The inflexibility of modern urban planning, which seeks to
determine the activities of urban inhabitants and standardise
everyday city life, is challenged by the unstoppable organic growth
of illegal settlements. In rapidly expanding cities, issues of
continuity with local traditions, local conditions and local ways
of working are juxtaposed with those of abrupt change due to
emergency, reaction to modernity, environmental degradation, global
market forces and global technological imperatives to make efforts
to control by physical planning redundant as soon as they are
enacted. In most third world cities there is little social welfare
and almost no attempt at social housing. The urban poor must still
house themselves with little or no state help to procure land or
infrastructure. Not having a legal existence, 'slums' are
automatically swept away to create a 'tabula rasa' prior to a
complete new build for those who can afford the full cost. The
notion of upgrading the existing built environment, has hardly
entered the official planning vocabulary. Since 2002, both Diploma
and latterly Degree students from London Metropolitan University
Department of Architecture and Spatial Design have produced schemes
from research work generated during an annual field trip to India.
Work is focused on situations where rapid cultural and technical
change is affecting traditional or transitional communities who
have access to only limited resources. Sites have included post
earthquake desert locations in Gujarat, under-serviced urban slums
in Delhi, dense traditional city landscapes in Meerut and the
integration of Marwari nomads into a settlement in Agra. This has
proved a stimulating and provocative academic learning environment
producing a range of innovative work. Some of the students involved
have been awarded RIBA medals and other prestigious student prizes.
In the course of this enterprise, links with Indian non-government
organisations and architectural schools have developed providing a
wealth of opportunity for further work, including a new MA and,
while a first live project which will provide sanitation to a low
income urban village in Agra is nearing completion, two other live
projects: for primary education in a stone quarry near Mumbai and
for a housing cooperative in north west Delhi, are just beginning.
The course has been ground breaking and innovative in this area in
that it seeks first to understand the cultural and physical
patterns of old city labyrinths and illegal urban settlements
before, and as an aid to, intervention. Extended physical and
cultural surveys which up date the 'diagnostic' surveys first
employed by Patrick Geddes in the early 20th century are carried
out by the students. By understanding the historical, cultural and
physical factors which underlie the current city fabric, students
are able to propose and validate a range of schemes from simple
conservative surgery carried out by the community alone, to working
alongside cultures of resistance to provide alternatives to planned
projects. They have also shown how major infrastructure projects
can be tweaked in practice to add greater potential to those who
use them. Unlike master planning this understanding does not seek
to lay down a fossilised grid within which inhabitants must fit
themselves. Rather than this, students design using a narrative
approach to frame, capture and harness (however fleetingly) moments
from the everyday to use as building blocks for their imagined
proposals. Their schemes show how an 'untidy' mix of the old and
the new, of memory and aspiration can, in a spirit of experiment
and curiosity, give unique identity to place. Cities are in a
process of constant renewal. The piecemeal reuse and adaptation of
the existing urban fabric in an attempt to match the changing
aspirations of its inhabitants is cost effective, environmentally
sustainable and appropriate. The book is about this increasingly
vital type of architectural work. It is also a testimony to the
value of linking real live projects with education in the studio.
Whilst primarily a review of the work of the studio in India, it
will serve as essential theoretical and practical guidance to
'thinking global and acting local' for students and practitioners
seeking to study wherever resources are scarce and culture and
technology are changing fast. The book is thus of global relevance.
The publication will illustrate and annotate selected student
schemes and place them within a critical theoretical framework. It
will trace the background to the studio work, review working
methods and, through a series of essays, reflect on themes for
studio endeavour and its application to live projects for students
and practitioners working with urban settlements throughout the
world.
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