Preamble:
In his 1989 article Tradition and Industrialization published in the Swedish journal “Tradition and Modern Society,” Kosta Mihailovic claimed that “the abandonment of traditional production and the traditional way of life is an unavoidable consequence of industrialization and urbanization” (Mihailovic 1989:36). A contentious assertion in its own right, Simon Bronner confutes Mihailovic’s claim in his essay Building Tradition: Control and Authority in Vernacular Architecture, when he rebuts that modernization can also have a revitalizing influence on traditions in a preemptive effort to “maintain community and identity” (Asquith 2006: 36). However this form of traditional “revitalization,” perhaps better termed “preservation” in Bronner’s mind, belies the inevitable emergence of new traditions often most immediately observed in “homemade” built environments, now more academically termed “vernacular,” “informal,” or “un-pedigreed.” The past half century has witnessed an irreversibly conspicuous shift towards a tradition of building that is characterized by this type of “informal,” grassroots style of innovation and it is an impelling tradition that comments incisively on modernization through its use of manufactured materials as the primary construction medium.
In his 1989 article Tradition and Industrialization published in the Swedish journal “Tradition and Modern Society,” Kosta Mihailovic claimed that “the abandonment of traditional production and the traditional way of life is an unavoidable consequence of industrialization and urbanization” (Mihailovic 1989:36). A contentious assertion in its own right, Simon Bronner confutes Mihailovic’s claim in his essay Building Tradition: Control and Authority in Vernacular Architecture, when he rebuts that modernization can also have a revitalizing influence on traditions in a preemptive effort to “maintain community and identity” (Asquith 2006: 36). However this form of traditional “revitalization,” perhaps better termed “preservation” in Bronner’s mind, belies the inevitable emergence of new traditions often most immediately observed in “homemade” built environments, now more academically termed “vernacular,” “informal,” or “un-pedigreed.” The past half century has witnessed an irreversibly conspicuous shift towards a tradition of building that is characterized by this type of “informal,” grassroots style of innovation and it is an impelling tradition that comments incisively on modernization through its use of manufactured materials as the primary construction medium.
The process of building homemade environments in a globalized century makes a powerful comment about the evolution of vernacular production in industrialized societies. That is, in the absence of accessible natural resources, makers have turned increasingly to manufactured products as their media of choice, modifying and altering the products, often to such an extent that the objects’ original functions are nearly unrecognizable. This form of building represents a transformative process of innovation, crudely and admirably calling attention to a globalized, commercial culture whose hyper-evolutionary nature has created a development paradigm that induces immediate product and technological displacement, which has contributed to a “cultural ecology associated [more immediately with the use] of local resources” (Asquith 2006: 38). This new and increasingly pervasive method of building is not only the next progressive step in the evolution of cultural traditions in many regions, but may also be the key to addressing the massive problems of housing in the twenty-first century (Oliver 1999). Mike Davis, in his messianic book Planet of Slums, quotes Jan Breman pronouncing, “a point of no return is reached when a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into [the mainstream] becomes stigmatized as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that cannot be included now or in the future in economy or society…” (Davis 2006: 199). Recent consensus amongst economists, politicians, and urbanists alike has been overwhelming in its decree that there exists no official strategy or scenario for the reincorporation of this vast “surplus of humanity,” into the mainstream of world societies, and the Malthusian implication is that only the slum remains as the most fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing the twenty-first century’s brimming populations (Davis 2006: 201). Aggressive and nuanced study of the kind of “informal” urbanism and construction that has become the insidious lifeblood of peri-urban developments however, may be critical in understanding how the twenty-first century city will evolve, while inspiring an all together new era of more “appropriate” architecture and urbanism that looks beyond the Western preoccupation with cosmetics and into a more benevolent era of global sensitivity.
I. The Macro-Problem: Even within individual cities, slum populations are able to support a limitless variety of solutions to infrastructural and socio-political neglect, ranging anywhere from makeshift churches, to police forces, to neoliberal NGOs and palpable socio-political movements. These activities and interactions are given dimension by the un-pedigreed built environment that quarantines them and that has evolved as one of the most startling examples of human innovation. But if there is no formal scenario in which to observe and legitimize such activities, the future of human consensus will depend on the urban poor’s refusal to accept the ordained perception of their way of life as anomalous, and a recognition that the ingenuity and evolving vernaculars inspired by the oppressive urgency in these communities is likely to be the most important key in recalibrating approaches to architectural design, planning, policy and cultural preservation in the twenty-first century city. This refusal may be heralded as avant-garde in its final and categorical rejection of the uncompromising modernist solutions of the mid-twentieth century and in its dismissal of the fashionable technology transfer programs made so popular by Marshal Plan-style initiatives after World War II.
II. The Question: From Karl Marx to Max Weber, classical social theories have predicted that the cities of the future would follow the same, large scale industrializing logic as Manchester, Chicago and Berlin (Davis 2006:16). However the development of cities over the past six decades has contradicted this projection, many instead developing in response to problems of “de-industrialization,” and the product and technology displacement cycles that have come to characterize the globalized era. If the Malthusian pessimism of Schumacher, Kaplan, Davis and Turner was not dogged by the fashionable, neoliberal optimism of aid organizations and Western policy-makers, then a clearer vision of urban development could be re-focused. If we assume that peri-urban development in the Global South is irreversible, and we understand the geopolitical implications of “a planet of slums,” then the issue of urban development and construction in the twenty-first century city becomes unequivocal in its decree that both policy and design ought to be recalibrated, not in resistance of homemade built environments but in reformation and even legitimization of it. Perhaps even more insidiously however, if we observe that a “planet of slums” is being constructed economically and opportunistically out the displaced products of formal societies, could this induce a more hegemonic style of construction and precipitate the dissolution of localized vernacular “styles?”
III. The Status Quo: An overwhelming spectrum of theories on the significance of technology and sustainable development has existed in a state of bloviated paralysis for decades now, while the voices and efforts of those actively engaged in developing circumstantially appropriate solutions isn’t much heard. In his flippantly naïve analysis in Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, Paul Polak observes that the twentieth-century has seen far too many “designs from Western architects for refugee camp shelters that look elegant to the Western eye and start at nine-hundred dollars, or dwellings for poor rural families for fifteen hundred dollars and up, prices that are far too high to be affordable for dollar-a-day people” (Polak 2008:73). While Polak fails to explicate his claim with any examples or architectural commentary, his point nonetheless alludes to the greater pathology afflicting appropriate design in the Global South. That is, so much of the solutions are appliqué, Western prescriptions that do not employ local labor, materials, or respond to user-ordained needs -- this was the institutional failure of modernism over half a century ago, and it is a mistake we seem to be making again as we progress in a century of declining Western hegemony.
IV. Significance of This Study: This study intends to marry a compelling interest in product and technology appropriation as an increasingly necessary construction medium with the repressive need to legitimize and incorporate peri-urban developments or “off-worlds” (to use the terminology from Blade Runner as Davis does) into the mainstream of urban development and housing theory. When studied together with interdisciplinary strategies taken from architecture, urbanism, sociology and anthropology, nuanced observations may be made to inspire innovative methods to aid in the more appropriate design of housing and cities in the future.
I. The Macro-Problem: Even within individual cities, slum populations are able to support a limitless variety of solutions to infrastructural and socio-political neglect, ranging anywhere from makeshift churches, to police forces, to neoliberal NGOs and palpable socio-political movements. These activities and interactions are given dimension by the un-pedigreed built environment that quarantines them and that has evolved as one of the most startling examples of human innovation. But if there is no formal scenario in which to observe and legitimize such activities, the future of human consensus will depend on the urban poor’s refusal to accept the ordained perception of their way of life as anomalous, and a recognition that the ingenuity and evolving vernaculars inspired by the oppressive urgency in these communities is likely to be the most important key in recalibrating approaches to architectural design, planning, policy and cultural preservation in the twenty-first century city. This refusal may be heralded as avant-garde in its final and categorical rejection of the uncompromising modernist solutions of the mid-twentieth century and in its dismissal of the fashionable technology transfer programs made so popular by Marshal Plan-style initiatives after World War II.
II. The Question: From Karl Marx to Max Weber, classical social theories have predicted that the cities of the future would follow the same, large scale industrializing logic as Manchester, Chicago and Berlin (Davis 2006:16). However the development of cities over the past six decades has contradicted this projection, many instead developing in response to problems of “de-industrialization,” and the product and technology displacement cycles that have come to characterize the globalized era. If the Malthusian pessimism of Schumacher, Kaplan, Davis and Turner was not dogged by the fashionable, neoliberal optimism of aid organizations and Western policy-makers, then a clearer vision of urban development could be re-focused. If we assume that peri-urban development in the Global South is irreversible, and we understand the geopolitical implications of “a planet of slums,” then the issue of urban development and construction in the twenty-first century city becomes unequivocal in its decree that both policy and design ought to be recalibrated, not in resistance of homemade built environments but in reformation and even legitimization of it. Perhaps even more insidiously however, if we observe that a “planet of slums” is being constructed economically and opportunistically out the displaced products of formal societies, could this induce a more hegemonic style of construction and precipitate the dissolution of localized vernacular “styles?”
III. The Status Quo: An overwhelming spectrum of theories on the significance of technology and sustainable development has existed in a state of bloviated paralysis for decades now, while the voices and efforts of those actively engaged in developing circumstantially appropriate solutions isn’t much heard. In his flippantly naïve analysis in Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, Paul Polak observes that the twentieth-century has seen far too many “designs from Western architects for refugee camp shelters that look elegant to the Western eye and start at nine-hundred dollars, or dwellings for poor rural families for fifteen hundred dollars and up, prices that are far too high to be affordable for dollar-a-day people” (Polak 2008:73). While Polak fails to explicate his claim with any examples or architectural commentary, his point nonetheless alludes to the greater pathology afflicting appropriate design in the Global South. That is, so much of the solutions are appliqué, Western prescriptions that do not employ local labor, materials, or respond to user-ordained needs -- this was the institutional failure of modernism over half a century ago, and it is a mistake we seem to be making again as we progress in a century of declining Western hegemony.
IV. Significance of This Study: This study intends to marry a compelling interest in product and technology appropriation as an increasingly necessary construction medium with the repressive need to legitimize and incorporate peri-urban developments or “off-worlds” (to use the terminology from Blade Runner as Davis does) into the mainstream of urban development and housing theory. When studied together with interdisciplinary strategies taken from architecture, urbanism, sociology and anthropology, nuanced observations may be made to inspire innovative methods to aid in the more appropriate design of housing and cities in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment