Learning From Lagos - Slum Architecture / Part 1

A few days ago, architecture and design magazine eVolo published a conceptual proposal called "Favela Cloud," a formal scheme to redevelop the Brazilian slums of Santa Marta.

Renderings for the master thesis project by Aalborg University graduate students Johan Kure, Thiru Manickam, and Kemo Usto depict a massive, porous steel "cloud" made from interconnected polyhedral modules. The amorphous form is raised upon a forest of intersecting poles and made accessible by lift or by whimsically off-kilter spiral staircases. Perched high above the cinderblock shanties of Santa Marta and basking in the midday sun, "Favela Cloud" is meant to proclaim the dawn of a new age, one in which the long-neglected urban poor are both entitled to and empowered by progressive architecture.

 

Architecture and social change

The lofty vision of "Favela Cloud" touches upon several trends cycling through architecture today. First, it responds to the rising popularity of "architecture for social change," for which the profession nobly renounces its service to the rich to address the issues of the poor. But the "Cloud" purportedly distinguishes itself from more conventional do-good design because its principle source of inspiration is the slum itself.

As eVolo explains, the success of the design hinges on its "additive system that can grow and adapt to its site conditions," motivated by the existing self-organizing logic of the favela. In other words, the intervention draws from the social and organizational qualities characteristic of the very environment it seeks to improve, a methodology that has its own backstory in architectural discourse, as I'll explore later. By returning to its point of departure and theoretically folding back into itself, the shiny edifice straddling Santa Marta brings into question if and how architecture can intervene in communities that have developed in the abject absence of a welfare state.

 

The "other" urbanism

Though envisioned specifically for Santa Marta, "Favela Cloud" spotlights a highly pervasive and urgent matter: the staggering growth — and plummeting socioeconomic conditions — of urban slums. As the global urban population continues to climb, so has its population of slum-dwellers. Mike Davis's provocative 2006 meditation "Planet of Slums" delivers a cold shower of statistics, estimating that at least a third of the global urban population now lives in slums, with over a billion people crammed into exceedingly underserviced urban peripheries in Africa, South America, and Asia. Forced out of their rural origins by rapid urbanization and barred from the city center by the state and the upper and middle classes, rising numbers of the urban poor are evicted to the underdeveloped city fringes, where life becomes a constant battle against hunger, disease, environmental hazards, and lawlessness. Victory promises nothing, while defeat means certain death: "If you sit down," one citizen of Lagos explained to a visiting reporter, "you will die of hunger."

 

Lack of infrastructure in the middle of a city

With basic rights to food, potable water, and shelter categorically denied to slumdwellers, decent public architecture is but a pipe dream. Without functioning infrastructure, working sewage systems, proper housing, and designated civic spaces, slum-dwellers are forced to engineer their own systems of order. Waste from the city proper is salvaged in the slums to form constellations of cinderblock shelters fortified with sheets of tin and plastic-bag insulation; the meager space of a home easily and often doubles as a workshop; makeshift marketplaces sprout like weeds in every available space. As urban sociologist Erhard Berner wrote in his 1997 book examining land use in Manila, "Virtually all the gaps left open by city development are immediately filled with makeshift settlements that beat every record in population density."

 

Vertical Favela

It is precisely this creative and thoroughly bottom-up organization of space and materials that is extoled in eVolo's "Favela Cloud" proposal. Enchanted by the 'other' urbanism surfacing in the world’s unheeded territories, the project attempts to distill the spatial practices of the favela into a prototypical, steel-engineered edifice. Elevated high above the existing slumscape, the "Cloud" makes accessible an immense volume of untouched space formerly unreachable for the favela's resident ad hoc architects. It imports the verticality of the traditional skyscraper — the ultimate symbol of metropolitan wealth — but endeavors to integrate and accentuate the organic qualities of its site through its irregular shape and exaggerated lack of spatial hierarchy. "Favela Cloud" emerges as a sculptural, avant-garde reproduction of the organized chaos just below it. Refined through the computer-generated expressionism of contemporary design, the problem somehow becomes a solution.

 

How we learned to stop worrying and love the slum

The notion that the slums can be both problem and solution has a rather long history. In "Planet of Slums," Davis cites the notorious early- to mid-century CIAM (Congrès internationaux d'architecture modern, or the International Congresses of Modern Architecture), a faction of which had romanticized Tunisian slums, or bidonvilles, for their “‘organic’ relationship between the buildings and the site…the flexibility of spaces to accommodate diverse functions, and the changing needs of the users.” The concept was further propagated in the 1970s by the English architect John Turner, who was fascinated by the ingenuity he had observed in Peruvian squatter settlements. Then-World Bank President Robert McNamara was particularly delighted by Turner’s subsequent proposal for slum improvement, which advocated for “self-help, incremental construction, and legalization of spontaneous urbanization.” For McNamara, Turner’s proposition was a conveniently cost-effective antidote to an unrelenting problem.

The policies that developed out of Turner's voyeuristic fascination were not just benign but damaging, however. They excused the state for sidelining serious efforts to abolish slum conditions. Through the 1970s and 1980s, as the world's slums and shantytowns grew like a cancer, quickly forming the bulk of megacities like Lagos and Kolkata despite half-hearted NGO interventions and ruthless local slash-and-burn campaigns, the slums were once again recognized as problems through and through—and seemingly hopeless ones at that. It wasn't until the 1990s and 2000s that the slums were taken up as architectural case studies again, this time with a new initiative: to learn from them and apply their lessons elsewhere.

 

First published by Kelly Chan in Artinfo

 

Foto 1: by godwin d, creative commons flickr

Foto 2 by khym54, creative commons flickr

Foto 3 by. Abhisek Sarda, creative commons flickr