Favelas include some important properties of self-organization that can be studied and re-applied to more humane pattern of settlement. The effort to raze such settlements and replace them with monotonous “warehouse” structures has in many cases also proved disastrous.
We came across an essay on urbanism and social housing which seems to have strong ‘p2p’ and participatory elements.
It is entitled Social Housing in Latin America: A Methodology to Utilize Processes of Self-Organization and was written by Nikos Salingaros and colleagues (Brain, Duany, Mehaffy and Philibert) from the Environmental Structure Research Group.
Contrary to the modernist approach, they see the state-induced social housing estates as problematic and the favelas as organic developments with a huge potential for good living.
The ESRG argues that “Much social housing is not concerned with the poor, but is merely a governmental act for political gain. Nevertheless, the same gain (in votes) can be achieved with a more lasting result in the housing fabric. This requires a real constitution, carried out by the community with government or private NGO help, the whole process aiming to embody the complexity of social life in the built environment.”
If I understand it correctly, the alternative to the top-down approach is to identify the happiness producing patters in such organic neighborhoods, and to build on them. This can only be done through widespread participation.
Here are some details of their vision, from their wiki hosted on Ward Cunningham’s AboutUs meta-wiki space:
“First emphazised by John F. C. Turner, the ESRG also insists that a human built environment cannot usually be imposed top-down. A central component of design with user participation is to use the patterns of Christopher Alexander in the design process, and to develop new ones as needed for specific needs of each project.
Varying degrees of flexibility of the design are necessary to allow the project to evolve in time towards accommodating human physical and emotional needs. Whether the street plan is flexible, or the lot sizes are flexible, or the interiors of the dwellings are flexible, or the choice of materials is flexible; one or more of these freedoms gives the necessarry life to the project. Community values cannot appear at the beginning of the process of building. They have to emerge as people’s feelings and ideas are allowed to shape their environment and endow it with the qualities of human space.
A project that preserves resources and is friendly to its residents and to the natural environment requires the cooperation of many actors above the residents: government on several different levels (who might be in conflict with each other); construction companies; utilities; the banking system, etc.”
Support for the argument that squatter cities are a good thing from Steward Brand:
I agree completely with this assertion. Cities are not collections of buildings. They are emergent phenomenon formed by the convergence of interests upon geographical locations of logistical advantage. A natural disaster could wipe New York or London out and they would be rebuilt as fast as humans were capable of it because what they are is not architecture. Environmentalism has had the city wrong for a century because it emerged in the midst of -and as an opposition to- a systematic imposition of dysfunction on cities through a kind of architectural fascism across the Industrial Age. Cities become dysfunctional, and thus decrepit, as a result of resistance or impedance to the necessary physical evolution of their architecture in response to social needs and the P2P negotiation that goes on in communities over those needs.
Architecture is the definition of place through the encoding of information into structure. This can be ‘read only’, but functional design demands an active conversation between inhabitants and environment through the medium of structure -read/write. For too long architecture as a profession has been under the erroneous assumption that it is in the business of producing sculpture and monuments. Today the concept that any structure has any solitary function or role across its practical lifespan is an anachronism. But too many designers still design as if they were producing a perfect artifact to last for eternity. Civil engineers routinely make this same error. The urban environment doesn’t need more designs. It needs systems, ways of habitation, genomes. I have often wondered why it is that modern cities do not commonly have an underground infrastructure akin to the raised floors of a computer room -a structure that anticipates the obvious need for its own continued maintenance and the constant and necessary evolution of what’s going on above ground.
With the contemporary growth of squatter cities we are seeing the city evolve in the manner of a coral reef or stromatolith. Most cities are dead in their core and surrounded by this blobby membranous organic structure that is the true living organism forced to the perimeter by our compulsion to bureaucratically preserve the status quo of dead architecture. This is the origin of urban sprawl. Without the means of effective wholistic physical evolution, cities are compelled to follow the patterns of primitive organisms that only evolve by growth. We have the technology to do better but institutionalized class divisions and classism/racism preclude a rational consensus view. The wealth gap has become an increasingly broad cultural divide and the privileged, with their absolutist notions of order, seem to really enjoy cultivating giant orderly cemeteries for some reason -even when a declining number of them actually live in them.
City is a verb. It’s something people do. Urban architecture and quality of life would be radically different if more people understood this.