive law (i.e. "thou shalt..."). The contention between proscriptive law as a constraint that limits freedom/actions, and a prescriptive law that condones behavior is more literally analogized in the distinction between railway routes and road routes. That is, in the difference between moving between any two positions along railway tracks in a marshaling yard which must be followed and between any two positions along streets in a city which are merely defined as boundaries which should not be crossed. Thus a hierarchy provides only one route between any two points at any one time, while a network is undetermanistic and can provide a variety of routes between any two points. The mundane significance of these facts is crucial to understanding the difference between how products are built and used in both the formal and informal sectors and in more deftly understanding the evolutionary paradigm of the built environment in the Global South.

Notes:

W.C. Ashby, Self Regualtion and the Theory of Requisite Variety. Penguin Modern Management Readings, London 1969.

John F.C. Turner. Routes and Hierarchies the Autonomously Built Environment. Marion, Boyers Publishers, London 1976.

Models of Urban Growth in the Global South

Red: Identifiable Ramshackle Settlements, Yellow: Identifiable "planned" Development

The diagrams above illustrate four different urban centers which are representative of two common typologies of metropolitan development in the Global South. The models are designated according to the urban fabric that characterizes them in satellite images and according to supplementary photographs of corresponding street conditions, and are meant to visually suggest the range of social situations and physical environments common in the regions. While the top two models (Soweto on the top and Nairobi below), have recognizable city centers, they do not follow "traditional" models of nucleated metropolitan growth. Both are stippled by ramshackle settlements along with rigidly planned neighborhoods that appear to have grown up in reciprocal fashion on the northern and southern edges of the city-proper. In the lower two models (Delhi second from the bottom and Buenos Aires last), the cities are designed around radial cores and peripheral growth occurs in a concentric or processual fashion.

The relationship between material quality, density and proximity to "formal" centers of urban activity is often paradoxical in understanding the impelling developmental calculus of Third World cities. Some of the poorest developments, materially speaking, are often the most effective socially, while many of the "higher quality" or "planned" developments are often found to be socially oppressive. The marked distinction between these two forms of settlements is illustrated in the satellite images shown to the right of each map. Note that in each image, areas of rigidly designed housing blocks seem to disintegrate into less "formal" areas of ramshackle development. These two seemingly opposite patterns of growth represent both the economic failures of mandated, policy-based development solutions, and the "need" for user directed models of development.

In fact, the provisional or informal structures of ramshackle zones are often a more appropriate social and economic solution to sheltering the burgeoning populations in the cities of the Global South. Being rent-free and close to employment centers, these materially poor structures can actually maximize the occupants' opportunities for betterment. The modern standard of peri-urban development on the other hand, while usually of comparatively high material quality, often isolates the occupants from their sources of livelihood and demands a sizable percentage of the occupants' incomes, thus ultimately minimizing the inhabitants' chances for socio-economic betterment.

Models of Development for a Surplus Humanity

Our planet has urbanized over the past half-century even faster than originally predicted by the Club of Rome’s startlingly Malthusian 1972 report, simply and forebodingly titled The Limits of Growth. When the report was first published, there were barely eighty-six cities in the world with populations of more than one million, thirty-seven years later there are four-hundred, and by 2015, there is expected to be over five-hundred.[i] The scale and speed at which global urbanization has taken place is unparalleled by any other period of growth in human history, and the population explosion in today’s Third World alone utterly dwarfs that of Victorian Europe’s.[ii] Economic consensus is funereal in its proclamation that there exists no formal or singular solution to curbing population growth or to the problem of sustaining and locating it in the long run. In fact, after 2020, cities will have become the receptacle for nearly all future population growth, and indeed only the mega-slum will likely remain as the most fully franchised solution to housing the twenty-first century’s surplus humanity.[iii] This seemingly inevitable course of socio-cultural evolution is incisive in its critique of the effectiveness of past and present attitudes towards urbanization and will affect the progression of twenty-first century design and planning theory in ways both subtle and profound. Patrick Geddes may have understood the direction of this course of development best when he declared in resignation, “slum, semi-slum, and super-slum…to this has come the evolution of cities.”[iv]

Yet while strategies towards procuring efficient and sustainable models of urban growth are in no way simple or absolute, they are by no means abstract either. The past three decades have been devastatingly irresponsible in their approach towards proactively confronting the burgeoning problems of strained urban infrastructures, transportation, housing and employment, deferring enduring intervention to the liability of speculative technological breakthroughs. While this general attitude has proven to be misguided, it is nonetheless understandable, especially when considered in a dominantly Western context. That is, the seemingly limitless potential of our technological innovation and the velocity at which the latter half of the twentieth-century has evolved technologically has in fact given us good reason to assume that the unstoppable process of technology evolution will “naturally” find solutions to any and all of our problems, wittingly or not. The history of man is hung unapologetically on a timeline of invention and discovery and our dependence on technology is certainly not unique to the twentieth century. What is unique to our modern history however is our seeming over-reliance on techno-evolution to help us problem solve and to sustain future growth. In fact, Western models of urban growth solidified rapidly into socio-political dogma in the century between 1860 and 1960, during the acme of technological optimism. So palpable was the West’s technological confidence during this time, that in his 1949 inaugural address, President Harry Truman proudly leveled the idealistic background against which the great innovations of the second half of the twentieth century would develop when he remarked:

“For the first time in history, humanity posses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of [destitute] people…I believe that we should make available to all peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life…Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.”[v]

Over twenty years later, after American technological prowess had sent a man to the moon, the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pronounced:

“For the first time, we may have the technical capacity to free mankind from the scourge of hunger [and poverty].”[vi]

However the daunting realities of the twenty-first century have emasculated these virile proclamations into impotent platitudes, and despite the undeniable technological wherewithal of our time, the majority of the world’s population still lives in squalor. What slum urbanization has in fact come to represent, is a reactionary typology of development that confutes the “self-indulgent technological binge”[vii] of the late twentieth-century and disproves the mid-twentieth century’s prescriptions for a development paradigm based on industrialization programs and policy reforms. While there is likely no one, single, autonomous, causative factor in the rapid over-population of our planet’s cities and of the startling prevalence of slum-sprawl, their shorter term catalytic progression can be located in the natural fall out of the Victorian industrializing epoch, the rapid and irreversible bipolarity of the geopolitical marketplace during the Cold War and the near instantaneous digital-revolution of the past three decades which has super-imposed perceptions of “Time Square-style commercialization”[viii] on the homemade built environments of the Global South. These “homemade” responses to urban survival, in spite of the aforementioned onslaught of globalization, have proven to be both inevitable and even “effective” in so much as they are worth more than just acknowledgment, and serious study and more nuanced intervention may in fact lead not only towards legitimization of these “informal” developments, but may also inspire more appropriate solutions to First World urbanization conflict as well.

The Global Precipitation of Homemade Cities

During the era of late Victorian Imperialism, the forcible incorporation of the brimming subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa into the global market, entailed the famine deaths of countless millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from their native tenures. The inevitable result of course was a new class of rural peasants, socialistically termed the “semi-proletariat,”[ix] lacking any long-term security in subsistence. The twentieth-century thus became an era of chronic rural uprisings and peasant wars, not epochal urban uprisings as classical Marxist theories had anticipated.[x] The loss of subsistence and the resultant “proletarization” precipitated the dissolution of traditional forms of work, governance and production which was unable to translate into formal society. However, this informal style of self-directed “development” and relocation was certainly not anomalous, and in fact has many historical antecedents. In Europe, Naples for instance, even more so than Dublin or East London was a sterling exponent of informal economic development and construction. In Naples, a “chronic super-abundance of labor”[xi] was harnessed into a catalytic spectacle of informal competition and growth. Today there exist thousands of cities that have followed the Napelese model, and their increasing economic informality within the global economy has become un-ignorably formalized in the growing prevalence of peri-urban slums. The metastasizing growth of these types of settlements has not ebbed or even changed in pattern or efficiency since the Victorian era of industrialization, rather it has only been exacerbated by the fall out of twentieth century international conflict and the resultant rise of an American-dominated First World.

In fact the brutal onslaught of neoliberal globalization since the apex of the industrial revolution would not be matched in socio-economic or cultural resonance until the 1960s and ‘70s when the central conflict of world politics quickly became defined as the “West versus the rest.”[xii] The bipolarization of the geopolitical marketplace during the second half of the twentieth-century was unapologetic in its alienation of de-colonized territories, and in its rejection to interact with Non-Aligned States. From this emerged a kind of “solidarity movement” or “Third Worldism,” which grew to be resentful if not martyrial in its active rejection of First-World free-markets and Second-World socialism. The socio-economic result of course was a painful and rapid process of “economic involution”[xiii] that kept many N.A. States from developing sustainable forms of governance, infrastructure and employment because the nascent economies had no access to foreign capital, no access to markets for their natural resources and no institutional models to build natural employment. Such remains the status quo in many of these regions today and even with the ideological dissolution of Cold War entrenchment, Third Worldism continues to compel the countries of the Global South into passive recipients of Western policy, technology and “aid.” Indeed the end of the Cold War and the abolition of the Containment Order set a new global stage at the end of the twentieth-century, where America’s hold on world power seemed unshakeable and where there seemed hope of improved global solidarity. But America’s unipolar moment lasted at best through the 1990s. The post-Cold War Peace-Dividend was never converted into a new, global, liberal order under the pioneering initiative of the United States and the socio-economic indigence of the Global South remains as unfettered and quarantined today as it did during the Cold War era. The sustained and growing marginalization within regions of the Third World is similarly evidenced in the increasing scale and velocity of the barrios and favellas of Lima and Buenos Aires, the chawls of Mumbai and the shanty-towns of Burundi and Ghana. All were stoked by the same brand of biopolar marginalization during the twentieth century and all seem to have developed both formally and behaviorally, in uniquely similar ways. The bearing distinction between marginalized peri-urban development today can only be observed in their capacity to absorb, internalize and even capitalize on the phenomenal new brand of post Cold War globalization that has enveloped our planet in the new century.

The clichéd “giant-logo land”[xiv] perception of both industrialized and Third World cities alike has become the familiar face of globalization today, and the image which has been most vociferously lauded as the most assured strategy to improving the socio-economic utility of the Third World. Anti-neoliberal resistance has argued that the global monoculture these images purvey has threatened to destroy the values and traditions of ancient cultures with abrupt speed and irreversible efficiency. While a valid point and perhaps even true, the concern, and at times even preoccupation with multi-national and NGO dominated theories of globalization distracts from the more pervasive reality that the monoculture that neoliberal opponents object to was already set in motion well before the modern incarnation of capitalism was given permission to globe trot. Urban development patterns, construction practices, jobs and infrastructures all began to coagulate into a similar urban and socio-economic typology during the Industrial Revolution. What anti-neoliberals are observing and objecting to today is a particular aesthetic of the globalized third world that is sustained by obsolete Sony gadgets and tattooed with Coca-Cola billboards. The shocking reality is that the homogenized aesthetic is only the most obvious evidence of globalization today, not the most systemic. The marginalized developments of the Third World began their amalgamation when the Industrial Revolution initiated a surplus of urban labor, which quickly forced the excess out of the epicenters of the cities and into the unsettled peripheries. This Diaspora of labor prompted the development of peri-urban settlements that all came to rely on the same forms of urban, industrial refuse and that were populated by the same types of disenfranchised individuals. What has changed today is not the causation, pattern, or sentiment of slum settlements, but only the velocity and texture of the growth as a result of the digital-revolution of our time, which has fiber optically connected all corners of the globe to every, eager impulse and innovation.

Techno-Slums: The Twenty-First Century Urban Typology

The coarse mechanism of neoliberal globalization since the mid-twentieth century, while in many ways analogous to the merciless processes that shaped the Third World during the Victorian era, has grown into a brutal and paradoxical era of hyper-evolutionary techno-progress where the same products and processes that have marginalized so many are the very devices that have come to sustain them. In fact, in many peri-urban settlements, the very tools, technologies and mechanisms that have modernized the formal world, disenfranchise all too quickly sizeable portions of the Third World’s work forces because many are unable to interface with those tools and are thus unable to enter into the modern sector. These “devices of wonder”[xv] however end up making their way from formal obsolescence to informal reinvention often with reliable regularity, feeding the burgeoning growth that has come to circumscribe the modern world’s “cities of innovation.” Consequently, there is little explicitly observed distinction between the functional, symbolic, pragmatic or aesthetic qualities of the peri-urban built environment. The peri-urban slum is in a constant and aggressive state of construction, where buildings are erected, added on to, repaired or replaced according to refuse “availability,” and more specifically according to the natural and rapid cycles within the modern sector of technology displacement. Foreign Policy Magazine estimates that there is anywhere from “between twenty and fifty million tons of electronic waste (E-Waste or IT Waste) produced globally every year, most of which ends up in the developing world.” The regularity, quantity and diversity of electronic waste have given the Third World village a valuable, albeit dangerous new building resource and even new potential sources of income. The peri-urban slum has evolved over the past several decades as a startling and critical palimpsest of the formal world’s techno-evolutionary cycles, where structures are unabashedly erected out of an efficient composition of mud, stone and wood, integrated with circuit boards, car doors, engine blocks and keyboards. Crude mud bricks are employed frequently along with the remnants of twenty-year old radios, obsolete “Walk-Men,” three-year old laptops, and first generation iPods. The twenty-first century slum is thus in many ways, an incisive and unapologetic documentation of both the formal world’s technological prowess and of its irresponsible shortcomings. The urban and geopolitical implications of the twenty-first century techno-slum, while sobering, have become un-ignorable. If left unfettered and marginalized, the cities of the future are likely to grow into even crasser, more contrived metropolises of digital and mechanical displacement, rather than the grand spectacles of glass and steel envisioned by earlier, more romantic generations. Instead of cities of light soaring into the heavens, the twenty-first century city will “devolve” into painful reminders of historical socio-cultural revolutions and economic bubbles, where the inhabitants sit in squalor amidst the very products that were once lauded as the indisputable savors of their economic indigence.

The Failures of Past Interventions and the Promise of the Future

So how can “a place be so ugly and violent, yet [be so] beautiful at the same time?”[xvi] A gnawingly existential question in any context, Chris Abani’s query into the aesthetics and behavior of slum ecology is both abstract and absolute in its answer. While the public, neoliberal perception of slums is understandably one of pity and disgust, the “beauty” latent within slum ecology is found in the settlements’ endogenous innovation and blunt critique of exogenous policy. John F.C. Turner may very well have understood the ecological paradigm of slum settlements best when he concisely concluded that:

“A new school of the built environment [is needed]: not to create a new organization, but to establish the fact that there is such a school and that it exists by virtue of many scattered individuals and a few groups from small organizations. The medium of the school is [an] international communications network.”[xvii]

Turner’s prescription may seem humble but it is nonetheless formidable in its rejection of pedagogically ordained housing solutions and Cold War era policy initiatives. The unreliable success of such twentieth century housing policies and Marshall Plan-style aid programs prompted institutions to develop more specific aid programs that focused on implementing financial packages and technology transfers designed to induce a laconic form of industrialization instead of encouraging developing countries to participate actively in their own development discourse. This has been the convoluted and ineffective logic that has validated innumerable development programs over the decades and permitted organizations like the World Bank and IMF to allow the same cherry-picked lot of multinationals to bestride the globe with sarcastically humanitarian grins. Admittedly however, the origins of this perverted pedagogy did have reasonable promise during the idealistic decades following World War II, when citizens from around the world seemed to admire the industrializing prowess of the West and aspire to an American lifestyle. Even Soviet citizens couldn’t deny their admiration for American technology and entrepreneurship, many even naming their children after John Deere and Henry Ford, [xviii] and it prompted the Soviet Union to improve their communist utility with even more aggressive industrialization programs. Even today, the meteoric rise of China in the twenty-first century geopolitical arena is fueled by a dated and unsustainable incarnation of American industrial-capitalism that may very well “put the last nail into the coffin of the postwar European [economy]” as many today fear, but will ultimately fatally contract.[xix]

The systemic problem is that development models like these are dangerous and unsustainable because they are not born of the exclusive will or vision of the people in those regions. They do not allow the people the opportunity to discover, reinvent, fail and succeed on their own. They are development models that rely on copying what the West has built for itself in a context and at a time that does not demand it and that cannot sustain it. It is a synthetic, appliqué model that has deceptive short-term success and irreversible long-term consequences. However there exists great promise in many areas of the global south and while many examples of effective self-sustainability remain all too obscure, there is valuable inspiration to be gained from them. The Dutch billionaire software developer, Guido Van Rossum, once said in response to Nicholas Negroponte’s “One Hundred Dollar Laptop Program” that giving computers to Third World communities is simply “the twenty-first century equivalent of sending Bibles to the colonies,”[xx] because it is insisting upon people a product that will not satisfy any immediate needs or encourage a socio-economic mentality of self-reliance. Van Rossum’s observation is pointed in its implicit verdict that simply making products more affordable for third world populations is not going to have any significant affect on rallying the markets or the people out of poverty because it is the exact same type of appliqué, policy-based initiative of the past, merely laundered behind twenty-first century technological prowess. Most likely if Negroponte’s program every made it over seas, the machines would be sold by the recipients for money or scrapped and used for another more immediate application as we’ve seen so many countless times before. Turner clearly understood the ineffectiveness of that type of paradigm in articulating his vision for a more “appropriate architecture” of development. He understood that the most beneficial contributions developed markets could make to the favellas, chawls and corticos of the Global South was not giving it their equipment or adopting a Western socio-economic mentality, but simply giving the communities demonstrative support and advice in their endeavors to engage the cultures and work towards some level of integration and legitimization. Turner understood better than anyone that it takes a sense of urgency to provoke new ways of thinking and it takes a unified will to act on that thinking. The Third World is lacking in neither innovative thinking nor collective will, but insistent and absolute technology placement programs and financing initiatives touted by neoliberal institutions have kept that ingenuity from effectively conquering Third World poverty and development for decades.

Notes:
[i] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, New York 2002.
[ii] Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. Verso Publishing, New York, New York, 2006. Pg. 2
[iii] Davis, pg. 2, 201.
[iv] Quoted in Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. New York, 1961 pg. 464.
[v] President Harry S. Truman, January 20, 1949
[vi] Henry Kissinger. Speech to the World Food Conference in Rome, 1974.
[vii] Weisman, Alan. Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT. 2008. Pg. 172
[viii] Black, Maggie. The No-Nonsense Guide to International Development. The New Instrumentalist, 2007.
[ix] Davis, pg. 174
[x] Davis, pg. 174
[xi] Davis, pg. 175
[xii] Mahbubani, Kishore. “The West Versus the Rest.” The National Interest. Summer 1992, pgs. 3-133.
[xiii] Stiglitzs, Joseph. Whither Socialism? 1994
[xiv] Black, pg. 60
[xv] Stafford and Terpak. A tongue in cheek synonym for high-tech devices.
[xvi] Abani, Chirs. Graceland. New York 200, pg. 7
[xvii] Turner, John. Housing by the People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. New York , 1976 pg. 158.
[xviii] Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, New York, NY, 1996, pg. 272
[xix] Friedman, Thomas. Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a New Green Revolution and How it Can Renew America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY, 2008. Pg. 50-58.
[xx] Guido Van Rossum, in an interview posted on Caslon Analytics Volkscomputers

WS Degree Project Curriculum

Week 1 (Jan. 5- Jan. 11):
Vernacular Design and “Local” Innovation in the Twenty-First Century

(Develop/refine schedule)
Finish Asquith and Vallenga Text
Finish Rudofsky Text(s)
Review Turner Text
Review Davis Text
-Refine thesis premise/outline and begin Excess Humanity and Development Study
-Photo, Geographical, (etc) documentation of urban growth patterns during the Victorian era of Industrialization, compared to patterns during the modern era of globalized Digitalization.

Week 2 (Jan. 12-Jan. 18):
Technology: Uses, Perceptions and Evolution in the Built Environment

Finish Excess Humanity and Development
Tenner Text
Stafford and Terpak Text
Eglash Text
Dobereiner Text
-Draft Vernacular Science and Innovation in the Global City Study.
-Identifying the most common sources and applications of tech. refuse in the Global South and contemplating alternative applications and First World implementations.

Week 3 (Jan. 19 – Jan. 25):
Policy, Economics and Public Perceptions of the Twenty-First Century City

Freidman Text
(Kingwell Text)
(Silverstein Text)
Dobereiner Text
-Draft Makeshift Developments and Informal Economies of the Twenty-First Century City Study.
-Experimentation with density patterns, location of bldg sources, and how changes in peri-urban densities, and proximities to urban centers and to refuse sources affects the development of the communities and the effectiveness of their economies.

Week 4 (Jan. 5 – Feb. 1):
Debunking Nineteenth Century Assumptions of “Vernacular” design and Understanding its Evolution in the Twenty-First Century

Asquith Text
Davis Text(s)
Silverstein Text
-Case study analysis and proposals/interventions:
Bldg. typology, materiality, programs, densities, etc--understanding their successes and finding ways to “legitimize”/ “formalize” slum ingenuity.


Week 5 (Feb 2 – Feb 8):
Finding Common Denominators: Identifying Reoccurring Problems, Solutions and Ascribing Causality

Dobereiner Text
Eglash Text
Turner Text
Asquith Text
-Continuation of case study analysis and interventions with a more “formal” explication of what ought to be done to confront the problems that have been identified as the most central and formidable; does a universal strategy/solution exist? If not what methods/products/theories are readily applicable to other scenarios?


Week 6 (Feb. 9-Feb. 13): Edit works, prepare presentation…Summation of findings, and outline of Spring Semester objectives and procedures.

Working Source List: Annotated Bibliography

-Asquith, Lindsay and Vellinga, Marcel. Vernacular Architecture in the Twenty-First Century: Theory, Education and Practice. Taylor and Francis Publishing, 2006.

A compilation of essays by urbanists, architects, economists, policy-makers and geographers, discussing the ways in which “vernacular” architecture can play a part in the future of built environments. Essays additionally analyze the value of vernacular traditions as it pertains to such fields as housing, transportation, infrastructure and governance.

-Bawa, Geoffrey. Bawa: The Complete Works. Thames, Hudson Publishing 2002.

A broad survey of the regional works of Sri Lankan architect, lawyer and scholar Geoffrey Bawa, who combined local construction methods with modern technology to create sensible, appropriate architectural solutions.

-Bhatia, Gautam. Laurie Baker: Life, Works and Writings. Penguin Publishing, 2003.

A deferential biographical and retrospective documentation of the British architect, planner, inventor and activist Lawrence Baker. Chronicles Baker’s work and growth from his days as an architecture student in England to his controversial role as a human rights activist to his Pritker Prize nominated architecture.

-Correa, Charles. Charles Correa: Architecture and Planning. Thames, Hudson Publishing, 1997.

A survey of Charles Correa’s architectural and urban planning solutions in India, supplemented with a collection of essays by Correa, Frampton and other notable critics and designers.

-Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. Verso Publishing, 2006.

An in depth, statistical discussion of the rise of informal urban development and how it relates to the formal global economy. Davis’s concluding thesis inspires the question of whether the great slums of the Global South are in fact the most efficient solution to housing the world’s “surplus humanity.”

-Dobereiner, David. The End of the Street: Sustainable Growth within Natural Limits. Black Rose Publishing, 2006.

Examines how developmental and sustainability idealism can be translated into practical techniques that encourage more responsible and efficient forms of urban development and that employs “appropriate technologies” in more mainstream ways.

-Eglash, Ron. Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power. Minnesota University Press, 2004.

An in depth survey of “user” developed technologies that examines the importance and effectiveness of re-invention and self-sufficiency. Discusses a variety of tools within a broad collection of cultural case studies, from Hispanic car design to Sub-Saharan herbal remedies.

Jefferies, Richard. After London, or Wild England. Ay Co Publishers, 1975

A gritty, post-apocalyptic socio-political projection of the “devolution” that Jefferies predicts will occur as the planet approaches the end of time, and the primal social, economic and survival instincts that will dominate human behavior in the absence of formal urban centers like London.

-Friedman, Thomas. Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a New Green Revolution and How it Can Renew America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2008.

A journalistic perspective on how global warming, rapid population growth, and globalization have necessitated the need for more immediate and pro-active economic and policy solutions in a variety of fields including, agriculture, trade, urban planning, housing and finance. An important reminder that the policy and development concerns discussed so fashionably in the media and by the academy is not a localized affliction of the Global South, but a very real concern for the First World as well.

-Kingwell, Mark. Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City. Viking Publishing, 2008.

A philosophical and inter-disciplinary discussion of the evolution of the city and how urban development informs and directs our social lives, economies and health.

DH Lawrence. Twilight in Italy: Sketches from Etruscan Places, Sea and Sardinia. Penguin Classics, 2007.

A compilation of Lawrence’s essays, poetry and drawings during his travels throughout Italy. His vibrant account of the decaying lemon gardens at Lake Garda in his poem “The Lemon Gardens,” bears witness to a way of life centuries ago and calls attention to a productive, healthy way of life in a region that has yet been touched by the “deadening effects” of industrialization.

London, Jack. “The Scarlet Plague.” London Magazine, June 12 1912.

An hysterical and somewhat polemical short story about cultural and biological eugenics, set in a post apocalyptic San Francisco. The story illustrates the law of survival of the fittest in a “post-urban climacteric.” The story concludes with a sobering scene describing the collapse of the Golden Gate Bridge into the Bay and an anarchical description of how saltwater corrosion has begun to dissolve the pillars of “the old civilization.”

Morris, William. The Earthly Paradise. Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

An epic poem by the British architect, painter and philosopher William Morris, that chronicles a seasonal evolution of human development in the romantic “garden cities” of the future.

-Polak, Paul. Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008.

A broad and at times overly simplistic survey of how appropriate technologies can improve the individual utility of the rural poor in the Global South.

-Rudofsky, Bernard. Architecture Without Architects. Connecticut Printers, 1964.

A broad survey of “communal” architecture, or architecture produced by non-specialists and a discussion of how often times “non-pedigreed” architecture is an ideal embodiment of appropriate and efficient development.

-Silverstein, Paul. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation. New Anthropologies of Europe. Indiana University Press, 2004.

A survey of the nineteenth century Algerian migration to France, examining a variety of cultural and social issues, including colonial governance, urban planning, immigration policy and housing shortages.

-Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. Alfred Knof Publishing, 1995.

An in depth survey of how and why technologies are created, their effectiveness and their potential dangers. Comparatively discusses the rapid and nearly uncontrollable evolution of techno-science and our continued reliance on empirical forms of mechanization. Concludes with a social study of how technological development has informed nearly every discipline and how it has come to dominate our culture and our thinking.

-Turner, John, F.C. Housing by the People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. Pantheon Publications, 1977.

An anarchical, neoliberal dissertation favoring sites and services projects and in situ slum “upgrading.” The dissertation was the product of years of travel and study in third world slums and intimate collaboration with former World Bank president Robert McNamara.

-Stafford, Barbara, and Terpak, Frances. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen. Getty Research Institute, 2002.

A social study of how modern media machines facilitate globalization and how it affects people’s perception of how to use and reuse technologies.

-Weisman, Allan. Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

A narrative account of Paolo Lugari’s heroic vision for a completely self sustaining community in the inhospitable Llanos of Columbia. The book is an inspiring case study of how appropriate technologies, productive policy debate and collective will can yield indisputably effective results -- (the discussion of the Gaviotan hospital is particularly pointed and ought to be considered one of the most significant buildings in the world by professionals and non-professionals alike).