ShiYan, Shenzhen December 2013

The Chinese city of Shenzhen insolently faces Hong Kong and its western heritage. Apart from being the embodiment of the Chinese economic success story, it has one particular feature that distinguishes its urban development:  its speed. Starting from the market-opening reforms launched in 1979 that transformed Shenzhen area into the first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in China, the city grew from being a mere fishing village to China’s tenth most populated city within 30 years, according to the official population census. That phenomenon inevitably brought about a uniquely rapid urban expansion. The city planners attempted, through three master plans in the space of 25 years, to organize and control the urban sprawl by establishing 6 cluster cities linked by highways and other communication infrastructure (1986 Master Plan). Yet with a yearly average population growth of about 30% over the previous 30 years, even the most organized top-down urban development policies could not have controlled the massive expansion.

By swallowing up the rural lands of its surroundings, the “instant metropolis” as it is nicknamed, caught up with the region quickly. Due to the speed of its development, villages were surrounded by the city without much attention being drawn to their situation, as urban planners preferred to avoid these complicated cases of pre-industrial settlements, which they saw as unfit to integrate into the official vision of the modern city. These villages therefore were swallowed up in the city’s tentacular sprawl, lost their rural lands, and were surrounded by high-rises. Transformation of their economic activities ensued, embodying their mutation from rural into urban villages, 城中村 literally “village-within-city”. As most urban villages around the world, they became neighborhoods offering cheap housing, hosting migrant workers coming from all over the country looking for a taste of Shenzhen’s economic miracle.

Source: Urbanus. According to some researchers the number of people living in urban villages in Shenzhen is much higher that 6 million. What seems certain is that over half of the people this city of 10,5 million people live in urban villages.

When passing through the city for a workshop, the URBZ team went through some of the 241 urban villages that dot the map. They also encountered Ching (叶青 Ye Qing), an inhabitant of one of these urban villages, ShiYan (石岩) (See write-up posted on Jan 1st, 2014). Living on Old Street (老街)in her family house, she remembered all the economic activities that her family relied on to make a living. These ranged from running a shop on the ground floor, where they would sell clothes, then shoes, then tea and barrelled water. She recalls how her family, and others in the neighborhood, assembled some factory parts such as artificial flowers or USB parts, on the first floor, to earn extra income. Ching’s story is emblematic of the reconversion of these urban village’s habitats into commercial and manufacturing activities more adapted to their newly urban environment. URBZ calls housing types that mix residential, commercial and manufacturing capacities as “tool-houses”. These are usually incrementally developed by their owners to fit their personal needs. These tool-houses are seen in most organic neighborhoods around Asia, from Tokyo’s low-rise commercial districts to India’s so-called “slums”, or even to some extent in Southeast Asia’s shophouses, and they clash with the contemporary vision of cities, based on the separation of residential and industrial activities.

View from Ching’s house in ShiYan village. The photo clearly shows how the older, traditional looking houses have been extended and crowded by new buildings, which are now rising to multiple levels.

In Shenzhen’s central urban villages, most houses were expanded thanks to the new income that they could earn from commercial and manufacturing activities or from renting some rooms to migrants, which led to a densification of the urban village. While they do not reach the height of the modern high-rises, they still partake in the densification of the neighborhood, lower but more numerous, in some sort of incremental development that contributes to Shenzhen’s growth by offering housing for migrants, who are vital elements of the city’s economy, and by producing simple goods, and then too by conserving a different scale and street grid that might be valuable on the long term.

Ching’s house: This tool-house built about 30 years ago combines residential and income-generating functions. The shop is a little over 30 m2. Above are two and a half floors with a terrace for residential purposes that cover a little less than 80 m2. The family has moved out since, but is refurbishing it in order to rent it out.  Ching remembers how, when she was a kid, her family would often bring home small manufacturing work to complement their income.

Indeed, when one looks at metropolises such as Tokyo, it is clear that the human scale and diversity offered by organically developed urban villages such as Shimokitazawa are valuable to the municipality as a vibrant commercial and creative neighborhood in a diversified economy. Even without such long-term vision in mind, Ching story’s also shows that by keeping and expanding one’s family house, inhabitants keep some kind of connection with their family and ancestors and some attachment to the neighborhood.

In Ching’s tool-house, there is a shrine dedicated to a precious member of her ancestry, known throughout the neighborhood as a generous figure and the former owner (and builder) of the house. Every year, Ching’s grandmother receives visits and gifts as thanks for her ancestor’s generosity. Such a story is an example of the human practices that developed in tandem with the area over time. In the context of growing critiques from the empowered middle class about the speed of the country’s development and the lack of respect for traditions or individuals, respecting and upgrading incrementally developed neighborhoods with unique human networks might be a way to show some consideration for a diversified type of urban development.

Ching showing the house under renovation, which is full of familiar objects and memories.

While this last dimension might seem out of reach for local urban planners, inhabitants of some urban villages have actually come together to protect this valued village spirit against redevelopment schemes that involve destruction of the organic structure of neighborhoods. In Guangzhou, Shenzhen’s sister city in Guangdong province, the planned destruction of Xian village (先村）in 2012 faced protests form locals who rallied under the slogan “Great greed cannot be dealt with in one day, nor will the heart of Xian villagers die in one day”. Similarly in Shenzhen, the Master plan of 2005 laid out the integration of urban villages (including Ching’s) in the cityscape by undergoing large rehabilitation processes that might endanger the alternative tool-house model and organic neighborhood structure.

Through Ching’s house’s story, one can reconstitute the integration of rural villages in the Shenzhen metropolis, their evolution into urban villages and the adaption of the living unit into the tool-house model of mixed used habitats. They also show how the diversity of urban scale that such areas offer to large new sprawling metropolises like Shenzhen, or anywhere else in China is a valuable urban resource.

This post by Julien Vincelot is based on research done by URBZ in Shenzhen during MoMA’s Uneven Growth workshop. Julien Vincelot is a student in social and political science in Paris. He is particularly interested in the Asian context, having grown up in New Delhi and Shanghai. He plans on specializing on urban planning and urban policies in developing countries, with a focus on alternative urban forms and their political and social implications. He is currently working with URBZ in Mumbai.

URBZ is proud to announce the publication of an e-book on Dharavi. It is published by Stelka Press (Moscow-London). You can order it here in digital and print formats. Below is an excerpt:

Dharavi, in the heart of Mumbai, is supposed to represent the quintessential Asian slum. Crowded streets and busy markets; domestic workshops cheek by jowl with sweatshops producing both real and fake Pepe jeans; brick houses rising as high as their microscopic footprints allow; high-rises mushrooming here and there like gigantic shacks; schools in Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, English, Marathi, Urdu and other languages, usually with more than 50 pupils per class; temples of every Buddhist and Hindu denomination; flamboyant mosques so crowded that people have to pray on the streets during namaz; old churches with full congregations – remnants of the region’s seventeenth-century Portuguese history – and new evangelical missions converting low-caste Hindus by the dozen; community toilets that double up as marriage halls; piles of garbage waiting to be picked over by scavengers; open drains running along narrow back streets; thousands of water pipes branching off in every direction.

Dharavi invariably confuses those eager to capture its reality in shorthand. Visitors looking for an essence of the place often land on its edges and corners, in spots that most Dharavi residents themselves have seen only on TV. They may be rewarded for their intrepidness by the sight of barefoot children walking on water pipes against the obligatory backdrop of garbage – a cliché that resonates so powerfully with familiar discourses on poverty and inequality that it obliterates the depth and complexity of the place. Dharavi is diverse and rapidly transforming, and it deceives as much as it overwhelms. It is an enigma that cannot be resolved by simply labelling it one thing or the other.

From the rooftop of Mohan Kanle’s two-storey house, the neighbourhood seems part of the immutable story of urbanism, recalling medieval Italian towns, Istanbul’s bazaars, the by-lanes of Benares, old Delhi, Guangzhou’s urban villages and even Tokyo’s dense residential suburbs. From this vantage point, it seems embedded in the shadow history of human settlements anywhere in the world where planning and control give way to incremental and small-scale development. In some parts, one sees hundreds of low-rise structures so tightly packed that they appear to share one single cement-sheet roof. No wonder urban designers and architecture students love to imagine bridges connecting all of these houses, with new roofs acting as public spaces and gardens.

Mohan’s house was built by his father in the early 1990s. Mumbai’s extreme weather, with monsoon rain for four months and hot, saline air most of the year, has tested the limits of this humble structure. The roof has been leaking for a few years, forcing Mohan to install a shed as protection from the violent rains. About 18 people share seven rooms, which can be accessed from multiple entrances. The structure consists of a maze of connecting doorways and passages, and its uneven proportions are a legacy of its incremental growth. While not abnormally big for Dharavi, the house is larger than most others. There is no rule when it comes to the housing typology of Dharavi. Diversity is the only norm.

In the past year we have been working hard to make the Homegrown Cities initiate a reality. Among other things, we have organized a Handstorm workshop and worked on a pilot house.

One of the highlight of the workshop was a discussion between a local builder from Shivaji Nagar in Mumbai and a local builder from Paraisopolis in Sao Paulo. They discussed their respective contexts and construction techniques. Among those witnessing their exchange was Yehuda Safran, who teaches architectural theory at Columbia University.

The pilot house should be built soon. At the moment the engineering firm Arup is revising a design we have done in collaboration with Sameep Padora’s architecture studio in Mumbai.

The report, which contains many images and links, can be downloaded here:

www.urbanlab.org/HomegrownCities-ProgressReport-June2014.pdf

We thank all of you who have supported us and followed the initiative on Facebook!

(English text in the following section).

Queremos ensaiar um modelo de arquitetura econômica e colaborativa, baseada no uso de materiais e técnicas locais e troca de informações entre moradores e profissionais locais, estudantes e arquitetos.

O projeto é justamente o ensaio de uma ação colaborativa que busca articular aspectos técnicos e científicos dos arquitetos com o saber do pedreiro local (Atayde Caetite) e o modo de vida dos habitantes do lugar.

Um trabalho experimental (work-lab) e um protótipo para entender novas formas de atuação do arquiteto diante dos desafios da cidade contemporânea.

A construção da casa já foi financiada em 10.000 reais e a primeira etapa deste trabalho aconteceu no ano passado.

http://urbz.net/work-in-process-casa-do-ataide/

Work in process…

O grupo URBZ brasil surgiu há aproximadamente 2 anos com o inicio dos trabalhos especificamente na comunidade de Paraisópolis – São Paulo e com o fortalecimento da relação com o pedreiro Atayde Caetite, construtor de mais de 100 casas dentro deste território e morador do bairro a mais de 30 anos.

Dentre estes anos, o grupo vem pesquisando o modo de sociabilidade, o modo de vida e as dinâmicas econômicas e culturais de Paraisópolis e seu impacto no espaço construído. A casa nesse território está em permanente construção, assim como a vida das pessoas, que está em mudança constante. O desafio é justamente pensar soluções para os problemas locais, se apropriando da cultura e modo de fazer já existentes, de maneira a potencializá-los.

English Translation

We want to test a model of economic and collaborative architecture, based on the use of local materials and an exchange of information between residents and local professionals, students and technical architects.

The project is just the start of a collaborative initiative that seeks to interweave technical and scientific aspects of architects with knowledge of the local mason (Atayde Caetite) and the way of life of inhabitants of the place.

This includes experimental work and a prototype, to understand new forms of performance architecture on the challenges of the contemporary city.

So far, the house construction has cost 10,000 real, spent last year.

http://urbz.net/work-in-process-casa-do-ataide/

Design of Ataide’s house. Click to enlarge.

The group emerged as URBZ Brazil about 2 years ago with the beginning of work in the neighbourhood of Paraisópolis – Sao Paulo. It consolidated our relationship with Atayde Caetite, a mason and builder of over 100 homes within this area, one in which he has lived in for more than 30 years.

The group has been researching modes of sociability, the way of life and the economic and cultural dynamics in Paraisópolis especially in the context of its impact on the built environment. We are involved in the ongoing construction of the house that Atayde is building, as well as in the people’s lives within, which is constantly changing. The challenge is to think of solutions to local problems as they unfold in these contexts, especially in their existing cultural language, and empower them as much as possible.

Contact us if you are willing to support this project!

Ataide Caetite at his temporary home.

Photo from inpolis.com

Since the early 70s, the concept of self-help in housing has become a strong theoretical foundation as well as a practical and functional basis for public interventions in upgrading slum areas. However, its definition has led to different interpretations. In general, self-help practices withdrew the notion of ‘user control’ over construction process, which led to their failure in achieving the concept’s original objective: allowing integrated community participation and the creation of autonomy in housing environments.

A set of practical questions about the self-help approach still remains unanswered. What is the user’s role and responsibilities? In which phases of the housing project does he participate? What is the role of the expert and the state? This documentary addresses these fundamental questions by referring to the informal housing production modes in Cairo, capital of Egypt, and one of the most dense cities in the world. Its informal development has been and continues to be the dominant mode of urbanization, housing over 9.5 million inhabitants.

http://www.vimeo.com/70629085

In this testimony, two families of self-builders living in Cairo’s informal settlements describe the process by which they built their homes and show the practical elements of self-help and challenges of housing autonomy. In fact, they demonstrate that drivers actors, processes and social systems are implied in the project management, they influence each other and their combinations include a variety of participation processes. Three principles of housing autonomy emerge from this informal self-managed construction process.

First, participation in housing implies user control over the entire project. The beneficiary must have a significant decision-making power over design, planning, financing, and management of the project. The autonomy that the informal owner-builder benefits from exists and prevails due to his capacity to articulate different essential resources such as land, local construction materials, financial and human capital, expertise and building tools.

Second, housing must be seen as a process rather than a product. Its values lie in the relationship and inter-action between the actors, their activities and the produced house. In the informal sector, the organizational design, that implies the user’s coordination between these three elements, is allowed by the existence of a decentralized market of housing components and resources. The informal housing market has a large network of independent actors and suppliers that offer a necessary variety of construction means. This multiplicity of choice creates the opportunity for the user to combine different options and responds to his specific needs through collective arrangements. The role of social networks and know-how transfer is also important in strengthening individual capacities and diversifies the user’s lines of action. These networks allow a freedom of action and choice, which is fundamental to an autonomous housing system. In addition, the informal housing financing modes are essential. As we question their role and the ways in which they benefit the development of the economy, we note that they are the ones financing the small and medium sized enterprises and the micro enterprise, particularly in the construction sector.

Third, a self-help housing strategy implies a change of the role of planners, architects and the state. The application of user control to the assembly of the housing components; the design; the construction; and the project management, means a greater dependence on the user’s capacity to negotiate land prices and localize the process of acquiring and transferring property rights, accessing tools and materials, financial resources, and architectural expertise. These resources are a function of law and its administration, which are controlled by the central authority. The user driven approach to housing isn’t a combination of the formal and the informal, but rather a combination between two inter-linked and open systems in which the state and professionals assist the people’s activities in planning, designing, building and managing housing projects. This co-responsible model demonstrates that the housing production environment has a complex role in identity formation and determines the strengthening, (or inversely), the weakening of the community’s capacity to participate in managing the housing construction process.

It is by these characteristics of its structure of authority and control that the informal modes of housing in Cairo create a resilient and user-generated city. These processes identify the emergent tendencies of developing countries, which define the global conditions of contemporary urbanization. This reality calls upon a dramatic change in the approach to the phenomenon. Overcoming its legalistic approach and understanding the organizational potential to promote it, requires a shift from a top-down planning system to a heterogeneous system of multiple networks in the construction sector, which includes actors, artisans, entrepreneurs, technologies, and financial mechanisms. Housing should be thought of in its integral complexity, by identifying and prioritizing its interdependent tendencies and avoiding a sectoral approach, which mostly ignores and fragments them.

Iman Salama is an urban planner from Egypt currently working at Urbamonde in Geneva on the construction of the social fabric in cities such as Cairo and Mumbai. She is initiating a PhD research looking at the role of local contractors and entrepreneurs in the popular housing and neighbourhood production processes in Cairo, while experimenting with new approaches to engage with and assist local dynamics.