Researching the contemporary city: Identity, environment and social inclusion in developing urban areas

Por Peter Kellett

The city is perhaps the most complex of all human constructs. In the 21st century when cities are bigger than ever, and the majority of the world's population now live in urban areas, the need for research into this complexity to address the large scale challenges of urban life has never been greater. This collection of research studies from different parts of the world, brings together case studies, underpinned by theory, to contribute to the urgent search to make our cities more just, more livable, more accessible, more participatory and more democratic: in short, more humane places to live and work. These crosscutting themes of social inclusion, spatial integration and poverty alleviation are the ever present motifs and motivations throughout this volume. The eleven chapters are grouped into four interrelated sections: the creation and representation of the urban; the production and transformation of the informal; the construction and appropriation of public spaces; and finally, the transformation, use and meaning of home. Collectively the essays engage with the city at a range of scales, but underpinning all of them is a concern for the everyday realities of ordinary people's lives. These detailed and finegrain analyses of complex processes are a modest contribution towards the creation of cities which are not simply more economically viable and environmentally sustainable, but also embody the ideals of social justice.

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 14 jul 2009
• ISBN: 9789587167580

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RESEARCHING THE

CONTEMPORARY CITY

IDENTITY, ENVIRONMENT

AND SOCIAL INCLUSION IN

DEVELOPING URBAN AREAS

RESEARCHING THE

CONTEMPORARY CITY

IDENTITY, ENVIRONMENT

AND SOCIAL INCLUSION IN

DEVELOPING URBAN AREAS

PETER KELLETT AND

JAIME HERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

—Editors—

Reservados todos los derechos

© Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

© Peter Kellett

Jaime Hernández-García

Mona Abdelwahab

Tamer Abdelfattah Ahmed

Antika Sawadsri

Musyimi Mbathi

Rittirong Chutapruttikorn

Mauricio Hernández-Bonilla

Brenda Galván-López

Muhammad Faqih

Agam Marsoyo

Primera edición: septiembre del 2013

Bogotá, D.C.

ISBN: 978-958-716-758-0

Número de ejemplares: 300

Impreso y hecho en Colombia

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Bogotá, D. C.

Corrección de estilo

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Diseño y diagramación

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Desarrollo ePub

Lápiz Blanco S.A.S

Researching the Contemporary City : Identity, environment and social inclusion in urban areas / editors Peter Kellett and Jaime Hernández-García. -- 1a ed. -- Bogotá : Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2013. — (Colección estética contemporánea).

253 p. ; 24 cm.

Incluye referencias bibliográficas.

ISBN: 978-958-716-634-7

1. ARQUITECTURA. 2. URBANISMO. 3. CIUDADES Y PUEBLOS. 4. ESPACIO EN ARQUITECTURA. 5. ESTÉTICA ARQUITECTÓNICA. I. Kellett, Peter, ed. II. Hernández García, Jaime, ed. III. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Facultad de Arquitectura y Diseño. Departamento de Estética.

CDD 720.103 ed. 22

Catalogación en la publicación - Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Biblioteca Alfonso Borrero Cabal, S.J.

dff. Junio 11 / 2013

Prohibida la reproducción total o parcial de este material, sin autorización por escrito de la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.

PREFACE IN HAPPINESS INN

A dozen people sit around a circular table against a large multi-coloured illuminated panel of the dramatic Hong Kong skyline. The group interact in a lively and animated way as they share many dishes of Chinese food and cups of green tea. Why are they here? What brings them together? Although an apparently diverse group with multiple nationalities, languages, religions and even disciplines, they have one thing in common—they are all PhD students in my research group at the School of Architecture Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University. After our intensive group seminars at the University, where we would debate, discuss and critique each other’s research proposals, presentations, recent chapters and conference drafts, we would come to the Happiness Inn to continue the discussions and share stories, jokes, and food.

Sharing food and eating together is one of the oldest and most fundamental aspects of being human, as shared meals not only help to create and reinforce a sense of group identity, but are also a key way in which we celebrate our humanity and make tangible our shared values and common endeavours. Interlinked with this social role, they transmit values and information, and are a perfect platform for the development of ideas, debate, argue and celebrate the mundane as well as the special—a recent viva success, a paper acceptance or good news from home.

It was during one of these lively meals that the idea of producing a collective book which would include contributions from all of us began to materialise and take shape. We were attracted to the possibility of a joint project which would make visible the linkages between us, and which would be a tangible outcome of our shared work and friendships.

I had been inspired a few years earlier by the book Home Possession: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, by one of my favourite anthropology writers and perhaps the foremost theorist on material culture: Daniel Miller. In the introduction he describes how each chapter was contributed by one of his many PhD students at University College London. He also offers a glimpse into the process of academic exchange and production, and reinforced my long held belief in the vital importance of shared food as a catalyst and agent in creative working. This was an ideal which fired my imagination.

In many ways the university is a place of privilege—where we have the resources and time to observe, analyse and critique aspects of the wider world. But this must never be a self-indulgent exercise. All the students who formed part of the group are working on research projects which aim in different ways to engage with the critical issues facing the urban populations of expanding cities. We have a responsibility to focus our energies and intellect so that our research, however modestly, is able to offer insights, interpretations and data which can support processes of change and improvement. This is a serious task, but one which—we believe—can be enjoyable too.

There were other students who were part of the group, but who for different reasons were unable to contribute a chapter to the book. Chin Nang Cheung, who analysed contrasting urban environments in Taipei, Taiwan, and who was an enthusiastic supporter of the book project in the early stages; Warebi Brisibe, who wrote an engaging study on the vernacular architectures of the Ijaw people based on his hair-raising fieldwork in the Niger river delta; Raquel Perez, from Spain, who spent two exchange periods in Newcastle and shared her enthusiasm and knowledge of environmental psychology applied to the study of domestic spaces; and Arina Hayati, from Surabaya, in Indonesia, who inspired us all with her remarkable work and experience of disability in demanding environments (including an exceptionally icy Newcastle winter). In addition, during the time that the book was being assembled and edited new students arrived to join the group and I hope it will be possible to include their work in future collective volumes. They include the three d’s from Indonesia—Dewi, Dona and Deva—and, more recently, Yohannes and Antonius.

However, the whole project would have remained only a good idea without the energy and commitment of my co-editor Jaime Hernández-García. On his return to the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, in Bogota, he managed to convince the prestigious publishing house of his university of the potential of this book project. He worked tirelessly in co-ordinating the editorial process and played an essential role at every stage. I cannot thank him enough.

We hope the readers of this volume will enjoy and appreciate the work as much as we have done in producing it.

Peter Kellett

Newcastle upon Tyne, July 2012

INTRODUCTION RESEARCHING THE CONTEMPORARY CITY

Peter Kellett and Jaime Hernández-García

Cities are neither organisms nor machines. They are flesh and stone intertwined. They are ‘built thought. ’ They are the containers of dreams and desires, hopes and fears. They are an assemblage of active historical agents making daily choices of how to live well. They are an assemblage of communities: communities of interest as well as communities of place.

Leonie Sandercock

Practicing Utopia

As numerous commentators and academics repeatedly remind us, this is the first time in the long history of human life on the planet that the majority of us are living in places which are classified as ‘urban’. In the past, cities were frequently places of privilege and opportunity for only a minority of people: places of commerce and exchange and the centres of sacred and secular power. The large majority of people lived in small settlements or in isolated communities engaging mostly in subsistence agricultural economies with relatively minimal engagement or knowledge of life in the slowly expanding cities. Urban expansion accelerated throughout the twentieth century and now, in the twenty-first century, this expansion through migration and natural increase has led not simply to the numerical dominance of the city, but to the largest cities that have ever existed. And these cities are more important than ever before, as they act as the nerve centres for increasingly complex and interlinked processes of globalisation.

Everyday Cities

There are now over 3.3 billion people living in urban areas—and such numbers can perhaps distract us from the enormous diversity and heterogeneity which exists between and within cities. Although some of the forces of globalisation can lead to increasing superficial similarity, the experience of urban life is still extraordinarily varied. Some of this variety is represented in this book with the inclusion of research case studies from diverse geographic contexts: Africa, Latin America and Asia; and also by engagement at a range of scales and contrasting perspectives. These include the transformation and appropriation of space at urban, community and dwelling levels; the construction, perception and meaning of space at both macro and micro levels; and the role of multiple actors in the creation and transformation of urban space. In this regard, Low (1996) reminds us that the social production of space includes more than social actions, but also economic, ideological, and technological expressions that influence the physical creation of material settings.

Although all of the studies in this volume speak about different aspects of the urban condition they mostly do so at the local level to engage with the fundamental human purpose of the city—as a place where individuals, families and communities live out their daily lives. As Leonie Sandercock (2001) reminds us, the city is much more than a place of work and residence—the buildings and spaces are containers of dreams and desires, hopes and fears, and everyday concerns and activities which collectively create what Robinson (2006) has encouraged us to see as the ordinary city. Engaging with these everyday realities of ordinary people’s lives in research terms is not easy and demands commitment, time and energy, but it can also be extraordinarily rewarding, as we believe the following chapters will demonstrate.

The Urbanisation of poverty and Inequalities

The United Nations Global Report into Human Settlements (UNCHS, 2009) confirms that processes of urbanisation throughout the world are unevenly spread. Although developing countries contain 14 of the world’s 19 megacities, only 8,4% of their urban population resides in such cities and 62% live in cities of less than 1 million. This means that contrary to common perceptions most urban dwellers live in relatively small cities. Although this book includes studies from a number of large capital cities, it also introduces studies from a range of smaller urban areas. More significantly, urbanisation is taking place amid increasing levels of urban poverty, one spatial manifestation of which is the proliferation of informal settlements, pejoratively re-labelled slums by the United Nations (UNCHS, 2003). Estimates and figures vary, but at least 30% and in many cities over 50% of urban population reside in these areas. According to the UN urban growth will become virtually synonymous with slum formation in some regions (UNCHS, 2006).

Informal settlements are of course part of the larger informal sector which also embraces informal economic activities. In Latin America, for example, about 60% of all those employed are working in the informal sector and it is estimated that four out of every five new jobs are in the informal sector. This reinforces the vital importance of research which endeavours to understand some of the complexities within such informal areas, together with the interrelationship between self-produced housing and income generation which is addressed in the final chapters of the book.

Related to this is another major urban trend—increasing inequality— which has given rise to urban areas with stark contrasts between wealth and poverty. Most observers agree that this social and economic inequality is fundamentally unsustainable and will undermine efforts to achieve greater environmental sustainability. More importantly, however, such widespread social and economic injustice raises ethical questions for researchers and offers a continuing challenge to make our work as relevant and applicable as possible. This is echoed in the chapters of the book which aim to contribute to the search to make our cities more just, livable, accessible, participatory and democratic—in short, more humane places to live and work. These cross-cutting themes of social inclusion, spatial integration and poverty alleviation are the ever-present motifs and motivations underlying much of the writing.

All efforts to address the multiple challenges facing the contemporary city must be based on informed analyses that come from rigorous, committed methodology and intensive fieldwork as well as critical readings of urban theory. There is a growing literature which offers sharp theoretical tools to help us conceptualise complex relationships and apparently contradictory phenomena, and to understand previously invisible connections and processes. For example, Harvey’s (2009) concept of the right to the city; Madanipour’s (1996, 2003)work on socio-spatial processes in urban design; Lefebrve’s (1991) ideas about the social production of space; Holston’s (2009) concept of insurgent citizenship; Roy’s (2005) re-conceptualisation of the informal sector; Robinson’s (2006) idea of the ordinary city; Rapoport’s (1990) insightful analysis of meaning in the built environment—and many more have offered sharp and helpful conceptual tools to guide the following analyses.

In order to offer clarity and structure to the book, the following eleven chapters are grouped into four interrelated themes: the creation and representation of the urban (Abdelwahab, Ahmed, Sawadsri); the production and transformation of the informal (Mbathi, Chutapruttikorn); the construction and appropriation of public spaces (Hernández-Bonilla, Hernández-García, Galván-López); and the transformation, use and meaning of home (Faqih, Marsoyo, Kellett). We will now explain these themes and briefly introduce the chapters.

The Creation and Representation of the Urban

Two complementary studies of Egypt and one from Thailand examine how cities are created through time and how ideas of the urban are continually evolving and represented. The first one, by Mona Abdelwahab, Cairo: a Deconstruction Reading of Space, draws on the radical theories of the French academic Jacques Derrida to deconstruct the image and reality of contemporary Cairo through an exploration of perceptions of this millenary city beyond inherited binaries and monolithic representations. She focuses on reading the spaces of the city and their potential to construct a real image of the people and the place beyond the associations with literature and fantasies. However, history has intervened in this process. On the conclusions, Abdelwahab stated that "The writing event of this chapter preceded the January 25th, 2011 revolution. Today over a year later, it could be said that during this time Cairo’s reading space has been literally deconstructed. The city is finally on her way back to her people. " But as events in Tahrir square continue to unfold it becomes ever clearer that such social processes are intimately grounded within space—and that specific places within the city take on highly symbolic and ideological meanings. This confirms that urban space is central to the construction and re-construction of civic and national identities.

Most of the land area of Egypt is arid, inhospitable desert but the Nile valley is rich and fertile. The valley has always been the place of life and is where the great Egyptian civilisations evolved. In contrast, the surrounding hostile desert was regarded as the place of death—where cemeteries and the tombs of the Pharaohs were located. This binary representation of valley/desert, life/death is being challenged by large scale, new developments which are aiming to resettle large populations out of the crowded, high-density city into spacious green ‘oases’ beyond the valley in the previously empty desert. This is not only a great technological and construction challenge but it is also necessary for future inhabitants to rethink their ideas of what and where the city is. In addition, such new cities raise serious questions about the longer-term sustainability of artificial environments.

In his chapter, "Transformig the Desert into a Liveable Place: The Egyptian Experience", Tamer Abdelfattah Ahmed analyses the experience of turning barren desert areas into desirable, residential environments. He identifies two approaches to the development of these Master Planned Estates (MPE) to enhance levels of liveability. The first is by means of urban policy with an emphasis on infrastructures, and the second, through ideas of landscape improvement. He draws on detailed data from a range of settlement types reflecting different income groups to argue that the outdoor characteristics, in particular intensive green landscape initiatives, have a significant effect on levels of satisfaction in these new urban environments. He concludes that the perceived liveability of these new developments can make them more desirable as residential environments compared to the inner city of Cairo.

The population of cities is very diverse. One group which has received considerable research focus in Europe and North America in recent years is that of disabled people. However, research into disabled people in the cities of the global south is very limited and therefore the study by Antika Sawadsri takes on added significance. The chapter Negotiating Disabling Environments: a Collective Movement in Bangkok explores the mobilisation of disabled people through the analysis of a particular urban project. It questions the extent to which access mobilisation can contribute to overcoming the problems of disabling environments to strengthen an accessible built environment agenda. She argues that although the transformation of physical barriers can be achieved in a short time, the issues related to negative societal attitudes towards the disabled are much more difficult to challenge and change. She explains that "the spatial needs of disabled users were perceived as an ephemeral phenomenon, of lesser import than their realistic needs in their day-to-day lives". She claims that there is a disability culture and lack of knowledge about disabled people’s spatial requirements and demonstrates how access movements which focus only on disabled people’s needs and expectations deliver only limited gains. However, this study of disabled people has wider implications, particularly for other minorities and marginalised communities in their struggles for human rights and dignity in the city.

The Production and Transformation of the Informal

Much of the urban expansion in the global south has taken place through the growth of informal practices. Of particular interest are the ways in which such informal settlements have evolved and changed through time, sometimes apparently independently of dominant structures and processes, at other times in close partnership. This approach to the issue would imply acceptance of the dominant paradigm that formality and informality are essentially binary opposites—that they are discrete and bounded entities and processes. However, this understanding has been challenged in recent years by several theorists including Roy and AlSayyad (2004). They argue that there is insufficient recognition of the reciprocal relationships existing between these two sectors which are not sharply delineated but are in fact closely interconnected and interlinked with multiple overlaps and entanglements. They propose that levels of legitimacy and legality can be mapped across a complex continuum with settlements and processes expressing different degrees of legitimacy, indicating that some people may be operating within both sectors simultaneously. Roy continues: informality is not a separate sector but rather a series of transactions that connect different economies and spaces together (Roy, 2005, p.148). This relationship makes generalisations about informal settlements even more problematic, and points to the need to recognise that the geographies of informality fluctuate in fluid and complex ways, acquiring precise shape at certain times in specific locations (Roy and AlSayyad, 2004; Lombard, 2004).

At the same time, responses to informal development processes are inconsistent and ambivalent, with the result that many activities and settlements are not integrated into regular planning processes and governance institutions. The 2009 UN Global Shelter Report concludes that modernist planning fails to accommodate the way of life of the majority who continue to create their own informal areas. Similarly, it fails to involve communities meaningfully in the planning and management of urban areas and imposes regulatory costs that are too high and time-consuming for the urban poor to comply with and, finally, the spatial models which are supported by modernist planning tend to reinforce spatial and social exclusion, thereby reproducing cities which are not environmentally sustainable. This situation inevitably means that informal processes continue to grow and, in many places, to outstrip more formalised processes of city building.

The following chapters, from different continents exhibit contrasting characteristics of informality and examine ways in which marginalised communities have managed to work successfully with official organisations to bring about significant improvements in living conditions. Both chapters analyse efforts to work more horizontally through participatory process—efforts which, despite encountering complexities and difficulties, have nevertheless proved fruitful.

In the first, Technology and Participation: Geo-information Tools in Settlement Upgrading, Musyimi Mbathi examines how spatial information provided using geo-information tools (GIS) can potentially facilitate community participation for planning and upgrading informal settlements. He refers to Isaak and Hurbert (1997), who argue that the capabilities offered by these tools such as spatial analysis and visualisation have enabled communities to participate in settlement planning and upgrading through management of new infrastructure. Drawing on detailed settlement case studies in Nairobi, Mbathi demonstrates how these information tools and technology have enhanced participation in upgrading programmes, despite the risks that these tools have of alienating and excluding those with limited understanding and knowledge of information technology. He emphasises the long-term dimension to these development processes and suggests that communities should be encouraged to adopt settlement monitoring and use the outcomes to plan for interventions and address new challenges that may arise. This also implies that stronger support from government and other partners is needed. Of particular interest in this case is the resulting change in the balance of power between landlords and tenants—with the majority of tenants managing to gain ownership titles to their dwellings. Such processes do not merely improve living conditions, but through these tenure changes residents are also repositioned along the informal-formal continuum.

The implications of moving from the informal towards the formal sector are explored in the following chapter by Rittirong Chutapruttikorn, Status, Capital and Identity: from Informal to Formal Housing in Bangkok. Drawing on participatory action research in which he worked closely with resident groups in informal railway-track settlements, he uses the conceptual ideas of Bourdieu to examine how they employed both social and cultural capital to change the status of their informal dwellings into formal housing. He explains how low-income families were given the chance to participate in self-managed housing projects within a government housing programme and argues that their social capital in the form of community association and collective action played a key role in these re-housing processes. He concludes that housing projects for low income residents should aim to go beyond basic shelter resolution to engage with fundamental issues of productive means and symbolic character, which he calls status capital and identity re-construction capabilities. A common thread through both these chapters is the agency demonstrated by low-income residents to engage in the construction and improvement of their own living environments; in the words of Harvey (2009, p.23) the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is [...] one of the most precious and yet neglected human rights.

The Construction and Appropriation of Public Spaces

Drawing on three contributions from Latin America the next section turns from housing processes to confirm the importance of the collective dimensions of urban life through an examination of public spaces. In the first of these, People Shaping Public Spaces: Popular Urban Design Processes in Mexico, Mauricio Hernández-Bonilla examines how low-income inhabitants of colonias populares in the intermediate city of Xalapa go beyond traditional limitations and engage with the space in a