19. October 2011 / Jessica Bridger
Formal Involvement Beyond the Form: Metropolis Nonformal
Over time the discourse in design has swung widely between what design can and can’t do. The truth of the matter is that design has such a broad range of applications and avenues of address, that the only sure thing about landscape architecture and architecture is that both strive to create new elements in the built environment. This is rather obvious, but what isn’t is the increase in the field of influence that landscape architecture has attempted to claim over the last ten years.
Though some leading practitioners have always gone beyond the disciplinary boundaries instilled by the professional status and training specific to landscape, the disciplinary realignment of Charles Waldheim is still only developing as a professional imperative or open option with a clear route toward attainment. One practitioner who is making important contributions to widening the field in landscape architecture is Harvard’s Chrisitian Werthmann. His recent symposium, held at the Techincal University in Munich, and titled “Metropolis Nonformal” is clear evidence that design – specifically landscape architecture - is able to impact some of the most pressing problems in the world today.
Metropolis Nonformal addressed the growing number of housing and living situations that are outside of formal structures of land ownership, financing, utility provision and even building standards. The speakers for the symposium came from a diversity of places, underscoring a point that Werthmann made early in the conference during his introduction, that the range of nonformal urban and semi-urban settlements takes a diversity of forms and modes of operation. South America, Africa, India were addressed, but over the course of the conference issues of nonformal living conditions were raised even in the Appalachian region of the United States or the case of the Roma People, living in nonformal conditions across Europe.
The single keynote speaker on the opening evening, Claudio Acioly, Jr. was perhaps the most sobering and unusual of the whole group. Acioly, who trained as an architect in Brazil and as an urban planner in the Netherlands, is currently chief of housing policy at the United Nations Habitat program. When asked how he thought other designers could begin to engage with the issues of the nonformal, his focus was on the ability and necessity for designers to educate themselves beyond simple practice issues. This is part of the rhetoric presented as the reason why design is well suited to engage with complex problems that necessitate a polymath’s diversity. However, it is not so often that a designer achieves the level of influence that Acioly can exert.
That promising start to the conference was borne out over the following full-day session. The presentations brought up an astounding range of issues, from actual projects to political processes, to even the very representation of nonformal settlements themselves. To borrow and use the growing love in architecture to adopt military terminology, the tactics and strategies ranged from the leveraging of pension funds of the poorest minority communities in the US (as presented in a particularly powerful talk by Phillip Thompson of MIT) to a restructuring of the way that we understand border and boundary conditions through representational means by Anuradha Mathur. In the spectrum between lay a range of design-based responses Arthur Adaye from Kounkuey Design Initiative(KDI) presented their work in Kibera, a settlement in Kenya, explaining that they chose a system of networked small moves to enable change even in limited circumstances. An initiative by KDI created an ongoing economic opportunity for Kibera residents in the form of a soil-stabilized brick manufacture. This manufacture then produced bricks for other KDI projects using locally sourced raw materials. Another excellent example of this sort of approach was presented by Harris Piplas for Urban Think Tank(UTT). He presented their “urban acupuncture” strategy that UTT uses in projects such as the Caracas Metrocable.
Unsurprisingly there was as much differentiation in thought as there was diversity in positions, and occasionally passionate positioning bubbled to the surface. Some took the position that the small networked interventions were nothing in comparison to what large comprehensive systems were capable of effecting. Looking at the typologies of street, house, lot orientation throughout the day made it clear that larger scale approaches, inherently more top-down in functioning are also needed.
It was clear throughout the conference that design has a lot to offer nonformal settlements. The recurring theme of designers engaging directly with the residents of nonformal settlements was inspiring. The importance of the involvement of community entities in order for designers to understand what is needed is essential in these situations where the traditional notion of “the client” is not operative. Design is a discipline uniquely suited to dealing with complex inputs, and arranging inputs and project goals to come up with comprehensive solutions. That these solutions often lead to more questions, and therefore the recognition of more problems is considered a generative thing in design, whereas in many other disciplines it would be considered less than desirable. Metropolis Nonformal was a showcase of some of these generative solutions, and in presenting these ideas and projects it will hopefully generate more discourse on the issue. There is simply no doubt that nonformal settlements will be an ongoing theme for design to address, as they will eventually comprise the majority of new development in the world.