Another interesting commentary by Eric Hunting, originally written as a draft post for the Urban Nouveau site:

“In recent years a new realization about the nature of the slum community has emerged among the rare conscientious architects who have taken a truly serious look at the contemporary slum and its social and economic dynamics. In the western world, where most slum communities are quite deliberately, if surreptitiously, engineered as dumping grounds for the urban poor and ethnic/racial underclasses as a means of containment, we have come to regard their existence as an aberration, disease, or dysfunction of the urban environment we blame on either the character of the impoverished inhabitants (whose poverty we likewise blame on its victims’ character), or on some imagined inherent flaw in the very concept of urban living itself.

But in the developing world, where slum development has often been the ad hoc result of a collapse of traditional self-sustaining agricultural economics due to the impact of western economic influence resulting in a migration of the rural poor to cities, slum communities have a vastly different dynamic. They are not dysfunctional habitats for hopeless dysfunctional people. They are often fully functional in their economic context -quite industriously so- and serve as vital economic engines bridging the gap in individual personal development -to some extent- between the grinding poverty of the economically obsolesced countryside and an urban middle class standard of living. The slum in the industrial world context is a state-supported (state-created) concentration camp for segments of the society capitalism has been stupidly allowed to let fall through the cracks and discard. No one accidentally lives in poverty in the US. The slum in the developing world has little to no dependence on or attachment to state social support systems out of simple class and race biased neglect. It is a self-made habitat emerging at the points where the state simply ran out of places to push people out to and as a result has evolved -in its own communities- its own new economic systems in order to afford some means of personal survival. Make no mistake, we are still talking about terrible, life-threateningly poor, standards of living that cry out for active humanitarian intervention. But, unlike their counterparts in the richer nations, these are not mere concentration camps for the underclass. These are working habitats physically built by industrious communities who are struggling -even if it is a multi-generational goal- to climb up in standard of living and employing incredible ingenuity and invention in their pursuit of survival -something very lacking in the poor communities of the industrialized nations because it is actively suppressed by a state that compulsively seeks to ‘manage’ and ‘contain’ the ‘problem’ of poverty rather than actually addressing its causes.

With their project Incremental Housing Strat, the design team of Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson, called Urban Nouveau, have demonstrated a revolutionary new approach to the role of architecture in the context of slum intervention that greatly reflects this new rational understanding of the nature and function of the urban slum in the developing world. Their choice of quote for a manifesto is at once poignant and deeply -recursively- ironic but their approach to slum intervention is the most sophisticated this author has ever seen and demonstrates active exploration of concepts those with an interest in Peer-To-Peer and Adaptive architecture have so far been limited to speculating about. The conventional response of the professional architect to slum intervention is wholesale destruction based on the assumption of worthlessness of the indigenous architecture slum inhabitants create. The habitat is assumed, as a whole, to be dysfunctional and thus demanding of wholesale obsolescence. And the end result is a social housing architecture with a nanny-state sort of inherent logic forcibly -violently- imposed upon communities whose rights, existence, and functional roles as communities are completely disregarded. But with Incremental Housing Strat, Balestra and Göransson come to Netaji Nagar in Puna India with a sensibility that could be called architectural anthropology. They seek out an understanding of the local self-made architectural vernacular as it is -no matter how crude it might seem- and the ontology of its existence in order to understand the economic and socIal ecology it is a product of. The architecture of the slum is not automatically dysfunctional. If it exists it means it must work in some fashion based on the situation. To devise an appropriate intervention for improvement one must comprehend that situation.

Using this deep knowledge they then devised an evolution of the existing vernacular, rather than some particular design, that incorporates the improvements the community itself identifies as beneficial. This evolution of the building vernaculars insures a realistic accessibility/affordability for the improved housing within the economic ecology that actually exists in the communities. It also integrates into the established culture as a technology the community itself can use in perpetuity. Here are two conscientious designers that really understand how contemporary architecture is evolutionary and its craft more a process akin to genetic engineering than mere artifact design. They then devised a system for the community participatory design of incremental redevelopment using presentation and communication geared to the local culture and linked to existing community based social systems. This author was particularly intrigued by their use of group interaction using modular paper models as this was a participatory visualization tool Agatino Rizzo, Michelle Bauwens, and myself had suggested for the participatory design of relief community clusters for L’Aquilla Italy. One can see they were really trying to seed a functional system of P2P architectural development to compliment their improved building vernacular that could carry on in perpetuity.

The rendered results suggest a physically much-improved habitat that retains the organic character of a functional living community and a high degree of personal customization and functional adaptation. This is no foolish attempt to disguise poverty with the camouflage of a middle-class facade. This is very simple practical housing that is consistent with the local aesthetic, functionally makes the most of what is affordable and possible in a very local industrial/construction context. while still letting the inhabitant freely express his creativity in the pursuit of an attractive and comfortable home. Though it appears the basic materials and structure are based on a reinforced concrete box frame with crude block infill, there are interesting similarities to minimalist modular post and beam construction systems employed by some Modernist prefab concepts. This is a low-complexity structural approach that assumes perpetual retrofit adaptation, ready incremental expansion, and integration of diverse materials. It may seem crude, but there’s no ceiling to how inhabitants could improve on it with ingenuity. Much like shipping container architecture, the comfort level is limited only by the materials at-hand and one’s ingenuity. It makes one eager to see what its inhabitants will do with it in time.”