Architexturez. wrote:
| the guys named in the recent RTI commissoner versus
| the powers that be in Delhi sequence? the so-called
| Experts (appropos a fully paid visit to hong kong in 2001/2)
| were quite gung-ho about these, with Chinese co-operation
| of course...
|
| actually, expect more wambooooze proposals (read plannerly
| nonsense) ref slums,
|
| two interviews about a blight that should never have
| existed, or better still, architected out of the city
| as they did in the nineteenth century.
One Small Project: Wes Janz
Mar 27, 2006
The notion of "leftover space" has always been of great interest to
architects, but in the context of global urbanization it conjures a
particularly visceral response. Leftover space—in the sense of being
ghettoized and depicting a sort of bare essentiality of being in
architecture—is not always easy to look at much less understand,
especially for a profession whose responsibility is designing the
structures that people will inhabit. For the most part, the issue of
global poverty is translated through viral images of shanties infecting
the landscape, peripheral slums leaching off the urban core, and
pictures that instill fear of an assailant rise of diseased squatter
cities. This not only demonizes the third world, it painfully reminds us
of our own failures to address the infrastructural necessities of
millions. However, these images narrate only part of the story for those
who go on sifting through the remains of an urban evolution which has
long since abandoned them.
cont'd....
http://www.archinect.com/features/article.php?id=35227_0_23_0_C
========================================
Learning from Informal Urban Economies
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the residents of squatter
cities will have much to teach us about resourcefulness and innovation
....
Are there examples from the developing world that are particularly
intriguing models of architectural innovation?
I think so. I was just reading a book about Bombay before it was Mumbai.
There was a story about a company building towers 35 stories high. The
construction workers were given rudimentary materials—lumber and rope
and fabric and sheet metal—to construct cheap temporary housing near the
site.
This instant legal slum would be their home for the duration of the
project. What was astonishing was that the workers actually occupied the
building itself as they worked on it and encamped there, where there was
shelter. It was a highly economical way to build. Perhaps soon we'll be
looking to squatter cities for design ideas, much as we looked to
biology. Rather than bio-mimicry, we'll be considering squatter-mimicry.
....
cont'd....
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/sep2006/id20060925_363389.htm