Defiant Imagination

Understanding slums and squatter cities

Each day, about 200,000 people around the world move from the country to the city in search of better opportunities. This means two things: the end of the dominance of western metropolises in favour of third-world cities, and the growth of informal and illegal neighbourhoods commonly referred to as slums or squatter cities. This is what tomorrow’s world will be like.
About one billion people currently live in slums around the world. Current estimations predict this number will grow to two billion by 2030. Although slums have traditionnally been negatively portrayed, their role has been instrumental in urban, economic and social development of societies. I’ve chosen to present the three personalities whose work has transformed our vision of the current urbanization movement.

The idealist

Steve Brand is better known as the co-founder of the Long Now Foundation and the Global Business Network. His controversial ideas about environmentalism have been summed up in the book Whole Earth Discipline.
Brand sees contemporary slums as a means to limit population growth and provide opportunities to million of residents in developing countries. His short TED talk sums up why we should care:

Brand sees a huge potential in turning slums into sustainable neighbourhoods. Slums are already “green” because of their high density of population. Urban farms, green roofs, solar panels and mass transit systems could be implanted in order to make these communities self-sufficient.

Read Brand’s article in Prospect magazine here.

The pragmatist

Journalist Robert Neuwirth has been witnessing life in slums first-hand by spending several years living in various squatter cities around the world. He is the author of the book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World and of the blog Squatter Cities.
Where some see poverty, Neuwirth sees neighbouroods that can be extremely vibrant, rapidly developing, home to intricate social networks and business opportunities. He notes that some of them are naturally evolving toward better standards of living, to the point where they become similar to any other neighbourhood. Neuwirth sees two conditions to this: the ability of residents to avoid eviction and remain on the land, and access to politics.
“The issue is not urban poverty,” he said as a conclusion to his 2005 TED Talk. “The issue is for us to recognize that these are neighbourhoods, this is a legitimate form of urban development.”
Neuwirth has been critical of the United Nations, whose Settlements Programme, also known as U.N. Habitat, has been ineffective. Its world headquarters are ironically located near Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the poorest slums.

Here is his PopTech! talk, slightly more informational than the TED one:

The theorist

Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums has been written from the comfort of his home. An urban theorist, historian, and political activist, Davis’s work is mostly theoretical and seeks to analyze slums from a global, historical and political perspective.
Davis notes the interest of the American military in studying slums. Modern warfare, having shifted toward urban guerillas, needs to understand the functioning of slums and capitalize on it.
He also underlines the rise of religious movements in slums, notably Pentecostalism and its importance in Latin America and Africa. “The largest self-organized movement of poor urban people in the world” according to Davis, Pentecostalism is responsible  for many social behaviours in squatter cities.
According to him, slums have been seeing a rise in political  and social movements within their limits. However he doesn’t believe in formal political institutions as a way for slums to access better living conditions, in large part because of corruption.
Davis’s work has often been described as “anti-urban” and “apocalyptic.” He has been rebuked for failing to see the potential of slums as sustainable communities.

Read Davis’s interview with BLDGBLOG.

Urban revitalization: when retail giants lead the way

Please excuse me for the lack of posts in the last few weeks. I’ve been busy preparing my move to Vancouver and slowly adjusting to my new life here. I hope to be able to write about all the good stuff happening in the city and hopefully visit other west coast cities such as Portland and Seattle.

This week, I’ve been looking at how chain stores can participate in urban revitalization. While doing some research for an article, I stumbled upon this 2005 Seattle Times article. American Apparel had just opened its first Seattle store in an area that was trying to take on a new lease of life, and hoped their presence would attract other boutiques. The article described their strategy:

While scouting locations for American Apparel stores, Webb looks for signs that speak to a hippay sensibility. Literal signs, such as “Loft Available” or “Vegetarian Restaurant.”

In a few instances, American Apparel is an active player in bringing other retailers to a street, leasing more space than it needs and subletting to those that cater to the same demographic.

In Houston, a city of malls, American Apparel opted to open downtown, where fashion boutiques do not exist, and is negotiating for a location in downtown San Jose, Calif. Yes, San Jose has a downtown.

And in Portland, American Apparel opened a store 18 months ago among boarded-up buildings on Southwest Stark Street instead of in the nearby Pearl District, where trendy redevelopment already had taken hold.

(By the way, did anybody stick with the term “hippay”?)

I never thought of urban revitalization as a conscious process, especially not operated by retail giants. Most of the time, revitalization happens progressively when store owners and artists look for cheap retail spaces and studios. But I incidentally found a similar example of this.

Urban Outfitters

Urban Outfitter’s new headquarters are housed in a huge five-building, 11-acre campus located in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The building houses offices for the company’s different brands (Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie and Terrain) as well as employee services: a cafeteria, a coffee bar, a library and a fitness centre. The clothing and houseware company undertook the redevelopment of this former shipbuilding complex in 2004. The revamped buidings are a wonderful example of adaptation of turn-of-the-century industrial archictecture to contemporary purposes.

This great article from Metropolis magazine sums up pretty well the change this represented for the company:

The idea of yanking more than 600 of Philadelphia’s most creative—not to mention best-dressed —workers out of downtown was the equivalent of exiling Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue fashion houses to an industrial park near JFK. Losing so many trendsetters would surely diminish the Center City District’s hard-won cool quotient. Meanwhile all those hipsters in skinny jeans and vintage boots would have to figure out how to get to a compound so far off the city grid it was practically tumbling into the Delaware River. There wasn’t a coffeehouse or magazine stand in sight.

Other businesses have since relocated to the Navy Yard, creating more than 4,000 jobs and participating in the rebirth of South Philadelphia.

See more pictures on Decor8′s Flickr photostream.