The reading of “What happened to Haussmann”, was talking about the story of Haussmann in the project of Paris expansion and renovation, work of the transformation of Paris. After the London city, the Paris began to form a modern city which against the traditional city. The new type of architecture, monumental and Blvd, Sewer system, express way, reveal the new type of city and new daily life as modern world. There is a very interesting about the residential building, the apartment or “a hierarchy house”, “A typical “tenement” of uniform façade without arcade walks on the Boulevard de Sebastopol includes shops on the ground floor, a mezzanine, three main floors with apartments for upper middle class tenants, and two attic floors in the sloping roof for servants and tenants of the poorer classes”, I have a question about phenomenon, why the city set this type of arrangement for apartment? And how the rich and poor wiling to live with each other in a same building? Maybe the it design the apartment for purpose which to reflect the power of middle class and rising of middle class in modernity.
I specially liked this reading because it talks more deeply about how an urbanization project could help a city in many fields. Not only providing architectural issues, also helping to transform the city to a better environment.
This multifunctional program at Manguinhos transformed a dangerous and abandoned sector into an active public space because the Rambla also include thoughts in new culture and recreation opportunities for residents. Not only connecting the two neighborhoods physically also emotionally.
CHICAGO’S SLUM-CLEARANCE PROGRAM
Cities and new tendencies of society are evolving. New forms to live were coming and this reading provides a large amount of reasons to consider before the redevelopment program they were studying.
They focused a lot of efforts on gaining the investor attention to be available to carry out the program but also studying where a increasing segment of population is going and his necessities. It’s interesting the way it explains how they had the intention to make this program succeed.
The goal or urban planning is to improve the environment, create a more accessible society that allows for growth and transformation for infrastructure to rise. The most important objective is to improve he quality of life. The reading goes on to the understanding of the identity of space and visual belonging being the nature of it. “Spaces that escape public control, which usually occupy great expanses and peripheries of cities constituting areas of impunity that have no traditional legal and juridical societal code.” Not quite sure what is meant by this, every space has some sort of control from the public, if not isn’t it just a private space? Is it in terms of an open ended space with infinite interpretations? If so doesn’t this still have a form of control?
A Socialist Vision Fades in Cuba’s Biggest Housing Project”
The debate of the socialist dream of Castro for Cuba’s housing crisis and its aftermath. To have everything equal avoids the envy and enforces a different kind of working for the greater good. This works to a certain degree where the incomes are at a stable rate in which case they were not. The influence of people working as a whole to create the housing they dwell in caused the movement of one of the largest social housing structures possibly in the world. The “city of the future” and its dream however have died with its ruler. The community of workers are now elderly with nothing to show for their work but the falling apart structures that inhabit. Which was due to lack of funding to allow proper upkeep. The socialist housing project has lost its socialist lifestyle.
The Texts, “Baruch Houses” and “Articulating the Broken City and Society” provided two very intriguing yet contrasting views on what the right way should be to repair a slum area. The Baruch houses were a very straightforward way to fix a slum, tear it down and build something better- or at least build something new. These apartment buildings were designed in a way which previous public housing was not, that is, more or less with the inhabitants in mind. The architects who were well known for their luxury apartments, tried to fix what other buildings had done unsuccessfully, such as providing cross ventilation, increasing the maximum possible sunlight hours in each room, provide scenic views of the East River, and so on. Such views as well as to be right on the waterfront are more typical of luxury housing as those locations are primarily prime real estate. It effectively wiped away the slums which once existed, giving people a new home in a tower in the park. The text spoke mostly about housing and mentioned very few community amenities which might help improve the character of the neighborhood, only featuring “a Community Center, a Child Health Station and Children’s Center” (Roth 10). The text makes it seem quite plain that their housing was superior to everything else that had been tried, but was it actually successful? Today, the Baruch Housing features one of the Specialized high schools in NYC, Bard, as well as a grammar school, playground and community theatre. But is this alone enough to create a better living space? Because a lot of time has gone by, we can see for ourselves whether or not it is. Lack of maintenance may be causing some problems as it has been noted in the news that hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs are necessary to fix these buildings. It is also noted in the news that the Baruch Houses are one of the top lowest in crime. It is often debatable today whether the tower in the park is successful or not, but the given text is clearly in favor of it. With the information I know about them as well as the articles clear bias in favor of the project, I believe that they have been quite successful in the removal of the slums and seem to be a relatively favorable place to live.
In great contrast to the methods by which the Baruch Housing was carried out, by demolishing and rebuilding, the methods by which slums are addressed in the text, “Articulating the Broken City and Society” are very different. These areas were proposed to improve the slums by means of the less invasive method of implanting structures into key areas of the site which would perform certain functions. In Complexo do Alenao, creating cable cars for connectivity with various community based program space does not address what I believe to be the root cause of the problem of the slums, which is living space conditions. Nor does Manguinhos’ proposal in which they plan to “elevates a divisive and dangerous railway and transports it into a linear park for recreation and commerce” (Jauregui 5). While these may offer some short-term solutions, I do not believe it will be effective long term. These people only occupy community spaces for a small portion of the day if at all. What is just as important, or perhaps a bit more so is their actual house where they have to sleep at night and perform other necessary functions in order to survive. While I don’t necessarily disagree with this type of proposal and method, I think it is more of a beginning to figure out a place to start to fix a problem. These interventions are however very new and so it may be unfair to judge the project at such an early place in time. Only time will tell which is truly more successful.
Which method is truly the better way to improve the quality of life for residents living in slums, could it be an alternative method, or perhaps even a combination of the two methods? What if we let the residents make the call on what should be changed and fixed, might that be a suitable solution? What is more important, social programs or living areas?
This brief article was interesting to read because it summed up the credibility of a prestigious firm by means of its ability to ” produce superior housing at the lowest possible cost for a potential tenancy that could ill afford to pay even the $8.50 per room required by law”. It is ironic because I assume design problems are challenging for their context, not simply for their limitation. This office was praised for its ability to provide low rent while still providing every smaller scale facility enjoyed higher paid rent apartment dwellers.
The readings this week presented a wide range of issues that definitely pave the way for how issues surrounding urban density are being treated in South America today. In Robert Moses’ biographical paper about Baron Haussmann, he highlighted the largest issue that led to Haussman’s demise – his inability to properly manage the public finances that he was given control over. While not entirely the same situation, mismanagement of finances is definitely a problem in modern redevelopment of South American urban settings. On a similar, but in many ways opposite note, Nathanial Owings writes about a desperate situation in Chicago, where funding could barely help clear 2% of the “blighted” areas in the city. What was most intriguing about this reading was that it seems that the author has many of the principles down that help explain what the actual problem in Chicago was – infrastructural issues surrounding the construction of railways, highways and industry – not conditions of blight brought upon the city by its residents. Slum-clearing, while a popular approach in the middle of the twentieth century, is not in my view the correct method for how to revitalize these blighted urban centers. The main problem to me is the simple fact that the government must, in some way, recoup some of its investment. Usually this creates residences with higher costs of living than the people who were displaced can afford, leading not to urban rehabilitation, but to forceful removal of those who live in blighted areas.
I find all of this to be very relevant to the cases in Latin America because of their stated goals of rehabilitating the informal urban residential areas, as opposed to the oft-failed practices of slum-clearing. As we established in class last week, the final judgment on the many cable cars being built in South American slums has yet to be passed, however this type of project, along with the construction of proper infrastructure (i.e. plumbing, electricity, other public utilities) for the residents of these informal settlements seem to be an improved solution for how to deal with the problem of “blighted” areas.
Articulating the Broken City and Society
There is a desire in the examples of the Favela-Barrio programmes to resolve the integration of formal and informal areas of Rio de Janeiro. This is distinctly opposite of actions such as the slum-clearance routines of Chicago, New York, and Paris, whose desires were to eliminate traces of undesired informality in favor of tabula rasa experiment.
One figure for the Manguinhos Complex in Rio describes 32,000 residents squeezed into 1.5 square miles of land. For reference, the Upper West Side of Manhattan contains 110,000 residents per square mile. However, Manguinhos is dense in the horizontal axis, whereas the UWS is such in the vertical. Clearly, the density on the ground is higher. A virtual lack of infrastructure and pervasive drug-trafficking activity further complicated the issue’s resolve.
The broader PAC program, a national urban development initiative, addressed the issue through an additive and re-use approach since slum-clearance was not an option with the relatively short four year term of the proposal. Their interventions appear surgical, but perhaps only to stop the bleeding of much larger issues. A system of cable-cars provide a certain amount of mobility for the Favela dwellers, providing islands of public services, public spaces, and retail to their landing points. As nodes, these points of landing seem innocuous amongst the “gift” of mobility, but actually infringe and execute a bit of eminent domain unto the land.
The Rambla conceives of the removal of physical separation between two neighborhoods, whose natures are not elaborated upon. By elevating the existing dividing railway, space is made for a public zone of ground based transportation and commercial offerings. As a strategy for stitching two disparate neighborhoods together it appears well, but without resolving the underlying issues stemming from the Favelas themselves this new avenue may facilitate modes of undesired informality to cross boundaries.
Baruch Houses – $30,000,000 worth of slum clearance for New York City
It seems odd to advertise the monetary value of wiping out 15 blocks of the lowest incoming housing, even considering their poor living conditions. This immediately suggests the intention of the authors to promote the project as a success. What they failed to investigate or report on were the needs or desires of the dispossessed, which the Chicago article at least thought to mention. The Tabula Rasa process is mentioned in passing as all the virtues of the new tower blocks are described in excess, right down to the plastering of salable imagery within the pages of the article. Of course when pitting the sparse line-work of the tower block plan against the imagery of slum conditions one may find its cleanliness all the more appealing. The imagery masks the lack of background on those who it dispossesses. 12,600 “dwelling units” were vacated, for whom residence in the new project is not described. Instead, what is described is the use of an Architect known for “high class luxury apartment houses” in the development of this project, however stripped of “refinements of elegance”.
Clearly, the author has not engaged the dispossessed whose priorities must include looking past lack of embellishment.
Articulating the Broken City and Society
We learn in this article how to “reinsert humanity into ourselves through the recognition of the other”. I like this because it gets to the crux of what it means to be social beings. Jauregui describes strategies of how this can be implemented, or rather how a designer uses this perspective to cultivate a positive result. But what interests me more than it being a stimulate for progress, I like that the author points to this as the means to articulate the divided city. This is great because instead of interpreting challenges as “problems” or “issues”, it interprets challenges as the object of discourse. Meaning, there is acknowledgement of permanent experimentation rather than chaos and complete impoverishment. It is very optimistic perspective of poverty. It attributes a quality to the human experience most professionals overlook because it is not expressed in the same “language”. It recognizes that within spaces that escape public control, people still express their innate creativity as imaginative creatures despite their ability to manifest change with it.
After I have read “What happened to Haussman” and “Articulating the broken city and society” it is unavoidable to compare both urban interventions. Although they come from different site contexts and epochs, we can generalize and analyze opposite concepts from two distinct mentalities:
– Revalue what already exists and improve it with “acupuncture” interventions before starts from 0, taking care local singularities {{VS.}} Create a completely new identity for solve the problem, nipping in the bud the conflict with huge resources in relation with generic solutions but with infinitive possibilities.
– The abstraction of the architect and the urban planner isolate them to an elitist position far from the reality and the public opinion, because they are the experts {{VS.}} The architecture and urbanism works horizontally in collaboration with some many agents; one of them is the public opinion, they observe the ordinary 80%.
– If we see the architect/urban planner as the link between power and resources. The architect/urban planner would design without conceiving any limit in the resources. That would be the responsible for producing exclusive designs for power(private) scenarios. {{VS.}} If we see the architect/urban planner as the link between power and resources. The architect/urban planner would design with limited resources and measured interventions for the social inclusive(public) design.
Is one the consequence of the other? What is objectively correct? Where are we? What we need?
This week’s readings expose two different approaches one can take when working with slums: “Tabula Rasa” vs. “working with what already exists”. In first place, there is the speech Nathaniel A. Owings made before The Economic Club of Detroit. This is not any man, he is the O in SOM, one of its founding members. You can feel the numbers rushing as he speaks, he is a business man, the entire world fits in his brain. He vehemently proposes a solution for a solutionless problem: decay is originated because of the dirt on Chicago’s treeless streets. Let’s bulldoze it all down, and build 12 level apartment bars with plenty of green space. When bringing the suburban feeling to the city core, “those” people will start rehabilitating themselves. Wise man.
Then comes the architect, R. Roth, implementing Mr. Owings ideas, or at least a version of them. His Baruch project, here in NYC, may not have the upscale elegance his studio is used to design, but for sure is a project that “still in essence provides at smaller scale every facility enjoyed at a greater scale by high rent apartment dwellers “.
Finally, 60 years go by, we of course know that N. Owings and R. Roth were monumentally wrong, that “tabula rasa” is a bad idea, and that some slum problems are deeply rooted in “youths who are too often seduced into the prevalent drug-trafficking activities that unfortunately generate a large number of jobs in low income areas”, instead of the “treeless streets” thesis. As show by J. Jáuregui, a less drastic approach – one that analyzes the community subject of improvement, one that tries to understand the origin of the problems this community suffers of- MAY be more beneficial. Articulating the divided city and society by providing greater accessibility, investments in infrastructure, new public social facilities and environmental revitalization, connecting the formal and the informal parts, appears to improve more the quality of life for residents.
Chicago’s slum clearing program
It is interesting how the author emphasized on the benefits of those slum residence, and the important role they play in flourishing the economy and the whole entity of the city rather than highlighting the danger of these people living in slums and the increase rate of crime and how is it dangerous on society like some other author’s do.
This might bring the question of; why does not the government itself consider those benefits (even it’s for sac of economics only), and work on a reasonable plan for those people, rather than trying to sell this idea of redeveloping already occupied areas with some Looseness (hoping that wouldn’t be in residents rights), in order to make them say yes.
Actually, there is also this concern about the destiny of the average families. What will happened to those who are non-child couples, unmarried, etc.? If the process went the direction mentioned in the reading anyway. If the density decreased (as it is supposed to be), then consequently many of those family members may not end up in the right place, or may be just there new location will be far from the factories and other industrial units they used to work in.
Housing Projects & Urban Challenges in the Americas 
The reading of “What happened to Haussmann”, was talking about the story of Haussmann in the project of Paris expansion and renovation, work of the transformation of Paris. After the London city, the Paris began to form a modern city which against the traditional city. The new type of architecture, monumental and Blvd, Sewer system, express way, reveal the new type of city and new daily life as modern world. There is a very interesting about the residential building, the apartment or “a hierarchy house”, “A typical “tenement” of uniform façade without arcade walks on the Boulevard de Sebastopol includes shops on the ground floor, a mezzanine, three main floors with apartments for upper middle class tenants, and two attic floors in the sloping roof for servants and tenants of the poorer classes”, I have a question about phenomenon, why the city set this type of arrangement for apartment? And how the rich and poor wiling to live with each other in a same building? Maybe the it design the apartment for purpose which to reflect the power of middle class and rising of middle class in modernity.
LikeLike
ARTICULATING THE BROKEN CITY AND SOCIETY
I specially liked this reading because it talks more deeply about how an urbanization project could help a city in many fields. Not only providing architectural issues, also helping to transform the city to a better environment.
This multifunctional program at Manguinhos transformed a dangerous and abandoned sector into an active public space because the Rambla also include thoughts in new culture and recreation opportunities for residents. Not only connecting the two neighborhoods physically also emotionally.
CHICAGO’S SLUM-CLEARANCE PROGRAM
Cities and new tendencies of society are evolving. New forms to live were coming and this reading provides a large amount of reasons to consider before the redevelopment program they were studying.
They focused a lot of efforts on gaining the investor attention to be available to carry out the program but also studying where a increasing segment of population is going and his necessities. It’s interesting the way it explains how they had the intention to make this program succeed.
LikeLike
Articulating the Broke City and Society
The goal or urban planning is to improve the environment, create a more accessible society that allows for growth and transformation for infrastructure to rise. The most important objective is to improve he quality of life. The reading goes on to the understanding of the identity of space and visual belonging being the nature of it. “Spaces that escape public control, which usually occupy great expanses and peripheries of cities constituting areas of impunity that have no traditional legal and juridical societal code.” Not quite sure what is meant by this, every space has some sort of control from the public, if not isn’t it just a private space? Is it in terms of an open ended space with infinite interpretations? If so doesn’t this still have a form of control?
A Socialist Vision Fades in Cuba’s Biggest Housing Project”
The debate of the socialist dream of Castro for Cuba’s housing crisis and its aftermath. To have everything equal avoids the envy and enforces a different kind of working for the greater good. This works to a certain degree where the incomes are at a stable rate in which case they were not. The influence of people working as a whole to create the housing they dwell in caused the movement of one of the largest social housing structures possibly in the world. The “city of the future” and its dream however have died with its ruler. The community of workers are now elderly with nothing to show for their work but the falling apart structures that inhabit. Which was due to lack of funding to allow proper upkeep. The socialist housing project has lost its socialist lifestyle.
LikeLike
The Texts, “Baruch Houses” and “Articulating the Broken City and Society” provided two very intriguing yet contrasting views on what the right way should be to repair a slum area. The Baruch houses were a very straightforward way to fix a slum, tear it down and build something better- or at least build something new. These apartment buildings were designed in a way which previous public housing was not, that is, more or less with the inhabitants in mind. The architects who were well known for their luxury apartments, tried to fix what other buildings had done unsuccessfully, such as providing cross ventilation, increasing the maximum possible sunlight hours in each room, provide scenic views of the East River, and so on. Such views as well as to be right on the waterfront are more typical of luxury housing as those locations are primarily prime real estate. It effectively wiped away the slums which once existed, giving people a new home in a tower in the park. The text spoke mostly about housing and mentioned very few community amenities which might help improve the character of the neighborhood, only featuring “a Community Center, a Child Health Station and Children’s Center” (Roth 10). The text makes it seem quite plain that their housing was superior to everything else that had been tried, but was it actually successful? Today, the Baruch Housing features one of the Specialized high schools in NYC, Bard, as well as a grammar school, playground and community theatre. But is this alone enough to create a better living space? Because a lot of time has gone by, we can see for ourselves whether or not it is. Lack of maintenance may be causing some problems as it has been noted in the news that hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs are necessary to fix these buildings. It is also noted in the news that the Baruch Houses are one of the top lowest in crime. It is often debatable today whether the tower in the park is successful or not, but the given text is clearly in favor of it. With the information I know about them as well as the articles clear bias in favor of the project, I believe that they have been quite successful in the removal of the slums and seem to be a relatively favorable place to live.
In great contrast to the methods by which the Baruch Housing was carried out, by demolishing and rebuilding, the methods by which slums are addressed in the text, “Articulating the Broken City and Society” are very different. These areas were proposed to improve the slums by means of the less invasive method of implanting structures into key areas of the site which would perform certain functions. In Complexo do Alenao, creating cable cars for connectivity with various community based program space does not address what I believe to be the root cause of the problem of the slums, which is living space conditions. Nor does Manguinhos’ proposal in which they plan to “elevates a divisive and dangerous railway and transports it into a linear park for recreation and commerce” (Jauregui 5). While these may offer some short-term solutions, I do not believe it will be effective long term. These people only occupy community spaces for a small portion of the day if at all. What is just as important, or perhaps a bit more so is their actual house where they have to sleep at night and perform other necessary functions in order to survive. While I don’t necessarily disagree with this type of proposal and method, I think it is more of a beginning to figure out a place to start to fix a problem. These interventions are however very new and so it may be unfair to judge the project at such an early place in time. Only time will tell which is truly more successful.
Which method is truly the better way to improve the quality of life for residents living in slums, could it be an alternative method, or perhaps even a combination of the two methods? What if we let the residents make the call on what should be changed and fixed, might that be a suitable solution? What is more important, social programs or living areas?
LikeLike
Baruch Houses
This brief article was interesting to read because it summed up the credibility of a prestigious firm by means of its ability to ” produce superior housing at the lowest possible cost for a potential tenancy that could ill afford to pay even the $8.50 per room required by law”. It is ironic because I assume design problems are challenging for their context, not simply for their limitation. This office was praised for its ability to provide low rent while still providing every smaller scale facility enjoyed higher paid rent apartment dwellers.
LikeLike
The readings this week presented a wide range of issues that definitely pave the way for how issues surrounding urban density are being treated in South America today. In Robert Moses’ biographical paper about Baron Haussmann, he highlighted the largest issue that led to Haussman’s demise – his inability to properly manage the public finances that he was given control over. While not entirely the same situation, mismanagement of finances is definitely a problem in modern redevelopment of South American urban settings. On a similar, but in many ways opposite note, Nathanial Owings writes about a desperate situation in Chicago, where funding could barely help clear 2% of the “blighted” areas in the city. What was most intriguing about this reading was that it seems that the author has many of the principles down that help explain what the actual problem in Chicago was – infrastructural issues surrounding the construction of railways, highways and industry – not conditions of blight brought upon the city by its residents. Slum-clearing, while a popular approach in the middle of the twentieth century, is not in my view the correct method for how to revitalize these blighted urban centers. The main problem to me is the simple fact that the government must, in some way, recoup some of its investment. Usually this creates residences with higher costs of living than the people who were displaced can afford, leading not to urban rehabilitation, but to forceful removal of those who live in blighted areas.
I find all of this to be very relevant to the cases in Latin America because of their stated goals of rehabilitating the informal urban residential areas, as opposed to the oft-failed practices of slum-clearing. As we established in class last week, the final judgment on the many cable cars being built in South American slums has yet to be passed, however this type of project, along with the construction of proper infrastructure (i.e. plumbing, electricity, other public utilities) for the residents of these informal settlements seem to be an improved solution for how to deal with the problem of “blighted” areas.
LikeLike
Articulating the Broken City and Society
There is a desire in the examples of the Favela-Barrio programmes to resolve the integration of formal and informal areas of Rio de Janeiro. This is distinctly opposite of actions such as the slum-clearance routines of Chicago, New York, and Paris, whose desires were to eliminate traces of undesired informality in favor of tabula rasa experiment.
One figure for the Manguinhos Complex in Rio describes 32,000 residents squeezed into 1.5 square miles of land. For reference, the Upper West Side of Manhattan contains 110,000 residents per square mile. However, Manguinhos is dense in the horizontal axis, whereas the UWS is such in the vertical. Clearly, the density on the ground is higher. A virtual lack of infrastructure and pervasive drug-trafficking activity further complicated the issue’s resolve.
The broader PAC program, a national urban development initiative, addressed the issue through an additive and re-use approach since slum-clearance was not an option with the relatively short four year term of the proposal. Their interventions appear surgical, but perhaps only to stop the bleeding of much larger issues. A system of cable-cars provide a certain amount of mobility for the Favela dwellers, providing islands of public services, public spaces, and retail to their landing points. As nodes, these points of landing seem innocuous amongst the “gift” of mobility, but actually infringe and execute a bit of eminent domain unto the land.
The Rambla conceives of the removal of physical separation between two neighborhoods, whose natures are not elaborated upon. By elevating the existing dividing railway, space is made for a public zone of ground based transportation and commercial offerings. As a strategy for stitching two disparate neighborhoods together it appears well, but without resolving the underlying issues stemming from the Favelas themselves this new avenue may facilitate modes of undesired informality to cross boundaries.
Baruch Houses – $30,000,000 worth of slum clearance for New York City
It seems odd to advertise the monetary value of wiping out 15 blocks of the lowest incoming housing, even considering their poor living conditions. This immediately suggests the intention of the authors to promote the project as a success. What they failed to investigate or report on were the needs or desires of the dispossessed, which the Chicago article at least thought to mention. The Tabula Rasa process is mentioned in passing as all the virtues of the new tower blocks are described in excess, right down to the plastering of salable imagery within the pages of the article. Of course when pitting the sparse line-work of the tower block plan against the imagery of slum conditions one may find its cleanliness all the more appealing. The imagery masks the lack of background on those who it dispossesses. 12,600 “dwelling units” were vacated, for whom residence in the new project is not described. Instead, what is described is the use of an Architect known for “high class luxury apartment houses” in the development of this project, however stripped of “refinements of elegance”.
Clearly, the author has not engaged the dispossessed whose priorities must include looking past lack of embellishment.
LikeLike
Articulating the Broken City and Society
We learn in this article how to “reinsert humanity into ourselves through the recognition of the other”. I like this because it gets to the crux of what it means to be social beings. Jauregui describes strategies of how this can be implemented, or rather how a designer uses this perspective to cultivate a positive result. But what interests me more than it being a stimulate for progress, I like that the author points to this as the means to articulate the divided city. This is great because instead of interpreting challenges as “problems” or “issues”, it interprets challenges as the object of discourse. Meaning, there is acknowledgement of permanent experimentation rather than chaos and complete impoverishment. It is very optimistic perspective of poverty. It attributes a quality to the human experience most professionals overlook because it is not expressed in the same “language”. It recognizes that within spaces that escape public control, people still express their innate creativity as imaginative creatures despite their ability to manifest change with it.
LikeLike
After I have read “What happened to Haussman” and “Articulating the broken city and society” it is unavoidable to compare both urban interventions. Although they come from different site contexts and epochs, we can generalize and analyze opposite concepts from two distinct mentalities:
– Revalue what already exists and improve it with “acupuncture” interventions before starts from 0, taking care local singularities {{VS.}} Create a completely new identity for solve the problem, nipping in the bud the conflict with huge resources in relation with generic solutions but with infinitive possibilities.
– The abstraction of the architect and the urban planner isolate them to an elitist position far from the reality and the public opinion, because they are the experts {{VS.}} The architecture and urbanism works horizontally in collaboration with some many agents; one of them is the public opinion, they observe the ordinary 80%.
– If we see the architect/urban planner as the link between power and resources. The architect/urban planner would design without conceiving any limit in the resources. That would be the responsible for producing exclusive designs for power(private) scenarios. {{VS.}} If we see the architect/urban planner as the link between power and resources. The architect/urban planner would design with limited resources and measured interventions for the social inclusive(public) design.
Is one the consequence of the other? What is objectively correct? Where are we? What we need?
LikeLike
This week’s readings expose two different approaches one can take when working with slums: “Tabula Rasa” vs. “working with what already exists”. In first place, there is the speech Nathaniel A. Owings made before The Economic Club of Detroit. This is not any man, he is the O in SOM, one of its founding members. You can feel the numbers rushing as he speaks, he is a business man, the entire world fits in his brain. He vehemently proposes a solution for a solutionless problem: decay is originated because of the dirt on Chicago’s treeless streets. Let’s bulldoze it all down, and build 12 level apartment bars with plenty of green space. When bringing the suburban feeling to the city core, “those” people will start rehabilitating themselves. Wise man.
Then comes the architect, R. Roth, implementing Mr. Owings ideas, or at least a version of them. His Baruch project, here in NYC, may not have the upscale elegance his studio is used to design, but for sure is a project that “still in essence provides at smaller scale every facility enjoyed at a greater scale by high rent apartment dwellers “.
Finally, 60 years go by, we of course know that N. Owings and R. Roth were monumentally wrong, that “tabula rasa” is a bad idea, and that some slum problems are deeply rooted in “youths who are too often seduced into the prevalent drug-trafficking activities that unfortunately generate a large number of jobs in low income areas”, instead of the “treeless streets” thesis. As show by J. Jáuregui, a less drastic approach – one that analyzes the community subject of improvement, one that tries to understand the origin of the problems this community suffers of- MAY be more beneficial. Articulating the divided city and society by providing greater accessibility, investments in infrastructure, new public social facilities and environmental revitalization, connecting the formal and the informal parts, appears to improve more the quality of life for residents.
LikeLike
Chicago’s slum clearing program
It is interesting how the author emphasized on the benefits of those slum residence, and the important role they play in flourishing the economy and the whole entity of the city rather than highlighting the danger of these people living in slums and the increase rate of crime and how is it dangerous on society like some other author’s do.
This might bring the question of; why does not the government itself consider those benefits (even it’s for sac of economics only), and work on a reasonable plan for those people, rather than trying to sell this idea of redeveloping already occupied areas with some Looseness (hoping that wouldn’t be in residents rights), in order to make them say yes.
Actually, there is also this concern about the destiny of the average families. What will happened to those who are non-child couples, unmarried, etc.? If the process went the direction mentioned in the reading anyway. If the density decreased (as it is supposed to be), then consequently many of those family members may not end up in the right place, or may be just there new location will be far from the factories and other industrial units they used to work in.
LikeLike