In forthcoming work done with my colleague Jake Wegmann, analyzing real-estate data in the region since 1988, we can show that the zip codes to which African Americans migrated were doing well in terms of median home value until 2005, long after the migration had begun. Not just well overall, but well against San Francisco’s Cole Valley, one of the most gentrifying places around. Their presence in the fast growing portions of deep suburbia did not cause the crisis, and their decision to move made sense. If you were black and middle class, moving to places like Antioch and Patterson seemed like a good deal — a chance at a piece of the American pie and a rational economic decision. Nobody realized how shaky the terms of the deal would turn out to be.
This is one of the many reasons that Chris Leinberger needs to change his tune. I agree that sprawl was a bad idea, that growth on the fringe helped bring the economy down and that urban centers are the heart of our global future. We’ve known this since suburbanization began in earnest two generations ago. But we failed to stop it.
Now the “fringe” in Northern California alone is home to millions. And in the 24 Bay Area cities [analyzed by Schafran], almost half a million of the 850,000 residents are not white. These are generally hard-working families who followed the same suburban path the white masses went down a generation or two ago — except much farther from city centers and with worse debt, less job security and no real mass transit. This is a generational raw deal hatched at every scale of our urban development.
The foreclosure crisis is a national tragedy that hand-wringing about the failures of sprawl will not undo. Predicting the “death of the fringe suburb” is reminiscent of the harmful language used to describe cities in the days before urban renewal, when we labeled the neighborhoods of the working classes and communities of color as “slums” and “ghettos,” bulldozing what we could and redlining the rest. This massive and exceptionally racist failure of urban policy in the post-war era laid the groundwork for this crisis more than a half century ago. While we were busy destroying inner cities and building nice suburbs, we denied African Americans the right to move out as well.
Schafran’s post is well-worth reading in full, particularly for the compelling maps he has produced.
Why is this a landscape whose origins can be traced at least in part to financialization? There are a number of reasons, including the disproportionate impact of public-sector austerity (and accompanying job losses) on the African-American middle class that Schafran refers to, the general hunger for exurban expansion produced by the reliance of the various invented products at the heart of the financial crisis — collaterialized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and so on –on a steady supply of new homes and fresh mortgages, the role of the financial sector in foreclosure fraud, and the ties between the mortgage market and the shadow banking system.
[The eighty-six proposed "commonwealths" of the lower forty-eight states, from "The Commonwealth Approach".]
1 I can’t take too much credit for our win — we borrowed the main idea from a pair of earlier competition entries Laurel produced.
I’m excited that “The Commonwealth Approach”, an entry to the Arid Lands Institute’s Drylands Design Competition that I worked on with Laurel McSherry1, has been selected for a research prize by the competition jury. Taking a bit of inspiration from John Wesley Powell, we proposed re-organizing the political geography of the United States, beginning with the replacement of the fifty states with ninety-three “commonwealths” whose borders are based on water resource geography. Our paragraph on “geography and bias” explains part of the motivation behind this seemingly impractical proposal:
“Political geography — the location of bureaucracies, the subdivision of a nation into smaller units, the position of symbolic power centers like the U.S. Capitol — biases decision-making. In the United States, and with specific reference to water, the position of the federal government, its siting in the District of Columbia on the eastern edge of the continent, produces a bias against understanding the full consequences of the aridity of the half of the nation that lies west of the 100th Meridian.
This political geography constitues an organizational architecture which precedes, constrains, and produces site architecture.”
One of the nice things about this award is that, unlike many competitions where the winning entries are selected and never developed any further, the research prize gives us the opportunity to progress our design research over the next couple months, towards public presentation as a component of the Drylands Design Conference at Woodbury University in Burbank at the end of March.
Consequently, this post is just a bit of a tease — a much fuller report will be forthcoming after we’ve finished our current work.
The other eight winning entries, including four more research award winners and various honor and merit awards, can be found on the Drylands Competition website.
[Warehouse at 1200 E McNichols Road, Highland Park, Michigan. The small red sign at the bottom right corner of the second image says "Metro".]
The warehouse above — and a network of others like it, scattered around the industrial abandonia of Detroit — is a crucial bottleneck in the global aluminium trade.
Before I explain how this is, though, a bit of background.
1 Kevin Slavin’s fantastic talk “How algorithms shape our world”, which I’m hoping to write something a bit longer about soon, would be a classic of that genre.
2 One of the things that makes that corporeality important is that, while much of the systemic perversity of financialization — like, say, the creation of synthetic CDOs — is intentionally obscure, the perversity of the landscapes that arise from financialization is often obvious, as the case of Metro International Trade Services will, I think, make clear.
“Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation’s stock exchanges.
What they do doesn’t show up in Google Finance, let alone in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. No one really knows how they operate or why. But over the past few weeks, Nanex, a data services firm has dragged some of the odder algorithm specimens into the light.
The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.”
Something that I’ve become increasingly interested in the past year — and consequently am collecting a series of related items I hope to post — is the physical geography of global financialization1. I think my interest comes from roughly the same place that my interest in the material infrastructure of the internet (and other hertzian spaces) does — recognizing that, like the internet, global financialization is obviously non-corporeal and, at the same time, less obviously but quite importantly corporeal2. (By corporeal in these cases, I mean both sustained by a complex network of physical infrastructures and generating various indirect physical products through influence within economic, social, and political systems). Financialization is also, like the internet, a thing that exists only in aggregate, its behavior governed by the interaction of a myriad of smaller parts which are directed by a multiplicity of potentially conflicting desires. As a consequence, both things — financialization and the internet — have extremely jagged edges, weird dark spots where aggregated lower-level behaviors manifest as bizarre meta-behaviors. As an example, the intersection of those two sets of dark spots is particularly weird: like last May’s “flash crash”, where “a single large sell order executed by a rather crude software program sent the already-stressed market into a downward spiral”, causing the Dow to drop “10 percent in just minutes”3.
But given that my interest is particularly in the moments where those weird behaviors are spatialized, finding form in buildings and landscapes, this post exists, as I suggested earlier, to highlight a specific point in the physical geography of global financialization: the Detroit warehouses of “Metro International Trade Services”.
[4815 Cabot Street, Detroit, Michigan.]
I was reminded of this peculiar company by the recent news that big banks — the global players from the financial crisis that are household names, like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Barclay’s — have been threatening to block the sale of a much less widely known organization, the London Metal Exchange. To explain why those banks, which own large shares in the LME, would want to prevent the sale of the London Metal Exchange, you have to understand what Metro International Trade Services is, and something of its materially bizarre business model:
“In a rundown patch of Detroit, enclosed by a cyclone fence and barbed wire, stands an unremarkable warehouse that investment bank Goldman Sachs has transformed into a money-making machine.
The derelict neighborhood off Michigan Avenue is a sharp contrast to Goldman’s bustling skyscraper headquarters near Wall Street, but the two operations share one important element: management by the bank’s savvy financial professionals.
A string of warehouses in Detroit, most of them operated by Goldman, has stockpiled more than a million tonnes of the industrial metal aluminum, about a quarter of global reported inventories.
Simply storing all that metal generates tens of millions of dollars in rental revenues for Goldman every year.”
3 The London Metal Exchange has a simple and legitimate reason for warehousing:
“The LME certifies and regulates the Detroit sheds as part of a global network of more than 640 warehouses. The network is meant to even out swings in volatile metals markets. During recessions, surplus metal can be stored until economies recover and demand picks up, when the metal can be released.”
But — rather problematically — “that function is now being undermined by the backlog in Detroit” — as Goldman Sachs drives up prices by releasing as little metal as it legally can.
So the way that the business model works is essentially this: through its subsidiary Metro International Trade Services, Goldman owns these Detroit warehouses which are stuffed with this vast quantity of aluminum — as the article at Reuters says, more than a million tonnes, a quarter of global inventories. The stuffing, though, is done by the London Metal Exchange3, which owns the metals in the warehouses, and consequently Goldman Sachs ends up making a great deal of money off the rent that the London Metal Exchange pays to Metro International Trade Services — even though Sachs is one of the major owners of the London Metal Exchange. (Goldman bought the warehousing company in 2010, in a wave of purchases of metal warehousing companies by global financial institutions seeking to use the rising price of physical commodities as a hedge against their poor performance in commodity trading.)
[13542 Helen Street, Detroit, Michigan.]
Meanwhile, as Goldman is collecting huge rents from the London Metal Exchange off its stockpile of aluminum, American aluminum buyers are starved of the metal they want to purchase:
The long delays in metal delivery have buyers fuming. Some consumers are waiting up to a year to receive the aluminum they need and that has resulted in the perverse situation of higher prices at a time when the world is awash in the metal.
“It’s driving up costs for the consumers in North America and it’s not being driven up because there is a true shortage in the market. It’s because of an issue of accessing metal … in Detroit warehouses,” said Nick Madden, chief procurement officer for Atlanta-based Novelis, which is owned by India’s Hindalco Industries Ltd and is the world’s biggest maker of rolled aluminum products. Novelis buys aluminum directly from producers but is still hit by the higher prices.
Madden estimates that the U.S. benchmark physical aluminum price is $20 to $40 a tonne higher because of the backlog at the Detroit warehouses. The physical price is currently around $2,800 per tonne. That premium is forcing U.S. businesses to fork out millions of dollars more for the 6 million tonnes of aluminum they use annually.
4 When producers fear a slowdown, they go to banks — like Goldman — to finance metals: “in a typical financing deal, a bank buys metal from a producer, agrees to sell it at some future point at a profit, and strikes a warehouse deal to store it cheaply for an extended time period.”
But, because of an archaic rule system under which the London Metal Exchange specifics minimum daily metal release requirements by the city rather than by the warehouse (“at the moment, a warehouse operator needs to deliver just 1,500 tonnes a day per city, whether it owns one warehouse there or dozens”), Goldman has every incentive to concentrate the physical position of the aluminum it is storing in a single city — Detroit. This is because the less metal is released, the more money Goldman makes, primarily off the rent on its warehouses, but also potentially on the commodities exchange4. On the other end, the London Metal Exchange gets a one percent take of all rents in all the warehouses it approves, which hardly incentivizes the Exchange to adjust its release rules, even failing to account for the fact that Goldman owns a large portion of the Exchange.
And that’s why a quarter of the world’s supply of “available aluminum” is sitting in warehouses in Detroit, warehouses which are “a whirl of activity in the early hours of the morning when metal is usually delivered for storage”, but deserted throughout the rest of the day — because the aluminum goes in, but it only very slowly comes back out.
[I originally came across the story of Metro International Trade Services in this post by Umair Haque.]
For the first LI@SX of 2012, Studio-X NYC is delighted to welcome Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker of Mammoth and Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon, three-quarters of the Dredge Research Collaborative (with Brett Milligan of Free Association Design), for a short visual tour of hulking geotubes, silt fences, sensate geotextiles, and other monuments of the dredge cycle, followed by a lively Q&A and informal discussion on the unrecognized architectural possibilities of dredge.
While dredge is commonly considered a linear act of industrial engineering — a dredging machine arrives at a site, sucks up a great quantity of sediment, and deposits that sediment on some other site — we argue that dredging is better understood as a component of a wider network of anthropogenic sedimentary processes which generate a fascinating array of interconnected landscapes. Fluid topographies are restrained by bright orange silt fences; dredging barges continuously empty shipping channels which are promptly re-filled with sediment disturbed by upstream farms and new subdivisions; sensate geotextiles monitor the stability of landscapes they are literally embedded in; hulking geo-tubes lay engorged with dredged sediments in streams on Filipino golf courses and along Mexican beaches and on the coastal dunescape of Virginian spaceports. Silts, sands, and clays flow rapidly between these landscapes in liquid suspension, linking them and re-shaping the earth’s surface. Collectively, the choreography of these landscapes embodies a vastly quickened counterpart to conventionally defined geologic cycles — the Dredge Cycle.
The Dredge Cycle is landscape design on a deliriously monumental scale, but unrecognized as an architecture. So far, it remains the domain of logistics, industry, and engineering, a soft successor to the elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams that captured the cultural imagination of the previous century, a new infrastructural vernacular for the self-aware Anthropocene.
At Studio-X, we’ll be talking both about what extant landscapes of dredge are like, and what potentials for design intervention they might offer. The event, which is on January 24th from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm, is free and open to the public; Studio-X NYC is 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610.
The evening’s conversation will serve as a prelude to a limited-ticket Festival of Dredge tour this summer, for which LI@SX attendees will be given reservation priority — look for more details on the Festival in the future.
Recommended reading: Alan Wiig’s “everyday structures”, a blog “explor[ing] the place of infrastructure in the urban landscape”, with a particular focus on “Hertzian space” and digital communications infrastructure. Wiig is studying geography at Temple University, so his blog most typically deals with landscapes in Philadelphia or its surrounds. Like many of mammoth‘s favorite things at the moment, “everyday structures” deals with the quotidianmaterialconditions of landscape, posting both readings from Sanford Kwinter or Henri Lefebvre and snapshots of Pelton wheels or a homeless camp juxtaposed with broadband lines. In a recent conversation with a couple other landscape architects, I noted that I think geographers are, in many ways, doing a better job of conceptualizing landscape than landscape architects, particularly with relation to infrastructural conditions in the networked city — Wiig’s blog is an excellent example of that.
[Image at top is from the post "fiber along the road" on "everyday structures". Wiig captions -- and I quote the full caption because it is the combination of image and caption that makes the typical snapshot on "everyday structures" fascinating -- "Automobiles turning, the fiber optic cable runs parallel to the road. Marlton Pike West, in the Garden State. That little white and orange marker in front of the "SO Cornell Ave -->" and "ALL TURNS -->" signs indicates the Internet and other forms of digital communication are flowing alongside the automotive and pedestrian traffic on this route."]
[The following piece, on the surprising ways that the residents of the Mumbai settlement of Dharavi have integrated that urban agglomeration into global economic networks, and the value of the unique spatial formatting that both enables and results from that integration, is the second thoroughly-footnoted guest post we've run from Peter Nunns. (The first was "fecal politics".) After being on hiatus during the time when we published that first post, Peter is blogging again at Read after Burning.]
“The slum-dwellers,” he adds, “are experts at live-work space design. They spontaneously do mixed-use! We just have to learn from them.” [1]
When homes are also considered places of work – either unpaid housework or paid industrial homework – then the industrial geography of the city assumes new meanings. [2]
1 Mason 2011
2 Sassen 2001: 261
3 Patel and Arputham 2007, Fernando 2009
4 UN 2006: 37
Dharavi has been described as “Asia’s largest slum”. Between 600,000 and 1 million people live in 85 dense neighborhoods clustered on 2.4 square kilometers of low-lying, marshy land in the heart of Mumbai [3]. (Mumbai’s total population was estimated at 18.2 million in 2005 by UNDESA (2010).) It is one of the most overcrowded areas of Mumbai – and one of the worst-served by infrastructure. Dharavi contains an estimated 1,440 people for each toilet seat, meaning that “streets, lacking drainage, become channels for filthy water carrying human excrement” during the rainy season [4]. In many respects, it has become a byword for urban squalor and poverty.
5 Nijman 2009
6 Grant and Nijman 2003: 474
7 Patel 2010
8 Chalana 2010: 31
9 Benjamin 2008: 721
It’s also a chunk of incredibly valuable real estate. The relaxation of foreign investment rules brought an influx of capital into Mumbai in the 1990s, and land prices skyrocketed [5]. The city’s central business district was “the most expensive in the world” in the mid-90s, while “residential real estate prices spiralled up as well, in part in response to the influx of money from nonresident Indians” [6]. Dharavi, which lies between two of the main rail lines, with close access to the new financial district and the international airport [7], has been describes as the “Opportunity of the Millennium” for developers [8]. Remaking Dharavi would open up new territory for foreign direct investment and globally-linked industries that would benefit from proximity to the international airport and CBD. In the words of Solomon Benjamin, it would exorcise the “spectre of cities besieged by cancerous slums” by putting a “modernist spin on attracting economic development: ‘Bangalore transforming into a Singapore, Bombay [Mumbai] into a Shanghai, and Delhi into a London’!” [9]
10 Chalana 2010, Patel and Arputham 2007
11 The anticipated cost of the redevelopment rose to US $3 billion in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
12 Patel, Arputham, Burra and Savchuk 2009
The Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), first proposed in 1996 by Mukesh Mehta, an American-trained architect working in Mumbai and started in 2004, is the latest attempt to capitalize upon inflated land values. It is intended to mix slum upgrading with the development of new office space and housing for Mumbai’s upper and middle classes [10]. The $2 billion DRP [11] calls for Dharavi to be divided into five zones, each of which would be designed and constructed by a separate property development firm. Residents who could prove their occupancy prior to 1995 (later extended to 2000) would be offered apartments on the same sites or new locations in exchange for their land [12]. A portion of profits from the sale of newly-constructed housing and commercial space would be used to finance upgraded housing for Dharavi’s low-income residents, while the rest would be returned to the city government and private developers.
13 Sanyal and Bhattacharya 2010, Nijman 2009
The purpose of the DRP is to globalize Mumbai; to create the sorts of “internationally competitive” living spaces and commercial areas required by globally-mobile businesses and workers in the “knowledge economy”. But this program ignores Dharavi’s actually-existing ties to the broader urban and global economies. The slum houses a wide range of informal enterprises that are integrated into globally disaggregated assembly lines through subcontracting arrangements. While we tend to think of slums as a form of low-income housing, Dharavi’s economic role is at least as important. Its living spaces often double as informal and unregulated production spaces – like many slums, it is a “spontaneous” form of mixed-use design [13].
14 Nijman 2009: 10, Fernando 2009
15 Sanyal and Bhattacharya 2010: 163
16 Nijman 2009: 10
17 Patel and Arputham 2007: 505
Roughly 70 to 80 percent of Dharavi’s residents work within the slum – an unusually high ratio compared with many other Indian slums [14]. It contains at least 5,000 industrial enterprises, which produce textiles, pottery and leather, jewellery, food products, and so on and so forth [15]. Its southwest corner “has a major cluster of plastic recycling factories, with some estimates of well over 500 units,” while many streets are “lined with retailing, food stands, kiosks, taxis, small restaurants, some hotels, etc.” [16]. These industries “provide incomes and livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of Mumbai citizens who would otherwise have no employment” [17]. Because they also entail a number of negative externalities – low wages, unsafe conditions, and high levels of air and water pollution – they rely upon the existence of flexible, unregulated space in the city center.
18 Fernando 2009
19 Sanyal and Bhattacharya 2010: 163
20 Harriss-White 2010: 131
Work done in Dharavi is a crucial part of the city’s economy [18]. Patel and Arputham observe that it “probably contributes far more to the Indian economy than most special economic zones.” Its annual turnover has been estimated at between $700 million and $1 billion [19]. And while Dharavi is somewhat unusual in the magnitude and diversity of its industries, it is part of a wider trend in India’s globalizing economy. According to Sudarshan et al, 30 to 40 percent of India’s exports now originate in the informal economy, which “includes entire industrial clusters making goods for export (metalware, machine tools, leatherware, textiles and garments, tools and equipment, and some IT services)” [20]. The expansion of India’s international trade is related to the growth of subcontracting networks and industrial homework.
21 Harriss-White and Sinha 2007, see also Frenkel and Kuruvilla 2002
22 Sudarshan et al 2007: 179
Over the past two decades, the country’s manufacturing sector has undergone parallel processes of upgrading and downgrading: businesses in the formal sector have become more capital intensive, displacing labor-intensive work into the decentralized and more flexible informal sector [21]. According to Sanyal and Bhattacharya, “sub-contracting from large firms to small firms has been increasing and consequently numbers of homeworkers, to whom small firms in turn sub-contract, are also increasing” (see also UNIFEM 2000). In 1999/2000, there were approximately 28 million homeworkers in the non-agricultural labor force, 30 percent of whom were located in urban areas [22]. The bottom reaches of subcontracting networks are predominantly female. Rani and Unni found that in 2000/01, “home-based [production] workers constituted about 81 percent of all female workers and about 46 percent of male workers.”
23 Sanyal and Bhattacharya 2010: 163
As the case of Dharavi demonstrates, these production arrangements also rely upon certain spatial arrangements. Slums are often ideal locations for combining living and work space – a fact that is often not appreciated by redevelopment projects. Consequently, the DRP is doubly problematic for residents: it threatens both their shelter and their livelihoods. Many of the central issues of contention relate to the preservation of Dharavi’s informal industries and mixed-use spaces. As a result, “the Dharavi resistance qualifies more as a ‘labour’ mobilization than slum dwellers’ resistance” [23].
24 Chalana 2010: 31
25 Chalana 2010: 32
The current master plan “entails building the rehabilitation housing zones on less than half of the original land, and allocating only 2 percent of the land to retain ‘‘non-polluting’’ industries” [24]. On the one hand, this would either increase density to an unsustainable level, or displace many of Dharavi’s residents. The project “would likely create additional homelessness, as some estimates suggest that about a quarter of the existing residents would not be eligible for rehabilitation based on the residency requirement,” which provides for resettlement only for households that can prove residency prior to 2000 [25].
26 Sanyal and Bhattacharya 2010: 163
On the other, the DRP proposes to replace existing shelters, which often mix domestic and industrial uses, with small residential spaces in high-rise buildings. As a consequence, the “entire business district as Dharavi is under threat because most of the enterprises do not have licences and so cannot find any place in the new redeveloped Dharavi [26]. Although “non-hazardous and non-polluting” workshops can potentially be rehoused, this will still mean closure of several important industries, such as pottery, leather goods, and recycling, and the loss (or displacement to the urban periphery) of tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs.
27 Patel and Arputham 2007, 2008, Patel, Arputham, Burra and Savchuk 2009, Arputham and Patel 2010
Two community organizations have contested the DRP, moving it into a “zone of negotiation” between inhabitants and city government. In a series of articles published in the academic journal EnvironmentandUrbanization, the leaders of the Alliance have provided regular updates on political negotiations over the project [27].
28 Patel, Arputham, Burra and Savchuk 2009: 244
29 Patel, Arputham, Burra and Savchuk 2009, Chalana 2010
30 Patel, Arputham, Burra and Savchuk 2009: 244
31 Arputham and Patel 2010: 502
To date, residents’ activism has secured several important gains. First, proposed densities have been lowered significantly. New guidelines issued in October 2008 specified a maximum building height of eight or ten stories, as opposed to original plans for 20 to 30 story apartment buildings [28]. The size of rehabilitation apartments for eligible slum-dwellers has also been increased, from 225 square feet to between 250 and 300 square feet [29]. This will, of course, make them more livable – but it will also provide additional space for home-based industries. Likewise, there have been incremental improvements to the space available for work in Dharavi. The original plans called for 50 percent of the floor space offered for sale by developers to be used for upper/middle-class housing [30]. Guidelines released in 2008 specify that 80 percent be available for commercial use – although there are wide variations between the five proposed sectors [31].
The fate of Dharavi is likely to set a precedent for future slum redevelopment projects in India. Activists and developers are closely watching the case of Dharavi: if such a large, economically important space can be redeveloped without significant consultation with residents, it will open the door for similar efforts elsewhere. In their latest update, Arputham and Patel note that the DRP is already being considered as a model for the redevelopment of a 1.1 square kilometre slum adjoining the Mumbai International Airport, which currently houses 85,000 or more households on commercially-valuable land.
I suppose that I’m alluding to two different types of outcome here. The first is a social one – the DRP would make many current Dharavi residents worse off, or at any rate reduce their ability to make choices about the city in which they live. But leaving that aside (and it’s a large thing to set aside!), the DRP may be a flawed project even on purely macroeconomic terms. It’s an attempt to develop Mumbai as a global city that completely runs roughshod over the actually-existing globalization occurring there. In a sense, it’s a struggle over whether a type of informal mixed-use design, and a certain mode of global integration, is allowed to continue within Mumbai.
[On the topic of the DRP, this old Airoots post, which makes a similar argument for understanding Dharavi as a "self-generating post-industrial city", is also worth a read:
The inhabitants of Dharavi have a fantastic capacity to solve their own problems. For many, Dharavi has been a platform for social mobility to middle-classdoom. However, one problem the inhabitants cannot get their head around is the threat of a top down redevelopment plan backed by the state. This burdens the residents of Dharavi more than anything else. Not only does the state not help, it even comes in the way of self-development. Why would anyone invest in their homes or business if it risks being bulldozed in a few months or years?
What seems to separate Dharavi from the DRP more than anything else is a generational gap. In the age of user-generated content, open-source and P2P, the net generation connects intuitively with the archetype of the squatter, who, just like the hacker in another realm, delves in and strives to overcome loopholes leftover by the system, and uses community and social networking as its modus operandi. In fact, it makes total sense to understand Dharavi as a self-generating post-industrial city...
More than a master plan, Dharavi needs a liberation of the imagination. Lets drop the heavy CAD maps and GIS surveys and zoom in to the street level. All Dharavi needs is some creative photoshoping and less of a patronising colonial gaze. If allowed to develop through their own internal skills, if provided for with basic infrastructural and amenities, the hundreds of enclaves, will keep improving their conditions, as they have always done. While no one can imagine what the neighbourhood may look in a couple of decades, it is certain to represent the city’s spirit like nothing else.
Click through for the references for Peter's post.]
References
Arputham, Jockin and Patel, Sheela. 2010. “Recent developments in plans for Dharavi and for the airport slums in Mumbai.” EnvironmentandUrbanization 22(2): 501-504.
Benjamin, Solomon. 2008. “Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs.” InternationalJournalofUrbanandRegionalResearch 32(3): 719-29.
Chalana, Manish. 2010. “Slumdogs vs. Millionaires: Balancing Urban Informality and Global Modernity in Mumbai, India.” JournalofArchitecturalEducation?(?): 25-37.
Fernando, Valerie. 2009. “In the Heart of Bombay: the Dharavi Slum.” Available online at esp.habitants.org. Accessed 20 June 2011.
Frenkel, Stephen and Kuruvilla, Sarosh. 2002. “Logics of Action, Globalization, and Changing Employment Relations in China, India, Malaysia, and the Philippines.” IndustrialandLaborRelationsReview 55(3): 387-412.
Grant, Richard and Nijman, Jan. 2003. “The Re-Scaling of Uneven Development in Ghana and India.” TijdschriftvoorEconomischeenSocialeGeografie 95(5): 467-481.
Harriss-White, Barbara. 2010. “Globalization, the Financial Crisis and Petty Commodity Production in India’s Socially Regulated Informal Economy”. In Bowles and Harriss.
Harriss-White, Barbara and Sinha, Anushree, eds. 2007. TradeLiberalizationandIndia’sInformalEconomy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mason, Paul. 8 August 2011. “Slumlands — filthy secret of the modern mega-city.” NewStatesman. Available online at http://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2011/08/slum-city-manila-gina-estero.
Nijman, Jan. 2009. “A Study of Space in Mumbai’s Slums.” TijdschriftvoorEconomischeenSocialeGeografie 101(1): 4-17.
Patel, Sheela and Arputham, Jockin. 2007. “An offer of partnership or a promise of conflict in Dharavi, Mumbai?” EnvironmentandUrbanization 19(2): 501-508.
Patel, Sheela and Arputham, Jockin. 2008. “Plans for Dharavi: negotiating a reconciliation between a state-driven market redevelopment and residents’ aspirations.” EnvironmentandUrbanization. 20(1): 243-253.
Patel, Sheela, Arputham, Jockin, Burra, Sundar and Savchuk, Katia. 2009. “Getting the information base for Dharavi’s redevelopment.” EnvironmentandUrbanization 21(1): 241-251.
Patel, Shirish. 2010. “Dharavi: Makeover or Takeover?” EconomicandPoliticalWeekly 45(24): 47-54.
Rani, Uma and Unni, Jeemol. 2009. “Do Economic Reforms Influence Home-Based Work? Evidence from India.” FeministEconomics 15(3): 191-225.
Sanyal and Bhattacharya. 2010. “Beyond the Factory: Globalization, Informalization of Production and the Changing Locations of Labour”. In Bowles and Harriss, eds. GlobalizationandLabourinChinaandIndia:ImpactsandResponses.
Sudarshan, Ratna, Vekataraman, Shanta and Bhandari, Laveesh. 2007. “Subcontracted homework in India: A case study of three sectors”. In Mehrotra and Biggeri: 173-209.
UNIFEM. 2000. APreliminaryStudyontheProductiveLinkagesofIndianIndustrywithHomebasedWomenWorkersthroughSubcontractingSystemsinManufacturingSector. New Delhi: United Nations Development Fund for Women.
United Nations. 2006. HumanDevelopmentReport2006. New York: United Nations Publishing.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division. 2010. WorldUrbanizationProspects:The2009Revision. New York: UN-Habitat Urban Info.
[An image from Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu's mayoral campaign.]
This past summer on Places, Rob Walker, one of the artists behind the “Hypothetical Development Organization”, penned a brief history of architecture fiction and discussed the even-briefer history of that organization. (The Hypothetical Development Organization was, if you are unfamiliar with it, a brief initiative which produced “hypothetical futures” for each of ten selected sites in New Orleans, with the proposals unbound “by rules relating to commercial potential, practical materials, or physics”.) My favorite thing that Walker does in the essay is tracing the essential vein of weirdness that links the fiction produced by the Hypothetical Development Organization to the ordinary and common development signs that inspired the project:
“One day I went for a routine walk. My wife and I live in Savannah, GA, in an area that’s mostly residential, but interspersed with commercial and public buildings. It’s a nice stroll to an excellent bakery, my bank, a convenience store, the main branch of the public library.
Our neighborhood is the sort that people describe as “transitional,” and some of the property, both residential and commercial, is vacant. On one nearby commercial structure, vacant for the four-plus years we’ve lived in the area, I noticed a sign during this particular walk. You’ve seen similar signs, and I’d seen this one probably a hundred times, without ever really thinking about it. It was a rendering of a development, a future, involving a small, empty building. It suddenly struck me that, given how long this sign has been here, what it depicted was, at best, a hypothetical future — and arguably a fictitious one.
Since whenever this sign was first posted, the real estate market has collapsed, the old go-go economy has evaporated, and as it happens this building has been put up for sale. Any development that may take place some day would depend on someone buying it, and on what that party might want to do. Until then, it’s just another empty building that happens to have a sign on it. The disparity between the rendering and reality is considerable: In the rendering, in fact, the actual extant structure has been folded into a much bigger building, which in point of fact exists nowhere besides that rendering. In real life, it’s a vacant lot.
It further struck me that there are vacant buildings much like this one, with no definitive future, all over town — all over lots of towns. In a sense, then, our city streets are full of fiction, or something very much like it. The stories, mostly visual, are told in the form of colorful signs attached to drab or neglected structures, presenting speculations about how the very same physical place might look in some unspecified future. The abandoned office tower could house airy condos. The long-shuttered auto shop might morph into a gleaming boutique. The factory built for some bankrupt enterprise will, perhaps, burst with life again, its cheery mixed uses enjoyed by stock-image people representing a cross-section of pleasant citizenry. Sometimes these ideas are punctuated by the name of a development company and its Web address. But the story flows mostly from the beguiling picture, showing what could hypothetically happen, right here.”
This seems both fantastic — recognizing the strangeness of ordinary things examined closely — and exactly right to me — recognizing the fundamental similarity in genre between Archigram and Forest City, regardless of the massive differences in how they work within that genre.
It also reminds me of the story of the Turkish real estate agent Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu, who we read about in Emre Alturk’s contribution to Al Manakh 2, “Dubai, Copied and Pasted”. You might say that, like Walker, Gökçeoğlu recognized something of the unrealized potential of the development sign as a fiction. And, also like the story of the Hypothetical Development Organization, Gökçeoğlu’s story indicates the power of telling stories not as “a series of words”, but through “plans, schematics, models, renderings”.
Unlike Walker, though, Gökçeoğlu was not satisfied to let his pictures simply tell a story. He ran for office on them:
“In January 2009, Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu, a local real estate agent running for mayor of Cesme, Turkey, publicized his campaign throughout the town in billboards and pamphlets. His vision for the future of this Izmir borough was to make it the Dubai of Turkey, literally. The imagery he deployed constituted aerial pictures of this touristic peninsula, fashioned with many projects previously proposed for Dubai including; an identical replica of the Palm Island, along with a tower of independently rotating floors to be the tallest in the world; a yacht marina, similarly to be the largest in the world; and an UFO shaped restaurant hovering meters above the ground. It wasn’t long before the ‘most eccentric campaign of the elections’, as it was called by the media, made it to the national newspapers accompanied with snide remarks. The imagery of the campaign circulated via email for weeks. Eventually Gökçeoğlu wasn’t even close to securing the candidate post in his party — the ruling Justice and Development Party. Enjoying a brief media attention, the campaign lived a short life in the absence of an endorsing sheik, money, public support, legislative basis and tax policies to attract desired foreign investment, or any substantial program for that matter.
There is hardly much to take seriously about the campaign. But, wildly unfounded as it is, it does bring two things to mind. First of all, it is striking that it caught a wide public attention at all. Gökçeoğlu’s vision would have hardly found any audience beyond the small crowd that he is probably able to gather in a political rally, if it weren’t for the images. It took him a — probably cracked — copy of Photoshop, some images pulled off the net, some hours of labor, and a modest capital to render this speculative agenda visible and palpable, thus mobilizing more attention and reaction…”
[Also on Places, the second installment in Mimi Zeiger's "The Interventionist's Toolkit" looked at the Hypothetical Development Organization as one of a series of "posters, pamphlets, and guides" occupying one niche in the world of "Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism". (This niche is not unrelated to the nascent genre of the urban field manual.) In BLDGBLOG post entitled "Urban Hypotheticals", Geoff Manaugh both describes the Hypothetical Development Organization and discusses more generally the potential uses and abuses of such speculative architectural projects.]
“Secret Servers”, an article by James Bridle originally published in issue 099 of Icon magazine, looks at the relationship between architecture and the physical infrastructure of the internet. I found Bridle’s last few paragraphs particularly provocative:
“What is at stake is the way in which architects help to define and shape the image of the network to the general public. Datacenters are the outward embodiment of a huge range of public and private services, from banking to electronic voting, government bureaucracy to social networks. As such, they stand as a new form of civic architecture, at odds with their historical desire for anonymity.
Facebook’s largest facility is its new datacenter in Prineville, Oregon, tapping into the same cheap electricity which powers Google’s project in The Dalles. The social network of more than 600 million users is instantiated as a 307,000 square foot site currently employing over 1,000 construction workers—which will dwindle to just 35 jobs when operational. But in addition to the $110,000 a year Facebook has promised to local civic funds, and a franchise fee for power sold by the city, comes a new definition for datacenters and their workers, articulated by site manager Ken Patchett: “We’re the blue collar guys of the tech industry, and we’re really proud of that. This is a factory. It’s just a different kind of factory then you might be used to. It’s not a sawmill or a plywood mill, but it’s a factory nonetheless.”
This sentiment is echoed in McDonald’s description of “a new age industrial architecture”, of cities re-industrialised rather than trying to become “cultural cities”, a modern Milan emphasising the value of engineering and the craft and “making” inherent in information technology and digital real estate.
The role of the architect in the new digital real estate is to work at different levels, in Macdonald’s words “from planning and building design right down to cultural integration with other activities.” The cloud, the network, the “new heavy industry”, is reshaping the physical landscape, from the reconfiguration of Lower Manhattan to provide low-latency access to the New York Stock Exchange, to the tangles of transatlantic fiber cables coming ashore at Widemouth Bay, an old smuggler’s haunt on the Cornish coast. A formerly stealth sector is coming out into the open, revealing a tension between historical discretion and corporate projection, and bringing with it the opportunity to define a new architectural vocabulary for the digitised world.”
Though Bridle does not make this link explicit in the article, the idea of a potential “new architectural vocabulary” is clearly related to the “New Aesthetic” that Bridle began talking about this past May. (I’ve always liked Matt Berg’s description of it as a “sensor vernacular”, and Robin Sloan’s “digital backwash aesthetic”. I’m not sure either of those capture exactly what Bridle’s been talking about — more like pieces of it — but they all dance around the same set of things, or at least similar sets.) Here’s Bridle’s original description, pinched together:
For so long we’ve stared up at space in wonder, but with cheap satellite imagery and cameras on kites and RC helicopters, we’re looking at the ground with new eyes, to see structures and infrastructures.
The map fragments, visible at different resolutions, accepting of differing hierarchies of objects.
Views of the landscape are superimposed on one another. Time itself dilates.
Representations of people and of technology begin to break down, to come apart not at the seams, but at the pixels.
The rough, pixelated, low-resolution edges of the screen are becoming in the world.
And when that — a new aesthetic vocabulary — gets linked to a “re-industrialization”, pulling together aesthetics, culture, economics, and politics, you’ve got a pretty significant project. I’d like to talk about this at more length later, but for now I will just quote from Dan Hill’s fantastic 14 Cities project. (Independent of the concerns in this post, the whole project is worth a read.) This is the fourth of the fourteen fictional future cities Hill describes, “Re-industrial City”:
“The advances in various light manufacturing technologies throughout the early part of the 21st century — rapid prototyping, 3D printing and various local clean energy sources — enabled a return of industry to the city. Noise, pollution and other externalities were so low as to be insignificant, and allied to the nascent interest in digitally-enabled craft at the turn of the century, by the early 2020s suburbs had become light industrial zones once again.
Waterloo, Alexandria and the Inner West of Sydney through to Pyrmont once again became a thriving manufacturing centre, albeit on a domestic scale, as people were able to ‘micro-manufacture’ products from their backyard, or send designs to mass-manufacture hubs supported by logistics networks of electric delivery vans and trains. Melbourne had led the way through its nurturing of production in the creative industries and its existing built fabric.
In an ironic twist, former warehouses and factories are being partially converted from apartments back into warehouses and factories. Yet the domestic scale of the technologies means they can coexist with living spaces, actually suggesting a return to the craftsman’s studio model of the Middle Ages. The ‘faber’ movement — faber, to make — spread through most Australian cities, with the ‘re-industrial city’ as the result, a genuinely mixed-use productive place — with an identity.”
[Cellular confinement systems were originally developed by the Army Corps of Engineers to facilitate the quick construction of temporary roads for heavy military vehicles; photograph from a Neoloy brochure.]
In a remote polar region, there is a small country that is rarely visited by outsiders. On the advice of a rogue Army Corps of Engineers liason — who was attached to the American embassy there in the mid-seventies and forgotten when the embassy was closed a decade later, but who, through his close relationship with the country’s ruling party, has become the country’s Minister of Internal Improvements — all of the nation’s roads are constructed using built-to-fail cellular confinement systems. What this means, of course, is that the nation’s roads are completely ephemeral, constantly appearing, disappearing, and re-appearing in response to the whims of commerce, the dictates of the Ministry, or even the happy mistakes of mis-directed or confused systems crews. You drive in to lead a medical clinic, and two years later, when you go to leave, the road you came in on has disappeared. Or zags northwest instead of northeast.
Maps of the nation’s roads are thus out of date as quickly as they are drawn, though it should be noted that clever cartographers have taken to color-coding the lines for roads based on their expected date of expiration.
[Building 20 at MIT, a "250,000-square foot wood building [that] hosted the development of many important research disciplines from Chomskyan linguistics to the new style of computing promoted by early hackers”.]
…startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got around, companies started copying the formula. They stuck stylized cube farms into faux warehouses and figured that would work. The coolness of these operations would help them look cool and retain employees. Keep scaling that idea up and you get Apple’s ultrahip mega headquarters, which is part spaceship and part Apple Store.
But as Stewart Brand argued in his pathbreaking essay, “‘Nobody Cares What You Do in There’: The Low Road,” it’s not hip buildings that foster creativity but crappy ones.
“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”
Brand’s essay originally appeared in his book, How Buildings Learn, and has just been re-released as part of The Innovator’s Cookbook, a new Steven Johnson-edited tome of great essays about inventing stuff. It couldn’t come at a better time. The aesthetic of innovation now dominates the startup scene, but it’s like the skeleton of a long-dead invention beast. The point of a Low Road building isn’t that it looks any particular way but rather that you could do anything with and in them. “It has to do with freedom,” as Brand put it.
While Madrigal is writing for the Atlantic‘s Technology channel, and is consequently concerned with Low Road buildings as the places in which technological innovation happens, the thing that interests me here is what the Low Road building says about architecture. That is, if Building 20 is where innovation happens, but Apple’s megaheadquarters are where architects get involved, then is architecture’s relationship to innovation merely that architects get involved with an organization after it has lost the capacity to innovate? Is architecture’s relationship with innovative organizations primarily that it instantiates their ossification?
2. Or is there a role for architects to play in the spatial structuring of innovative and vibrant organizations? If so, what does this architecture look like? Madrigal and Brand suggest that, whatever this architecture might be, it certainly doesn’t look like Norman Foster and Frank Gehry — whatever the merits of their work may be.
“Brand uses this point about the endless productivity of these old spaces to reinforce one of Jane Jacobs: that new ideas generally can’t come from new buildings (The Death and Life of Great American Cities). However, if the Smithsons had attempted to design Sheffield University – a defiantly new building – with the characteristics Brand was looking for in old buildings, perhaps the situation is more subtle than Brand and Jacobs suggest? One hopes so, as much as it makes good sense to reuse suitable old built environment. There are strong ideas in Gehry’s building, in terms of creating ‘trading zones’ forcing disciplines together (more on this theme in a forthcoming entry on Richard MacCormac’s new Broadcasting House building) and it’s important to resist forgoing innovation and modernity in such buildings in favour of simply lobbing up portakabins for the sake of ongoing adaptability. Adaptability and modernity surely needn’t be mutually exclusive.”
3. Commenting on Madrigal’s piece, Bill Woods adds a quote from C. Northcote Parkinson’s Parkinson’s Law:
It is now known that a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse. This apparently paradoxical conclusion is based upon a wealth of archaeological and historical research, … A study and comparison of these [buildings] has tended to prove that perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death.
Satirical or not, it seems that there is a useful lesson for architects in this, as it would be terrifically sad if we defined architecture so that great architecture is possible only in an era of decay.
4. Finally, I’m reminded of a comment that Bryan Boyer made in an extended discussion at Rory Hyde’s blog at the beginning of the year. Boyer described his thesis work (which proposed a new capitol for the United States) as being an investigation into “the organizational consequences of spatial decisions made without any spatial understanding”. It seems to me that, if there is a role for architects to play in the life of organizations or institutions which find themselves in “a period of exciting discovery or progress”, it will almost certainly involve understanding the organizational consequences of spatial decisions — and being able to demonstrate convincingly that architects bring a kind of understanding to those decisions that will improve them as they are made.
This week, I’ve organized a short (very short) lecture series for the students in my studio (well, the “Post-Natural Ecologies” half of the studio) at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center.
Tuesday at 5:15, Fred Scharmen (sevensixfive/the Working Group on Adaptive Systems) will give a talk entitled “Soft Sites”, examining four sites on the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, which are “all located at the intersections of infrastructure, industry, and commerce”. Though these sites are seemingly “castoffs”, Fred argues that “closer examination reveals a more complicated reality – [they] are in fact mirrors of their surroundings, visible evidence of the shifting political, economic, environmental and cultural interests that compete to determine the creation of new space and development”.
Friday at 4:00, Brett Milligan (Free Association Design) will speak on “Landscapes of Dredge: Cycles and Choreography”, looking at the industrial act of dredging as a component of a wider system of anthropogenically-accelerated sediment handling processes which generate a fascinating array of diverse and bizarre landscapes. (Brett is based in Portland, Oregon, and will be joining us via the internet.)
While this is rather late notice, both of the lectures are free, so if you’re in the DC area either tomorrow (Tuesday 25 October) or Friday (28 October), feel free to stop by — as the poster above says, we’ll be in the Red Room of the WAAC (1001 Prince Street).
Carl’s map marks the location of each of the volcanic craters that dot the surface of Auckland. The craters exhibit a fascinating variety: some have been heavily altered by mining operations (which particularly seek volcanic scoria, a type of rock suitable for use in landscaping and drainage construction); others have been “subsumed by suburbia”, as Carl puts it; still others are wholly or nearly wholly intact, protected by the 1915 “Reserves and Other Lands Disposal and Public Bodies Empowering Act” and their own insuitability for development.
A while ago, I wrote a post called “recreational volcanism”, about the possibility that there might be a
…city [which], being built atop dormant volcanoes, has reserved the most unstable districts of the city as municipal parks. Whose landscape architects have been called upon to design access systems for these geological freakologies, these unstable geysers, mud pots, fumaroles, and hot springs which sit between broad avenues, kvartals, dense clusters of towering buildings, and whose citizens frequent its public parks not for bucolic relaxation but for sublime thrills.
Auckland isn’t quite that city; but, perched atop its still-active volcanic field, it’s the closest thing I’ve seen.
[Facade of Pharos Building, Hoofddorp, Vanessa van Dam, 2002 -- never realized.]
Given our recent thinking about the role of maintenance in urban design, I was quite interested when I noticed, in a couple-year-old copy of 306090, an article by Hilary Sample (of MOS) on the potential of maintenance in architecture. The piece, “Towers, Maintenance, and the Desire for Effortless Performance”, is well-worth reading in full, but I’ll quote one section, which deals with the project pictured above:
“Architecture relies upon a never-ending regime of labor called maintenance. The purpose of maintenance is to restore newness to architecture by offsetting the effects of climate, environment, and time — it is an ongoing and continuous act. Within crowded urban environments, where maintenance is unavoidably public, it has become a spectacle in its own right, fuelled by new technologies and novel techniques. This spectacle is especially evident at the site of large transparent exterior surfaces, where the distinct machines, apparatuses, materials, and techniques of maintenance have become part of the image of the city…
Artist Vanessa van Dam’s window washing installation at the Pharos Office Tower (2003) near Amsterdam by Kohn Pederson Fox Architects, offers one such critique on the anonymous glass office building. To explore the relationship between architecture and maintenance, van Dam proposed the installation of 85 industrial-sized window wipers typically found on airplanes and lighthouses. While the project was never built, the wipers were designed to respond to a programmed script activated by sensors in tune with shifting local weather conditions. The synchronicity of the mechanical facade in action, ever vigilant against the effects of weather and dirt, embodies the modernist injunction of cleanliness in robotic hyperactivity. The addition of the black and heavy arms on the light glass and aluminum facade brings maintenance to the foreground, revealed as an object of a mechanized fantasy that threatens to overtake the architecture itself.”
Of course, the relationship of maintenance to buildings and landscapes is potentially quite different. Where, as Sample notes, maintenance has the potential to reveal architecture “at its most vulnerable: weak and prone to constant decay”, what has excited us about maintenance in relationship to landscape is just the opposite: the potential of maintenance, as an on-going act of intentional cultivation, to harness the capability of landscape to become more complex and more productive over time, rather than decaying inexorably. (That the traditional landscape capital project typically follows, albeit at a slower pace — first building towards maturity, before entering decline — the same pathways as buildings is, in fact, entirely the point, because it is that trajectory that we set out find alternatives to.) It is more difficult to imagine maintenance playing this role in relationship to buildings, but that does nothing to diminish the value of the investigations Sample suggests.
[Homes on the outskirts of Shanghai, via Google Maps.]
A recent report in the New York Times which looks at global marriage patterns from an economic perspective contains the following fascinating excerpt, which indicates that China’s one-child policy, “combined with a cultural preference for sons and technologies that permit selective abortion”, has indirectly produced a proliferation of phantom third floors on Chinese houses:
…evidence suggests that young Chinese women and their families have in fact become much more selective in recent years.
They appear, for example, to focus more critically on the earnings potential of prospective mates. Because house size is often assumed to be a reliable signal of wealth, a family can enhance its son’s marriage prospects by spending a larger fraction of its income on housing. (Other families can follow the same strategy, of course, but when all families do so, the resulting homes are still reliable indicators of relative wealth.) Such a shift appears to have occurred.
For example, when Shang-Jin Wei, an economist at Columbia University, and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute examined the size distribution of Chinese homes, they found that families with sons built houses that were significantly larger than those built by families with daughters, even after controlling for family income and other factors. They also generally found that the higher a city’s male-to-female ratio, the bigger the average house size of families that have sons.
Mr. Wei reports that many families with sons have begun to add a phantom third story to their homes, one that looks normal from the outside but whose interior space remains completely unfinished.
“Marriage brokers are familiar with the tactic,” he reports, “yet many refuse to schedule meetings with a family’s son unless the family house has three stories.”
This — a kind of architectural extension of ritual courting displays — could be read as an odd corollary to the American predilection for viewing the home primarily as an investment strategy, which mammoth has previously written about. In both cases, the home’s function as shelter (or machine for living) is subsumed by its financial potential, whether it serves to display wealth or produce it — and it would be quite interesting to learn if this shift in the function of the home has had the kind of bizarre side-effects in China that it has had in the States.
We recently wrote a brief piece, “Appeal”, for the excellent architecture journal Quaderns in response to their most recent issue, “Parainfrastructures”. We used this response as an opportunity to consider why we are so drawn to infrastructural landscapes like Blue Plains — not just as sites of logistical and technological operations, but aesthetically as well:
Let us suppose for a moment that the “Parainfrastructures” whichQuaderns #262 concerns itself with are a class of things, that object-parodying helium balloons hovering around Heathrow Airport to block its expansion, inflatable “instant cities” powered by air compressors, “geodesic domes, parachutes, spray-foam dwellings, zomes, space frames”, “indoor built and ephemeral complexes” colonizing the open floor plans of abandoned airports, and architectural systems of “air control” can be read as a category of architectural objects called “parainfrastructures”. Even though we will be supposing in error—because “Parainfrastructures” never seeks to delineate its subject matter by so crude a means as a definition—this seems a productive error, because it permits us to see a pervasive weirdness.
This weirdness, in the context of architectural critique, is that parainfrastructures paradoxically gain their strength and appeal from having been designed with a certain disregard for aesthetics. Parainfrastructures are constructed out of the banal materials of twentieth-century industrial innovation like synthetic fabrics, geotextiles, and industrial plastics, not the refined and expensive finishes of high-corporate architecture. Structurally, they depend on ties, straps, bendable rods, and air compressors—temporary, flexible, contingent engineering.
Read the whole piece at Quaderns and, while you’re there, think about ordering the full issue; it’s well worth your time, as it features contributions from John May, Enrique Ramirez, Roger Sauquet, Javier García-Germán, and more.
1 If you haven’t already read it, be sure to check out Peter Nunns’ post from Tuesday on “fecal politics”, which deals with exactly these issues of poverty, fecal matter, infrastructure, and agency in India.
“Shitscape” describes “the making of an entirely functioning landscape built from human excreta”. It proposes to accomplish this by recovering “the ‘soil’ from the settlements while extracting the beneficial flora from the forest and, in turn, utilize both as a generator for a new and evolving landscape”. The project aims to give “those living in peri-urban” Mumbai the capacity to relieve their own ”conditions of poverty” by providing a structure within which “they participate in the creation, processing and profits of this landscape”1.
Analysis of the existing site; areas currently used for toileting are shown as gray fields. (All the images in this post can be enlarged by clicking on them.)
The site for the project is the Appapada Quarry, which sits between “the northern Mumbai suburb of Malad East” and “a hillside of informal settlements”. “In the middle of the quarry is the large Appapada Maidan, used by kids and adults from varying parts of northern Mumbai. Several areas in and around the quarry environs are used for toileting by the local populace”.
Section of composting toilet unit above quarry wall.
Section above quarry wall with water catchment and filtration system.
“‘Shitscape’ proposes three major introductory insertions: constructed trench-like composting toilets, a stone pathway traversing quarry wall and stone ‘tanks’ for the retention of water. Other minor insertions should include a slow-sand filter for availability of potable water, a grove of both coconuts and bananas to help begin the functioning of the landscape and pit toilets for use during the monsoon season.”
By infrastructural, I mean that it seeks to construct a framework which can be inserted into the landscape and used to trigger generative effects within that landscape; by generative, I refer to the tendency of landscape to multiply, transform, and alter the inputs it receives. The construction of toilets, a pathway, a filter, and retention tanks does not directly produce a new fertile terrain. (One way, for instance, that a new fertile terrain could be directly produced would be by importing a carefully specified topsoil, as in the average landscape capital project. This is exactly what Betnar does not propose.) Rather, those infrastructures transform an input — feces — into a substance — compost — that can be applied to the landscape over time, introducing a new process to the set of processes already operating on that landscape, and creating what Betnar calls the shitscape.
Stone swales, sluices, concrete channels, contour swales, and fencing — the infrastructural vernacular of Shitscape.
The planting scheme focuses on creating an economically productive landscape, bearing fruits, timber, and Ayurvedic medicines.
Laudably, a significant portion of the Betnar’s study is devoted to considering both the potential progression of the landscape through time and its capacity to serve as a prototype for similar future landscapes:
“With water, improved soil, food supplies and the resiliency of the local population, this landscape can evolve throughout time to accommodate more varieties of produce and the potentially profitable growing of timber and Ayurvedic plant material. Additions to the water and toilet systems can be made as required by the local community. If this landscape is to be a success, it will need not only the inputs from the community, but their ingenuity in adapting the plan to their own uses. As such, it is hoped that this landscape could be maintained through multi-family networks, much like a village system. This project is designed as a prototype scenario which, if successful, could be repeated elsewhere along the western edge of the park.”
This describes one of the significant advantages of working infrastructurally and utilizing the generative capacity of landscape: because those methodologies offer opportunities to transform seemingly useless inputs into valuable material outputs, they are particularly valuable to people who lack the capacity to take advantage of more capital-intensive modes of landscape transformation.
Graphs representing “a temporal evolution of the site”, including the toileting and composting process, “development of the site’s water and pedestrian infrastructure”, and plant cultivations. Enlarge the image to read the diagrams; note that the two diagrams — columns one and three are one continuous diagram of “Settlement: Soil”, read top to bottom through column one and then top to bottom in column three; columns two and four (“Forest: Monsoon”) have the same relationship — are keyed to the plan diagram below.
Top, diagram of site evolution, that serves as key for the diagram above; bottom, combined diagram of site circulation and water flow in the proposed condition.
Last spring, Mammoth visited the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant. This massive facility — which claims to be the largest plant of its particular kind in the world — exists to remove the solids that the 2 million residents of Washington, D.C. and surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia introduce into wastewater from their parking lots, their laundry, and their toilets.
Blue Plains creates clean water by refining influent, removing particles of ever-decreasing physical scale. It separates true waste components from useful nutrients from clean water. Facilities like Blue Plains — not just sewer and wastewater treatment, but garbage dumps, power plants, distribution centers, ports, and a thousand others — are both massive and critical to the function of cities, yet often have minimal visibility. This lack of visibility can be intensely problematic, particularly in a democratic society, because it distances the public both from the utility of infrastructural facilities — which often translates into neglect and a lack of will to develop and execute long-term vision — and from any problems those facilities might create through their operation — again, resulting in a failure to improve or re-think those infrastructures.
A key theme in the contemporary operation of many infrastructural facilities, and of Blue Plains in particular, which deserves this visibility is a growing shift from linear processes (extraction, use, disposal) toward cyclical processes (use, extraction, re-use). In an article called “Landscapes of Disassembly” in Topos 60, Pierre Belanger describes this transition:
“Though the economic and ecological histories of Europe, Asia and North America may differ, they all present compelling examples for understanding the latent reciprocity between industry, waste and urbanism. As a result of global legislation – such as the 1992 Basel Convention that prohibited the transnational movement of hazardous wastes – the pre-eminence of waste colonialismin the 20th century is now a thing of the past. Multilateral strategies, including waste diversion, separation, recycling, composting and remanufacturing, are proving effective as durable alternatives to conventional systems of waste management that previously relied on consolidated forms of disposal. With skyrocketing costs of mining, surging fuel prices and growing patterns of urbanization, exhausted economies are being jumpstarted through combined strategies of economic regeneration and ecological reclamation, where water, land, energy and waste are becoming the bedrock of a new world economy. Dismantling the Old World notion of the city, urban-industrial synergies never before possible are forming beyond metropolitan areas, signaling the birth of a new and diffused urban economic pattern that is best described as an operational ecology held together by supply chains and distribution networks.”
1Scott Huler explains this in his fascinating On the Grid, quoting a Raleigh wastewater treatment superintendent T.J. Lynch:
“All we’re doing is what a river would do… what happens in our plant is the exact same thing that happens in a stream. That’s exactly where the process came from. We’ve just concentrated it. It might take the river a couple hundred miles to accomplish what we’d do in a couple days.”
While it’s obvious that a treatment plant handles water in this fashion (indeed, the reason plants like this were first developed was to combat the severe pollution of waterways where waste water was disposed, and the process of waste water treatment mimics — in an accelerated fashion — the natural cleaning processes of waterbodies1), this isn’t the only cycle Blue Plains engages. Take, for instance, this excerpt from a Foreign Policy essay about peak phosphorous, followed by two quotes from our tour guide:
“From Kansas to China’s Sichuan province, farmers treat their fields with phosphorus-rich fertilizer to increase the yield of their crops. What happens next, however, receives relatively little attention. Large amounts of this resource are lost from farm fields, through soil erosion and runoff, and down swirling toilets, through our urine and feces. Although seemingly mundane, this process cannot continue indefinitely. Our dwindling supply of phosphorus, a primary component underlying the growth of global agricultural production, threatens to disrupt food security across the planet during the coming century. This is the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.”
2Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are paraphrased statements from our tour guide.
‘In 30 years, OPEC will stand for Organization of Phosphorous Exporting Countries.’ 2
‘Wastewater treatment plants are estimated to control 20% of all agricultural nutrients in the United States.’
Blue plains doesn’t just process water — it also processes all of the things that we put into water, which are very often things we need back. Our tour guide said that he preferred to think of Blue Plains as a ‘nutrient reclamation facility’ instead of merely wastewater treatment. This seems apt. Many of the newest and most impressive technologies we saw weren’t so much about making the cleanest water possible — these facilities have been very good at that for some time — but about refining what they pull from the water into a useful substance (such as biosolids for use in agriculture and brownfield rehabilitation) or processing unusable byproducts more efficiently.
And so our blog tour is split into two parts. The first, making liquids more liquid, traces water refinement, which culminates in discharge into the Potomac. The second, making solids more solid, is about the cycles within the wastewater treatment cycle, about how we reclaim valuable matter from our feces and runoff, and configure that matter for re-use.
A final note before we begin the tour: it’s worth keeping in mind Peter Nunns’s post on fecal politics in India as you read this. The contrast here — between the struggle for something so basic as access to adequate sanitary facilities and the incredible technological forces brought to the refinement and reclamation of water and useful material from wastewater here — is as clear an example as any of the way treatment of feces mirrors a society’s values, wealth, and technological capabilities.
Satellite view of the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Aerial view of the facility from the south looking north. The dark blue spot in the water, just above the dock about halfway down the facility along the coast, is the outflow point for all treated water – note the change in water color downstream. This change in color is even more noticeable in the satellite photo above.
Simplified diagram showing the wastewater treatment processes at Blue Plains, courtesy of District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority.
MAKING LIQUIDS MORE LIQUID headworks
One of two headworks buildings, which contain the influent screens that remove loose garbage from the influent (our largest class of solids), the first of two pumping processes which allow the water to gravity-feed across the blue plains landscape through the refinement stages, and the sand and grit removal operation. This is called the ‘preliminary screening process.’
(Note: all of these aerial photos can be clicked for a larger view, some larger than others.)
6 mm screens rotate up through the influent, removing garbage and placing it onto conveyors which place it into trucks that take it to the dump. Although Virginia has a waste-to-energy facility in Lorton run by Covanta Energy, garbage removed from waste and sewage water has too much moisture to be efficiently burned.
Some of the worst contaminants are removed before they ever reach Blue Plains, through metro-wide pretreatment processes that occur on-site at the locations which produce them. Industrial facilities (and others) are under regulatory requirements to meet limits developed for nine heavy metals, cyanide, non-polar oil and grease, and pH.
Unless otherwise noted, all site photography and videos are by mammoth.
In the next room over, a series of massive electric pumps pull up influent from deep underground pipes to an elevation from which it is then gravity fed through the rest of screening, primary treatment, secondary processing, and nitrification / denitrification.
Blue Plains opened in 1935, and was originally designed to handle 120 million gallons per day (MGD). Today, it can pump up to 1000 MGD, and can process 370 MGD. This is sufficient processing capacity for treating water during all but the most dramatic flow events. However, the facility is occasionally overwhelmed, and has to pump water straight through to the Potomac untreated. To fix this problem, DC Water is implementing the “Long Term Control Plan” — a $1.8bn storage system to be constructed over the next 20 years. It will be an incredibly large pipe — 11 miles long, approximately 20ft wide — running back up the Anacostia River and into DC. This pipe will hold overflow beyond what facility can treat during massive runoff events until system is back below capacity, permitting Blue Plains to avoid dumping sewage and untreated runoff into river. It is expected to eliminate 97% of untreated waste overflow issues.
One of the air brakes between the screening/pumping building and the sand and grit removal building; the air brakes stop water from running backwards through a pump when it isn’t in operation.
‘everything, every 20 years’
(Our guide discussing replacement and maintenance of equipment, by which he means virtually every component other than the structural core of the buildings.)
Adjacent to the screening process is the ‘aerated grit filtration room’ which removes sand, grit, eggshells, coffee grounds, and many other primarily inorganic particles by blasting air through the water to disturb these particles so they settle to the bottom, where some 8,000 tons are removed each year.
This room hosts a portion of what might be our favorite cycle that Blue Plains is plugged into, which might be called the Pothole Cycle. Because of the District’s combined sewer system (stormwater and wastewater use the same set of pipes), all of D.C.’s potholes — or, more specifically, the materials washed out of them — go here. As roads and highways break down, their aggregate erodes, enters the sewer system, and is eventually carried in stormwater to this room. Here, that aggregate is collected from the stormwater, sold to manufacturers of asphalt and concrete, and re-distributed — perhaps even used to patch the very holes created by that aggregate’s erosion.
This room smells terrible, and utilizes an astonishing amount of airflow to keep smells down (you barely notice it outside of the building). Massive air turnover is the most effective way to minimize the nasty scents that are associated with facilities like Blue Plains and, consequently, perhaps the most significant energy use at the facility has to do with blowing air instead of pumping water.
primary treatment sedimentation tanks
Influent arrives into the primary treatment tanks, the aerated excitement of grit filtration exchanged for placid pools content to wait out the dissolved solids, floatable solids, settleable solids, suspended solids, colloidal solids which remain in the water. Settleable organic solids (called primary sludge) collect at the bottom, and fats, oils and grease (called primary scum) are skimmed off top of the tanks. Sludge is diverted to gravity sludge thickeners and scum to floatation thickeners, which will be discussed in second half of this post, ‘making solids more solid’.
secondary treatment reactors
The rest of the liquidification processes, until final filtration and chlorination, follow the same general methodology: do something to the influent (aerate, add microbes, add nitrates, etc), wait for that to cause more things to drop out of the water (which are then shifted to the sludge track), then take that slightly cleaner influent and do something else to it (or repeat the process). Secondary treatment is focused on removing dissolved and suspended solids by introducing a cocktail of microbes that like to eat the various organic solids left in the water, or otherwise process them into something that can be pulled into the sludge stream. This occurs in the secondary treatment reactors, where re-aerated influent has the microbe ecologies introduced.
Inside a pump building, which supplies the massive final aeration of the influent before it enters secondary treatment.
One of the Volkswagon-sized Centrifugal Pumps, dissassembled for maintenance.
As the processes are largely outdoors, junk can get back into the water. It collects at various dead spots in the facility, and is re-routed back to the beginning of the process.
secondary treatment sedimentation Tanks
After exiting the reactors, polymers are added to the influent before it flows gently through a long series of sedimentation tanks. As sludge settles to the bottom, some is sent back through the secondary reactors, and some is sent to floatation thickening. Water, now called secondary effluent, is sent to the advanced treatment processes of nirtification, denitrification, filtration and disinfection.
The channel which takes water from the sedimentation tanks to the nitrification/denitrification tanks.
nitrification/denitrification
“Nitrification, denitrification, and filtration processes establish Blue Plains as an advanced wastewater treatment facility.
In secondary treatment, nitrogen in the organic material is converted to ammonia, a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen. The nitrification process converts ammonia in wastewater to nitrates. While ammonia in high concentrations can be toxic to some aquatic species, nitrogen in the form of nitrates is not toxic, but is algae food and can lead to algae blooms, depriving aquatic life of oxygen. Denitrification is the process of converting nitrate into harmless nitrogen gas.” [From DC Water literature on Blue Plains.]
Click to enlarge, and get a sense of how deep the empty tanks near the middle of the image are.
“Denitrification requires the absence of dissolved oxygen. This forces the microbes to consume the oxygen in nitrates for respiration and release nitrogen gas into the air. This process is acheived in the same tank as nitrification, but the nitrification process is aerated (aerobic), while the denitrification section is un-aerated (anoxic).” [From DC Water literature on Blue Plains.]
aerobic = nitrification –>
anoxic = denitrification –>
A drained tank, showing their depth and sludge settlement at the bottom. source
Play at home! Can you label all of these different Blue Plains landscape features? [Click me I'm huge.]
final filtration and chlorination
Influent comes out at the end of the denitrification tanks and comes across the channel in the bottom third of this image, to the pool at the base of multimedia filtration building. The second (and final) set of water pumps takes the influent, which has been gradually descending across the Blue Plains landscape since it was pumped out from deep underground at the headworks, up to the top level of the building, where it makes its way through a series of progressively finer filtration media consisting of anthracite and sand. Sodium hypochlorite is added at the beginning of this process to disinfect the water, and is removed prior to discharge by the addition of sodium bisulfite.
The pumps which raise the water to the top of the building are behind those roll-up doors.
Rear view of mammoth and Blue Plains tour guide ascending the stairs to the top of the multimedia filtration building.
discharge
Clean water is released under the surface of the Potomac, with little fanfare, out of a pipe that extends about a hundred feet from next to the small shack on the water’s edge.
The end of the line.
If you look closely, you can see the line between clean Blue Plains water, and the browner water of the Potomac coming from upstream.
The building which houses much of the rest of our adventure — sludge processing.
MAKING SOLIDS MORE SOLID gravity sludge thickeners
At every step of influent treatment (except chlorination), solids are removed in the form of a soupy sludge or scum, and diverted to the process we will now follow. It has two key goals.
First, remove as much water as possible: water is heavy, and whether the solids removed from influent are waste or reusable, that extra weight makes transporting them to their next destination more difficult and more expensive. Sludge begins this process at between 1% – 4.5% solid, which is about the consistency of chocolate milk, or a very soupy hummus. By the end of the process, it will be at about 30% solid — similar to a thick chocolate cake batter.
Second, separate waste elements (floatable solids like fat, grease and oils, as well as residual grit) from valuable elements which will be turned into boisolids returned to beneficial use in surrounding communities. This separation happens almost immediately after the primary treatment stage in the liquids process — sludge is passed through influent screens which strain any remaining grit, and scum skimmed from the surface of the tanks is thickened in a ‘rotating drum scum screen’ before it is loaded, along with the grit, into trucks which haul them to a landfill. The remainder of our tour is about the thickening of sludge into biosolids.
Gravity sludge thickeners are the first step. After grit screening, primary sludge is diverted here for thickening before they are mixed with other thickened solids (removed later in the liquid process) in the centrifuges for final dewatering.
dissolved air flotation tanks and centrifuge room
“Biological sludges and scum from the secondary and nitrification processes are directed to dissolved air flotation tanks, where the sludge stream is mixed with recycled water that is supersaturated with air under pressure. The mixture is released into the flotation tank where the supersaturated air forms micro bubbles that attach to the biomass and float it. The flotation-thickened sludge is then skimmed off the surface.” [From DC Water literature on Blue Plains.]
The skimmers move across the surface of the mixture on an armature similar to the wheel tracks of a tank. This is toward the front of the tank…
… and this is what it looks like at the other end, with the floatation thickened sludge having been dragged across the surface, concentrated and ready to be pumped into the centerfuges.
An empty thickening tank.
In the centrifuge room. Sludge and scum from the gravity thickening and aerated flotation skimming processes are mixed together and run through centrifuges, which take a substance approximately 5%-10% solid and remove water to until it is 30% solid.
A recent improvement at the facility was switching from a vacuum tube dewatering process (which only produced a 23% solid substance) to these centrifuges.
Lime stabilization alters the pH of the final biosolid and plays an important role in pathogen removal. One of the benefits of biosolids that have been stabilized using lime (in addition to nutrient replenishment) is the role they can play in pH remediation of brownfield sites which have excess acidity in their soils.
biosolids storage silo and loading
“The biosolids program is entirely focused on recycling an organic and nutrient-rich material in an environmantally safe and beneficial manner. All of the more than 1,200 tons of wet biosolids produced daily is reused through a diverse land application program that improves the soil for agricultural production, silviculture, mine reclamation, or other projects… The stabilized Biosolids are applied to agricultural land in more than 35 counties in Maryland and Virginia.” [From DC Water literature on Blue Plains.]
A challenge for the Blue Plains Biosolids program is ‘fecal fear.’ Blue Plains produces what are known as ‘Class B’ biosolids, which can only be used in agricultural applications that don’t directly produce food for humans – for example, they can’t be used to grow tomatos, but can be used to grow feed for cattle. The distribution of Class B biosolids is tightly controlled and monitored.
Blue Plains is planning the installation of cylindrical digesters, which will reduce the overall amount of biosolids (reducing trucking cost), improve the quality of biosolids to Class A, which can be used in farming processes that create food for humans, and produce methane, which can be used to generate around 50% of plants power need.
This is what it’s all about…
1,200 tons of biosolids per day (about 50-60 truckloads).
This is the concentrated fecal matter of Washington, D.C.
control center and electrical substation
The on-site substation which handles all power for Blue Plains. For redundancy, two power stations feed into it. The Blue Plains facility is the single largest electricity consumer in Washington, D.C., typically spending $700k – $800k per month.
Some years ago, a massive power outage was caused by truck transporting lime (we’ll learn about lime soon) which lost control of its load and coated the facilities electrical substation in the fine caustic powder, knocking it out for 18 hours — and bringing down a quarter of DC’s electricity with it.
The centralized monitoring and control center. The facility has approximately 30,000 input / output signals distributed across the landscape.
blue plains
[This concludes our tour of Blue Plains. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the fine people at Blue Plains for generously taking their time to show us around and answer all our questions.
In our experience, it isn't uncommon to be able to tour infrastructural facilities like this. We strongly encourage it, and hope to read dispatches from our infrastructural present by folks across the country.]
One of the more spectacular engineering accomplishments of the United States in the late nineteenth century was the reversal of the Chicago River. Through the construction of a series of canals — most notably, the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal, seen under construction in 1896 above — the river was made to flow not into Lake Michigan, as it did when Europeans arrived in Illinois, but away from Lake Michigan and towards the Mississippi, which it had not done since the area was covered by the prehistoric glacial Lake Chicago. As Scott Huler explains in On the Grid, this was done because of fecal matter: ”…the outfalls of the sewers made such a mess of Lake Michigan that during large rainstorms the plume of tainted water flowed all the way out to the intake for the water system”, contaminating the city’s water supply.
The following piece is a guest post from Peter Nunns. Peter is a recent graduate of the University of Auckland, with a MA in Political Science; mammoth readers may be familiar with him from his contributions to last summer’s discussion of the Infrastructural City. His current research interests include shelter and urban development challenges in developing-world cities, the rescaling of political economies, and the reconstitution of citizenship rights within the city. Peter hails from California, but now lives in his ancestral homeland of New Zealand.
The filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar, the auteur of the toilet documentary Bumbay, told a startled interviewer that in Bombay “half the population doesn’t have a toilet to shit in, so they shit outside. That’s five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that’s two and a half million kilos of shit each morning.” (Mike Davis, Planet of Slums: 142)
In India, where distance from one’s own excrement can be seen as the virtual marker of class distinction, the poor, for too long having lived literally in their own shit, are finding ways to place some distance between their waste and themselves. The toilet exhibitions are a transgressive display of this fecal politics… (Appadurai, Arjun, “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics” in Public Culture: 39)
1 cf. Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums (2006)
2 UNDESA 2008, 2009
“Slum” is a word with a weighty and questionable history, but in the last decade it has been “operationalized” into a small set of criteria by housing agency UN-Habitat. Although it has become commonplace to talk of “a billion slum-dwellers” globally1 , it would be more accurate to discuss the infrastructural and legal shortcomings of developing-world cities. For example, in 2010 the UN’s Global Urban Observatory estimated that 185 million Indians, or 50.7 percent of the country’s urban population, lived in slum conditions2. Actual living situations are highly diverse, ranging from Kolkata’s pavement-dwellers to Mumbai’s chawls, or run-down former factory housing, but one thing that most slums have in common is a profusion of shit.
According to the World Bank, in 2008 46 percent of Indian urbanites – or nine out of every ten living in a slum – lacked “improved sanitation facilities”, meaning that people living within them lack sewerage and public toilets3. Where community toilets do exist, poor maintenance and overuse often render them unsanitary before long. For example, a survey of 151 slum settlements in Mumbai conducted by Mahila Milan/NSDF found that there were 3,433 municipal toilet seats, 80 percent of which were not working, to serve one million people – a ratio of one toilet for every 1,488 people4. Likewise, a 1993 survey of half a million slum-dwellers in Kanpur found that 66 percent had no toilets. Lacking facilities, they shit in the open or in waterways.
5 Appadurai 2002: 39
6 Davis 2006, Burra, Patel and Kerr 2003, Bapat and Agarwal 2003
As a result, residents of slums face a disproportionately high disease burden, with high incidences of cholera and diarrhea. “One macabre joke among Mumbai’s urban poor is that they are the only ones in the city who cannot afford to get diarrhea. Lines at the few existing public toilets are often so long that the wait is an hour or more, and of course medical facilities for stemming the condition are also hard to find”5. But in addition to being a public health crisis, the lack of sanitation is especially concerning for women, who are most severely affected by the lack of privacy when defecating6. In public toilets, they are frequently harassed. Defecating in the open in the absence of toilets is even more risky; as a result, most women choose to do so at night or in the early hours of the morning, which in turn leads to gastric disorders.
There is no obvious solution to this particular infrastructural shortcoming. Because many slum settlements are illegal or informal, occupying the margins of railway lines and airports and other undeveloped land, city governments are not keen to extend sewers and other utilities into them. Funding and building public toilets is often problematic for the same reason. When the Indian government allocated money for toilet block construction in the 1990s, most of it went unspent due to city governments’ disinterest in upgrading slums. In Pune (population: 4.4. million in 20057), a municipal initiative resulted in the construction of only 22 toilet blocks between 1992 and 19998. The toilets that were built often became unusable relatively quickly due to overuse and a lack of maintenance or cleaning. Even in cases where projects were completed and maintained, the “focus on cost recovery from the poor means that sanitation is often provided not according to those who need it most, but according to how many people can pay a contribution”9.
10 Burra, Patel and Kerr 2003: 19
11 Burra, Patel and Kerr 2003: 20
I’d argue that sanitation in Indian cities is not just a challenge for urban planning and architecture; it’s also an essentially political problem. One of the most successful programs of community toilet construction involved not just new design elements but the development of what Arjun Appadurai describes as “fecal politics”. After the failure of Pune’s city government to deliver toilets, its municipal commissioner invited NGOs to bid for construction and maintenance contracts. A national shelter activist group, the Alliance between the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), the National Slum-Dwellers Federation (NSDF), and Mahila Milan (or “Women Together” in Hindi), won a contract to build 320 toilet blocks with 6,400 seats throughout the city10. As a result, “between 1999 and 2001, more toilets were constructed and more money spent than in the previous 30 years”11. Equally important, the new toilets were designed and constructed by those living in the slums, resulting in lower building costs and several important architectural innovations.
12 See Appadurai 2002, Patel and Mitlin 2001, Patel, Burra and D’Cruz 2001
The Alliance’s success in sanitation is a result of its particular model of political activism, which is rooted in the everyday experience of slum-dwellers but diffused among national and global networks. Its “politics of shit,” tested in Pune and subsequently replicated in Mumbai and other cities, is a response to the infrastructural and legal dilemmas facing its members. Others have written at greater length on the organization and operation of the Alliance12. Rather than duplicating all of their work, I’d like to discuss its technique of employing the knowledge and expertise of the urban poor.
Fecal politics relies upon information generated by and for slum-dwellers, testing and legitimizing new or existing uses of urban space. Appadurai describes it as “a politics of show-and-tell”, in which slum-dwellers “claim, refine, and define certain ways of doing things in spaces they already control and then use these practices to show donors, city officials, and other activists that their ‘precedents’ are good ones and encourage such actors to invest further in them.” The Alliance’s projects invariably employ community knowledge of the daily challenges of slum living – particularly in terms of housing quality and access to water and sanitation – to devise ways of improving their lives. As Burra, Patel, and Kerr note, this is appropriate given that slum-dwellers are the people who actually build cities:
People are the best experts. A long-established myth is that experts with advanced degrees are needed to plan improvements in slums. But the realities of life in India’s slums are best understood by slum dwellers themselves. If experts had a better track record, their expertise might have more credibility – but the deplorable state of infrastructure in Kanpur or Bangalore suggests there are serious holes in this “expertise”. The slums in India are home for most of those who actually build cities: masons, pipe layers, cement mixers, brick carriers, shuttering designers, stone cutters, trench diggers and metal fabricators. The poor, as they construct their own homes and neighbourhoods, are already the designers and implementers of India’s most far-reaching systems of housing and service delivery. The systems they use are not ideal, are largely “illegal”, and often inequitable, but they reach down to the poorest groups and cover far more ground and affect far more lives than any government programme could ever achieve.
Quite often, the “people” Burra et al are referring to are women. Although women still face a number of structural barriers to participation in the public sphere, as suggested by their low rate of labor force participation (in 2009, 81.1 percent of men were in the workforce, compared with only 32.8 percent of women), they are often the most knowledgeable about living conditions in slums. Most women in urban India labor in the home, performing unpaid domestic work or various types of subcontracted homework, and they are most heavily affected by the lack of water and sewerage. As a result, women play an important role within the Alliance: they are strongly represented in its leadership and are responsible for much of the financial side of slum upgrading through Mahila Milan’s savings collectives.
13 Burra, Patel and Kerr 2003: 11
14 Appadurai 2002: 41
The politics of shit is, of course, an intrinsically local thing. What could be more intimate, more deeply particular to an individual place, than defecation? But at the same time, the lack of toilets and sewers is a problem shared by most slum communities, irrespective of their own particularities. As a consequence, the Alliance’s work tends to cross geographic scales: it integrates local struggles into national (the 750,000 members of NSDF across 52 Indian cities13) and international (Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), a federation of shelter groups from Latin America, Africa and Asia14) networks. This gives the Alliance scope to scale up projects and precedents that have proven successful at a local level. This process facilitates “horizontal learning” through the exchange of slum upgrading methods, critical debate, and solidarity among shelter activists and slum-dwellers.
15 Patel 1999a: 11-12, Burra, Patel and Kerr 2003: 15
Practicing fecal politics has delivered concrete gains for Indian slum-dwellers. In Pune, the Alliance ultimately constructed 400 toilet blocks with roughly 20 seats apiece, which are capable of serving roughly half a million people a day provided that they are kept clean. They were designed, built, and managed by community members, those who “actually build cities”, rather than by outside contractors as is normal for such projects. In doing so, Pune’s slum-dwellers were able to draw not just upon their own experiences but on knowledge developed within the Alliance as a result of smaller-scale projects carried out in Mumbai, Kanpur, Bangalore between 1988 and 1996 with funding from the UK charity Homeless International and from slum-dwellers themselves15.
“Photo 1: Aundh toilet block built by the community in Bangalore.Credit: Photo provided by the UK charity, Homeless International”; from Burra, Patel and Kerr (2003)
16 Burra, Patel and Kerr 2003: 22, see also Burra and Patel 2002, Bapat and Agarwal 2003
The result was better toilet facilities constructed at a lower cost – 5 percent under municipal cost estimates, according to Burra and Patel. Design innovations made them well-lit, better-ventilated and easier to clean, important considerations given that public toilets in Indian cities have a history of becoming rapidly fouled. For example, storage tanks were increased in size to ensure that there was sufficient water for washing up and keeping facilities clean. Input from women, who are particularly vulnerable to the lack of appropriate toilet facilities, resulted in several simple but important new features. Toilet blocks were designed to reduce harassment by including separate entrances for men and women, and seats that did not directly face each other. And, recognizing that children are generally shunted aside in latrine queues, blocks of children’s toilets were also constructed. As the picture below shows, these were specifically designed to be easy for children to use, with handles, smaller openings, and child-friendly decorations16.
17 Appadurai 2002: 39, Burra, Patel and Kerr 2003: 24-25
The Alliance recognized from the start that constructing a toilet isn’t sufficient to improve sanitation in the slums, as they must be cleaned and maintained in order to be usable. Collecting the money to do so is challenging, as it must balance usability with accessibility. “User-pays” fees for public toilets are unaffordable for many residents. They are usually set at one rupee per month – a small amount that adds up quite rapidly. Families living at the official urban poverty line of 20 rupees per person per day would strain to pay even that. Consequently, the Alliance has relied upon community organization and a system of affordable collective payments from slum households – roughly 20 rupees per month – to pay for maintenance17. In order to hold maintenance costs down, caretakers and their families are provided with a room in toilet blocks as part of their compensation.
In keeping with its principles, the Alliance has actively shared the knowledge it has developed, both within its own network and with other interested groups. Communities have put on “toilet festivals” to celebrate and publicize their new facilities, thereby reinventing “this private act of humiliation and suffering as the scene of technical innovation, collective celebration, and carnivalesque play with officials from the state, the World Bank, and middle-class officialdom in general”18. This has helped to stimulate interest in community-built and -maintained toilet blocks among city governments, other NGOs and CBOs, and the World Bank. As a result, Pune’s toilets have set a precedent for future sanitation improvements in Indian slums. For example, in 2000 the World Bank and the Mumbai Municipal Corporation funded the Alliance to construct 320 similar toilet blocks in that city19. In 2001, the Alliance’s successes in Pune and Mumbai encouraged the national government to provide subsidies for similar public toilet construction programs20.
There are many more things that could – and should – be said on fecal politics. I’ve hinted at a few of them here. Obviously, there is a lot more to say about the architectural practice that it might generate. But speaking for a moment as a political scientist, what I find fascinating about the work of the Alliance is the way that it alters the meaning of citizenship. If the politics of shit is a way for slum-dwellers to “place some distance between their waste and themselves” – both literally and figuratively – it is also a way for them to claim the right to live in the city. When Bapat and Agarwal interviewed slum-dwellers in Pune and Mumbai about water and sanitation issues, a recurring complaint was about their own invisibility to politicians and planners. By building their own toilets, and then showing them off in toilet festivals, they reclaim some of the legitimacy denied to them by governments.
Click through for references and tables.
References
Appadurai, Arjun. 2002. “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics.” Public Culture 14(1): 21-47.
Bapat, Meera and Agarwal, Indu. 2003. “Our needs, our priorities: women and men from the slums in Mumbai and Pune talk about their needs for water and sanitation.” Environment and Urbanization 15(2): 71-86.
Burra, Sundar and Patel, Sheela. 2002. “Community toilets in Pune and other Indian cities.” PLA Notes 43: 43-45.
Burra, Sundar, Patel, Sheela and Kerr, Thomas. 2003. “Community-designed, built and managed toiled blocks in Indian cities.” Environment and Urbanization 15(2): 11-32.
Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso.
Patel, Sheela, Burra, Sundar and D’Cruz, Celine. 2001. “Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) – foundations to treetops. “ Environment and Urbanization 13(2): 45-60.
Patel, Sheela and Mitlin, Diane. 2001. “The work of SPARC, the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan.” Institution Institute for Environment and Development Working Paper Series on Poverty Reduction in Urban Areas 5.
Satterthwaite, David, McGranahan, Gordon and Mitlin, Diana. 2005. “Community-driven development for water and sanitation in urban areas.” Presented at the 13th session of the Commission on Sustainable Development, New York.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division. 2008. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision. New York: UN-Habitat Urban Info.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division. 2009. World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision. New York: UN-Habitat Urban Info.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division. 2010. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision. New York: UN-Habitat Urban Info.
World Bank. 2011. World Bank World Development Indicators. Accessed online 1 July 2011.
This week — really, we promise it will just be a week — we’ll be looking at landscapes of shit. We’ll take a guided tour of DC’s huge wastewater treatment plant, Blue Plains, we’ll have an excellent guest post from Peter Nunns on “fecal politics”, we’ll look at a student project that proposes ”the making of an entirely functioning landscape built from human excreta”, and there may be a few other miscellaneous items. This should be fun.
mammoth is a roving pair of unlicensed architects operating out of motel rooms, sketching indecipherable plans while drinking moderately expensive whiskey out of wax-paper cups.
Our interests include extinct megafauna, the production of urban space through the manipulation of infrastructure, landscape processes, and tactical architectural interventions aimed at forestalling the arrival of our inevitably dystopian future and/or ushering in a new era of global harmony.
The index archive will direct you to our longer and more substantial posts. mammoth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
