Planning for the Unplanned

Aseem Inam:  A friend of mine recently asked me about one of my books, Planning for the Unplanned: Recovering from Crises in Megacities. The book examines a critical issue for cities in the 21st century: How do we deal effectively with crises? The April 2015 devastating earthquake and terrible human tragedy that affected Kathmandu and surrounding areas in Nepal brought to the fore the urgency of the issue. However, while most research and analysis of crises focuses on what went wrong [extremely valuable as that research is], I wanted to find out what went right; that is, what kinds of things do work in urbanism, why, and what can we learn from them.

The book examines the specific case of how large public institutions respond to crises in nimble and adaptive ways. I did a careful study of how local governments in Mexico City in 1985 and Los Angeles in 1994 dealt with rebuilding housing after the earthquakes. What is particularly interesting is that both these cities have long had poor images [e.g. traffic, pollution, crime, etc.]. These case study analyses, on the other hand, yielded surprising and valuable insights into the dynamics of urbanism, particularly in terms of their institutional effectiveness.

One counter-intuitive insight was that these public institutions were effective because they were bureaucratic; that is, they relied on established institutional routines and procedures, which were then adapted and applied relatively quickly to the situations at hand. Another insight was that the key actors were neither the leaders at the top nor the community groups at the grassroots; instead, they were the mid-level managers who understood both: the resources and procedures at the national level as well as the needs and conditions at the neighborhood level.

One of the most important lessons from the book is to learn to compare in an increasingly global and interconnected world. Fortunately, there are many efforts in comparative urbanism. Unfortunately, many of them can be fairly superficial [e.g. ideas about “best practices” that fail to taken into different political and economic structures] or viewed through a singular lens [e.g. one-size-fits-all ideas of “sustainability”]. To compare in a meaningful way, one has to carefully think about why we are comparing [e.g. purposes] and how we are comparing [e.g. analytical frameworks and research methods].

The comparative method is one of the most powerful ways of learning about urban practices from all over the world, to reflect critically on one’s own city, to be sensitive to the similarities and differences among contexts, and to collaborate across international borders. One critical component for comparative research and practice is to be multilingual, because language opens the door to local cultures and social norms that are essential for engaging with contextual differences. The other critical component for comparative urbanism is being self-aware, because even well meaning urban practitioners and scholars are often unaware how their values [e.g. middle-class or Euro American-centric] color how they perceive and act in different contexts around the world.

In these ways, comparative urbanism can be an extremely effective way for learning, for practicing, and for planning for the unplanned.  AI

The book, Planning for the Unplanned: Recovering from Crises in Megacities, analyzes examples of successful housing rebuilding after earthquakes in Los Angeles and Mexico City, but also failed attempts at addressing critical economic development and air pollution challenges in both cities. Source: Aseem Inam.

Diversity Politics and Engaging Pluralism as Transformative Urban Practice

Nadia Elokdah:  My current research, a thesis in theories of urban practice, examines notions of identity, culture, and urban imaginary in everyday practices.

Cities are dynamic systems perpetually reproduced through negotiations and practices of myriad endogenous and exogenous actors and forces, as well as their interconnnections. In this regard, cities are active sites of collective imagination, invention and intervention. In these sites, there is perpetual urban transformation shaped by active engagement and lived experience.

There is a disconcerting pattern that has emerged in contemporary cities, which is the co-optation of diversity alongside reductionist notions of culture. The critique of this pattern lies in understanding how notions of diversity are wielded by power structures, such as city governments or anchor institutions. Rather than offering the city as an active and pluralistic platform, diversity is used as a veil to mask the actual and often complicated richness of pluralism.

In order to identify new possibilities of diversity, I am collaborating with Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, an arts and culture non-profit organization based in Philadelphia. My argument has three facets. One is the design of an interactive exhibition embedding identity within the urban realm, on display from February to April 2015 at Philadelphia City Hall. The second is a series of interviews. The third is a repositioning of actors from city departments, arts and cultural organizations, and small-scale, community based organizations as collaborators.

These actors can inform and support one another in multiple ways to activate and co-design spaces of plurality toward urban transformation. Key actors are positioned as intermediaries able to wield power to affect transformation beyond symbolic support. These actors are fundamental to bridging the gap between local, nuanced knowledge of grassroots or community-based organizations and top-down, reductionist practices often found in urban governance.

When thinking of cities as shaped by active engagement and lived experience, conversations involving multiple voices from multiple actors are possible. An important moment is when the formation of strategic alliances begins to emerge. If these alliances prioritize complex identities as foundations for diversity and cultural initiatives, they might be able to consciously move toward a practice of co-design using the urban imaginary as a vehicle for inclusivity of multiple voices and aspirations. The interactive exhibition is a prototype of this. The goal is a practice of co-design of multiple voices and aspirations and a pluralistic framework for arts and culture in urban governance.

I conclude the thesis by addressing a critical question: How can actors better navigate current power structures for urban transformation, while offering expanded notions of what constitutes valid knowledge of the urban? This necessarily becomes a project of making inclusive urban epistemologies while expanding and deepening urban practice.  NE

The “We Went Looking for Home but We Found” interactive, bi-lingual exhibition asks attendees to contribute to the discourse of urban transformation through questions such as, “How does your identity shape the culture of Philadelphia?” Mapping the relations between various stakeholders demonstrates which voices included in decision making and how power structures negotiate. Source: Nadia Elokdah

Understanding the city of Philadelphia as perpetually transforming allows for critical analysis of current systems of urban governance while also creating openings for new possibilities. Putting in conversation unlikely allies moves toward processes of inclusion and co-design of pluralistic frameworks for arts and culture and diversity politics. Source: Nadia Elokdah

Embodying The Transformative Potential of Urbanism

Aseem Inam:  How does one symbolize urban transformation?

That was the creative challenge for designing the cover of my book, Designing Urban Transformation.  Does one go with the common techniques of either showing a city skyline, or a public space, or an abstract design?  Since my argument in the book is uncommon [i.e. more critical and much deeper and than most approaches], I wanted to embody urban transformation with the same multifaceted complexity that cities themselves represent.  Urban transformation in fact occurs in many different ways and takes multiple guises, including unexpected ones.

I worked with an excellent team, my TRULAB collaborators Namkyu Chun and Matt DelSesto, my editor at Routledge, Nicole Solano and the art director at Taylor and Francis, Sally Beesely.  The basic idea was to focus on one of the most compelling examples of contemporary urban transformation, the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi.  The project is deceptively banal.  On the face of it, it is simply a low-cost community-based sanitation infrastructure project and it has been presented as such multiple times.

However, a deeper analysis via the conceptual shift of “beyond practice:  urbanism as creative political act” reveals a much more compelling narrative of urban practice.  Within an incredibly challenging context of extremely poverty, violence and gender discrimination, the Orangi Pilot Project has not only dramatically improved the urban fabric and health conditions of an informal settlement, but has also mobilized the community and contributed to vital improvements in housing, health and entrepreneurship.

The background image is of a woman making and selling incense sticks, one of the beneficiaries of the Orangi Pilot Project’s entrepreneurship program.  The foreground diagram is the hand-made map of the lane-by-lane alley-by-alley sewage system that has benefitted an astounding one million people and counting.  This black diagram also evokes the intricate jaalis [i.e. windows with delicate stonework] of the Mughal architecture of South Asia. The colors of the cover—the white main title text, the orange font of the author’s name, the pink of the spine and back cover—are taken directly from the colors of the background photograph.

To understand how this all works together as a multilayered embodiment of remarkable urban transformation, the cover is best appreciated as a full spread, as seen in the image below.  AI.

The full spread of the cover of Designing Urban Transformation shows how the background image and foreground image [which spills over onto the back cover] work together with the placement of the texts and their colors.

There is no silver bullet

Drew Tucker:  Our investigations into the current state of urbanity revealed a long term strategy by the state, public and private actors towards urban solutions. We conducted intensive, urban forensic investigations into these social, policy based, and economic projects only to uncover that they more often compounded seemingly intractable problems in their wake. Modern urban ‘solutions’ in the U.S (our primary site of investigation), slum clearance and urban renewal, displacement as housing policy, and gentrification, have by and large sought to solve problems of urban form, in lieu of function, through social exclusion, creative destruction, and out of scale development. While their intentions were often, in the beginning, well meaning, divisive politics, moralism, and economic competition more often than not, led them astray.

We can now clearly identify a new set of urban solutions on the horizon: smart cities, New Urbanism, Place Making, tactical urbanism, Market Urbanism, Sustainable/Resilient Urbanism, etc. These emerging practices are not for the most part problematic in and of themselves, it is simply that they are overburdened in their task: to provide a concise, complete, and ultimate solution to urban problems. Urbanists are asking too much of these methodologies. Each of them are only a part of the puzzle, and as such, each can only address its particular paradigm of interest. More importantly, urbanity is a process of expanding, intense spatial change. A process that acts upon both the social and physical environment through “a historically situated and geographically unevenly distributed condition, characterized by interdependencies, unpredictability, mobility, differences, speed and intense affects.”  How could any theory or set of theories control for the fluidity of urban change? How could any set of methodologies purport to be the solution to the true wicked problem of urbanization? Rather, shouldn’t we instead develop a similarly fluid set of strategies and tactics to address the mercurial nature of urbanity? Shouldn’t we accept a certain level of shared social precarity and abandon market based solutions whose success is inherently dependent on a level of transference of precarity onto a marginalized group in exchange for an increased economic security for another?

This lesson is especially important for us as we begin to leave (or decide to stay) in New York City and to seek out the physical spaces where we will practice. Personally, I have learned to take a good hard look at how my city, Louisville, is courting new urban trends as solutions to entrenched, historical urban frictions. In some ways, for Louisville, any urbanism is good urbanism, but in many other ways, these urban trends will further complicate (or ignore) entrenched issues of racial segregation, infrastructural deterioration, and economic disparity. What I know now is that my practice, as it impacts Louisville, must add a level of depth to these well meaning ideals; my work must engage a broader element of research, a deeper level of commitment mediation between marginalized and privileged communities, and offer reflexive, embedded, and pragmatic interventions that speak to both of these communities.  DT.

Multiple intersecting urbanities: Love @ The Garage Bar in Louisville, Kentucky. Source: LuAnn Snawder Photography via Flickr and Creative Commons

A verb, not a noun

Drew Tucker:  In the Fall of 2012, over thirty prospective graduate students traveled across the globe to take part in an incredible experiment. Many had just months earlier finished their undergraduate degrees in a myriad of different disciplines: geography, philosophy, film production, urban planning, architecture, design, and fine arts; others were more experienced professionals, already in the field, and feeling some tension between what they had imagined their personal practice would be, and the reality of that work on the ground. What they all had in common was a desire to study in a city like no other, New York City; a city that Aseem Inam explains by saying, “no extrapolation can be made, it is an anomaly.” Also, these students were on their way to become the first cohorts of Parsons the New School for Designs two new groundbreaking urban programs; the Theories of Urban Practice and Design & Urban Ecologies programs. These programs, housed in the School of Design Strategies, would attempt something completely new to academia in the United States, the simultaneous unveiling of two programs, both transdisciplinary in make-up, and focused on actual real world interventions in the urban environment. While each program has its own benefits and methodologies, students from each group quickly formed a network of camaraderie and co-production that drove their research, and deliverables to new heights.

A series of urban investigations into the city of New York allowed us to begin to understand the complex political economic, social, and cultural ecology into which we were becoming integrated. Our investigations included site based forensics on the acquisition of property for immigrant populations and their political organizing efforts; the history of urban homesteading and its possible re-imagining as a fair and affordable housing strategy; strategies for measuring current and future forced displacement due to gentrification; urban gardening as an anti-recidivism urban resilience strategy; cooper square and expanding community land trusts; reconceptualizing the history of the commons; street vendors as diffused architectural solutions in times of crisis, and many, many more. Each of these projects was physically situated in one or more boroughs in New York City, and each one worked directly with an on the ground community group to produce an actual real world urban transformation. We quickly learned that the designer does not have the luxury to just critique but instead must “ask powerful questions” of the frictions within the city. This implicates and positions them as actors in a process of participation and risk; not simply as observers. They openly engage as embedded agents of social processes, giving legitimacy to these interventions.

Over the two year engagement, something interesting happened. We stopped being geographers, architects, and designers; we stopped being academics. We stopped wanting to be urbanists. Our theories and practices became fluid, constantly developing, site based methodologies. We began to work from coexistence with one another toward a co-production of urban praxis. We learned that conflict can be agonistic rather than antagonistic. In the end, we stopped trying to fit ourselves into static categories, rigid methodologies, and combative political ideologies. Instead we created convivial tools towards civil engagement. We developed participatory methods of cogeneration. Our ethic became collective, democratic action, toward the realization of a common liberatory urban good. We began to act as the sans-culottes an “irresistible force...a strategic alliance that recognized a common “revolutionary project” as we worked collectively to participate in La Cite.  DT

Perpetual Renewal: An intensive workshop in the Lower East Side of Manhattan that probes the true nature of supposedly finalized projects such as urban renewal and creates further opportunities for truly equitable outcomes in the redevelopment of land. Source: Aseem Inam.