Project Context:
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 environments that quarantine them, and that have evolved as some of the most startling examples of human innovation and social settlement in our modern history. However, the re-integration of marginalized populations and materials into the mainstream of socio-economic consideration in the Global South is a complicated and often abstract ambition, rendered increasingly more unintelligible by its lack of socio-urban verifiability and unregulated supply and population influx. Despite the overwhelming scale and pervasiveness of peri-urban settlements in the Global South, the causative factors that necessitate their development have more accessible and quantifiable analogues in the backwater communities of the industrialized world, and may in fact provide more useful circumstances in which to test and measure the effects of architectural and urban intervention scenarios. This study intends to marry a compelling interest in product and technology appropriation as an increasingly necessary construction medium with the increasingly repressive need to legitimize and integrate peri-urban developments or “off-worlds” (to use the terminology from Blade Runner as Davis does) into the mainstream of urban planning and developmental design theory.
One of the most promising approaches for engaging this field of study and articulating an appropriate intervention strategy is framed by a philosophy of “acting in order to induce others to act.”[i] That is, a philosophy that offers impulses rather than prescriptions, and that nurtures an environment for change from within by cultivating and releasing the emergent potential latent within any appropriate intervention. From this type of strategy emerges an agenda of reforms to policy, legal frameworks, and standards which help to build social capital, promote social integration, reduce dependency, unlock resources and improve livelihoods. These are the forces and affects of effective peri-urban integration and can be studied on objective, macro scales by looking to the developing cities of the Global South, and tested on smaller, more tangible scales by working within the marginalized communities of local First World cities.
Derivative Criteria for Architectural Intervention
Based on the research and analysis done during Wintersession, the success of any putative architectural response to the aforementioned problem will be measured according to how well the project, 1) legitimizes/formalizes marginalized activities within the designated community(s), 2) reuses and/or reintegrates disenfranchised labor and supplies, 3) can be effectively reinterpreted and re-applied in other contexts to achieve similar ends.
Project Rationale and Working Course of Action
I. If the same developmental paradigm can be observed in the marginalized communities of the First World….
- Would the same intervention criterion be effective?
- What would alternative, appropriate intervention programs and criterion be?
- Do the community densities and proximities to urban centers and waste
- sites have the same affect on community development?
If the same developmental paradigm cannot be observed in the marginalized communities of the First World…
- What other types of intervention might be applicable?
- Are there verifiable intervention precedents that have the same type of integrative effect?
- Can these precedents be appropriated into a displacement-integration paradigm of urban theory/development?
- Would this appropriated paradigm be effective/sustainable?
- Can its effectiveness be measured according to its 1) emergent potential, 2) its ability to integrate socio-economic urban sectors, 3) and its ability to inform and direct formal sector development and infrastructure planning?
II. Based on the answers to the above questions…
-More specifically identify local program/need and exaggerate its scope.
- locate and hypothesize specifically the program’s inductive effects (conceptual mapping/diagramming?)
- Identify appropriate/available materials and user groups to work with in articulating design strategies (i.e. massing, form making etc.).
- Understanding materiality and product uses (reuses) in designated context; working towards full scale experimentation.
III. Can designated program/intervention be backwards integrated into other contexts?
- Test intervention/variation of intervention program in formal and opposite contexts
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 environments that quarantine them, and that have evolved as some of the most startling examples of human innovation and social settlement in our modern history. However, the re-integration of marginalized populations and materials into the mainstream of socio-economic consideration in the Global South is a complicated and often abstract ambition, rendered increasingly more unintelligible by its lack of socio-urban verifiability and unregulated supply and population influx. Despite the overwhelming scale and pervasiveness of peri-urban settlements in the Global South, the causative factors that necessitate their development have more accessible and quantifiable analogues in the backwater communities of the industrialized world, and may in fact provide more useful circumstances in which to test and measure the effects of architectural and urban intervention scenarios. This study intends to marry a compelling interest in product and technology appropriation as an increasingly necessary construction medium with the increasingly repressive need to legitimize and integrate peri-urban developments or “off-worlds” (to use the terminology from Blade Runner as Davis does) into the mainstream of urban planning and developmental design theory.
One of the most promising approaches for engaging this field of study and articulating an appropriate intervention strategy is framed by a philosophy of “acting in order to induce others to act.”[i] That is, a philosophy that offers impulses rather than prescriptions, and that nurtures an environment for change from within by cultivating and releasing the emergent potential latent within any appropriate intervention. From this type of strategy emerges an agenda of reforms to policy, legal frameworks, and standards which help to build social capital, promote social integration, reduce dependency, unlock resources and improve livelihoods. These are the forces and affects of effective peri-urban integration and can be studied on objective, macro scales by looking to the developing cities of the Global South, and tested on smaller, more tangible scales by working within the marginalized communities of local First World cities.
Derivative Criteria for Architectural Intervention
Based on the research and analysis done during Wintersession, the success of any putative architectural response to the aforementioned problem will be measured according to how well the project, 1) legitimizes/formalizes marginalized activities within the designated community(s), 2) reuses and/or reintegrates disenfranchised labor and supplies, 3) can be effectively reinterpreted and re-applied in other contexts to achieve similar ends.
Project Rationale and Working Course of Action
I. If the same developmental paradigm can be observed in the marginalized communities of the First World….
- Would the same intervention criterion be effective?
- What would alternative, appropriate intervention programs and criterion be?
- Do the community densities and proximities to urban centers and waste
- sites have the same affect on community development?
If the same developmental paradigm cannot be observed in the marginalized communities of the First World…
- What other types of intervention might be applicable?
- Are there verifiable intervention precedents that have the same type of integrative effect?
- Can these precedents be appropriated into a displacement-integration paradigm of urban theory/development?
- Would this appropriated paradigm be effective/sustainable?
- Can its effectiveness be measured according to its 1) emergent potential, 2) its ability to integrate socio-economic urban sectors, 3) and its ability to inform and direct formal sector development and infrastructure planning?
II. Based on the answers to the above questions…
-More specifically identify local program/need and exaggerate its scope.
- locate and hypothesize specifically the program’s inductive effects (conceptual mapping/diagramming?)
- Identify appropriate/available materials and user groups to work with in articulating design strategies (i.e. massing, form making etc.).
- Understanding materiality and product uses (reuses) in designated context; working towards full scale experimentation.
III. Can designated program/intervention be backwards integrated into other contexts?
- Test intervention/variation of intervention program in formal and opposite contexts
Notes:
[i] Hamdi Nabeel. Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities. Earthscan Publishers, London, England, 2004.
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