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- Convenor:
-
Isabel Raposo
(Technical University of Lisbon)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Jeanne Vivet
(University Bordeaux 3. Laboratory LAM)
- Location:
- C5.09
- Start time:
- 27 June, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel intends to reflect critically and from the Right to the City standpoint on the underlying urban paradigms of recent interventions in semi-urbanized housing suburbs of African cities, taking into account the contexts, processes and actors involved that influence them.
Long Abstract:
In the beginning of the new millennium, for the first time in history, the majority of the world population lives in cities. This rapidly urbanizing world is expressed in new territorial configurations, more or less segregated, with an increseing extension of suburban areas, more pronounced in developing countries. Africa still remains mainly rural, but it is foressen that half of its population will be urban in 2015 and currently about 25% of a billion of city dwellers who live in housing suburbs are Africans. Following the 'reflexivity' concept, the new human and territorial scale of these housing suburbs leads inevitably to new "ways of thinking urbanism" paraphrasing Le Corbusier.
Beyond the dominant thought, normative, functionalist and top down, now also neoliberal, forged in the construction of the urbanized cities, new perspectives and new paradigms of intervention emerge in the suburban areas, more interactive and inclusive, which incorporate the Right to the City concept. There isn't a systematic, reflexive and critical approach to the types of recent interventions in the suburbs and to the underlying urban paradigms, from urban renovation, massive relocation and social housing, to urban re-conversion, regularization or upgranding. Which types of intervention predominate in the last decades in the African suburbs? This panel aims to reflect, from different case studies in African cities, on recurring heuristics trends and concepts that guide interventions in semi-urbanized housing suburbs, on types of interventions, and on underlying urban paradigms, having in consideration their specific contexts, processes and actors invoved.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Sílvia Jorge (Research Centre of Architecture, UTL)
Paper short abstract:
Given the strategic importance of peri-central self-produced areas on the urban reconfiguration of Maputo in this new millennium, the paper analyses, in a critical and reflective view, the urban renewal and upgrading interventions that take place here.
Paper long abstract:
In this new millennium, Maputo city beholds an accelerated process of urban reconfiguration, resulting from the consolidation of the neoliberal model in which it is included. The diversity of powers, interests and strategies translates into different paradigms of intervention: some of neoliberal contour, tendentiously generating processes of gentrification and socio-spatial exclusion; others with an emancipatory character, aiming for a more inclusive and egalitarian city (Raposo et al., 2012).
Several areas of the city are subject of intervention, like the design of large urban projects outside the boundaries of the former 'cement city' and the verticalization of its center. This metamorphosis is particularly relevant in the peri-central self-produced areas that surround it, due to their strategic position in the dominant market logics, which favour profitable renewal interventions over the upgrading of the existing built space. As such, they are targets of urban renewal actions, based on its tabula rasa and on the (re)location of affected populations in more peripheral areas.
This critical and reflective analysis is based on empirical and documental information acquired, crossed with a detailed observation of aerial images of this city perimeter, registered since the beginning of the new millennium. This method which will allow to map and typify the urban renewal actions and dissonant upgrading interventions operated and/or planned in this period, as well as to identify relevant case studies.
RAPOSO, I., JORGE, S., MELO, V., VIEGAS, S. Luanda e Maputo: Inflexões sub-urbanísticas da cidade socialista à cidade-metrópole neoliberal. Curitiba: URBE, V 4, N.2, Julho-Dezembro 2012, 189-205.
Vanessa Melo (School of Architecture, University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
The paper reflects upon three main types of housing intervention that emerge in Maputo in the new millennium, aiming to understand their relation with the current uneven economic growth and increasing globalized society and their role regarding the city's strong socio-spatial disparities.
Paper long abstract:
With the opening to the market economy (mid 1980's and early 1990's), Mozambique started a process of uneven economic growth, which currently tends to increase with the discovery and recent exploitation of natural resources, highly valued in the international market. Along with it, new agents emerged, from international agencies to civil society organizations and private sector investors, intervening in various fields.
In Maputo, the majority of the population, with reduced economic resources, still lives without adequate living conditions, though these may assume different characteristics and intensities. Over time, alongside with a few public interventions, this population has been the main builder of their own residential space, mainly through unofficial or mixed processes. Simultaneously, in the new millennium, three main types of housing interventions - resettlements, subsidized housing and market driven investments - have been developing in Maputo's expansion area, introducing different kinds of approaches, related to this new context.
Understanding the urban space as a social and capital product, in the line of Lefebvre (1991/74) and Harvey (2001), the paper draws on paradigmatic case studies of such housing interventions. It aims to analyze their territorial impact and how they may contribute or not to overcome the strong socio-spatial disparities present in Maputo, trying to understand the complex relations established between them and the globalizing socio-economic context in which they take place.
HARVEY, D. - Spaces of capital: towards a critical geography. New York: Routledge, 2001. XI, 429p.
LEFEBVRE, H. - The production of space. Trad. NICHOLSON~SMITH, Donald. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991/74. 454p.
Sílvia Leiria Viegas (FAUTL)
Paper short abstract:
We intend to reflect on the actions and impacts of current housing policies and urban public initiative (or with state incentive) in the suburbs of Luanda and on the emergence of emancipatory and/or transforming practices of resistance able to contribute to an approach to the 'right to the city'.
Paper long abstract:
The current housing policies of public initiative (or with state incentive) in Angola are promoting the emergence and consolidation of urban paradigms that tend to aggravate the socio-economic and territorial inequalities inherited from the civil-war period (1975-2002). In the capital, where the poverty of the suburbs is truly expressive, civil society organizations and social groups with fewer resources criticize the actions of the executive in order to defend the equitable distribution of urban resources (such as housing properly infrastructured and the benefits of urbanization) and the collective participation in a transformed urban life.
We intend to reflect on the type of (sub)urban 'governmentality' recently implemented in Luanda by identifying, on the one hand, actions and impacts arising from the strategic and programmatic structures that define the practices of party-state (centralized and autocratic) and, on the other hand, the corresponding counter-conducts which also characterize it (in accordance with Foucault, 2008). We also propose to recognize the contradictions of the 'production (and transformation) of space' (Lefebvre, 1974) and to identify emancipatory practices of resistance able to contribute to an approach to the 'right to the city' (as advocated by Lefebvre, 1968 and Harvey, 2008).
FOUCAULT, M. Segurança, território e população (1977-1978). São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2008.
HARVEY, D. The right to the city. New Left Review. London: NLR, No. 53, September-October 2008, 23-40, [Ac. 20.10.2011] In http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2740
LEFEBVRE, H. Le droit à la ville, Paris: Anthropos, 1968.
LEFEBVRE, H. La production de l'espace, Paris: Anthropos, 1974.
Ann Schlyter (University of Gothenburg)
Paper short abstract:
The urban population in African countries are young, but there are a growing number of elderly, who have built their neighborhoods and seen them affected by a variety of policy interventions. Many of them work and support the younger generations until the very end of their life
Paper long abstract:
A growing number of elderly people have spent most of their life in town. The dominant view of elderly in cities is still reflecting the colonial labour contract, dictating that the workers should at retirement return to "their village". Still some do, but many of urban elderly have lost contact with their region of birth. Or they opt for staying in the city, expressed in the phrase: "This place is my home". They claim their right to the city.
This paper is based on findings of the authors own longitudinal studies over almost fifty years in a peri-urban area in Lusaka and on other studies in the region. It will describe from the perspective of some older individuals how this area called George compound was built and then subjected to a series of interventions, such as legalization, provision of infrastructure, continues deterioration and new provisions. Finally it will look into the housing and living situation of the elderly in poor peri-urban areas today.
The paper concludes that massive infrastructural provisions carried out in a responsive and participatory way enhance the life qualities, but are not sustainable in a situation of perpetuate poverty. The paper argues that the house, the home, is a central asset for a household, and that elderly people, especially women, are a productive and contribute disproportionally to their families.
Yusuf Abdulazeez (Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto) Munir Abdulazeez (Government Model School)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines social interventions, their processes and parties involved in Lagos. It also outlines suburban survival strategies among residents of Lagos' suburbs. Using Right to the City approach, it advocates for good urban governance to transform Lagos into an inclusive city in Nigeria.
Paper long abstract:
Using diverse approaches, such as Right to the City (RTTC), scholars and students have inquired about the lives and works of urbanites worldwide, but most findings had little, if any impact in addressing the multidimensional poverty (economic, basic social and capabilities needs) suffered by suburb dwellers in the multipolar African cities. This is serious in Lagos, a city-name rooted in Portuguese words, 'lagoons' or 'lago de Curamo' (lakes) courtesy of Rui de Sequeira in 1472 and home to 11,547,000 (in 2012) people, whose busy business and hustling styles accord it the status of the only megacity in West Africa, second fastest growing city in Africa and seventh in the world. The under-reporting of the suburbs is possibly influenced by less pro-active studies on the nature and extent of social schemes expended to its suburbs (Badagry, Epe and Ikorodu), especially on the context, content, course and caretakers of the interventions. Against this background, this paper examines social interventions, if any in housing suburbs, the processes and parties involved in Lagos. The paper also outlines suburbanite survival strategies (SSS) that characterised life coping mechanisms in Lagos. Need arises to integrate the RTTC in urban governance to foster urban justice, growth and development in Lagos, an age-long migrant city; home of pre-colonial Portuguese explorers and slave traders, settlement of creoles and ex-slaves from Brazil, Liberia and Sierra Leone; Christian missionaries' headquarters, British colonial capital, Nigeria's former capital, now 'centre of excellence', 'port' and 'new migration' city in Africa's most populous country.
Tiago Castela (University of Coimbra)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the history of planning interventions for the government of suburbs in unequally divided cities in colonial and postcolonial Mozambique, foregrounding how the formation of planning knowledge, suffused with expert urban aspirations, has entailed ideas about the right to the city.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the history of the government of suburbs in colonial and postcolonial Mozambique—from 1945 to the 2010 riots in Maputo—to question the ways in which spatial planning knowledge has articulated disparate ideas about the right to urban life. The paper foregrounds a genealogy of planning interventions for the government of informally created suburbs: in the growing capital Maputo, created as part of the late Nineteenth Century occupation of southern Mozambique; and in the northern town of Angoche, whose existence predates European colonization. It argues for a broad conception of spatial government, as encompassing both state planning techniques—including situated participation practices—and the ways in which dwellers govern themselves. The paper focuses on understanding how the government of suburbs is suffused with the urban aspirations of officials and professionals. Such aspirations often involve a priori assumptions about suburban spaces as marginal to urban life, and a filtering out of the role of the periphery as an actant on planning. I propose that understanding suburbs as participating in an assemblage of urbanities is crucial for a reflexive formulation of the right to the city, and in particular for a disarticulation of participation from a management of unequal citizenships. In a contemporary world of suburbs that were mostly created informally, this history aims to provide tools to those engaged in imagining future modes of spatial government that acknowledge the potentialities of suburbs in Mozambique and elsewhere, and challenge persistences of colonial reason in present-day spatial planning.
David Viana (Escola Superior Gallaecia) Isabel Raposo (Technical University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
The paper will focus the relation between housing areas in Maputo and its structure, which reveals a link that connects processes of residential self-construction with urban self-organization. This interdependence promotes renewed perspectives about the city’s morphological transformation.
Paper long abstract:
The capital of Mozambique reveals housing areas with diverse framework, relevant to understand its districts and barrios. Semi-urbanized parts of the city accommodated population largely excluded from economic development axes. Housing suburbs has been consubstantiated mainly through everyday action of people that take in their "hands" the initiative to build and/or improve their houses. This situation - of self-construction (sometimes with formal support by the authorities, others within strictly informal processes) - has significant impact in the city´s urban fabric, which must not be ignored or attached to depreciative notions of its urban qualities. Analysing Maputo's urban condition one can verify an intricate relation between housing areas and the structure that configure the city's urban form. There are parts of Mozambique's' city capital self-organized by its inhabitants, through micro-strategies of urban transformation and appropriation, in which residential self-construction promotes a prolific standard of creative processes that must be integrated on a wide range of approaches to city future planning - in terms of access to urban services, land property, local equipment's, uses, activities. Within the link between city planning and urban self-organization, the paper will set a morphological analysis based on the correlation of physical elements of the urban form with qualitative, contextual, social and economic aspects that are important to understand Maputo in a compact, integrated and systemic perspective. It is necessary to learn from housing self-organization, inquiring it in terms of its emerging potentiality, tools and methods - despite the scarce resources and the rapid change that one can observe.
Alexandra Paio (ISCTE-IUL)
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper will present the current research of a multidisciplinary team from ISCTE-IUL that is collectively working on an integrated design tool to generate humanized urban and self-built tailored incremental housing based.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years the governments of the Portuguese-speaking of Africa have sought to address the housing needs by launching state programs to encourage construction. Angola has launched the National Housing Construction Program. The aim is to build about 1 million houses for low-income population in each country. Large massive housing blocks have been constructed offering identical typological dwelling types that does not suit the needs of the population neither the characteristics of the site or the local lifestyle. This inequality between rigid and repetitive housings and the need to answer different situations including time variables is one of the most complex challenges in nowadays architecture. It is necessary to define more efficient ones based on the implementation of sustainable housing units at all levels - ecological, social, cultural and economic. Several approaches have been done to support an alternative to mass housing production: (1) "support's system" from SAR leaded by John Habraken (1972); and (2) integrated planning support system for low-income housing in Chile by Dirk Donath and Luis González (2006). The act of housing production is understood as a process instead of a static end product.
In order to integrate these concepts in the design planning system tool we proposed a methodology for approaching both the urban design and housing design that explores parametric generative system and digital fabrication to deliver a system of alternative solutions instead of the usual unique and definitive solution. The system has been conceived to generate proposals for low-cost incremental tailored housing, according to procedures used in the studied countries.