Mongolian Migrations

Rob Story and Giovana Beltrao

Migration can be a comfortable pattern or a tumultuous struggle. A culture built on migration has it woven into life. Movement is integral, anticipated and essential. But migrating a culture out of that pattern can be a different story. 


The people of Mongolia have migrated for centuries, routinely carrying their iconic gers with them as the seasons changed. But now, many have made the last migration - into the city, the migration of a culture, a pattern of life, an economy and an architecture. The move is not only theirs. It is a global phenomenon over which a nomadic family has little control over the pushes, pulls and consequences.
People are pushed by nature, pressures on resources, a collapsed economy; pulled by awareness of alternatives to the hardships of traditional life, by the draw of the city's bright lights. The young leave and the traditional cycle collapses. The search for a replacement life is inevitable, but the consequences can be traumatic and adjustments complex.
The draw of the city often dumps people into an urban poverty worse than the rural one they hoped to escape. A new settlement pattern must be adopted, a new economy must be entered, accessing basic needs must be re-learned, and an architecture must adapt. Developing governments are seldom ready to cope with the needs, and neither are many families. Sprawling slums are the result.
The traditional Mongolian family is nomadic and self-sufficient, moving with its herds through the hostile environment of the open steppes from summer grazing to winter protection. Long-standing communal traditions of land tenure recognize which families have grazing rights in a particular watershed and where their winter camping spots are. When the season ends, it takes only a few hours to fold up the family ger, pack it onto a couple of camels, or into a creaking old Russian truck, and move.
Architecture is the management of environments for people and their activities. By definition it must be holistic. Good architecture embodies the realities of a community's social structure, cultural beliefs, environment, economy and available technologies and materials. Indigenous architecture is always good architecture, it has no choice or it disappears. Best of all it is innately affordable and without formal debt. The well-know ger (yurt in Russian), is a perfect example. It evolved over generations in pragmatic response to that very set of drivers. When the drivers change, the architecture will follow. The situation in Mongolia exemplifies the challenges in doing so.
The ger is designed for the pattern of seasonal migration. We are familiar with the ger's classic kit-of-parts design, the hardware components, but less familiar with the software components, traditional family roles, social structure, household routines and the community relations that the ger encompasses. Migrating to an urban setting changes all of those. The software components are the first to feel the impact of urban migration, then the hardware must evolve. On the land the squat, decorated ger door opens from the expansive steppe to culturally ensured hospitality. A visitor need never knock. The mandatory salty butter tea is always on the stove. In the city, the door is behind a high fence, the gate is locked, the door is locked and the stove may be cold with family away in the cash economy.


Four contemporary events dramatically altered Mongolia's nomadic norms: the rise of Soviet control in the 1920s, its subsequent collapse in 1990, a twist of nature and globalising communication.
Under Moscow's direction, supply-driven rural industries were established throughout the countryside spurring a wave of migration off the land as families opted to abandon their nomadic lifestyle in favour of sedentary employment. Many brought their gers with them while others took advantage of Soviet-supplied workers housing in blocks of typically poor quality flats.
The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered another wave of migration. Overnight, rural industries became unsustainable and collapsed. Former nomads were stranded in small towns without employment, and without the ability or desire to go back to the land. The option was to migrate again, this time into the capital, Ulaanbaatar.
Then nature kicked in with two consecutive devastating winters that decimated the herds of the remaining nomads and launched yet another wave of rural-urban migration, this time straight from the land to the capital.
Compounding all of these, globalised communication is beaming exposure to lifestyle alternatives into even the most remote rural ger with its satellite dish and solar panel attached to a car battery. Aspirations rise, migration accelerates.


Ulaanbaatar is centuries old having evolved as a trading hub and a religious base anchored by Buddhist temples from which nomadic monks provided far ranging support. During the 70 years of Soviet domination, large portions of the simple traditional core of Ulaanbaatar were transformed into the semblance of a developing 20th century city with a combination of grand Soviet public buildings, shoddy apartment blocks, wide streets, centralised infrastructure and central government land control. The social and architectural contrasts between the two eras are stark.
With the end of Moscow's subsidies in 1990, government resources to manage urban growth disappeared. The result is that about 70% of Ulaanbaatar's built-up area is unplanned, sprawling beyond the Soviet-era core in poorly serviced, informal ger areas.
The nomadic perception of free rural land usage is dramatically different from that of an urban sense of ownership with a cost. Government guidance to orderly development of land, infrastructure and economic development should come first as the framework for growth, but the pace of rural-urban migration far outpaces government's capacity. Families can't wait and the building is always first. Real life replaces planning. Government then struggles to overlay some form of land tenure and insert infrastructure into the organic form of an informal settlement.
Incremental processes of development and densification over time are readily evident in Ulaanbaatar's "suburbs". New families arrive on the edge and plant their ger behind a new fence. Whatever plan, infrastructure and control exist have not made the transition to urban needs. Someone will claim land ownership, official or not, and payment for a "fence" will be needed, but without recourse to a Central Land Titles Office. It may be hundreds of metres to the nearest source of water with a wheelbarrow to pay market prices  up to 20 times that of the subsidized urban core. The sanitation system is a hole in the ground. Food comes from a shop and shops want money and that needs employment.
In older ger areas a single "fence" may have densified to contain two or three gers and several contemporary structures built as the family grows, aspirations are realised, or relatives arrive to share the space. Gers may have even been replaced all together. Corresponding improvements to infrastructure, however, are usually far behind. Bankable land tenure is not in place. Primitive pit latrines remain frozen through the harsh winters, then melt in spring and flow into the dirt passages serving as streets. Coal, dung and wood smoke from thousands of rural stoves choke the urban winter air. The struggle to enter the cash economy can rapidly alter the familiar family structure with the men migrating for work, women leaving the house and kids on their own.
It is true that the perceived social and economic opportunities of the city exist, but for far too many they remain out of reach. Migrations will continue. Cities must embrace the dynamic processes involved and target the key points of intervention if the goals of urbanised social, economic and environmental health are to be met. With the framework in place, a new vernacular architecture will evolve.

Rob Story: a Calgary-based architect, urban planner, traveller and photographer working with human settlement issues throughout the developing world for the past 25 years. President of HABICO Planning + Architecture.  Giovana Beltrao: a Brazilian-born architect and urban planner who started working in the favelas of Brazil 18 years ago and continues to work on human settlement projects throughout the developing world with Rob and HABICO.

Story, Rob and Giovana Beltrao.    'Mongolia Migrates'  On Site review, no. 24 Fall 2010
©Rob Story, Giovana Beltrao and On Site review 

Velo-City

Chris Hardwicke

It’s Monday morning. You grab your gear and strap your bag onto your bike. It is cold and raining, and the traffic’s heavy, but it’s only a few minutes to the bikeway. Here it is. A quick lane change and you are pumping your way up the onramp and gliding through the entrance. The street noise falls away as you join the flow. Already you feel the draft of the other cyclists blurring past in the fast lane, their steady wind pulling you forward. You relax into the rhythm and the tension leaves your shoulders as you let down your defences. No more cars breathing down you neck.
You ride along, matching your speed to those around you and looking through the raindrops on the glass-domed tube at the panorama of the city. Up ahead, you see a friend’s familiar bike trailer– he’s taking the kids to daycare. Pulling into the slow lane you chat for a few minutes before they get to their off-ramp.
Soon the bikeway opens up, widening to six lanes as you pass the commuter train station. Hundreds of suburbanites on yellow bikes merge smoothly into traffic. As you cross a valley, high above the expressway, the sun breaks through the clouds. You shift down, and take the next exit to work. Checking your watch, you notice you are early again.
Welcome to velo-city.



Velo-city is a highway for bikes, a network of elevated bicycle roadways connecting distant parts of the city. There are three lanes of traffic–slow, medium, and fast–in both directions, each direction having a separate glass-roofed bikeway tube. The separation of directions reduces wind resistance and creates a natural tailwind for cyclists. The reduction of air resistance increases the efficiency of cycling by about 90 percent, allowing for speeds of up to 50 km/hr.
Because it is elevated, Velo-city can be located in existing highway, power, and railway corridors, adapting to the built environment while requiring no additional real estate. Bikeways float above intersections and fit into spaces where trains, subways, and roads simply can’t go due to their size, noise, and pollution. Light and compact (you can fit seven bicycles in the road space taken up by one car) Velo-city produces no noise or pollution, so it can run right beside or even into buildings.
For commuters, Velo-city delivers total travel times that rival any other form of high-speed transit, and it is active rapid transit. In contrast to the passivity of taking a train or a bus; it includes exercise as an essential part of an urban lifestyle. Personal independence is expressed in individual freedom of movement. By working as a parallel infrastructure connected to subways, railways, highways, and parking lots, the bikeways expand commuting choices, while reducing congestion on our transit systems and highways. Bikeways are the ultimate in efficient, health-generating rapid transit.
Maintenance costs for Velo-city would be substantially lower than the expense of keeping subways and highways in good operational order, because the weight and vibration of bicycles is considerably less than that of automobiles or railways. And because Velo-city is covered, the lane surfaces would be sheltered from weather distress.
The culture of a city is often defined by its transportation system: yellow cabs in New York City, bicycles in Beijing, streetcars in San Francisco, freeways in Los Angeles, double-decker buses in London, scooters in Taipei, vaporetti in Venice, cyclos in Ho Chi Minh City, and the Paris Metro. Modes of transport create interdependent relationships with urban forms and city culture. Think of the relationships between cars and shopping malls, subways and skyscrapers, streetcars and main streets, scooters and roadside stalls. Over time, Velo-city will create a cycling culture for the cities it inhabits: kiss ’n’ rides, shower facilities, cycling fashion shops, velodomes, bike parks, health clubs, cycle path stalls, repair shops, bike couriers, bike picnics, car-free housing and intermodal stations. Velo-city would simply give bicycles the same level of dedicated infrastructure that other modes of transportation have enjoyed.

The bicycle has been around for more than a hundred years. It was a brilliant, modern invention back then, and remains one today. Bicycle enthusiasts have always been tenacious and devoted. And now, perhaps, it is an idea whose time has come back – bicycles now outsell automobiles in North America.

Hardwicke, Chris. 'Velo-city' On Site review, no. 21 Spring 2009
©Chris Hardwicke and On Site review

Marginal Stories

South Point Douglas
Gregory Beck Rubin and Conrad Dueck

In the process of junking its tools of production, Winnipeg has assembled the objects for a museum. Curated by homeless people, bound by trees, tall grass and water, Sheldon’s junkyard archives without restriction the making of the prairie city. And its location is symptomatic of development in Canada – build it, junk it: there’s so much more land. But a closer look at the topography of Point Douglas reveals the framing of the junkyard, and this frame anticipates a new kind of museum.
Covering roughly one-half square mile, South Point Douglas is marginalised in part by its proximity to Winnipeg’s downtown. It is bordered on the west by Main Street, the premier street of Winnipeg, which constantly revolts against efforts at gentrification. Bending around the south and east of the site is the main waterway dividing the city, the Red River, badly polluted and threatening to flood every spring just after break-up. The train tracks that bisect the city pass through the Point, and compose the northern edge of South Point Douglas, ultimately isolating this area from normal city development.
Containing the old Canadian Pacific Railway station, South Point Douglas is a former city centre, one in a string of attempted civic re-inventions. At its tip is Sheldon’s junkyard, a swelling of the city’s waste under casual surveillance, the final destination for decommissioned industrial machines, heavy metal, rusted truck cabs, antique domestic objects, dunes and dunes of paper. This is a museum that documents the possible lives of objects, but the collection is uncontrollable, wild and under constant tension.


one
Behind the main gate is a factory wall punctured by the openings of delivery docks; the factory has been closed for years. Parts of the brick wall have been tagged by graffiti artists, and the ground is scattered with countless stoves, fridges and other domestic appliances. It is a jumbled lot, and it is hard to focus on any particular point.
We notice the sound of water, closer than the river. Its gurgling draws our attention to the far end of the wall where there’s a pipe hanging off the roof, in front of a window. It’s a peculiar water collection system: discharged from the pipe, streaming in front of the glass before landing and running down long sections of ductwork; the water trickles through an opening to the long aluminum counter top along which it rolls neatly to the corner, slows down, and pools. The pool reflects the sunlight on the wall, and the water slowly drips off the counter and into a black bucket on the ground. Vegetation has crept through the spaces of rusted metal, and little plants grow along the top of the ductwork towards the pipe. The industrial cabinet is tilted, and the peeling paint reveals coats of teal and salmon mousse.

two
Near the tracks to the east of the compound is a yard littered with machines, swallowed by paper in drifts like snow banks. The paper creates a malleable landscape, an elaborate topography engulfing cars, forklifts, bins, switchboard, and containers. It curls like roots into the spaces in and between them, crawling through the windshields, twisting itself to fit through engines and broken glass. The limits of the paper topography are unclear: it appears to reach all the way to the river. We are tempted to step onto this landscape, but like a snowdrift, it could refuse to support us and we would fall in.


We are looking for the responsiveness of objects to multiple forces. We seek out the proofs of decay and reinvention; we want to gauge the vitality of things that fill places like this. Every element of the junkyard makes apparent the wide-ranging and co-existent forces trespassing the site, with no distinction drawn between causes. Objects are moved by people with divergent motivations, causing new systems to develop: an abandoned factory, a flourishing architecture; technology transcending its original function. The site, as a part of the city, demonstrates the inevitability of continual change, redefinition of an area that has been considered as finished.
Leadership is taken from the margins, in terms of the systems of power in the city. The curator is neither a single person carefully crafting a single line, nor a group of people working in concert, rather curation is a series of decisions in competition with one another, undermining and reframing what others have thought to have completed. And almost every action is anonymous.
The person who comes to observe this museum is just one of a diverse group of trespassers, all of whom curate the collection: whether out of necessity or curiosity, they all activate this site. Unlike the normal order of museum-making, objects sit in an apparently unplanned state: time will elapse, objects will move, the specific interaction, the play of water, will have changed – the experience may or may not be repeated – the junkyard museum is an organism, never static.

Rubin, Gregory Beck and Conrad Dueck. 'Marginal Stories' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Gregory Beck Rubin and Conrad Dueck and On Site review

Living History

Being involved with the arts can have a lasting and transforming effect on many aspects of people’s lives. This is true not just for individuals, but also for neighbourhoods, communities, regions and entire generations, whose sense of identity and purpose can be changed through art.


spmb projects: Eduardo Aquino and Karen Shanski
Monuments, including the ones in Vimy Ridge Park, commemorate heroic past moments. Even though Vimy Ridge represented a victory towards freedom and democracy, creating a hopeful path for generations to come, maybe, after these 88 years, we are on a historical threshold where the notion of celebration will also shift, promoting and celebrating peace and communication among people. Public art challenges the traditional notion of monument by reinventing public space, unfolding new modes of celebration, placing the public at the centre. Our notion of a living history addresses qualities of the present, to remember the present as it is lived, about and for the people that are alive and participating in the life of a community.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT Art that is rooted in a “listening” self, that cultivates the intertwining of self and Other, suggests a flow-through experience which is not delimited by the self but extends into the community through modes of reciprocal empathy. The audience becomes an active component of the work and is part of the process.

If the project is not about other heroes from other times but it is about the people, everyday heroes of the present, then it is about the people of Wolseley, the primary users of the park. The first character of public space is the public. For this project we have proposed an engagement strategy to create an opportunity for direct participation of the community. If public space is about the people, then the people should participate in the process.

PROCESS: PARTICIPATIVE DESIGN But a central objective of community-based site specificity is the creation of a work in which members of a community – as simultaneously viewer/spectator, audience, public, and referential subject – will see and recognized themselves in the work, not so much in the sense of being critically implicated but of being affirmatively pictured or validated.

The engagement strategy created a dialogue around the project, establishing a link between the people of Wolseley and the artists. If there is something in common with all Wolseley neighbours it is language. Through language we establish relationships and build community. Words become the link between people, private and public, past and future. We invited the people of Wolseley to contribute WORDS to the project. Each household were asked to donate 5-word phrases that represented a sentiment about the place; a desire or a dream; or the memory of an event that took place in the neighbourhood. With all the collected phrases we composed a narrative, a story, a history of Wolseley – a landscape of language.


COMMUNITY TABLE
The dinner table is the centre for the teaching and practicing ...of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of society...

Traditional monuments in public space have, for most of the time, glorified a moment or an individual. This glorification has lent the convention obelisk-like objects and statues: frontally presented, privileged siting, usually taller than the people, placed straight up, installed on a base. These overpowering features have unconsciously distanced the people and altered their interaction with public space. We take an opposite position by inverting these features in order to bring the people to the project, and to develop a situation where interaction is valued – the return of the public. We considered the project to be horizontal, close to the ground, harmonious with the existing landscape, accessible and appealing to the most diverse activities. When getting together around the TABLE, participants engage physically, socially and emotionally as ideas, inspiration and a sense of community occur. A TABLE can make a family of strangers connect through sharing, talking, watching and listening. The unpredictable nature of what happens around a TABLE sets the stage for an event to occur – not prescribing the event, but allowing the community to establish it. The WORDS donated by the community, imprinted on the TABLE, make the people recognize themselves around the TABLE by being affirmatively pictured and validated. The TABLE and collection of WORDS become not the main subject but the canvas that creates the space of happening.

SITE CONSIDERATIONS
The designated site for this public art project plays an adjacent role to the whole park’s program. It moves away from the primary vocation as a playground for kids, as we see along Home Street, to a more isolated, quiet zone along Canora Street. The path network present on the site privileges the orientation north-south, servicing pedestrians moving in and out of the neighbourhood via Portage Avenue. This elongated disposition clarifies the vocation of the site as a passage. The project preserves this function adding to a group of specific spaces along the proposed table to respond to the diverse set of activities that may take place. In this manner the project is responsive to the site by creating these spaces without restricting the existing uses. The table assumes the size of the community, carefully observed during the community consultation process.

spmb projects. 'Living History' On Site review, no. 16 Winter 2006
©Eduardo Aquino, Karen Shanski and On Site review

Blue Roofs

the fifth façade – beautiful affordable eco-roofs

Owen Rose www.ecosensual.net
The human body is largely composed of water and its intimate connection to the blue planet does not stop with the flush of a toilet.
Often a source of grief; too much or not enough, water is both a visible and invisible concern for cities. not only do we have to find a source, clean it up for potable use and then distribute it, but we also have to dispose of it. Black or grey, waste water treatment is a costly and difficult task. Think of cities such as Halifax and Victoria that dump their untreated wastewater directly into the ocean. Although Montréal has a large sewage treatment plant a the east end of the island, the city still averages about 22 discharges of untreated sewage directly into the Saint Lawrence River each year. When it rains too much the combined storm and sewer system cannot process all of the water from our houses, hospitals, factories, rooftops and polluted streets. Thus the problem is passed on to the fishes, whales and other cities downstream.
Now that we have started to face the growing threat of environmental problems such as urban heat islands, air, water and noise pollution as well changing weather patterns, ecological building criteria such as the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating system have encouraged the construction and design of more ecologically sustainable buildings. In the six LEED categories, water management takes on several forms: one is a vegetated roof.
Instead of installing deserts of tar and gravel on our roofs, more and more institutions, businesses and homeowners are opting to grow fields, gardens and vegetable patches on them. Aside from their obvious beauty, green roofs offer natural cooling, a greater lifespan and better rain water management. They retain about 50% of fallen rain (returning water to the atmosphere bypassing the city's sewer system). The other 50% will still find its way to the drain, but the return of this water is delayed, which helps city infrastructure manage water levels during downpours and intense rainfall.

What about Leaks?
Modern green roof experience started in Germany fore than forty years ago, and the waterproof aspect of such roofs is no longer a major concern. In North America, quality waterproofing membranes are on the market, capable of withstanding the constant humid environment of green roofs. Also, earth cover protects the membranes from large day to night temperature fluctuations and the sun's ultraviolet rays, both of which break down conventional roofs over their 20-year lifespan, whereas green roofs should last about twice as long. The real challenge is in created the lightest technology possible so that plants are still able to survive summer droughts and, more importantly, cold Canadian winters.

Green roofs on New or Existing Buildings?
In the deluge of new interest in green roofs, some owners of existing flat-roofed structures have looked at retrofitting an extensive green roof on their buildings; however, not all existing flat roofs are able to support the weight of even the lightest green roof assemblies. To study residential green roof retrofit possibilities, the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre built a demonstration project on top of an existing 100-year old Montréal duplex in 2005. the project included the complete reconstruction of the roof structure followed by the installation of a 15cm thick extensive roof. Half of the project cost was related to the structural retrofit. Although successful, the project was expensive.

In the case of new construction, extensive green roofs are much more economical and usually cost two to three times the amount of normal roof standard roofing systems; however, these green roofs should also last twice as long. With the natural renewal of a city's building stock, the widespread installation of green roofs with new construction would transform a city's roofscape over time. In 2006, the City of Toronto adopted public policy to encourage green roofs through urban planning and financial subsidies [www.toronto.ca/greenroofs/index.htm].
More and more building professionals and contractors are learning about green roof construction. to facilitate the learning process the Urban Ecology Centre [www.urbanecology.net] published two green roof reports (in French) in 2005 and 2006. the first report, Toîtures vertes a la montréalaise, was a 100-page introduction to green roofs for the southern Québec climate with a survey of green roof experiences in Québec and around the world. The second report, Projet-pilote de toît vert, documents the demonstration project form its initial planning to ongoing plant maintenance. It includes many photos and illustrates the project's costs, materials, earth and plant choices, the role of each team member. the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has also published reports relating to green roofs [www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca].

Team Effort
The basic construction team for a green roof includes the client, architect, structural engineer, green roof supplier, general contractor and roofing subcontractor. Depending on the extent of the project, a landscape architect or a horticulturalist could also be part of the team. there are more and more green roof suppliers in Canada. Technically, the construction of a green roof is not that difficult; however, due to the additional weight, a structural engineer should always be consulted. Ultimately the success of a project is determined by the correct choice of plants and substrate thickness given the roof's particular microclimate and the client's desired aesthetic. the true test of a green roof is whether the plants are able to survive three consecutive winters; so, when a new green roof technology appears, it is always a good idea to ask if it has at least three years of proven success and/or a good warranty.

Green Roof Composition
The green roof system can be installed once the roof structure has been properly designed and the appropriate roofing membranes have been applied. the system varies from one supplier to another, but usually contains a number of items such as an anti-root membrane, water drainage panels, a geotextile and specially formulated green roof light earth substrate. The weight of the earth holds the system in place by gravity.
Now the gardening begins! The most appropriate categories of plants for extensive green roofs are wild grasses, wild meadow flowers and sedums (waxy plants). the ecological goal is to favour indigenous plants, but the final choice depends on the chosen green roof technology and the roof's planned use. A number of institutional extensive projects in Montréal have used clover for its low-cost and tenacious character. Each green roof supplier is capable of furnishing information about the appropriate choice of plants and their aesthetic impacts. The installation of an irrigation system also depends on the type of roof and choice of plants. The more ecologically-oriented the roof, the less likely that it will need an irrigation system. In cities, irrigation of green roofs and gardens uses municipal water. Rain and/or grey water recuperation and indigenous landscaping strategies can help reduce summertime demand for city water resources.

It's Alive!
Unlike a normal roof that most of us tend to forget,a green roof does require regular maintenance. For an extensive ecological roof, the maintenance is minimised to about six times a year from spring through to autumn. This requires inspection of the roof drains to make sure that they are clear of debris, trimming the plants in spring and periodic weeding. If the roof does not have a built-in irrigation system, even the hardiest of ecological roofs may need additional irrigation during intense summer heat waves. Much of the roof's maintenance will depend on how the roof is used, the plants that have been chosen and the owner's gardening habits. Residential green roofs can also be used for recreational gardening.
Loft owners in Montréal have also invoked the idea of an urban cottage where the roof may include an outdoor bedroom, shower, summer kitchen and patio surrounded by a roof-top meadow and views of the city. For the building owner, green roofs increase building value and create a personal urban oasis. For the larger community, green roofs reduce the load on a city's water infrastructure and help to moderate urban temperatures. Clearly, green roofs not only benefit individuals, but they also benefit our neighbourhoods and our cities. the fifth façade has never shown so much potential.

Rose, Owen. 'Blue Roofs' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Owen Rose and On Site review

Soggy Bottom Architecture

worried about rising sea levels? Go to the Netherlands — they have lots of experience with these things
Paul Whelan, illustration: New New York by Hugo Arriojas
According to a pair of studies published in the journal Science, global warming has already committed our planet to rising sea-levels. Jonathan Overpeck, an earth scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who co-authored both studies, says that the sea level will rise at rates of up to a metre per one hundred years – and it could go faster.
Humans are vulnerable because we build most of our cities in low coastal areas. The recent example of New Orleans and the ongoing struggle between the Netherlands and the sea are reminders of our future reality. We know that the water is rising, so what can we do? The obvious answer is to reduce our dependence on carbon ... but humans are catastrophically bad at taking preventative actions. Inevitably we will have to adapt to global warming and all its consequences, including higher sea levels.
However, there is a continuum of available responses ranging from holding back the water, making or buildings float, or simply doing nothing.

Beavering Away
If we decide to fight the seas and hold the water back, the Netherlands offers planning, engineering and political lessons Their extensive systems of dykes, dams and drainage strategies are designed to keep land below sea level dry. Rising sea levels threaten the entire country.
Recently a Dutch landscape firm, H+N+S, have proposed a new response to the triple threat of rising sea levels, subsiding land and increasing rains. To dampen the impact of ever-increasing storm surges, H+N+S propose selectively channelling the water behind the defences. H+N+S advocate catchment systems for fresh and salt water and reservoirs for excess rainfall. This strategy will require relinquishing land so strenuously won from the sea. The landscape will change from traditional farmland with water channels and ditches to one of raised lakes and reservoirs – a kind of non-sensical contour map. However, it could be the only way the Netherlands can save its country.
Regardless of the engineering and planning, the Dutch rely on a highly centralised government to construct and maintain their sea defences. Their system of participatory and centralised democracy is a political anomaly and I fully expect that fighting the sea would more likely result in less-friendly autocratic government.

Floating
Happily, buildings can float. there are two models for floating foundations. the Canadian model is based on the diving raft with concrete poured around polystyrene. These structures are unsinkable, but tend to be less stable for non-square geometries. Not surprisingly, the Dutch have been experimenting with floating buildings. Based on the river barge, Dutch technology consists of a floating concrete container in which the lower level becomes an underwater basement. Waterstudio Architects of the Netherlands have designed floating houses and are currently developing a 25-storey floating office tower and courtyard housing prototypes.
To date, floating buildings depend on nearby dry land for services or are anchored with mooring poles that also provide an umbilical connection for services. Without sea defences, floating buildings will be extremely vulnerable to increasingly violent storms, except where large expanses of newly inundated lagoons could provide a storm-damping environment in flat low-lying areas. Floating buildings could be effective in marshy delta areas that are already threatened by rising waters.

Do Nothing Romanticism
Doing nothing may ultimately be the most romantically compelling response to rising sea levels. Venice, a city that accepts its regular inundations, may offer the most clues for the benign-neglect approach. As Venice slowly disappears, many other cities could take its place as a magical tourist destination. Imagine gondoliering through a New York transformed into a city of canals and skyscrapers. However, a deliriously wet New York will ultimately require serious design to ensure the right level of submersion. At the very least, infrastructure such as the subways, potable water, power and sewage would have to be re-engineered.

Saving our sinking sea-level cities will be an expensive undertaking. The capital needed to re-engineer an entire city will be scarce as businesses move away to drier and higher ground. Whole districts of the city will elegantly decay as the water laps at their second floor windows. We live in an era where financial markets dictate settlement form. As in Venice, it is quite likely that at some tipping point, the rich will abandon the coasts for safer inland settlements, leaving the poor to cope with their deteriorating coastal cities.
In any built response to rising sea levels, infrastructure and its maintenance will be a significant challenge. What we humans lack in intelligence we sometimes compensate for by cleverness. Perhaps we will be making floating cities anchored to the atlantan ruins of our submerged cities. Maybe our future will be a combination of Futurism fantasy and Disney picturesque.
Whelan, Paul. 'Soggy Bottom Architecture' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Paul Whelan, Hugo Arriojas and On Site review

We Are The Environment

plug us in, connect us to the earth and we might start to get it

Jonah Humphrey
We are altering the chemistry and biology of our world: human endeavours are not just limited to the local, but now operate at the scale of the globe itself.
The earth, spatially and temporally, is immense. We fear that our alteration of life-supporting processes will be irreversible and uncontrollable. However, when combatting environmental changes, we often react against natural transformations such as floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. Our fear and uncertainty wants a kind of permanence. We try to prevent 'natural processes' from changing and evolving.
We must reconcile our own personal spatial interactions with the new global connectivity that exists between technology, the material products of our cultures, and the natural environment. Global connectivity was a twentieth century concept —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller each saw a coming hybridisation of technology and nature in new spheres of global interconnections.
Teilhard de Chardin believed that our capacity to generate complex systems and technologies of interaction mimics the evolutionary and biological development of consciousness. After the geosphere, and the biosphere, comes the nöosphere – a sphere of thought that now surrounds the earth. McLuhan saw this connectivity as driven by global media to the point that systems of sound and video will be so inter-linked as to form our environment entirely. Fuller demonstrated technological and biological interconnectivity in a geodesic dome, a geoscope, the interior of which was lined with aerial images simultaneously displaying flows of economic and natural resources: a control centre for the earth's cultural and ecological processes. Link the world wide web to contemporary theories of global ecology and we experience the earth as an enormous entity of organic, fluid and artificial system interwoven in a network of physical and virtual space.

Why then, with such powers of transformation, do we have a fundamental fear of altering the environment?
We need a better understanding of the inherent forms of feedback that already exist between the world and us. As we adapt to drastic environmental change, we can measure the perceptions and preconceptions we hold of ourselves compared to the environment's own character, state and nature.



Land|Scope, a theoretical project, addresses some of these things. It defines landscape as a combined realm of ecology and culture borrowing ideas from Fuller's Geoscope to find new applications for responsive technologies – systems embedded in structures that allow them to sense, think and act within the environment. Whereas Fuller's proposal was an enclosed, spatially separated global system of control, Land|Scope is an integrated landscape of interaction, offering a place for interpretation and reconciliation with the environment.
This project is sited at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters (CCIW), home of the National Water Research Institute (NWRI), which researches and tests natural and man-made water-based systems. CCIW sits on Hamilton Harbour beside the Skyway Bridge that connects Burlington to Hamilton – a site between suburban development, industrial lands, remediated wetlands and the open waters of Lake Ontario; a site quite literally at the centre of many of Canada's leading environmental concerns, including the state, the natural environment, industrial production and pollution, and fresh water reserves. The NWRI houses Canada's Global Environmental Monitoring System for freshwater (GEMS/WATER), part of the United Nations Environment Programme.
It is precisely this monitoring that Land|Scope aims to use as a basis for interpretation and response. the current monitoring done at the NWRI, as well as monitoring of new systems in a hybrid natural/industrial landscape surrounding the site, will be brought into the architectural component of the project – a monitoring centre where our interactions with the local ecology can be publicly accessed, showing the connectivity between the wetlands surrounding the facility, Hamilton Harbour and the biosphere.
Responsive architectures – whole environments of connection – have the potential to free us from the rigid ideas that we currently use to define our environment. Within new hybrid environments, we might better understand phenomena present in nature and technology alike, reacting and adapting accordingly as both the living creatures and the cultural beings we are.

I would like to extend my thanks to Michael Forbes, Science Liason Officer for Environment Canada, and the NWRI, for allowing me to tour the facilities, and providing me with the information to make my research and design work possible.

Humphrey, Jonah. 'We are the Environment' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Jonah Humphrey and On Site review

São Paulo's Water Ways

redefining the power of São Paulo's infrastructure
Fernando de Mello Franco
On the verge of summer, when pluviometric rates in São Paulo are at their highest, the chronic problem of flooding resumes. With the intense process of disorderly urbanisation, the soil has become excessively impermeable. The transformation and occupation of São Paulo Basin riverbanks and fluvial plains, which used to control water flows, just worsen the problem.

The entire population is hit by the flooding. Underprivileged populations who live close to water flows in historically depreciated areas are directly affected in their own dwellings. The risk situation of these populations represents for every public administration a reason for concern, which might be either of lower or higher level, according to their social commitment. This issue has never been tackled in an effective manner, and suffers with continual government changes and discontinuity.

The population not affected in their own dwellings is affected by difficulties imposed by a lack of mobility when the main road system, situated on a tableland and strategically placed parallel to the water ways, floods. As water incapacitates traffic flow, the problem gains a metropolitan dimension, also reaching production sectors.

As flooding is a factor of urban diseconomy, harming the efficient flow of people and goods, it belongs to the city administration plan and political agenda, to which successive governments have allocated funds, although never enough. In this investment, there is an opportunity for action, pinpointing needy areas throughout the metropolis.


Articulating Systemic and Local Concerns: the network of piscinões
The issues involving water resources — urban drainage, sanitation and water supply — are complex and demand efforts at both macro and micro levels. Since 1990 it has been dealt with by the State Plan of Water Resources (PERH) and Macro-drainage Plan for the Upper Tiete Basin.
One of the solutions proposed for city flooding is the construction of a set of large reservoirs, piscinões, to retain and control rain water, holding it back from city rivers and streams, reducing any overflow. In short, the piscinão replaces the original regulating function of the fluvial plains, now occupied and fully impermeable.
Presently, there are about 319 built reservoirs out of a total estimate of 131, which will be sable to hold 15.5 million cubic metres of water. They are distributed throughout the micro-tributary basins of Tiete River, covering the entire São Paulo water system. Many are located in peripheral areas, close to informal sectors of city occupation. Thus, in order to face the metropolitan dimension of flooding problems, there must be some meaningful public investment in peripheral areas. Finding a fit between the metropolitan and local dimensions of this question is the starting point toward any solution.
The 'informal' sectors have the most need for public spaces. In São Paulo, where disputes over space are often mediated by violence, there are still some unoccupied areas: pieces of land usually devoted to football fields, and other community activities. In the informal sectors, samba, funk dance and football matches are important events for the construction of social and communal networks, highly necessary for the strengthening of relationships to resist the adversities present in a large metropolis. They are a spontaneous manifestation that shows the value of public space in these areas.

This collection of vacant urban spaces in São Paulo can be converted into an opportunity for a new network of public spaces. For example, the piscinão is only active about 3 to 4 months out of the year, during high-water periods. For the other months it is idle. New programs can be added to the piscinão, building on the future steps of the Macro-drainage Plan.
Piscinões unit both the system of the borough's public spaces and the technical system for the drainage, treatment and re-use of water resources. They can serve as a landmark and spatial reference on the cityscape of the borough, laying water's claim to the floodplain.

Re-urbanisation of Água Branca, São Paulo, SP, 2004
Fernando de Mello Franco, Marta Moreira and Milton Braga, in association with Camila Toledo Fabrini, Guilherme Wisnik, Martin Corullon and Roberto Klein.
São Paulo will have to be consistent in managing its natural resources in a sustainable and rational manner. In this context, the effective urban reconfiguration of an area as large as the proposed new borough in Água Branca can only be achieved through the infrastructural planning of the region. However, an intervention on this scale essentially means defining the design of that urban infrastructure, giving legible form to a strategic action on behalf of the public authorities.
The association between transport and water-related issues in São Paulo surfaces here as a project theme, broached through a consequent critical deportment.

New train stations on existing lines are proposed to fulfill a strategic role as points of mediation between scales, and to serve as links between the metropolitan transport non-polluting railway system and the localities. In our project, these train stations are organised as agglomeration points for public facilities, special services and social housing.

Another matter is the definition of public spaces in this project: recreational and gathering spaces, which seek proximity with the circulation system and with the watercourses, arise out of precisely this conviction. the resulting water square holds both the system of the borough's public spaces and the technical system for the drainage, treatment and re-use of water resources. Fruit of a wellspring of non-contaminated groundwater, it will serve as a landmark and spatial reference on the cityscape of the borough, laying water's claim to the floodplain, at once technical and symbolic, rigorous and crystalline.

de Mello, Fernando. 'Water Ways' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Fernando de Mello Franco and On Site review

Water Mythologies

building civic narratives that read like novels
In the skin of a Lion in many ways parallels Roman Polanski's equally mythic film, Chinatown. Ondaatje's dream-like quality sets it apart from Polanski's harder-nosed struggle over water supply in the creation of modern Los Angeles. Certainly there is a comparative reading in the privatised and violent nature of American birth as opposed to the civil service Canadian approach. But in the end there are the respective stories and their artefacts.


Paul Whelan
Lacking any kind of magical foundation story, Toronto craves a mythology. It's often left up to artists to create the magical bedrock for a city's future mythology. In Toronto, poet bp Nichol developed an urban imagery through a creative re-reading of its geography and street names. And it was Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion, that widely disseminated a personal myth of the city's coming of age. The novel focusses on the Bloor Street viaduct and the Victoria Park Filtration Plant, both constructed in the 1920s and 30s through the bullheadedness of a remarkable civil servant, RC Harris, Toronto's Commissioner of Works.

Harris proposed that a 2-mile intake tunnel be built under Lake Ontario, terminating at a new filtration plant. In Ondaatje's novel the filtration plant is referred to as the Palace of Purification. The industrial processing of water may seem an odd choice for the basis of a new mythology, but as was well understood by all ancient cultures, the regulation of water underlies both the foundation of the city as well as its on-going well-being. Ondaatje portrays Harris as a mythic hero who provides the vision, ambition and political will while Thomas Pomphrey, the filtration plant's architect, provides the architectural expression to house Harris's project.

Early in the book, while talking with Pomphrey, Harris muses, 'before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting'. Toronto's filtration plant is a testament to this kind of imagining, an architectural anomaly mysteriously beached on the shores of Lake Ontario. Contemplating this beaux arts composition with its grass terraces, palaces and commanding views, it is almost sacrilege to believe that its raison d'etre was simply to solve Toronto's water purity problems by processing millions of litres of lake water.

The architecture is modernist in the direct way that structures sand their placement reflect the inward flow of water and the industrial production of clean drinking water. In contrast, the architectural styling shares nothing with a reductive modernist sensibility. The materials alone – yellow brick, limestone, copper, bronze, terrazzo floors, black marble, herringbone tile work and fine plaster, coupled with inventive detailing and fine craftsmanship – create a sumptuous environment in which the mechanics of the pumps and controls are elevated to a shining, functional art.

The pump house, in an elegant ballroom, is at the lowest terrace, nearest the water – an aqueous anteroom to the purification project further up the terraces. The alum tower marks the nest step on the water's path to purification. Water passes under the tower and coagulant is dropped into it before the underground pipe turns 90 degrees to approach the filer building on axis, a simultaneous beaux-arts compositional rule and a modernist functional diagram. Small particulates in the water adhere to the alum, sinking to the bottom of settling tanks. Clean water is then piped to the city. The tower could easily have been a simple metal tank, but is instead a vertical punctuation mark on a horizontal process. The functionally unnecessary top floor belvedere exists only to offer powerful views of Lake Ontario.

The upper ground is dominated by the sprawling filter building, buttressed by administration towers that flank a monumental arched entry. An octagonal rotunda marks the crossing of the filtration building wings and the administration building. In the centre of the rotunda is a pylon providing data on filtration rates, water capacity and time of day. Like the entire plant, this device only needed to be a prosaic piece of equipment, but instead is celebrated and elevated in an elaborately detailed stone obelisk.

At every turn our expectations about water filtration are eclipsed by the exuberance of Pomphrey's architectural ambition for mere infrastructure, almost as if Nicola Salvi and Pope Clement XII had re-imagined a Trevi Fountain to celebrate the arrival of water in the modern city.


What of Ondaatje's fascination with the Palace of Purification? It is possible that the Harris Filtration Plant is just one site for inventing a Toronto mythology. Perhaps Ondaatje's novel is a single particle of alum dropped into raw lake water. With enough alum, maybe a movie or two, the ooze that settles from the raw water will become the material of rumours and tall stories. And while we wait for the stories to accrete, we celebrate the delivery of clean water.

Whelan, Paul. 'Water Mythologies' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Paul Whelan and On Site review

Bombay Dhobi Ghats, New York Laundromats

a laundry list for urban vibrancy: drip-dry urbanism

Aniket Shahane
In the Laundromats of Bombay and New York, water and power go hand in hand. Not only do they comprise the infrastructure required for the Laundromats' operation (water for washing and electricity for drying), but their availability as resources determines both how and how much space is claimed by this banal activity. The architecture of the Bombay Dhobi Ghats — a generations-old Indian public Laundromat – and the New York City Laundromat unveils the impact of infrastructure on people, activity and architecture.


India's infrastructure can be characterised as fragile at best. Although improving, the supply of both water and electricity are unreliable. Power outages are not uncommon and water is often unsanitary, if running at all. Low levels of water and electricity instill in Indians a frugal mindset towards the consumption of these resources. Water needs to be carefully allocated. Electrical loads must be at a minimum. But what India lacks in resources, it more than makes up for with resourcefulness. In Bombay, a city of 18 million individuals, the human hand is the best means to monitor the quantity of water that flows from a tap. Reliance on manpower is critical and is most evident in the architecture of the Dhobi Ghat.

Like many other Laundromats, Bombay's Dhobi Ghat provides complete laundry services for its clientele including clothing pick-up/drop-off, washing, drying and ironing. However, in contrast to Laundromats that have a stronger infrastructure at their disposal, the Ghat survives on a spartan attitude towards water and energy consumption. It works like this. Upon request, a courier from the Ghat is dispatched to a client's home to pick up dirty laundry. The clothes are wrapped in a brightly coloured sack and swiftly delivered to the Ghat by the courier, usually on a bicycle or other man-powered vehicle (water and electricity are not the only resources that are hard to come by in Bombay). Upon arrival at the Ghat, the clothes are sorted, marked and handed over to the laundrymen. Unlike washing machines, which provide little flexibility in water usage, washing men can regulate the stream of water from a tap so as to use only the amount necessary for a given load of laundry, minimising wasteful water consumption. After the appropriate amount of water is released, soap is added and the washing man begins his job. Knee deep in sudsy water, he dunks a few articles of clothing at a time, pulls them out, smacks the garments on a flogging stone in order to beat out the dirt, and then wrings the clothes of excess water with his bare hands. The process is repeated until the washing man determines the load to be clean, at which point he carries the garments in his arms to one of many clotheslines strung from one side of the Ghat to another to begin the drying process. The clothes are hung to air-dry individually one article at a time; the occasional Bombay sea breeze is far more dependable than the Bombay electrical infrastructure. Finally, the dried, wrinkled clothes are hand-pressed using a heavy iron heated in a wood-burning oven. They are then folded, packed in another colourful sack, and returned by courier to their rightful owner. The Dhobi Ghat is a place of messy, physical work that engages the entire human body and demands much from its architecture.

Above all, the Dhobi Ghat needs to house men performing an arduous job. Unlike the washing machine, a washing man requires more space and maintenance. He needs to be able to bend down, stand up, scrub and flail wet clothes. It's necessary for him to be able to eat, drink and communicate with other washing men. He is far less predictable and productive than a machine. He can slip and fall, take ill, bear a bad mood, or demand better pay. Moreover, the washing man lacks the capacity to wash as many loads as one washing machine. Therefore, in order for the Dhobi Ghat to run as a legitimate business, it needs to house many washing me. With such a complicated program, it is not wonder the Ghats are designed the way they are: they are not enclosed at all. An open Laundromat – one with no walls – gives the washing men enough room to manoeuvre as required while allowing plenty of natural air circulation to mitigate the pervasive dampness. In this open format, rows of concrete pens on the ground are sized to allow one laundryman to wash. Bundles of pipes feed the fragile Bombay water into each one of these pens through a spigot. Overhead a web of clotheslines make an ad-hoc trellis. In Bombay, where the act of washing and drying clothes can't be trusted to resource-guzzling machines, a man inside a concrete pen and a clothesline suspended in open air are the best substitutes.

The architecture of the New York Laundromat, in contrast, is far more subdued. The city's robust infrastructure gives New Yorkers the licence to use as much water and energy as desired, even at a time when the word 'sustainability' is all the rage. This allows the demeanour of the New York City laundryman to be drastically different than his counterpart in Bombay. Like the Dhobi Ghat, the typical New York Laundromat also provides full laundry services for its clients. Once the clothes have been dropped off at the Laundromat, the laundryman empties the bag of clothes into a washing machine, usually separating whites from colours. A plastic dial is twisted to select water temperature, while seven quarters are thrust into a metal try in order to start the machine. After exactly twenty minutes, it stops, at which point the load is assumed to be clean. The clothes are then unloaded by the laundryman, transported in a cart a short distance to the drying machine, and tossed into a dryer. A fabric softener sheet is added, another dial is turned to select the desired level of heat (i.e. electricity) for the job, more coins are inserted to determine drying time (one quarter buys six minutes of hot air), and finally a button is pressed to begin the machine drying process. the only part of the New York City laundryman's job that doesn't involve the use of a machine is the folding of clothes, which has to be done by hand. If clothes are folded soon enough after drying, there is usually no ironing required. Because the laundry process in New York is not nearly as labour intensive as in Bombay, it enables many clients to come in and do their own laundry – an option not available at the Dhobi Ghat. Locals will arrive at all hours, unload a bag of clothes into a washer, return thirty minutes later to transfer the clothes to a dryer, then come back once again to take the clothes home. compared to the Ghat, the New York Laundromat is an easy, tidy operation.


The architecture of the NYC Laundromat is a direct reflection of its resource-abundant, labour-deficient process. It requires space to accommodate a certain number of machines with identical dimensions and predictable behaviours. A rehabbed ground floor of a row house will do just fine. The Laundromat on Smith Street in Brooklyn is a typical example. Besides the overflow of glaring fluorescent lighting from the large storefront window, there is very little that gives away the activities that occur inside. The interior contains two rows of machines with a centre aisle. Washing machines are towards the streetfront, while dryers occupy the back of the space. The floors, walls and ceiling are a ragtag composition of vinyl and acoustic tiles, in order to provide an economical and acoustically sound enclosure. The architecture of the New York Laundromat is, for the most part, fairly discreet.

In both the Dhobi Ghat and the Smith Street Laundromat, space is generated not only by the physical form, dimensions, and organisations of men and machines; it is also a direct result of varying degrees of access to water and energy. Because the Dhobi Ghat has to be a physically open space in order to function, it is possible for the average passer-by to peer down on the space and witness the chaotic collection of people and clothes, wet and dry. The sound of laundrymen bellowing to each other and the smell of dirty cloth and caustic soda contribute to the public assault of one's sense. The Ghat's location next to the train line allows the activity of clothes-washing to be a landmark passed on the commute to and from work. In more ways than one, the Dhobi Ghat asserts itself onto its city. In fact, this kind of emphatic claim of urban space is typical of Bombay locals. When given scarce resources, countless Bombay residents take matters into their own hands. They claim the space of their city as their own, not just for washing and drying, but also for cooking, eating, sleeping, bathing, entertaining, defecating, urinating and cremating. Bombay is a city of perpetual urban aggression – each individual carrying out in public what they cannot do in private.

In New York, on the other hand, the introverted nature of the Smith Street Laundromat betrays its city's tendency toward privatisation. The abundance of resources in New York affords a city that is luxurious enough to individualise almost everything, including access to a washer and dryer. Everyday mundane chores such as washing and drying clothes don't require the effort they do in Bombay and are mostly kept out of the public realm. Why air dry outside when there is plenty of electricity to machine dry inside? In fact, it is so uncommon to see clothes hung out to dry in New York that on the rare occasion when it actually happens, it often induces outcries from neighbours. Hanging laundry in New York today is seen as a sign of a neighbourhood in decline. It devalues adjacent property. So even if New Yorkers are tempted to air dry (to save on electric bills, for example), they will most likely opt to be good neighbours and use a drying machine instead. Alas, the price of living in a city with seemingly endless reserves of water and electricity is the burden of propriety: please use a clothes dryer rather than a clothesline to dry your clothes so my property does not depreciate; please grill in your own backyard rather than on the sidewalk so I don't smell your cooking; please play your music in your living room rather than on the street so my quiet evening at home isn't disturbed. The affluence of New York infrastructure has instilled in New Yorkers something that currently does not and cannot exist in Bombay: a common sense of civic etiquette. It is a reminder that commodities as basic as water and electricity have the power to affect people, behaviour and ultimately, space.

Considering the impact of architectural spaces such as laundromats on cities like Bombay and New York begins to shed light on the possibility that seemingly naive everyday acts such as cleaning clothes, washing dishes, or taking baths do much more than tap our collective infrastructure. They promote or sometimes impede urban vibrancy. A vibrant city is an arena for both celebration and conflict, a place that readily counteracts order and predictability with unanticipated spontaneity. Now is a time when New York, despite – or perhaps because of – all its resources, is in danger of becoming so bound by civic etiquette that there is less room left for New Yorkers to improvise on their streets. Conversely, if Bombay's infrastructure doesn't catch up to India's charging global economy it stands to marginalise millions of Bombayites, which could exacerbate, among other things, the city's serious problem of shanty towns (a most extreme kind of urban improvisation). Sustainability and globalisation gurus have drilled into us the notion that we are one global village, inter-connected and networked; consuming resources in New York equates to depleting them elsewhere. But what if New Yorkers relied less on water and energy not only to slow down global warming, but also as an excuse to bring to New York some of Bombay's penchant for spontaneous street intensity? what if the clothesline poles that stand in the backyards of so many Brooklyn brownstones were activated with clean laundry once again, not just to help save the planet, but also to help keep Brooklynites from co-opting their borough's air space? If the proponents of the Green movement are proven correct, then reducing the load on New York's infrastructure might eventually have positive repercussions in other parts of the world. What is certain, however, is that it will almost immediately shift more activity from New York's private to its public realm and help encourage a more free-spirited vigour on its streets.

Shahane, Aniket. 'Drip-dry urbanism' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Aniket Shahane and On Site review

The Streets We Need

mechanical and social developmentAlfredo Landaeta
Not so long ago, streets were very simple: no sidewalks, curbs, infrastructure or public transit, and without strict differentiation between pedestrians and other means of transportation. Ancient mesopotamian cities show narrow streets and cul-de-sacs that provided access to courtyards linking clusters of dwellings belonging to extended families or clans. Streets were not a continuous system connecting urban settlements but rather the minimum necessary space required to delineate distinct clusters. It is perhaps this concept of the street as the in-between that first tinted it with a social undertone, establishing such spaces as the meeting place, the political arena, the place of commerce.
Mediæval streets show a similar simplicity: street networks evolved, becoming more complex, intertwined and hierarchical in nature and, in many instances, actively incorporating trees and landscape as part of their design.
The street as a socially populated void with minimal technological attributions is still very much in use today. Informal settlements in developing countries, products of completely unregulated and unplanned development, usually generate dramatic streets and alleys, uncannily proportioned to the human scale, uncaring of accessibility codes or infrastructural logic. These spaces arise purely from the tension between the pressure of occupation and the need to circulate. There is an organic quality in these spaces that is clearly lacking in the formal city.
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In many contemporary cities, streets have become flow: their value is not for what they host, but for how good they flush; the simplicity of the original void has been filled as an inevitable consequence of modern life, with a long list of stuff: parking, public transport lines (at times in exclusive rights-of-way), mail boxes, lamp posts, power lines, storm water channels – and all that just above the surface. Below grade is almost as crowded with water pipes, telephone lines, electrical cables, gas and sewage lines, fibre optics, metro lines, district cooling and heating, even grey water lines for landscape irrigation. In fact, streets are the de facto location for most of our ever-increasing infrastructure needs. To design a street these days is to necessarily accommodate, combine and reconcile all of these different requirements.

This mechanistic conception of the street as a device for the mobility of people, vehicles and services leaves little room for the street as a true public space. Good streets not only function as conduits for all types of transportation and services, they also must perform as social ground, negotiating transitions between zones and loaded with historical and cultural content.

The value of the street is based in the complex ballet of movements and carefully timed rhythms and sequences that it hosts (compellingly amplified and portrayed by fast-motion movies such as the 1983 Koyaanisqatsi) than in its spatial qualities. This exhilarating tapestry of movement and activity is the very definition of modernity; it is what draws rivers of people to urban centres and what simultaneously repels and attracts us.


Let us look at a typical mid-density neighbourhood street servicing a mixture of residential and commercial uses. Depending on the culture, context and climate we will find that the street, conceived as a technological device, is designed, calibrated and built with the intention of maximising the performance of non-human elements — the social component is often negated entirely. Differentiated strips for pedestrians, trees, vehicles and public transit facilitate the uninterrupted flow of traffic, justified by arguing that this clear separation is for the safety and congeniality of otherwise incompatible uses and activities. As such, the contemporary street is inevitably hierarchical and specialised, predestined at the design stage to fulfill a specific role within the urban continuum.

What happens if the initial assumptions established at the planning stage no longer hold true, or if significant technological changes begin to affect the behavioural patterns of people? What if political and cultural changes cut deep enough to affect the nature of its use, or if the basic assumptions related to the cost of mobility are challenged?
Our paradigms for developing and designing our cities, and by extension our streets, are currently under revision. Growing environmental awareness is placing great pressure on a way of life that is increasingly wasteful and responsible for our current state of environmental deterioration. As this awareness permeates the core of our values, changes will begin to accelerate. Streets will require as radical a redefinition as will our production-consumption-disposal cycle.

Wishful thinking? No. This transformation is of similar proportions to the one experienced when the industrialised world transformed itself into the car-oriented society of today. Car manufacturers in conjunction with the oil industry successfully lobbied for an aggressive highway system that put suburban development on steroids, making it not only a possibility but the preferred alternative to traditional urban life. This transformation was unstoppable; there have been very few other historical moments with such a concurrence of interests: the cultural perception of a better way of living complemented quite neatly by the interests of big corporations, swiftly backed up by politicians with the necessary regulatory backup.

Climatic change and emerging environmental awareness are creating a new alignment of interests based not on a perception of how we might live better, but on the assumption that such a transformation will ensure that life itself will continue. As research and scientific evidence amasses, the future looks bleak indeed. As pressure on leaders and political institutions to deal with global warming and environmental degradation increases, cities are likely to become the preferred ground for a fair number of initiatives — escalating oil prices and pollution levels demand measures that reduce car dependency, favour public transit and increase densities.

The potential for the most change exists in personal and public transportation – more bicycles on the road, more designated bike lanes. Bicycles and pedestrians will share the public realm with alternative mobility options such as Segways and electrical bikes, replacing some or most cars (even if alternative technologies reduce the nasty side effects of internal combustion engines, personal cars still require significant and unconscionable space to circulate and park while consuming massive amounts of resources for production and maintenance). Public transit can be diversified: high capacity buses with reserved lanes, people-movers along pedestrian corridors and personal rapid transit systems (PRTS), where small automated vehicles in dedicated lanes transport people directly to their destination. Streets, therefore, will be forced to accommodate different overlapping systems of mobility at the expense of driving lanes. As with most human inventions, accumulation of knowledge results in better and more elegant solutions.

It is impossible to know how streets and cities will evolve and change as society shifts paradigms; technology, education and social aspirations seasoned with ample doses of chance will play equally important roles in defining the emerging dominant trends. No matter how they develop, streets as design artifacts will have an obligation to be responsive to climate and location and, most of all, to be tailored to reflect local values and cultural standards. Streets should be the sites where people act in concert, as Hannah Arendt defined politics in its broadest sense. Maybe then, by understanding the streets as spaces of true social interaction, they will echo a new and better urban ideal.
Landaeta, Alfredo. 'The Streets We Need' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Alfredo Landaeta and On Site review

Porta Portese

the evolution of a Roman street marketDanielle Wiley
Each Sunday morning, the Porta Portese market overwhelms the Portuense neighbourhood of Rome, spreading through streets, sidewalks and squares. Although its architecture consists of lightweight bancarelle, the market is one of Rome’s densest spaces. There are 1000 official vendors, but the Comune di Roma estimates the actual number to exceed 30 000. While the surrounding neighbourhood gives shape to the market, the market reciprocates by actively shaping its milieu. Over the past six decades, bus and tram lines have been deflected, segments of streets have been widened into piazzas, and the municipality’s ambitions to redevelop the neighbourhood have been stymied. The city and market are mutually constitutive, on a very tangible physical level as well as on a cultural one.
Porta Portese is Rome’s largest Sunday-morning market and also one of its youngest. When in 1943 the main avenues into Rome were bombed and blockaded, a spontaneous group of black market carrieri materialised, running private cars with contraband food and goods into the city. By 1965 the demography of vendors at the market had shifted. The new majority were Neopolitans who would spend six days trolling the Campagna region for wares, sifting through local beaches and farmhouses abandoned during the war. They would then arrive in Rome at midnight on Saturday to secure the best spots along Viale Portuense. Today, most clothing stalls along Viale Portuense are managed by recent immigrants from North Africa and India. Along Via Ippolito Nievo, established vendors of predominantly eastern European origin sell furniture, while contraband peddlers compete for space on the sidewalk, laying out CDs on sheets of cardboard. A recent wave of Chinese vendors selling home electronics and digital novelties reflects Italy’s new political relations with China. The shifting demographics, activities, wares and territorial boundaries in the Porta Portese market describe a facet of the city’s evolving identity.
The Porta Portese market is a loose space – relatively self-organising and highly adaptive. The market might serve as a vernacular precedent for the kind of event space that is de rigeur in contemporary architectural theory and practice. More deft than a formal piazza, the market responds to changes in the city’s cultural, political and economic conditions. This responsiveness may stem from the market’s paradoxical status as a marginal space within the city’s centre. The market negotiates many boundaries: the ancient Aurelian wall and its seventeenth century portal, an industrial riverbank of the Tevere, an edge of the mediaeval city and tracts of modernist post-WWII palazzi. Many contemporary urban scholars, including the Rome-based Osservatorio Nomade, argue that the peripheral zones of historic European cities have the greatest capacity to generate new urban forms, experiences and identities. The Porta Portese Market, although embedded in the city centre, has the qualities of an urban edge. The market’s generative capacity becomes apparent through its weekly transformations. Each Sunday morning produces a new iteration as the stall keepers negotiate their territory and adjust their wares according to season and fashion.
The idea of a street, square or market as an archetypal public space becomes contentious in view of transnational and cross-cultural dynamics in places like the Porta Portese market. Even the most basic precepts of public space come into question: what it is, where it is, who is it for, what it should do. Since the late 1990s, the diaspora of people between and within Italy, the EU, Africa and Asia have caused rapid shifts in the make-up of local districts in Rome, particularly in Esquilino and Portuense. This intense movement of peoples, at a global and a city scale, is paralleled by transnational flows of commodities, information, images and ideas — in Rome, which once maintained a mono-cultural image in the face of all contrary evidence, nowhere is this transnational mobility as evident as in Porta Portese market.
Those who participate in street life now carry with them a much greater diversity of historical models and different, possibly conflicting, symbolic expectations of public space. Some fear that the public sphere might become too fragmented to sustain a dynamic yet cohesive street life. Over and above the pressures of absorbing so many multiple interests into urban public space are the challenges that an expanding digital public realm presents to the street as a primary scene of encounter. The permeation of the city by communications technologies – which, in fact, make this mobility between the global and local possible - transforms our sense of place. Contemporary urban theorists suggest that the new role of public space is to reassert a sense of place by expressing local identities in relation to a globalised public domain. What does this prescription for public space mean for architects, who take the front line in making public spaces?
Vernacular precedents are valuable models for architects to study how these broad concerns play out in ways that are in fact very material and case-specific. The Porta Portese market, for example, demonstrates how layers of permanent and temporary structures, everyday practices, regulatory policies, and changing economic and cultural conditions can create a vibrant and resilient public space – one that is, in the end, very particular to Rome. Porta Portese also raises questions for how such sites are observed, mapped and, finally, interpreted in an architectural design. Architects might consider what investigative and representational strategies would be appropriate to a public space that, like the Porta Portese market, is best understood as an encounter between a place and its inhabitations – one that is extended through time and embedded in a specific cultural milieu.

Wiley, Danielle. 'Porta Portese:the evolution of a Roman street market' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Danielle Wiley and On Site review

Mat Building in Halifax

rebuilding the mat in the contemporary urban landscapeMatthew Neville
Density is a contentious issue in Halifax. A region characterised by a slow growth conservatism, the city appears divided, even paralysed, between heritage preservation and new urban real estate development. Misrepresenting density as purely height, coupled with excessively rigid and paradoxically vague municipal building regulations, Halifax shows a great disconnect between social and spatial perceptions of the liveable city. One process, called mat-building, defines density as both physical and of social characteristics at the ground plane, and is measured by levels of intensity and mixitié; mat-building is density at the scale of habitat. As a strategy to increase density in low-density North American cities, mat-building can enrich the presently hostile [sub]urban pedestrian environment, offering an alternative to the relatively unchallenged New Urbanism model. With a fine-grained historic fabric and many vacant sites ripe for redevelopment, Halifax is an ideal testing ground for mat-building. It would give the city valuable insight into the tribulations and contradictions of its rich history, culture and its unique sense of place.
Introduced by Alison Smithson in 1974, mat-building provides individual freedom of movement through the city by weaving close-knit patterns of association between objects, supported by a dense internal language of circulation. Mat-building emerged from Smithson’s fascination with the traditional Arabic casbah – its rich texture, ‘full of starts and stops and shadow…with a high degree of connectedness to allow for change of mind and the in-roads of time’. As connective tissue in various phases of construction, destruction or decay, mats are never finished: they encapsulate the continuous evolution of urban form.
Mat-building is a process: it structures high density patterns of living. Mat-building requires delicate interplay between variations and repetitions of form; it is governed by connections and thresholds rather than by geometric boundaries. In contrast, a grid is indifferent to and detached from topography; no where is this more evident than in the 1749 British plan for Halifax where a flat military grid was laid upon a steep hillside. The ultimate objective of mat-building is total integration of building, tissue and landscape. From building to city block, mat-building intensifies the relationship of landscape to culture by emphasising process and organisation over objects.
Mats are close-knit, fine-grain fabrics with a dense internal language where choice of movement for the user is maximised; they allow for easy appropriation of space; they welcome organic, incremental growth and various states of construction, destruction and decay. They are produced under the influence of culture, landscape and time.
Remnants of mats are visible in Halifax as one navigates from the top of the glacial drumlin where a 19th century citadel remains, through the historical residue scattered over the slope, down to the harbour and the edge of the ocean. As the grid pattern aligns the short side of the blocks with the water, it increases the east-west porosity –the number of choices– of the fabric. Personal space unfolds; each part of the route is governed by time and a series of sequential, changing thresholds.
Although the Citadel and harbour seem to present a stable bi-polar system while peripheral areas fill a dynamic role to meet changing urban needs, recent history tells us this is not the case. Such monuments act as divisive objects that fragment the tissue as well as the city. At a smaller scale, there are numerous vacant sites scattered throughout the fabric that act in similar ways by creating barriers, dead zones and areas of exclusion that further degrade quality of place.

The site of the former Halifax Infirmary (including two adjacent parking lots) is the most significant vacant site on the peninsula. With no shortage of ideas for its redevelopment as residents, business leaders, politicians and developers express their desires through many recent visioning exercises held by the city, the debate over the future of this site is only just beginning. Many proposed uses are institutional (a library and courthouse) while others focus on more residential and commercial space in the area. The site is a strategic location, next to the Dalhousie’s schools of engineering, architecture and planning, and between Citadel Hill, a national historic, Spring Garden Road, a main shopping area and Barrington Street, a proposed heritage district. Rather than highlighting these differences by engaging in acts of monument building, the city is in desperate need of a strategy to build associations and social and spatial interdependence in this area. As a site where distinct urban areas collide, it has the potential to act as a threshold between the primarily residential south end of the city, commercial areas to the east and north, and the hospital and university areas in the west. Instead of creating an exception in the tissue, the city requires a reciprocity that weaves together old and new physical elements, and social patterns of use and behaviour, creating a dense fabric that remains active throughout the busy summers and often long winters.
Imagining a new centre of stability in the city – anchored by strong existing public institutions – the elements that fill the site must take on an unconventional, anti-monumental shape. Through an organic understanding of the in-between – a sort of interstitial urbanism – these elements can not only form the physical construct of the site, but can create habitat and allow for unexpected patterns of human behaviour. Such a process requires one to step away from buildings and plans viewed from above and to explore the hidden potential on the ground, in the city, on the street and in the landscape.
Aldo Van Eyck predicted an end to architecture’s fascination with form, to be replaced by a ‘culture of determined relations’ where ‘the relation between things and within things are of greater significance than the things themselves’. Mat-building continues this push for a shift in architectural design from static imagery to organisation, temporality and transition. It places architecture closer to the humanities and in a position better able to deal with the dynamics of contemporary cosmopolitan forms of urbanity. Mat-building is place-making in a phenomenological sense – using the experiences of people as the foundation of design. The mat is a discussion of density, city life (in buildings and in the street) and cultural differences in the use and meaning of space. In this sense, the mat may be the most appropriate ’ground cover’ for culturally diverse cities as it embraces the overlapping and complex structuring of social and spatial elements of urban life.

Neville, Matthew. 'Rebuilding the Mat in the Contemporary Urban Landscape' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Matthew Neville and On Site review