Information is not a roof
Strictly speaking, shelter is outside the remit of this blog. However the article The Exigent City in the New York Times was an excellent piece of reporting, and I urge everybody to read it. (HT: Simmy Ross) The article closes with the following lines:
When I first contacted Cameron Sinclair, who started Architecture for Humanity with Kate Stohr in 1999, he replied with a long e-mail message that began, “You’ve stumbled upon the question of the century for those working in the built environment,” and ended with a signature line that listed his title as “Eternal Optimist.” A lot of people I spoke to afterward agreed with the first sentiment; almost no one with the second. The world is short a billion homes. Now all we need are a few million architects to help build them.
I’m not optimistic either, but nor do I agree that we need a few million architects. What we need is to help the people who need a billion homes to become their own architects – to develop simple, workable construction forms that can be disseminated easily and virally. There’s a role in that first part for architects, urban planners and shelter experts, sure – but the second part can only be achieved if we take a different approach to the actual construction process.
We can’t can’t rely on central planning to take into account the massive and growing improvised urban areas – at best they’ll be able to provide basic services, but not even that is guaranteed – so poor communities already build their own dwellings, which is where shanty towns come from in the first place. The poor are already their own architects, so the only solution is to help them become better architects who build better dwellings – better in the sense of being more robust, more environmentally friendly, more durable and more liveable.
So we come back around to the role of ICT, which for the first time offers a way of disseminating this information on a large scale at relatively low cost. The question is, what’s the best vector for that dissemination, how do we ensure access to the information, and what forms do we need to use to make the information relevant to the end users?
Answers on a postcard to the Shelter Centre, I guess….
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Fair article; perceptive, good spread of views on the issue, nice reference to Fred Cuny, etc.
I would have liked to see some discussion about the roles of legal status and property title, and their influence on ideas of permeance of settlements. What kind of effect would the grant of legal title to a shelter have?
Tom Longley
13 Jun 08 at 12:17
Yes, the legal questions were noticeably absent. Understandable – it’s intended for a general audience – but problematic – since those have really become the questions in this area. I’m sure if Conor’s reading this he’ll have something to say…
Paul Currion
13 Jun 08 at 21:18
Hi, all: Jim Lewis here. I happened on your blog and thought I’d respond, in part because the questions you raise are indeed important. I don’t think granting legal title to a shelter is quite the solution, though, since the larger problem is ownership of the land on which it rests. My understanding is that a majority of the world’s poor don’t own the property they live on: renters, tenant farmers, squatters, and so on. (You may already know this: I don’t mean to be preaching to the choir here.) It does create great enormous problems. Among other things, aid groups are chary of investing in building on land that might be taken away at any moment, and few of them are equipped to deal with the legal issues that would arise. Indeed, no one really wants to take on the task of responsible building for, e.g., squatters. But even if one were to get a program started that encouraged land ownership, it would presumably take considerable time and legal expertise to get the issues sorted out. In the meantime, those people are living in grossly sub-standard conditions. — Ought we, then, to encourage the building of portable shelters?
I don’t know. (And again, my apologies if all of this is too familiar to you.)
As for why I didn’t write about it: I did, in an earlier draft. But one always has less space than one would like, and in the end we decided, first of all, to try to stay focussed on design, as such, and secondly, that the legal issues of land ownership were so complicated, and varied so widely around the world, that it would be more irresponsible to mention it briefly than to pass over it altogether. (I had to leave out a number of other issues that I would have liked to have discussed as well — women’s rights, for example, the question of sovereignty, and many others.)
All best,
JL
Jim Lewis
14 Jun 08 at 15:48
Hi Jim —
Thanks for getting stuck into our harping and carping about your (excellent) article. Perhaps you can persuade your editor to commission a follow-up about the complexity of the legal issues in emergency, transitional and even slum settlements.
A book on this matter that has really influenced my own thinking is Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, which is all about the development of private property laws. It’s not as dull as it sounds!
Tom Longley
15 Jun 08 at 9:12
Jim – thanks for dropping by. It’s rare to find an article in the press that reflects critical issues in this sector accurately, so I hope you write more!
Tom’s point about the legal issues doesn’t detract from the article – I understand that space is always a constraint – but it is important. In the future we’re going to see NGOs forced to get to grips with legal questions around what we broadly call “protection”, which includes property rights. (He beat me to it with the de Soto reference – I’m not as much of a convert as I used to be, but it’s still a good read.)
The rights question is made more complicated by the legal status of refugees, of course, but it seems that we should be more concerned about the “shantyization” processes that we’re seeing globally, which threaten to knock back many of the advances we’ve made in terms of health, education, etc. Urban planning needs its own revolution…
Paul Currion
15 Jun 08 at 10:59