Architectures of Segregation -- on the failures of the Fair Housing Act

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/opinion/sunday/the-architecture-of-segregation.html?_r=0

Note: "As things stand now, federally subsidized housing for low-income citizens, which seems on its face to be a good thing, is disproportionately built in poor areas offering no work, underperforming schools and limited opportunity. Zoning laws in newer suburbs that rest on and benefit from infrastructure built with public subsidies prevent poor, moderate-income and minority families from moving in. Discriminatory practices exclude even higher income minority citizens from some communities.".....

Victor Buchli

Hi Everyone,

Pardon my blanking out on the name of the author for the book I mentioned yesterday. It's Victor Buchli. Title: An Archaeology of Socialism.

Trangdai

            PLANNING AND DESIGN FROM GARDEN CITY TOWARD MODERN CITY

Iran-Iraq war (1981-89) left both countries, especially Iran with lots of damages. Three cities in Iran, next to boundaries with Iraq, ruined hundred percent, like no one, never lived there. I have been to one of those cities, Ghasre Shirin which has called bride of Iran’s cities before destruction. Many of residents lost their life or beloved one and many didn’t want to go back and struggle with building a new city. The Central government also didn’t want to invest in cities so close to boundaries. People started to build houses with the basic material. These cities don’t have an urban plan and just a couple of years ago its local government started to build some public areas. In this case, the problem is cities strategic location, being close to boundaries leaves them with no solution but investing in the army more than the city.

            The other reason could be that even before the war they were not big cities with a huge population. However, it reminds me that one of the important cities in the south of Iran that occupied with Iraq army for a while after twenty-six years still look like a city in war. Destroyed building with bullet effects everywhere.

            It sounds there are not more than three cities in Iran that government really care about their urban plans. Of course, one of them is Tehran, the capital. Tehran located in an area which has been a settlement for more than six thousand years. It is the third biggest city in the Middle East. The face of Tehran, as I said before, is so different in different areas. Reading of this week raised the question of how it is possible to make an urban plan for a city like Tehran.

            I searched for an answer and the article, “URBAN ECOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE PLANNING AND DESIGN FROM GARDEN CITY TOWARD MODERN CITY - A CASE STUDY: TEHRAN CITY IN IRAN”, has some good points about Tehran urban planning.

It is speaking of planning and design from garden city, traditional plan for Iranian cities, toward modern city: “In recent decades, as a result, the comprehensive and detailed plans carried out in Tehran which neglects the environmental structures and landscape ecology and also the valuable historic gardens, we are confronted with the disturbed situation of the city, Environmental pollutions, fragmentation in the landscape ecology, disorder in the city structure and land use, etc.”

http://www.iotpe.com/IJTPE/IJTPE-2012/IJTPE-Issue11-Vol4-No2-Jun2012/19-IJTPE-Issue11-Vol4-No2-Jun2012-pp128-134.pdf

“Tehran grow on me”

 https://vimeo.com/130068359

Short version:

https://vimeo.com/121880287

Modernities Negotiated and Repurposed

Reference:

Rofel, L. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. University of California Press.

Le Normand, Brigitte. 2014. Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism and Socialism in Belgrade. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Prakash, Vikramaditya. 2002. Afterword. Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India. Seattle: University of Washington Press.  

Swyngedouw, Erik. 2006. “Metabolic Urbanization: The Making of Cyborg Cities.” In The Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. N. Heynen, M. Kaika, E. Swyngedouw, eds. London: Routledge. Pp. 20-39.

Entering this week’s readings, I grapple with the questions:

1. How is ‘modernity' planned and designed through the built environment, taken in light of the intersectionality of culture, politics, and the built environment?
2. How does modernist planning unfold in the processes of building urban infrastructure?

As we continue to occupy ourselves with the modernity projects in the urban space, I am reminded of the pluralistic nature of any concept or phenomenon that pertains to infrastructure and modernity. I chose Lisa Rofel's book because of its intersections with the themes of modernist planning, cultural (gendered) aspirations and implementations, and socialist realities. But more so, because she keenly calls out the fact that there are other forms of modernities - imagined and pursued - that would not conform to the Western concepts of the term. As she boldly suggests in the title, there are infact other modernities beyond the academic writings on modernity at the time of her research in the late 1990s.

Rofel defines modernity in various ways in the book, but opens with a definition as “…an imaginary and continuously shifting site of global/local claims, commitments, and knowledge, forged within uneven dialogues about the place of those who move in and out of categories of otherness” (Rofel 1999:3).

Rofel, Prakash, and Le Normand all speak of the global-local duality in their ethnographies about how modernity is negotiated at the state level as well as how it is interpreted by the people. The tango is between the modernization projects as intended and/or implemented by the state and the subject formation in the lives of everyday people. As Prakash shows, Chandigarh's Le Crobusier is the contesting ground where state's desires coalesce with local practices: the city's claim to modernity through appearances, be it Indian or colonial (149); the village people's repurposing of the architecture and its space on the Esplanade in their daily practices (146-7). If Prakash asks, “Whose architecture is it?” then we can find Rofel asking in her book, “Whose modernity is it?”

In the three texts, the historical parallels and continuities in modernization projects reflect the many ways in which a nation and its people grapple with modernities and their processes. Through these projects, actors at all levels participate on their own terms to show how national identities are created, negotiated, and reconstructed - even how such identities are perceived from afar. These terrains bring us back to the power structure and struggles in infrastructures, as we follow Spivak’s call to question “the ethics of representation" (Prakash 2002: 152). The gaze from the West, for instance, can be occupied with “the binary poles of acting on and being acted upon" in  Malraux’s mediation on the “irreconcilability of the West and the East" (Prakash 2002: 150). In the case of postcolonial India, Spivak argues that “Modernism… as a failure because it did not put decolonization on stage" (152).

Authors we have read thus far allude to the complex undersides of modernity as exhibited in various forms of infrastructures. In Other Modernities, Rofel “addresses the cultural politics of modernity in the late twentieth century. It suggests how modernity is imagined, pursued, and experienced… in those places marked by a deferred relationship to modernity” (Roffle 1999:3). Early in this seminar, Swyngedouw reminds us that, “Urban modernity is a particular set of processes of socio-metabolic transformations promises exactly the possibility of the active, democratic, and empowering creation of those socio-physical environments we wish to inhabit. In this sense, modernity is not over; it has not yet begun” (2006).

Modernism and Architecture

Brigitte Le Normand details the intersections between architectural infrastructure and political plans in Belgrade. Tito envisioned hygienic and functional spaces would create modern subjects in Belgrade. While architects designed tall apartment buildings with green spaces and social infrastructures such as schools within each neighborhood, residents also desired detached American homes. Perceptions of an American separate house interact with state goals of more egalitarian housing. Rural migration into Belgrade and a lack of affordable housing created a situation Le Normand terms rogue construction. 

In the case of Cambodia, the Sihanouk regime envisioned architecture that would enable a construction of a national identity with national following independence from France. Scholars have begun to examine more critically the infrastructures of modernity in Cambodia in the 1953-1970 postcolonial period which includes architecture. While in my research, I examine the infrastructure of music termed “modern music,” I’ve decided to focus on an architect this week, especially because of Vikramaditya Prakash’s excerpt on Le Courbusier. I selected the work of architect Vann Molyvann, the subject of a documentary entitled The Man Who Built Cambodia. Following independence from France, the Sihanouk regime hired Vann Molyvann to design buildings in Phnom Penh under the concept New Khmer architecture. Vann Molyvann born in 1926 and in 1946 Vann received a government scholarship to study in Paris where the work of Le Corbusier significantly influenced Vann’s designs. For example, Vann noted similarities between Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and wooden stilt houses in the countryside and proposed urban housing called “100 houses.” 

http://www.vannmolyvannproject.org/archive#/100-houses/

http://www.phnompenhpost.com/7days/vann-molyvann-my-legacy-will-disappear

Housing Crises, Ideology, and Living

Please forgive me ahead of time for the tone of this post and its rambling nature. I am still working through my thoughts about modernism, ideology, and urban design, which are tied up with my deep applied concern for these issues.

With nearly daily frequency I experience a moderate level of anxiety that we human beings have no idea how to live on our planet, how to eat, clothe ourselves, shelter ourselves, reproduce, communicate, or really do anything. We don’t even know what’s in the ocean. We try to combat this debilitating ignorance, of course. The Athens Charter was one attempt to encourage us to organize human life in a manner seen by many as rational, efficient, productive, just, and modern. But changing ideologies, lack of resources, and on-the-ground human behavior and desires revealed the weaknesses of the design for New Belgrade.

What influences and processes shape our desire to live the way we do? What ideology is revealed in the possibility of desire shaping how we live at all? The Athens Charter implies that infrastructure could shape human occupants into modern citizens. Is it desirable or possible to trust the city to all its inhabitants?

Rather than dwell on my own unsolvable anxieties, I decided to look for an outside source about Indonesia to provide a counterpoint to Designing Tito’s Capital. Jakarta was the obvious choice; the colonial and post-colonial capital of Indonesia grew from 115,000 souls in 1900 to more than 28 million in 2010 and suffers acutely from housing and infrastructure issues. A google search led me to a fascinating blog by Deden Rukana dealing with “advancement of urban development in Indonesia.” The post “The Megacity of Jakarta: Problems, Challenges and Planning Efforts” describes a history not dissimilar from that of Belgrade and New Belgrade, but with different ideological undercurrents.

Unlike in Belgrade, the government of Indonesia actively divorced itself from socialist ideology beginning with Suharto’s New Order government in the mid-1960s, and availability of modern housing for all was not a specified goal in Indonesia until recently. The New Order energetically courted foreign investment, according to Rukmana, which meant that new infrastructure was overwhelmingly in the property sector, especially “offices, commercial buildings, new town development, and highrise apartments and hotels” (Rukmana). State-sponsored infrastructure projects mirrored the desire to attract investment; an arts center, industrial zones, and the fascinating Taman Mini Indonesia Indah theme park were some of the government’s major accomplishments. But, much like in Belgrade, economic crisis halted and altered plans for development.

The reach of the economy into infrastructure is not the only similarity. As in New Belgrade, “rogue” building and settlement is considered an issue in Jakarta to the extent that rogue communities have maintained and created suburban areas within the city. Rukana writes, “to understand the suburbanization in the megacity of Jakarta, it is essential to recognize the socio-economic dualism pervading Indonesian urban society. The manifestations of this dualism are the presence of the modern city and the kampung city in urban areas. The kampung, ‘village’ in Indonesian, is associated with informality, poverty, and the retention of rural traditions within an urban setting. Firman (1999) argues the existence of kampungs and modern cities reflect spatial segregation and socio-economic disparities” (Rukmana). While a special body has been brought together to deal with development in Jakarta and relieve the inequality of space, the local governments retain authority over development and political tensions prevent cooperation.

From my superficial understanding of Jakarta urban design (based on limited experience, an article, and a blog post) compared with Designing Tito’s Capital, I suspect that neither socialism nor capitalism has a premium on declaring certain types of building and development undesirable, wild, or illegal. Nor do either exclusively draw people into a city only to find housing shortages. Ideology, in these two cases, differs vastly, but produces many of the same housing problems. The self-determination at the root of the problem was, according to Le Normand, part of the solution in Belgrade. Will it work in the long term? Will we ever know how to live? 

Rukmana’s truly excellent blog post:

http://indonesiaurbanstudies.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-megacity-of-jakarta-problems.html

A youtube video of Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, one of the Indonesian government's favorite accomplishments from the era of modernization: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8Ses9OTyXo

Many Modernisms

Throughout Brigitte Le Normand’s Designing Tito’s Capital, I was very interested in the idea of many different modernisms, or different uses of the concept of modernism. Le Normand shows us that, although the Athens Charter was designed by European architects specifically to address problems in European cities, the idea traveled to areas “outside the West” (Le Normand: 11). Modernism arrived in the “European periphery” and postcolonial world by colonial government or elites of authoritarian states, and was used to assert power and legitimacy. In these areas, modernism was based on imitating European examples. However, in post-colonial areas that often meant imitating colonial styles, which gave modernism a different interpretation. Vikram Prakash finds that in a time when the postcolonial leaders in India should have used modernism to emphasize decolonization, or “put decolonization on stage” (Prakash: 152), modernism rather was used as “an antidote to the ‘pitfalls of ancient identities’” (Le Normand: 12). Prakash sees modernism as a failure in postcolonial India because of how it was introduced—in a “top-down” fashion that did nothing to help India’s problems attached to a recent colonial history.

In Belgrade, there are struggles with taking the concept of modernism, originally conceived of in the Athens Charter to optimize capitalist cities, and integrating socialist goals into the plan—community-centered living and social equality. In both uses of modernism, there are the general goals of using scientific planning and technique to help citizens achieve a “better standard of life”. There can be tensions, though, in visualizing what the better life looks like. This tension derailed urban planning in Belgrade, once overall goals became somewhat conflicted: does the better life include detached single-family housing or a more connected community-centered plan, and is it possible to have both? You can see that modernism isn’t a stable or bounded concept—people pick out different aspects of what comprises modernism and find use for or discard them to fit certain needs or ideologies. However, it is usually posed as a solution for social life, whatever that ideal solution may look like.

I was curious to compare these ideas to the Philippines. I found a couple different uses of the idea of modernism. They represent a much more current interpretation of what it means to be modern, or live modern, in the Philippines, and it was interesting that both concepts center on environmental responsibility—being “green” or “sustainable”—to combat the problem of climate change.

In this article, from a middle/upper class newspaper (http://www.philstar.com/modern-living/614693/green-urban-design), the author describes “landscape urbanism” which finds success not only in maximizing the flow of goods and people, but also integrates environmental protection: “The success of modern districts, cities, and larger metropolitan areas depend on changing the old paradigm based on just urban economics or functional circulation of goods, services, and people. An even more overarching approach is emerging that requires a new type of urbanism, one that addresses the standard economic and functional requirements but puts emphasis on greening and being green” (Alcazaren 2010). Just as modernism imitates European example, this proposed urban model for the Philippines would imitate other more economically successful cities, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Modernism is offered here as a solution for climate change.

A statement written by the Philippines socialist party (Party of the Laboring Masses), on the other hand, also sees climate change as the central social problem to be addressed, but sees different techniques of modernism as the solution. (http://climateandcapitalism.com/2014/09/24/philippines-socialists-capitalism-sustainable/). This modernism highlights the distribution of new technology, like solar lanterns, and also on developing the renewable energy sector but criticizes capitalism’s ability to adequately address social problems associated with climate change: “It’s capitalism, a global system based on prioritizing profits over people, which has brought us to the brink of a climate-induced catastrophe that can destroy humanity. There is no ‘sustainable capitalism’. There’s ‘disaster capitalism’, which epitomizes capitalist greed for profit, at any cost” (Climate and Capitalism 2014). Later in the article, it becomes clear that the party’s conception of modernism imitates the example of socialist government in Bolivia.

So, similar to examples in Le Normand’s book, modernism is used in different ways to combat different enemies to social welfare or “standard of living” (and sometimes shared enemies in the case of climate change).

References

Alcazaren, P. (2010, September 25). Green Urban Design. Philippine Star. Retrieved from http://www.philstar.com/modern-living/614693/green-urban-design

Climate and Capitalism. (2014, September 24). Philippines Socialists: Capitalism Cannot Be Sustainable. Retrieved from http://climateandcapitalism.com/2014/09/24/philippines-socialists-capitalism-sustainable/

Planning for Modernity's Exhaustion

Articulating visions of the city as a rationalized and civilizing system, master plans often constitute visual artifacts made sticky with the affective excesses of top-down modernist imaginaries. As Le Normand shows, these “plans” extended beyond the normally limited visibility of planning documents and maps themselves, as images of modernity circulated through public exhibits and advertisements of domestic modernity; first with moderate depictions of “living within our means” designed to inculcate collectivism, and following the transition to market socialism in 1965, with steadily more luxurious depictions of larger houses.   

Le Normand’s examination of historical documents covering the reconstruction of Belgrade as the dust began to settle from World War II is a case study in contradiction. Urban planners were motivated to materialize conditions of more egalitarian living standards immediately following the war through infrastructural redevelopment (following the Athens Charter, whose primary architect Le Corbusier was tirelessly devoted to the fantasy of capitalism as a force for egalitarianism). For instance, Le Normand notes that New Belgrade is perhaps the only city in the Eastern bloc that had envisions worker’s housing at the center. However, Le Normand argues that, where other scholars attributed the failure of modernist urban planning to materialize egalitarian conditions of better living to an inherently alienating quality in the architectural forms themselves (e.g. towering residential areas, “functional” divisions that instantiate and literally concretize hierarchies, apparatuses designed to render subjects “legible”), Le Normand argues instead that the failure to realize the utopian visions of New Belgrade was a consequence of a loss of support among “decision makers” (pg. xiii). Where Le Normand frequently takes Scott (1998) to task for an overly dichotomous view of the state, Designing Tito’s Capital gives a more mundane and rhizomatic account of modernist imaginaries that appear to simply succumb to exhaustion, that never entirely “get off the ground” as sources of political support and funding frequently fail to materialize.

With the final chapter, I grew increasingly curious as to the extensions of cybernetics theory as a foundation in civilizing technologies. Le Normand suggests that the asymmetrical collaboration with Wayne State U to model more effective and decentralized infrastructural approaches to transportation infrastructure with increasingly dense traffic was primarily “window dressing,” a technological transfer used to firm up political support for an entirely new master plan under a façade of “science.” Anthropologist Michael Fisch (2013) similarly examined the decentralized restructuring of commuter train networks in Japan via cybernetics and systems theories. Amidst rising rates of suicide and suicide-by-train under protracted conditions of socio-economic precarity, Fisch demonstrates the techno-social logics by which engineers deploy cybernetics to construct “smart” train network infrastructures guided by a self-regulating state of “emergence” and able to effectively predict and adjust for delays as a consequence of suicides, to normalize and to regulate the irregularity of suicide (announced over train intercoms as jinshin jiko – delays as a consequence of “[human] body accidents”). Fisch suggests that the “corporealization” of the “smart” train network potentially “encourages the experience of commuter suicides as a necessary and recursive process of metabolic renewal within a totalizing system” (Fisch 2013:340).

Connecting this theme back to Le Normand’s discussion of rogue builders in “Planning Undone” (and recognizing that influence from cybernetics came several years later) I want to consider more deeply how imaginaries of modernity were mobilized in New Belgrade to configure particular modes of “habitation” as systemically incompatible with the materialization of a “modern” city – despite claims to egalitarianism. Is this process of ideological exhaustion something that we feel, after reading the text, like Le Normand feels is in some ways endemic to the process by which “modernity” moves from design to implementation?

Fisch, Michael

2013

Tokyo's Commuter Train Suicides and The Society of Emergence. Cultural Anthropology 28(2): 320–343.