SCIBE Conference Programme | Within the Limits of Scarcity: Rethinking Space, City and Practices

RETHINKING SPACE, CITY AND PRACTICES

PHD CONFERENCE 26TH -28TH FEBRUARY

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

JEREMY TILL | Central Saint Martins

OLE BOUMAN | Nederlands Architectuurinstituut

CAMILLO BOANO | The Bartlett - DPU, UCL

PIER VITTORIO AURELI | Architectural Association

ERIK SWYNGEDOUW | University of Manchester

ANA PAULA BALTAZAR | MOM -UFMG, Brazil

PHD PARTICIPANTS

Piero Sassi | Nancy Couling | Sante Simone | Mejrema Zatric | Christina E. Crawford | Adeola Enigbokan | Michael Klein | Luisa Otti | Rui Aristides | Mara Ferreri | Barbara Elisabeth Ascher | Julia Wedel | Federico Venturini | Ersilia Verlinghieri | Isis Nuñez Ferrera | Bo Tang | Naama Blatman-Thomas | Tomaz Pipan | Sharóne L. Tomer | Sheikh Serajul Hakim

| WITHIN THE LIMITS OF SCARCITY2

Self-building in the informal settlement of Atucucho, Quito, Ecuador © SCIBE

RETHINKING SPACE, CITY AND PRACTICES | i

01 INTRODUCTION

1.1 About the SCIBE Project 1

1.2 About the Conference 2

02 PEOPLE

2.1 About the Participants and keynote speakers 5

03 CONFERENCE OVERVIEW

3.1 Programme 14

3.2 Abstracts 18

3.3 Important dates 54

3.4 Locations 55

CONTENTS

| WITHIN THE LIMITS OF SCARCITYii

Derelict pub in Bromley-by-Bow, case study area in London © SCIBE

RETHINKING SPACE, CITY AND PRACTICES | 1

01 INTRODUCTION

1.1 ABOUT THE SCIBE PROJECT

SCIBE explores the relationship between scarcity and creativity in the context of the built environment by investigating how conditions of scarcity might affect the creativity of the different actors involved in the production of architecture and urban design, and how design-led actions might improve the built environment in the future. The research is based on the analysis of processes in four European cities: London, Oslo, Reykjavik, and Vienna.

The project was first formulated at the end of the 2000s when the world was moving from a decade of growth and accompanying depletion of resources, towards a condition of economic and environmental crisis. If the 2000s might be defined as the decade of abundance – or rather false abundance as it turned out – then it is likely that in the 2010s scarcity will be at the forefront of attention. The project therefore focuses on how various actors involved in the production of the built environment might respond, or have responded, to the condition of scarcity and how creativity might be affected under conditions of scarcity. The project team see these new conditions as motivations for change rather than limits that might close down creative activity, but to realise these opportunities it may be necessary to move towards new forms of creativity and design practice. With this aim in mind, the main research question that drives the project is:

How does creativity operate under conditions of scarcity?

Where the prevailing discussions around issues of sustainability in the built environment tend towards instrumental fixes, we see scarcity as evolving out of a series of social, environmental and economic networks. We seek to understand the construction of scarcity within those networks in order to see how to intervene most creatively. Where the normal focus of creative attention in the built environment is the building as object, our attention shifts from the object and towards the processes that go into the production of the built environment.

The objectives of the project were set out as follows:

To investigate conceptually and empirically the relation between scarcity and creativity, and to develop new models of innovation that rise out of this relationship.

To clarify the conditions of scarcity that affect the production of the built environment.

To identify the creative responses that these conditions of scarcity elicit, in a range of geographical and cultural contexts.

To uncover ways in which creativity might be deployed in the design process within the production of the built environment.

A key aim of the project is to ensure that the findings and outputs from the project are accessible to as wide an audience as possible, and wherever possible are directed towards the implications for future practice.

For more information visit:

http://www.scibe.eu/

| WITHIN THE LIMITS OF SCARCITY2Recovering the riverside, community kitchen/garden in Why Not Academy, Mathare, Kenya © SCIBE


01 INTRODUCTION

1.2 ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

Focus and Rationale

Scarcity is often considered as a fundamental condition of human societies. On the one hand, the state of not having enough has been at the bottom of a variety of strategies and techniques to overcome it; on the other, it has served as an explanatory argument for social order, for distribution or for conflict. Scarcity has accompanied the becoming of the urban condition. Repeatedly, (im-)material shortage has been at the core of the city’s struggles. More recently, global economic uncertainty, widespread urban inequality and pressing environmental questions in both North and South, are posing acute challenges to all involved in producing the built environment. Within this scenario, different actors, from architects and other built environment professionals to local authorities and community based organisations, will be increasingly pressured to deploy strategies to work within or against the limits of scarcity.

This conference seeks to investigate the processes through which scarcity is constructed in specific urban settings, shedding light on its setting, emergence and production in the built environment. Moreover, it seeks to understand how the challenges posed by this condition can shape alternative ways of investigating, conceptualising and theorizing city and space so as to inform innovative strategies and challenge the existing normative practices.

Papers could aim to answer one or more of the following questions:

What innovative ways of investigating and explaining the city can arise from looking through the lens of scarcity?

How can the examination of issues of scarcity in the built environment and the strategies emerging within its limits, can inform new ways of thinking and acting around cities and space?

What are the historic and current strategies deployed by the different actors involved in producing the built environment within the limits of scarcity? What lessons can be drawn from them?

What is the role built environment professions in responding to the challenges posed by current conditions of scarcity?

Participants

The conference will engage a selected group of 20 PhD students in presentations and discussions as a peer-to-peer response, supplemented by keynote speakers and networking sessions. The participants come from a wide range of disciplines, including architecture, planning, geography, environmental psychology. transport studies and others. See section 02 for more details.

Publications

Selected papers will be published in the Journal Places subject to peer review and editorial evaluation.

To follow the conference, visit:

SCIBE Conference Website http://www.scibe.eu/category/conference/

Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Scibe-PhD-Conference-London-2013/470990029611390

Twitter #scibephdconf https://twitter.com/SCIBEConference



02 PEOPLE | About the participants and speakers

Rui Aristides | University of Coimbra, Portugal(Born 1983) Architect graduated at the Department of Architecture of the University of Coimbra(2007), having developed a final thesis with the following title: “Voire Faire – Towards an architecture theory of the Helgeland museums”. During the studies, participated in the direction and editing of the architecture magazine NU and also several student activities related with the architecture students association. Conducted a theoretical research on the social component of the project of architecture as a result of the attribution of a scholarship by the Ministry of International Relations of the Norwegian Government (2007-2008). Worked as a collaborator in the architecture offices of Atelier do Corvo (2004) and Fátima Martins Lda (2008-2012). Developed architecture projects in Burkina Fasso, integrated in the association Alizeta – Projetti Solidali Onlus (2007-2010). More recently collaborated in the exhibition “Fernando Távora – Permanent Modernity” (2012). Presently developing a PhD in architectural and urban culture at the Centre of Social Studies (CES) in Coimbra, with the following title: “From the organization of space to the organization of society – a study of the social compromise in architecture.

Contact: [email protected]

Barbara Elisabeth Ascher | Oslo School of Architecture and Design, NorwayBarbara Elisabeth Ascher, born in Germany, was trained as an architect and urban planner at Bauhaus University in Weimar and the Oslo School of Architecture with a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. She has worked as an architect in Egypt, Austria and for the project office of “shrinking cities” in Berlin, before she joined the award- winning office Helen & Hard in Norway after her graduation in 2006. Her professional experience extend from exhibition projects, housing schemes, cultural centers to experimental public spaces such as “Geoparken”. She later joined the department for cultural and urban development in the oil-boom town of Stavanger as an urban planner working mostly on large-scale redevelopment schemes of former oil-related industrial areas closely linked to her engagement in the working group on sustainability “fremtidens byer” (future cities) network. She joined the Oslo School of Architecture and Design as a PhD research fellow in 2012. Her research is part of the EU-funded project on “Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment” and focuses on the design and process of social housing provisions in the Norwegian welfare state.


Pier Vittorio Aureli [Invited Speaker] Architectural Association and Berlage InstitutePier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and educator. At the Berlage he is responsible for the “City as a Project” PhD Program and for the Research Unit “Labour, City, Architecture.” His projects, researches, writings, and teaching focus on the relationship between architectural form, political theory, and urban history. He is the author of publications including The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture and The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism. Aureli studied at the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV), before obtaining his PhD from the Delft University of Technology. He teaches at the Architectural Association and has taught at Columbia University, the Barcelona Institute of Architecture, and Delft University of Technology. Together with Martino Tattara, Aureli is the co-founder of DOGMA, an office focused on the project of the city. In 2006 they received the Iakv Chernikov Prize, and in 2005 Dogma shared a first prize at an international competition for a new administrative city for 500,000 inhabitants in Korea.



Ana Paula Baltazar [Invited Speaker] | MOM, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, BrazilAna is a Brazilian qualified Architect, holds an MArch in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil, and a PhD in Architecture and Virtual Environments from the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. She is a Senior Lecturer teaching at both undergraduate and graduate programs at the School of Architecture at UFMG, where she also co-leads the research groups MOM (Morar de Outras Maneiras / Living in Other Ways) and LAGEAR (Laboratório Gráfico para Experimentação Arquitetônica / Computer Laboratory for Architectural Experience). In the last five years she has been teaching first year architecture students, working with low-tech and low-cost interactive urban interventions in poor small villages in Brazil. Her current research focuses on means to raise the historical awareness of people living in fragile and informal settlements, such as favelas and rural areas, in order to both understand the processes of production of space they engender and to empower them to defend themselves from heteronomous interventions of the State and capitalist interests. Her main research interest includes spatial practices of resistance to capitalism, the autonomy of users in the production of space, the possible simultaneity of design, building and use, the role of architects as interface designers, architecture as interface, and low-tech/low-cost immersive environments for collaborative production of space-events. She has several papers and book chapters published and was awarded three research prizes and two design prizes.


Naama Blatman-Thomas | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, IsraelNaama is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University in Israel. She holds an MA in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel Aviv University. Naama is a human rights activist with extensive professional experience in both the Jewish and Palestinian civil societies. Her PhD research investigates the movement of indigenous peoples to and residence within (post) colonial cities in Israel and Australia. learning and counter-mapping.


Camillo Boano [Invited Speaker] The Bartlett - Development Planning Unit, University College LondonDr. Camillo Boano is a Senior Lecturer, Course Director of the MSc Building and Urban Design for Development and Co-Director of UCL’s Urban Lab. Camillo is a qualified architect who combines interests in critical architecture, spatial production, transformations, urbanism with the exceptional circumstances of disasters and informality. His research interests are focused on urban development, design and urban transformations, shelter and housing interventions, reconstruction in conflicted areas and divided cities, and on the contested urbanism. He worked and undertook researches and consultancies in Nicaragua, Ecuador, Venezuela, Salvador, Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Jordan, Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia. He is also associate lecturer in the department of Planning Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, and visiting lecturer at University of Bologna and Polytechnic of Turin and Milan (Italy).

Ole Bouman [Invited Speaker] Nederlands ArchitectuurinstituutOle Bouman has been director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) since April 2007. Before taking up that position he was editor-in-chief of the periodical Volume, a cooperative venture of Stichting Archis, AMO (the research bureau of OMA/Rem Koolhaas) and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University. He has curated a series of public



events for the reconstruction of the public domain in cities that have been hit by disasters, such as Ramallah, Mexico City, Beirut and Prishtina. Bouman has been lecturing Design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

Bouman is (co-)author of a.o. the encyclopaedia The Invisible in Architecture (1994) and Al Manakh (2007). As well as the manifestos RealSpace in QuickTimes (1996) and De Strijd om Tijd (2003). His most recent publication is Architecture of Consequence which constitutes a portrait of a proactive design mentality. He has curated exhibitions for the Milan Triennale, Manifesta 3 and Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum. His articles have appeared in such periodicals as De Groene Amsterdammer, The Independent, Artforum, De Gids, Domus, Harvard Design Review, El Croquis, Arquitectura & Viva, and Proiekt Russia. He has been guest editor-in-chief for A+D. Bouman regularly lectures at internationally acclaimed universities and cultural institutions.

Nancy Couling B. | Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne, SwitzerlandArchitectural studies in Auckland, New Zealand and I.U.A.V. Venice with a post-grad scholarship. Nancy has 5 years practice in NZ, building projects both privately and within architectural offices and in renowned architectural practices in Europe, Hong Kong and Australia, eg. Massimiliano Fuksas, Rome, Otto Steidle, Munich, Christoph Langhof, Berlin, Liang Peddle Thorp, Hong Kong and LAB Architecture Studio, Melbourne. Nancy formed the interdisciplinary partnership cet-0/ cet-01 in Berlin 1995, focusing on urban design and developing prototypes in applied research, such as SPREE2011- an off-shore retainer for drainage overflow in central Berlin and a community garden facility in Leipzig designed with resident’s input. (www.cet-01.de). She also taught at the Technical University Berlin, chair for urban design, Prof. Klaus Zillich 2000-2005 and 2008-09. She developed a focus on urban water and organized the “Wasserschaft Spree” Forum with colleagues 2009. In 2010, nancy joined EPFL as a research assistant to Prof. Harry Gugger. Researched and coordinated the Barents Sea project 2011/12 (http://laba.epfl.ch) and began doctoral studies with the topic “the Urbanization of the Sea” in Feb 2011. She is a member of the “Urban Lab Network” (Erasmus Mundus Action 3 project) with TU Berlin & six further international universities.


Christina Crawford | Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, U.SChristina Crawford is a third year PhD student in Architectural History and Theory at Harvard University whose work focuses on architectural and urban design strategies particular to periods of intensive transition. Her dissertation research explores experimentalist Soviet Union theory of the 1920s and the subsequent attempts to make it instrumental. Christina received her B.A in Architecture and East European Studies from Yale University, and her M.Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design: All degrees were conferred with Distinction. She served as Vice Consul in the U.S Consulate in St. Petersburg, Russia and received a Fullbright Fellowship to Ukraine, where she researched post-Soviet Ukrainian architecture and urbanism. Articles on her Ukrainian work were published in Metropolis (U.S), Archis (Netherlands) and A.C.C (Ukraine). Prior to returning to Harvard, Christina worked for several years as an architect and urban designer in Boston and taught architectural history and theory at Northeastern University. Her professional work included designs for discrete architectural projects, master plans for local municipalities and open space design for a waterfront city in Dubai, UAE. She is a Registered Architect and an affiliate of the Davis Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard.




Adeola Enigbokan | City University of New York, U.SAdeola Enigbokan is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Psychology at the City University of New York. She holds an MPhil in Anthropology from The New School for Social Research. She is also an artist based in New York City. Her artistic research practice involves creating interventions, which provide an alternative framework for approaching urban “problems.” This practice has often involved the use of historical artifacts and archives, everyday public spaces, practices and language to create opportunities in which participants might reconsider their own ways of thinking and moving in the city. She has presented her work at diverse venues such as Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow, Center for Independent Social Research, Saint Petersburg, El Museo del Barrio, New York and The Royal Geographical Society, London. She has published articles about this artistic research process in Cultural Geographies and No More Potlucks, as she prepares her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Archiving the City.” To find out more about her work visit http://archivingthecity.com.


Isis Nuñez Ferrera | University of Westminster, UKIsis is a Honduran architect specializing in urban planning, design and international development. She holds an MSc in Urban Design for Development from the Bartlett - Development Planning Unit at University College London and is currently a PhD researcher at the University of Westminster as part of the international HERA funded project on Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment (SCIBE). Her experience includes over 5 years of practice, research and fieldwork on urban regeneration schemes, diversity in the built environment, urban transport, slum upgrading and community-led development in Honduras, Ecuador, Brazil, India, Turkey, Kenya and the UK. She has collaborated on issues of housing rights and inclusive approaches with UN-Habitat, Practical Action-UK, Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Development Planning Unit (DPU) at University College London, local government agencies in Honduras and various grassroots organizations in Africa, South-east Asia and Latin America. She is currently an associate of Architecture Sans Frontieres – UK, working in coordinating the Change-by-Design international workshops undertaken in Brazil and Kenya.


Mara Ferreri | Queen Mary, University of London, UKMara Ferreri is a researcher and writer interested in the political potential of contemporary art/activist practices in conflictive urban contexts. After completing an MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, in 2009 she joined Queen Mary, University of London, to pursue a PhD in the School of Geography, where she is currently completing a thesis on the cultural politics of temporary vacant space reuse in contemporary London [link to the page on Qmul site: http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/staff/ferrerim.html]. Her research is informed and inspired by her work with several cultural and activist collectives around issues of precarity and gentrification, both in London and abroad, through non-hierarchical practices of co-learning and counter-mapping.


Sheikh Serajul Hakim | National University of Singapore, SingaporeHakim is a Bangladeshi national, and presently a PhD candidate at the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture (CASA) under its School of Design and Environment. He has been trained as an architect at his undergraduate level in BUET (Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology), Dhaka, and later received an MSc in Urban Management and Development from the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS) Rotterdam,



with a major in Urban Social Development. Hakim is also a faculty member for the Architecture Discipline under the Science, Engineering and Technology School, Khulna University, Bangladesh. Hakim’s interest in ‘migrancy and urban form in the third world context’ originates from his MSc research, in which he aimed to explore the structural and local conditions behind rural-urban migration off one of Bangladesh’s troubled coastal regions, and also in migrants’ livelihood practices to cope with the structural and local conditions prevailing in the third world city. His present research focus is in fact rooted in his keen interest in the production mechanism of ordinary built environments in the third world societies. Hakim has published extensively in journals and newspapers, spoken and participated in seminars and workshops.


Michael Klein | Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, AustriaMichael Klein is an architect and researcher based in Vienna. He studied architecture at Vienna University of Technology and the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2007. Since then, he has been working in the field of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism. From 2009 on, Michael has been lecturing and teaching design classes at Vienna University of Technology. His theoretical research interest focuses on how political thinking, its theory and economic conditions relate to design, architecture and the urban environment. Currently, he is engaged in the ESF-funded research project SCIBE - Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment and following a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.


Luisa Otti | Università degli studi Roma Tre, ItalyLuisa Otti (Civitavecchia - Rome 1978) graduated in Architecture in 2002 at Roma Tre Faculty of Architecture; from the beginning she joins research activities with professional experiences as an independent architect. Since 2003 she is assistant professor at the third year Architectural Design Atelier, and since 2011 she is PhD student at the Architectural Design Department, developing researches on typological and technological innovation with particular reference to housing practicies. She regularly contributes writing articles and taking part to several international conferences as speaker. As an independent architect, she started her carrier collaborating with several practices in Rome and then in Vienna with Berger+Parkkinen Architekten GmbH as team leader for on-going projects and international competitions. After this 3 years experience abroad, she worked with Studio Amati Architetti s.r.l. in Rome with design and coordination responsibilities on numerous public and private projects. At the moment, she runs her own practice PlanB, a multi-disciplinary practice of architecture that profits from the diversified skills of the founding partners and the continual collaboration with experts from various fields, combining architectural theory, research, innovation and experimentation with high technical knowledge and professionalism.


Tomaz Pipan | London Metropolitan University, UK and Berlin Technical University, GermanyTomaz Pipan is a practitioner, researcher and a tutor. He finished his Architectural part 2 studies in 2007 in Ljubljana, Slovenia specializing in Urbanism. He went on to receive his Academic Master’s degree from Landscape Urbanism at Architectural Association in London in 2008. His project was awarded Honors degree. Currently he is a PhD research candidate at London Metropolitan University. Tomaz worked at established London practices such as CHORA and landscape office Gustafson and Porter. He worked on urban scale projects ranging from Singapore, China, UAE to Europe.



He was on a winning team for a prestigious competition Valencia Parque Central in Spain. As a teacher, Tomaz was a unit tutor at London Metropolitan University and later at Technical University Berlin. He led a number of workshops in Xiamen China and Chengdu as well as held lectures and presentations at Architectural Association and University College London. Tomaz’s PhD research focuses on industrialized rural areas in China, on their possible reinterpretation as sustainable and flexible urban patterns. He is investigating capacity of morphological fragments to accommodate different claims on a territory, enabling an alternative civic order.


Piero Sassi | Bauhaus-University Weimar, GermanyPiero Sassi is a PhD student at the Institute for European Urban Studies (IfEU) of the Bauhaus-University Weimar. His main research interest is in the environmental issues posed by urbanization. Piero Sassi’s doctorate research focuses on the effects of European soil protection policies on urban and regional planning practices. He is currently holding a seminar in which the limits and future prospects of urban planning practices in limiting resource depletion are discussed (“Questioning Growth. Theoretical and Practical Challenges for Planning”). Prior to this position, Piero Sassi studied Architecture and Urban Planning at the School of Architecture of Ferrara and at the Institute of Urban Planning at the School of Architecture of Copenhagen. His Master thesis was centered on the analysis and the design of Kildedal, an environmentally fragile area in the “Frederikssund Finger” of the Greater Copenhagen.


Sante Simone | University of Rome La Sapienza, ItalySante Simone is an architect and a PhD candidate at the Department of Architecture and Construction, Space and Society’ (Sapienza University in Rome). The title of his research project is “Novi Beograd. A Portrait of an Interrupted City”, in the PhD Program ‘Housing in Europe 1980-2010’. His published written work includes “Luigi Cosenza. Esperienze di architettura” in “Architetti italiani del 900/Progetti e culture dell’abitare” and “memoriae causa” in “Architecture & Ideology”. Simone graduated in architecture with honors, under supervision of Prof. Franco Purini (Sapienza University of Rome). Since 2011 he teaches at the Istituto Quasar at Rome. He is the co-founder of KURMAK, an office based in Rome and focused on the relationship between architecture and city form. Kurmak received an honorable mention at the Europan 10 (Wien, 2009) and a runner-up at Europan 11 (Pec, Kosovo2011).


Erik Swyngedouw [Invited Speaker] Professor or Geography at the School of Environment and Development, University of ManchesterErik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester in its School of Environment and Development. He received his PhD entitled “The production of new spaces of production” under the supervision of David Harvey at Johns Hopkins University (1991). From 1988 until 2006 he taught at the University of Oxford and was a Fellow of St. Peter’s College. He moved to the University of Manchester in 2006. Swyngedouw has published several books and research papers in the fields of political economy, political ecology, and urban theory and culture. He aims at bringing politically explicit yet theoretically and empirically grounded research that contributes to the practice of constructing a more genuinely humanizing geography.



Bo Tang | London Metropolitan University, UKBo Tang studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), University of East London and London Metropolitan University, where she graduated with distinction in 2008. Since 2006, Bo has been involved in the research field of the Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources (ARCSR), coordinating and managing live projects with students in informal settlements in India, in collaboration with local NGO’s, and funded by the Water Trust. These include a sanitation upgrading project in Agra, cooperative resettlement housing in Delhi and quarry classrooms in Navi Mumbai. A further research project in Sierra Leone has led to the construction of a new primary school in Freetown in 2011. Bo regularly organises and curates ARCSR exhibitions, and was part of the RIBA Boyd Auger Scholarship 2008 research team, which explored art, urbanism and architecture in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bo is currently an undergraduate studio tutor, and member of the Projects Office at the CASS, London Metropolitan University. She is also a candidate of the PhD Programme on a full scholarship. Her research thesis is entitled “Negotiating Shared Spaces in Informal Peri-Urban Settlements in India”. Bo is co-editor of a recent publication “Learning From Delhi” by Maurice Mitchell, published in December 2010.


Jeremy Till [SCIBE Speaker] Central Saint Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts LondonJeremy Till is an architect, educator and writer. Since 2012 he has been Head of Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design and Pro Vice-Chancellor, University of the Arts London. His extensive written work includes Flexible Housing (with Tatjana Schneider, 2007), Architecture Depends (2009) and Spatial Agency (with Nishat Awan and Tatjana Schneider, 2011). All three of these won the RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding Research, an unprecedented sequence of success in this prestigious prize. As an architect, he worked with Sarah Wigglesworth Architects on their pioneering building, 9 Stock Orchard Street, which won the RIBA Sustainability Prize. He curated the British Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Sharóne Tomer | University of California, Berkeley, U.SSharóne Tomer is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in the History of Architecture and Urbanism. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis, a Master of Architecture from the University of Oregon, and a Master of Philosophy in Architecture from the University of Cape Town. She is additionally a registered architect, and teaches architectural design and history/theory courses. Her research interests include histories and performances of architectural professionalism; relationships between race, gender and architecture; architectural activism; urbanism in the Global South, particularly South Africa; and alternative modernities. Her dissertation examines histories of architectural engagements with democratic struggle in Cape Town, South Africa, from 1976 to 2004. The dissertation engages with discourses concerning racial and gendered difference, the right to the city, privilege and poverty, and architectural modernism, and seeks to stake a place for architectural practices in the literature of cities of the Global South.




Ersilia Verlinghieri | University of LeedsErsilia Verlinghieri is a PhD student at the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds. Her project regards city resilience and disaster recovery. She holds a Master in Applied Mathematics at the University of LÀquila, Italy.


Federico Venturini | University of LeedsFederico Venturini is a PhD student at the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. Aim of his project is to explore the relations between modern cities and Grassroots Urban Initiatives (GUI), using Social Ecology as defined by Murray Bookchin as a research framework. He holds a master degree in Philosophy from the University of Trieste, Italy, and one in History and European Culture from the University of Udine, Italy.


Julia Wedel | Oxford Brookes University, UKJulia Wedel is a PhD student and associate lecturer in the School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. Prior to embarking on the PhD, she trained as an architect and completed her Part I, II and III training at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She subsequently worked for 9 years as an architect in London, focusing on environmental and international development projects, for Ian Ritchie Architects and Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, amongst others. Intrigued by why architectural projects with an environmental focus are often not as successful as planned, she felt that the answer may lie in the human dimension of this relationship. Searching for a course that addressed the relationship between people and their environment, Julia found this in the MA International Architectural Regeneration and Development at Oxford Brookes University, which she completed part-time from 2007-09. The PhD focus on responses to scarcity developed out of the interest of human-environment interactions. The research is located in the Department of Architecture, and supervised by Dr. Marcel Vellinga, an anthropologist, and Dr. Brigitte Piquard, a political scientist. It is funded by Oxford Brookes University’s Urban Futures scholarship. After completing the PhD, Julia hopes to combine practice and research in the area of social and ecological interactions.


Mejrema Zatric | University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and HerzegovinaMejrema ZATRIC is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Urban Design at the University of Sarajevo, where she is also a lecturer in the urban design program. Mejrema earned her Master of Architecture and Urban Studies from the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya in Barcelona through the Metropolis program jointly administered by the UPC and the CCCB. More recently, she was also a research-fellow in the ‘gta’ department at the ETH Zurich. Her research interests are in the spatial and social underpinnings and the consequences of the urban transformations of post-socialist Europe. Mejrema’s research is informed and inspired by the theoretical endeavors of Henry Lefebvre and critical urban theory in a broader sense. Her doctoral research examines the conceptualizations of ‘the value of the urban’ and ‘the urban as value’ in the architectural culture prevalent in Europe in the 1990s.


RETHINKING SPACE, CITY AND PRACTICES | 13Mapping scarcity in Bromley-by-Bow, London. Photo elicitation exercise by the residents © SCIBE


DAY 1 | TUESDAY 26th FEBRUARY

1400 Arrivals and registration

1500 Welcome reception | Introduction to SCIBE by organisational committee

1520 SCIBE Speaker | Professor Jeremy Till Pro Vice-Chancellor, University of the Arts London Head of Central Saint Martins

SESSION 1

1540 S1.1 Soil Scarcity: Degrowth Urban Policy?

Piero Sassi | Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany

Respondent | Nancy Couling

1620 S1.2 Scarcity within a context of abundance- Case-study Barents Sea, Norway

Nancy Couling | Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne, Switzerland

Respondent | Piero Sassi

1700 Coffee break

1720 Invited Keynote Speaker | Ole Bouman Director Nederlands Architectuurinstituut

1820 Networking activity

DAY 2 | WEDNESDAY 27th FEBRUARY

0900 Invited Keynote Speaker | Camillo Boano Senior Lecturer | The Bartlett - Development Planning Unit University College London

SESSION 2

1000 S2.1 Voids as Modern Ruins - The Project for the City in the Face of New Spatial Scarcity

Sante Simone and Mejrema Zatric | University of Rome La Sapienza and University of Sarajevo

Respondent | Michael Klein

1040 S2.2 The Innovative Potential of Scarcity in SA’s Comradely Competition for Communal Housing, 1927

Christina E. Crawford | Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, U.S

Respondent | Adeola Enigbokan

03 CONFERENCE OVERVIEW | Programme


1.1 CONFERENCE PROGRAMME03 CONFERENCE OVERVIEW | Programme

1120 Coffee break

1140 S2.3 “We must begin to build for ourselves a city in which we want to live”

Adeola Enigbokan | City University of New York, U.S

Respondent | Mejrema Zatric and Sante Simone

1220 S2.4 Need, Desire and the Production of Scarcity: Housing and the Modern Metropolis

Michael Klein | Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria

Respondent | Christina E. Crawford

1300 Lunch break

SESSION 3

1400 S3.1 Strategies for housing the new poor: typological and technological innovation for contemporary housing habits

Luisa Otti | Università degli studi Roma Tre, Italy

Respondent | Mara Ferreri

1440 S3.2 For Scarce Means, Abundant Ends: Fernando Távora and the production of modernity

Rui Aristides | University of Coimbra, Portugal

Respondent | Barbara Elisabeth Ascher

1520 Coffee break

1540 S3.3 Reflections on the Temporary City: short-term uses and urban scarcity

Mara Ferreri | Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Respondent | Rui Aristides

1620 S3.4 Built Rationally! Olav Selvaag and the Austerity Debate on Housing

Barbara Elisabeth Ascher | Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway

Respondent | Luisa Otti

1700 Invited Keynote Speaker | Pier Vittorio Aureli Researcher and Lecturer Architectural Association and Berlage Institute

1800 Dinner and drinks



DAY 3 | THURSDAY 28th FEBRUARY

0900 Invited Keynote Speaker | Professor Erik Swyngedouw Professor of Geography, School of Environment and Development University of Manchester

SESSION IV

1000 S4.1 The costs of flexibility: Responses to water scarcity in an informal settlement in Lima, Peru

Julia Wedel | Oxford Brookes University, UK

Respondent | Bo Tang

1040 S4.2 Scarcity, post-scarcity and local community: LÀquila as a case study

Federico Venturini and Ersilia Verlinghieri | University of Leeds

Respondent | Isis Nuñez Ferrera

1120 Coffee break

1140 S4.3 Territories of Scarcity and Creativity: A Critical view on Informal Settlements and Emerging Tactics under Conditions of Scarcity

Isis Nuñez Ferrera | University of Westminster, UK

Respondent | Julia Wedel

1220 S4.4 Negotiating Shared Spaces in Informal Peri-Urban Settlements in India The Role of Amenity Buildings and the Effect of the Post-Hoc Introduction of Infrastructure in the Creation of Common Places

Bo Tang | London Metropolitan University, UK

Respondent | Federico Venturini and Ersilia Verlinghieri

1300 Lunch break

SESSION V

1400 S5.1 “The Arabs of Karmiel”: exploring the other side of manufactured land scarcity in Israel/Palestine

Naama Blatman-Thomas | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Respondent | Sheikh Serajul Hakim

1440 S5.2 Territorial Compromises: Limits of Morphological and Civic Negotiation

Tomaz Pipan | London Metropolitan University, UK and Berlin Technical University, Germany

Respondent | Sharóne L. Tomer

1520 Coffee break



1540 S5.3 Architectural Acts of Redress: Articulating Scarcity of Resources and Rights in Cape Town During Apartheid and After

Sharóne L. Tomer | University of California, Berkeley, U.S

Respondent | Naama Blatman-Thomas

1620 S5.4 Scarcity, Control and Third World Urban Form

Sheikh Serajul Hakim and Dr. Joseph Lim Ee Man | National University of Singapore, Singapore

Respondent | Tomaz Pipan

1700 Invited Keynote Speaker | Ana Paula Baltazar Morar de Outras Maneiras (MOM - Living in Other Ways), research-based practice at Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil


03 CONFERENCE OVERVIEW | Abstracts

S1.1 Soil Scarcity: Degrowth Urban Policy? Piero Sassi | PhD Candidate Institute for European Urban Studies (IfEU), Bauhaus-University Weimar

Soil is a non-renewable, scarce resource, threatened by uncontrolled urbanization processes. This paper seeks to tackle the issues of soil scarcity and soil consumption within the contemporary European growth vs degrowth debate. The question that is posed here is whether and to what extent degrowth policies, if implemented through urban and regional planning, could contribute to meet the soil protection goals of the European Union? This work has to be set within the broader planning discussion on new holistic ways to deal with current resource scarcity.

The background to this work is the problem of soil consumption due to uncontrolled urban expansions. Urban growth and soil sealing are considered major drivers of soil degradation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the 1990s we witnessed the urbanization of more than 8000 km2 of land (EEA, 2006). The consequences are many and serious, including the loss of rural land, essential for the production of food, to urban use. Thus, awareness that soil resources are growing scarce should inform contemporary planning practices and environmental policies.

Over the past few decades resource scarcity (including land and soil resources) has been a major subject of political debate in Europe. As a result, several strategies to overcome finite resource depletion have been put forward. Among others, advocates of degrowth approaches proposed a radical cultural shift towards new production and consumption patterns by questioning the underlying assumptions of growth. These models have been discussed in economics, but were disregarded in mainstream urban planning and only implemented within small-scale projects and local movements. However, over the past few years insecurity regarding global economic recession, along with the acknowledgment of the threats from current ecological crisis, have provoked a new wave of interest in post-growth alternatives. An example is represented by so-called transition towns.

Within this context, this work investigates the extent to which degrowth alternatives could contribute to the development of new holistic planning approaches to deal with the soil scarcity problem. By considering soil scarcity through the lens of contemporary growth vs degrowth debate, this work presents the theoretical framework of the author’s ongoing PhD research, a study on the effects of European soil protection policies on urban and regional planning practices. Challenges posed by current limits of scarcity approach to urban planning are the main issue discussed within the seminar (“Questioning Growth. Theoretical and Practical Challenges for Planning”) that the author is currently holding together with a colleague at the Institute for European Urban Studies (IfEU) of the Bauhaus-University Weimar.





S1.2 Scarcity within a context of abundance- Case-study Barents Sea, NorwayNancy Couling | PhD candidate laba- the laboratoire bâle1, Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne, Switzerland

The characteristics of the urban age, where urban systems operate at a multitude of scales, densities and levels of specialization over vast areas of the planet, has led to the conception of a finite spatial world. This has been discussed by Lefebvre in The Production of Space and The Urban Revolution. Within this system, the conditions of abundance and scarcity are in a continual state of flux. Urban transformation processes fueled by diverse, yet specific parameters, produce both new fields of action within the context of abundance and fields of stagnation within the context of scarcity.

Our discussion on issues of scarcity and emerging strategies in the built environment, focuses on ocean space. Scarcity of land-based resources has motivated what we claim is an urban expansion into the ocean where new types of territories are being produced. At the same time, converging environmental indicators point to an emerging condition of spatial limitation - research shows that almost no part of the ocean remains unaffected by human impact.The seemingly unlimited spatial reservoir of the ocean, including its biological, mineral and chemical wealth, is becoming scarce.

Through the investigation of the Barents Sea case-study2- a research by design conducted at laba (laboratoire bâle), EPFL- the dynamic and extreme relationship between abundance and scarcity in this particular environment became apparent. Responding to the parameters of impending exploitation of massive as yet almost untapped reserves of oil and gas, the initiation of the new Northern Sea Route and the associated environmental threat caused by both of these developments, architecture students developed both territorial constitutions and architectural projects aimed at long-term sustainable development.

Initially appearing as a territory marked by economic wealth, an abundance of resources and Europe’s last intact marine ecosystem, the research revealed the internal terrains of scarcity –the terrains subsequently chosen as sites for intervention. The Barents Sea project illuminates how the oil & gas industry- destined for a European market - jeopardizes the long-term resilience of fragile local systems for example traditional, small-scale fishing. Vardø, the oldest town in the region together with Hammerfest, has lost 17% of its population over the last 10 years and has inherited over 150 empty houses as a result.

Scarcity in the region is also present in other forms. The geographical and climatic conditions contribute to a scarcity of light, of trees, (and therefore building materials) and of year-round public space. The architectural projects investigated the concept of infrastructure as it relates to architecture, of non-negotiable requirements for human settlement. Seen as infrastructure, interventions were therefore concerned with optimizing existing systems, initiating synergies and developing new hybrid typologies capable of responding to new challenges in the region. Despite the prospect of new wealth, it was in this case scarcity that drove the process of architectural design.

1 laba- the laboratoire bâle, Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (Switzerland) was initiated by Professor Harry Gugger in 2011, following the laboratoire pour la production de l’architecture (laba 2005-11). www.laba.epfl.ch 2 Recent publication of this project: Gugger, Harry, Couling Nancy & Blanchard, Aurélie: 2012 Barents Lessons: Teaching and Research in Architecture Zurich: Park Books



A view of Svalbard, Norway



S2.1 Voids as Modern Ruins: The Project for the City in the Face of New Spatial Scarcity Sante Simone and Mejrema Zatric | PhD Candidates at University of Rome La Sapienza and University of Sarajevo

In the tradition of the critique of political economy, the shortage of space is understood as a socio-economic phenomenon. If different ideologies are to be defined as different proposals for socio-economic arrangements, the case of New Belgrade showcases the urban space as a product of design intelligence within the limits of two different politically determined ethos of spatial scarcity.

Conceived before both Chandigarh (1953) and Brasilia (1956), New Belgrade (1947) can be considered the oldest of the great urban projects carried out by modernity. Being the first experiment in which the socialist policy has tried to built the modern city in Europe, and preceding even similar urban achievements of Western Keynesianism , New Belgrade bore a strong imprint of the modern functionalism that framed scarcity strictly through the design of the interior space.

While the existenzminimum principle subtly echoed in the reproduced legacy of the early socialist modernism, instructing the architectural design to operate within the tight limits of the humble apartments for the ‘universal worker’, the abundance of the voids marked the New Belgrade as the city, not as much of buildings, as of distances.

The crisis of the socialist policies, however, never allowed to complete the project of the modern city, especially in the sense of the definition of public spaces. Notably, the great central axis contained in the New Belgrade draft of the 1960s remained uncompleted, as its three squares and the services connected with it were left unbuilt.

Today these voids stand as the ruins of the modern city, exposed to the construction of the new spatial scarcity framed by the demand for the free, buildable land. In the circumstances of the inversion of the spatial scarcity principle, we propose, it is not the reduction of the gaps, but the adaptation of the voids-as-ruins that should lead the design intelligence in the quest of asserting the potentials of the modern city as a project.





S2.2 The Innovative Potential of Scarcity in SA’s Comradely Competition for Communal Housing, 1927 Christina E. Crawford | PhD Candidate Faculty of Architectural Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, U.S

In early 1927, the preeminent Soviet architectural journal, SA, announced a “Comradely Competition for Communal Housing,” with the charge to design the so-called dom-kommuna or house-commune. The competition was prompted by the need for innovative urban housing solutions in cities such as Moscow that were experiencing a population spike at a time of economic downturn. These base conditions—urban overcrowding and fiscal belt tightening—are unfortunately starkly familiar. This paper argues that close analysis of these nearly century-old designs may educe strategies for contemporary architects to approach, mitigate, and even innovate in the face of material scarcity.

The economic effect of the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) on Russia’s cities was immediate and devastating. The population of Moscow fell almost 50% during this period, heavy industry, already well-behind production of Western Europe, was virtually at a standstill. After 1921, however, workers flooded back into cities that were ill equipped to handle the influx of population. Since all property had been socialized in 1917, the Soviet state was solely responsible to address the housing shortfall, yet governmental building projects were stymied throughout the 1920’s by the bleak financial outlook. Stopgap measures were put in place, the first being subdivision of previously aristocratic and bourgeois residences into multi-unit housing. This solution, persistent throughout the Soviet period, is what came to be known as the kommunalka (communal apartment). But even with the transformation of existing building stock, a housing shortage ensued. Such circumstances made housing reform—specifically the design of efficient communal unit types that would sweep away petit bourgeois domestic habits—the primary means by which the architectural avant-garde could most expediently contribute to the material transformation of society.

This paper contextualizes the conditions that prompted the Comradely Competition, but focuses primarily on the competition brief and the resultant submissions. The brief makes clear that from a socio-political standpoint the dom-kommuna was to be the architectural instantiation of communism, the setting for the novyi byt or “new way of life,” promulgated by the regime deliberately to reform the structures of everyday life at all levels. Financial feasibility of construction was, however, equally important; inventive solutions were encouraged, but only within the most efficient spatial and material means possible. Many of the eight published competition entries indicate—in technocratic fashion—floor areas allocated to the individual resident, apartment and overall complex in the descriptive text that accompanies each scheme. But these simplistic charts obscure the radical spatial complexity of the units. At closer look, the designs reveal a masterful balance of plan minimalism and sectional generosity, the result of economic stringency paired with ground breaking social organization.





S2.3 “We must begin to build for ourselves a city in which we want to live”Adeola Enigbokan | PhD Candidate Environmental Psychology, City University of New York, U.S

“Moscow: not the most comfortable city for living. Last year the Moscow [municipal] authorities presented a master plan for the city, which ignores a lot of its current problems. We want to live in a green city with convenient public transport, bicycle lanes, beautiful old and new buildings, tolerant mayor, authorities and residents. We must begin to build for ourselves a city in which we want to live.”

--Moscow 2020 Manifesto, a product of Delai Sam

Delai Sam, Russian for “Do it yourself,” is a recent phenomenon in Russian cities. The emergence of DIY movements such as Delai Sam into the urban political sphere in Russia prompts the need toreconsider traditional notions of grassroots activism and resistance in the city. Russian DIY movements operate at street level and with few resources in an atmosphere of aggressive neoliberal economic restructuring, in which mega projects act as catalysts for wholesale spatial reconstructions of the city. Recent attempts by municipal authorities to officially include the public in urban planning processes through increased transparency about proposed designs, while appearing to have little impact on the final plans, have created a space for arts and design-led grassroots movements to form and respond with alternative city plans and designs. It is into this newly aestheticized political space, carved out in the actions of private citizens of modest means who are increasingly taking initiative to imagine the cities in which they want to live, that I place my analysis of the rise of DIY urbanism in Russian cities.

Founded in 2010, the Delai Sam Festival of Urban Actions represents a novel approach to DIY urbanism in Russia, in which artists, designers, activists and scholars are joining together to develop alternatives to official visions for the design and planning of their cities. Delai Sam actions typically consist of small interventions into the urban environment, such as garbage collection, bike rallies, urban art interventions, and architectural presentations all over the city. While these activities were sometimes oriented towards practical interventions at the street level, they focus heavily on issues of urban design and planning, including developing architectural and planning programs for the preservation of historical districts, rethinking systems for performing road maintenance and creating pedestrian crossings and bike paths. Additionally, the Delai Sam interventions have a notably aesthetic orientation, relying upon the participation of street artists who create libraries out of defunct bus shelters, monuments to Soviet history made from the remains of collected refuse or painted benches shaped like crocodiles.

This article critically contextualizes the discourse and practice of the first few Delai Sam festivals held in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, by drawing comparisons between today’s art and design-led DIY movement and late Soviet-era alternative art practices by collectives such as the Collective Actions Group (Moscow) and the Necrorealists (Saint Petersburg). These groups worked outside official channels with the materials of everyday life to create free space for reflection within the closed socialist city. While the Soviet-era groups are quite different in subject matter and methodology, both from each other and from Delai Sam, they each take scarcity—of resources and freedom—as a creative working condition and not merely a limitation. Through a comparative analysis of the working methodologies of each group, this article attempts to illuminate the aesthetic possibilities for imagining and creating “other” spaces, both political and non-political, while working from a position defined by abundant scarcity.



DYI - Moscow © Maria Semenenko



S2.4 Need, Desire and the Production of Scarcity: Housing and the Modern MetropolisMichael Klein | PhD Candidate Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria

When Otto Wagner, in 1911, presents die Großstadt, he describes it as extending to mere infinity, as a fundamentally expansionist model of planning. Wagner draws on the overcrowded city of Vienna to exemplify his concept of a prospering hygienic city offering sufficient housing. Growth - population growth and economic growth - is the foundational premise of the Großstadt, which has to be understood as a plea against a static conception of society and the city. Wagner’s proposal is not an exception: the idea of growth remains prominent in a series of projected cities and architecture over the 20th century.

At about that time, modern architects and engineers put effort into developing measures against the pressing shortage of housing. In several cities, of which Vienna is just one, they seek to design housing schemes and to devise other strategies for the pauperized massed to end scarcity. One builds on efficiency and statistical thinking, so as to counter scarcity in the best way. At the core of these proposals intended to relieve the oppressed is the question of need. This approach, based on quantifiable, ‘natural’ need, becomes probably most explicitly in the Wohnung für das Existenzminimum, but it remains decisive for the whole century in housing.

One of the narratives of modernism, interwoven with capitalist society, is based on the fundamental indeterminacy of what is called need. Along with increasing affluence, also needs rise, to follow that narrative. In the environment of emulative consumption, need aligns to desire, rendering both ultimately indiscrete; a desire that indeed produces scarcity and that does not vanish with material wealth. In opposition to that position arises on the other side an urgent requirement to determine and to measure need: there is, according to this other side, such thing as ‘real’, material scarcity that has to be countered. Repeatedly, the two positions get in each others’ way. Underlying their lines of reasoning is an oppositional notion of scarcity: one considers scarcity absolute, the other relative.

We are confronted with both of these modern ‘constitutions’ in the conceptualization of the social state of the metropolis; moreover they correspond to the two strands in its architecture epitomized above, as this paper examines. They particularly appear in the projects where architects and visionaries ‘build’ a new city and society and which can be read as reactions to the respective existing modes of production and the distribution of means. The two oppositional notions have substantial impact: Whether housing is considered a commodity or a right is based on that dualism of the modern city that also reappears in the current debates concerning the urban question.

In addition to the two strands, there is a third form: one of praxis, of the everyday life of urban realities. Like the two others, it holds a notion scarcity, of desire and of need, yet they are constantly redefined and escape from standardization. In my discussion of the production of the city, I will confront the central dualism with this third form of the mundane, of users, dwellers and of settlers to open up for an alternative approach.





S3.1 Strategies for housing the new poor: typological and technological innovation for contemporary housing habits Luisa Otti | PhD Candidate Università degli studi Roma Tre, Italy

Housing policies for the greatest number and the consequent level of dwelling supply is still an important indicator of the social character of a society and even nowadays one of the main themes of discussion and research in architecture. Many are the reasons of this new centrality of the housing theme, starting from the more complex and elusive demographic structure of the society: on the one hand, the society transformation, the new household idea, the unsettled job market, that turns individuals into city users, are all factors that define a diversified scenario; on the other hand, the global financial crisis in 2008 has stricken in particular young people, immigrants, young couples, elderly people, city users, atypical families, in short that grey area of the population not poor enough to be in the list for a public housing project, but not rich enough to buy or rent a house. In which new way, then, should we, as designers, approach the housing project in this moment characterised by the scarcity? Two seem to be the main research directions: the investigation on the housing demand coming from the new demographic structure and new urban behaviours (typological field), and the research on technological and constructive systems responding to actual limited economic and energetic resources (technological field). Adding, moreover, in the background of these two main research fields the recent world economy collapse, the cost topic gains renovated importance in housing, in terms of both resources and purchasing power reduction. From these considerations, finally, the main research question: in this scenario, how new housing typologies and new technologies address new living habits overcoming, towards a new sustainable and affordable housing model?

The research, therefore, starts from defining the words cost and sustainability in housing, through a sociological research on the demographic structure, highlighting the link between them and the innovative typological and technological devices, identified in a large number of recent housing projects in Europe, that boasts of catchy slogans as “innovative”, “social”, “sustainable” or “low cost”. In a second phase, the survey focuses on the detected innovative typological devices, that are able to define a new housing model with a particular living quality, more connected to the contemporary elusive demographic structure and new urban behaviours; then, the study tries to identify the connections between those typological devices and the technological solutions applied. Finally, a new housing definition that resists all handed-down, preconcived notions of structure and functions, focused on creating of the right framework for events of life: a strategy to address the contemporary housing project in the scarcity.





S3.2 For Scarce Means, Abundant Ends: Fernando Távora and the production of modernityRui Aristides | PhD Candidate Department of Architecture of the University of Coimbra, Portugal

This study intends to disclose the concept of scarcity and its relationship to architecture through a disciplinary discussion on architecture, inspired by some works of Fernando Távora, currently being studied in a PhD project1 of which this study is a part. Távora’s (1945) article O Problema da Casa Portuguesa, reflects the importance of studying Portuguese architecture, both erudite and popular, from the material and the social conditions that originate it. Considering Jeremy Till´s (2011) differentiation between actual and constructed scarcity, these conditions can refer, respectably, to material scarcity and to the social conditions in which a relation to the latter is constructed. For Távora (1945) it is the popular house which constitutes the best model of analysis, because it is “(…) the most truthful, most functional and the less far-fetched”(1945, p.10). On a later review of his text, Távora would add: “(…) simply put, the one that is more in accordance with the new intentions”(1947, p.11)2.

Understanding architecture through these lens means going beyond the “aesthetic niceties” (Till, 2011, p.9) It is about apprehending an essential relation between matter, form and need; it is about understanding the intentional choices demanded by scarcity (Till, 2011), and the architectural forms that mediate it.Távora’s attitude, throughout his work, is reminiscent of what we may call an atemporal classical attitude, one that can be traced back to Vitruvius. an attitude that views architecture through its constants, its everlasting and unchanging lessons. For Távora (1952) there are, at least, three of these lessons: architecture’s permanent modernity, the collaboration that architecture demands, and its importance as a conditioning element of human life. Távora extracts these lessons from the numerous spatial solutions stemming from the existing variety of material and cultural contexts that human creativity has been able to produce. This creativity is only transmitted to architecture when the architect is able to produce a constant modernity.

Bearing this in mind, this study aims to analyze how a constant modernity may be interpreted, how does it frame the dilemma of scarcity and the constraints of a designer´s response to it. This analysis will be structured in the relationship between a modern attitude and the production of the two conditions that Távora speaks of, the material and social conditions of architecture. To analyze the first condition this study will offer an understanding on how a modern view of the production of nature has been articulated within architecture. The starting point will be Alberti’s problematic understanding of the role of artifice. As for the second, it will be offered a depiction on how a modern stance on architecture confronts the production of social space while acknowledging the eccentricity of human beings, grounded on a discussion of architecture as second nature. What will stem from this analysis is neither a conception of scarcity as the lack of something, nor as the result of an economic policy, but as an element produced within the design process. Specifically from what Tafuri (2006) calls the “maeutics of the limit” (p.51).





S3.3 Reflections on the Temporary City: short-term uses and urban scarcity Mara Ferreri | PhD Candidate Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Pop-up shops and temporary urban gardens are rapidly becoming iconic forms of spatial interventions in contemporary cities. The discourses and policies that support them exist at the intersection of pre-recession imaginaries of creative cities and current realities of austerity urbanism. Short-term projects of reuse are often portrayed as offering an innovative and experimental solution to two differing problems: on one hand, they promise to counter the negative effects of vacancy in context of stalled developments or retail decline; on the other, they provide much-needed rent-free open spaces for social and productive activities in inner city areas. From this angle, temporary urban projects and interventions have been theorised and celebrated as forms of spatial re-appropriation and as experiments in transforming the built environment through informal, participatory and improvised ways of commoning spaces and resources.

A ‘temporary city’ of pop-ups, however, can only exist thanks to extensive urban networks of precarious practitioners, professionals and volunteers who need such projects to gain visibility and experience in a volatile labour market, and who are often engaged in forms of flexible and intermittent employment, which enables them to devote time and energy at a short notice. As a field of practice, temporary projects of reuse can be thought of as the expression of the subjects of an ideal ‘projective city’ of heightened short-lived connectivity and dispersal. Temporary interventions in vacant spaces are thus deeply grounded not only in a scarcity of social and productive spaces, but also in a scarcity of time, as the labour flexibility of its practitioners can also be understood as precarious labour marked by an inability to engage with a space or a project on a long-term basis.

Moreover, the use of space rent-free is granted on the assumption that the reclaim will be a short-lived, and many legal tools have been recently devised to ensure their temporariness. In celebrating such projects as forms of spatial re-appropriation, it is easy to forget that they also embody forms of temporal foreclosure, which becomes particularly crucial in a historic conjunction that sees a retrenchment of neoliberal forms of production of the urban environment, and its parallel disciplining of forms of resistance and protest.

Short-term projects of reuse can therefore be theorised as symptoms rather than solutions of an ever-increasing scarcity of urban time-space. This presentation will draw on the in-depth study of practices of temporary vacant space reuse in recessional London (2009-2011) to critically address their limitations and potentials as forms of urban intervention, and to analyse the current fascination with temporary and interim uses in planning, architecture and the arts. Grounding these critical reflections in practitioners’ own accounts, it aims to offer insights into a current trend and to open them up to broader conceptual questions about the discourses and theories that inform contemporary urban thinking and acting.





S3.4 Built Rationally! Olav Selvaag and the Austerity Debate on HousingBarbara Elisabeth Ascher | PhD Candidate Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway

In the context of the ongoing research project Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment (SCIBE)1, which looks at the development of post-war housing in Oslo as a case of a development from conditions of scarcity to abundance, the absence of a critical discussion of the influences of private developers and builders in Norwegian architectural history in the 20th century came as a surprise. Within changing theoretical approaches, that set architectural work into the context of larger phenomena, this paper will look at Olav Selvaag as one main protagonist of ćommercial´ social housing development in Norway after 1950, especially seen within the light of his production of a significant amount of housing in Oslo under conditions of scarcity and his contributions to the austerity debate in the post-war period up until now.

Whatever the reason for Selvaags neglect in architectural history, may it be his background as an engineer rather than architect, the missing element of a place specific component of his architectural concepts, the controversial character of his technical ”innovations” or be it the disfavor of private developers during the time of the development of the welfare state, this paper aims to revisit the ideas and selected housing projects of Olav Selvaag.

The paper will draw attention to how the austerity debate around his ‘affordable’ family homes opened up the discussion about architectural quality by adding economic thinking to the terms in which housing was referred to in the public debate and how the perception of these arguments changed over time.

Selvaag´s seminal book Bygg rasjonelt (Built efficiently, Oslo,1950) will be used as a starting point to reflect on the effects (and after-effects) of his proposed technical and architectural solutions and how they manifested themselves in the buildings he built and their relation to local building traditions. The paper will be tracing some of his interventions through selected housing projects such as Ekeberg, Ullernåsen and Bjørndalen, thus illustrating how scarcity and its ínescapablećontraints became the starting point of various of Selvaag´s design approaches.

1 Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment (www.scibe.eu) is a EU HERA-funded project investigating how conditions of scarcity might affect the creativity of the different actors involved in the production of architecture and urban design, and how a design-led innovation of the process could improve the built environment in the future. The project is a collaboration between the University of Westminster (Jeremy Till), TU Wien (Andreas Rumpfhuber) and Arkitekthøgskolen I Oslo (Christian Hermansen).




S4.1 The costs of flexibility: Responses to water scarcity in an informal settlement in Lima, Peru Julia Wedel | PhD Candidate and Associate Lecturer School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University, UK

This paper investigates residents’ responses to water scarcity in an informal settlement in urban Lima. Whilst efforts to alleviate the global water problem fail to meet target after target, political inequalities in Peru compound the problem, so that equitable distribution of water remains but a theoretical possibility for millions of people in urban Lima. As scarcity of this fundamental natural resource persists, the question arises which strategies those affected employ to respond to water scarcity, and what effect these strategies have on livelihoods and the production of the wider built environment. This paper aims to address these questions.

Adaptation theory, which views human adaptation to environmental constraints, suggests that flexibility is a good proxy measure for evaluating long term success of responses to environmental constraints: if a person responds flexibly to a challenge today, they have better chances of acting successfully tomorrow when changed circumstances require different responses. Two prevailing theories of flexibility dominate the literature. The first stresses the ability to vary behaviour, whilst the second centres on trade-offs and balances to be struck between seemingly competing interests. However, little empirical evidence exists to inform which theory might be more applicable in the context of environmental constraints. Using the proxy measure of flexibility, this paper examines how successful people’s responses to water scarcity are, which aspects affect any such success or lack of it, and which flexibility theory might hold more weight in this particular case.

The primarily qualitative analysis is based on data collected during 5 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an informal settlement in Lima. A small respondent base of 25 households participated in the production of in-depth ethnographic data, including critical event accounts, observations, water maps and visual data. Quantitative measures of water use and participants’ accounts were analysed to establish a locally specific definition of water scarcity. This formed the baseline from which the occurrence, extent and quality of flexibility in response to water scarcity was examined. Initial analysis suggests that flexibility may not be the largely positive trait it is claimed to be in the literature. Specifically, the paper examines the effects of trade-offs between shortterm and long-term flexibility. The following observations inform this discussion:

1. Relative flexibility in dealing with water scarcity on a daily basis appears to hamper the ability to constructively engage with the problem and to identify associated pathways towards longer term solutions and at larger scales.

2. Individual flexibility sacrifices some social support mechanisms.

3. Inequality within the community affects the range of flexibility displayed.

4. Whilst participants’ initiative and ingenuity allows some flexibility in the use, reuse, and recycling of water, the issue of sanitation presented a bottleneck where little or no flexibility was observed.

The paper concludes by discussing how observations of flexibility can creatively inform existing practices to upgrade the built environment in informal settlements; what the findings may come to mean in the wider debate on the interaction of social and ecological systems; and how the data contributes to flexibility theory.





S4.2 Scarcity, post-scarcity and local community: LÀquila as a case studyFederico Venturini | PhD Candidate, School of Geography at University of Leeds Ersilia Verlinghieri | PhD Candidate, Institute for Transport Studies at University of Leeds

This work analyses the problem of scarcity using the Social Ecology framework as defined by Bookchin (2005). It shows how through a process of community discovery it is possible to build a ‘post-scarcity’ society (Ibid).

We take the position that the today scarcity of resources is mainly caused by the current political and economic system (Swyngedouw 2004; Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006). This capitalistic system is progressively enhancing, both in the ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries, social unbalances and environmental problems that are increasing scarcities effects and threatening human existence.

On the other hand, nowadays, the concrete availability of resources and the incredible technological advancement could greatly contribute to build a post-scarcity society, where it is possible to imagine “the fulfilment of social and cultural potentialities” (Bookchin 2004: iv). In defining this concept we recognise that, however, the technocratic approach to the scarcity problem is not effective: the fundamental problem arises from both the legacy of man’s domination over nature and over humanity (Bookchin 2005). In order to reduce scarcity, deep social changes are required, rooted in a new relationship with nature that is alert to how resources are affected by our consumption rates (Bookchin 1988; Hopkins 2008; Hern 2010). We stress that the key factor of this change is the local community, the root of the social system (Moulaert at al. 2010). In this context, post-scarcity is not understood as merely material status: the possibility of having enough quantity of goods for all the people to survive in a decent way, opens the doors to a deeper possibility: the achievement of freedom (Bookchin 2004: xvi).

Evidence of these concepts are easily found in our selected case study: the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. The Italian government’s management of the post-disaster lack of shelters has created a permanent scarcity of housing as well as a progressive fragmentation of the local community, perfectly marrying the ‘shock economy’ principles (Klein 2007; Messina 2010; Puliafito 2010). Phenomena like forced displacement, permanent ‘red zones’, land consuming and the construction of ‘new towns’ completely disconnected with the previous city have led to a deep negation of the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1968) and to important examples of gentrification (Ciccozzi 2009). Moreover, the condition of “‘produced’ scarcity” (Swyngedouw 2004: 60) has increased in the community an internal egoistic competition for resources and restrained the possibility to utilize this crisis as an opportunity to enlarge social solidarity and build a better city (Olshansky, Johnson and Topping 2010).

However, we are still able to find some positive examples (e.g. Assemblea Cittadina dell’Aquila, Asilo Occupato, 3e32, Comitato per la Rinascita di Pescomaggiore) of the community’s attempt to assert itself as the main actor of the reconstruction. This underlines the importance of the empowerment of the community and its connection with its territory.

We are interested in rethinking the city’s processes of recovery which instead of focussing only on scarcity as an economic and engineering issues, recognizing the power of a Social Ecology approach, should value the role of local communities and the importance of the relationship between citizens, nature and urban space.





S4.3 Territories of Scarcity and Creativity: A Critical view on Informal Settlements and Emerging Tactics under Conditions of ScarcityIsis Nuñez Ferrera | PhD Candidate School of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Westminster, UK

This paper explores the processes through which scarcity is constructed in informal settlements and how it gives birth to a plethora of particular phenomena shaping the territory, social relationships and processes. At the same time, this paper deconstructs the tactics emerging within the limits of scarcity in a diagrammatic way to generate a critical study of their potential for socio-spatial change that goes beyond the everyday survival.

Scarcity is often associated with “not having enough” of something, most usually of a material nature. In contrast, this paper is based on the premise that scarcity is a constructed condition, hence exploring it beyond its immediate manifestation and illustrating its discursive, distributive and socio-material components. In this line, the research uses Assemblage Theory as both an approach and a tool for analysis. This approach allows the research to depart from everyday narratives of the residents, and gradually evolve into a multi-scalar, rhyzomatic reading of scarcity, by following leads into different realms and unpacking a series of routine events to uncover their connections to wider processes and particular elements affecting the settlement and the city as a whole.

The research is based on a qualitative, flexible and multi-sited methodology, using different case studies as testing grounds. Collected data stems from an 8-months ethnographic fieldwork in informal settlements in Ecuador and Kenya, analysing the socio-spatial practices and strategies deployed by the different actors producing the built environment and arising from everyday and latent experiences of scarcity. The paper examines the multi-scalar nature of these strategies, including building and management tactics, saving groups, the mobilisation of grassroots organisations, innovative ways of networking deployed by different coalitions and the reformulation of urban development policies.

As outcomes of the research, the paper will show illustrative diagrams that allow a better understanding of, firstly, the construction of scarcity in the built environment beyond its immediate manifestation and secondly, the way that emerging tactics a) improve existing conditions of scarcity, b) reinforce the status quo or c) contribute to the worsening of the original condition.

Therefore, this research aims to offer lessons with both practical and theoretical considerations by giving an insight into the construction of scarcity in informal settlements and illustrating how this understanding can inform new readings of the city and more creative and transformative practices in the built environment.





S4.4 Negotiating Shared Spaces in Informal Peri-Urban Settlements in India. The Role of Amenity Buildings and the Effect of the Post-Hoc Introduction of Infrastructure in the Creation of Common PlacesBo Tang | PhD Candidate Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University, UK

This paper investigates the nature of common places in informal peri-urban settlements in India through negotiation and sharing, and aims to develop a sensitive understanding of the role of amenity buildings and the effect of the post-hoc introduction of infrastructure in the creation of common places. A philosophical approach takes a comprehensive view of the history and context surrounding concepts of ‘public spaces’ in the West, and compares this with the notion of shared spaces in informal peri-urban settlements. This approach is paralleled with first-hand experience of practical testing through small-scale live interventions.

This research hypothesises that the social structure and levels of involvement in the shared environment is transforming; adjusting to accommodate to the limited resources and changing urban landscapes within low-income settlements. The continual negotiation of these common places alludes to a collective identity that is shared by the community as a whole, moving from the domestic scale of the dwelling to that of the city.

These changing conditions for shared territories in these neighbourhoods suggests a renewed understanding or interpretation (by the urban migrant/citizen) of the nature of common places, embedded in the origins or memory of the traditional rural village but harnessed to the situation of the city/peri-urban settlement.

Two case studies of on-going live projects addressing the scarcity of resources provide an empirical basis for this study: [1] The Kachhpura Settlement Upgrading Project started in 2006 focuses on sanitation in Agra, beginning with the introduction of household toilets leading to a natural decentralised waste water treatment system (DEWATS) turning foul drain effluent into a community resource for clean water; [2] The Quarry Classrooms Project, initiated in 2008 deals with amenity buildings in quarry worker settlements in Navi, Mumbai. The fragile nature of the quarry environment, and the scarcity of resources available demanded the close engagement of community, local tradesmen and students to overcome obstacles faced in challenging conditions, to construct classrooms using available local material resources. Both projects were carried out in collaboration with Indian NGOs, local communities, and architectural researchers and students, in a continual cyclical process of negotiation involving a strong hands-on participatory approach from the bottom up.

Appropriation of the new spaces by the community through temporary events and activities suggests a sense of ownership and improvised place making, as opposed to space making. Connections are established between improved access to basic services, amenities and facilities, and the opportunities for creating common places, leading to suggestions on improving, appropriating and cultivating shared territories in today’s informal peri-urban settlements, culturally and physically.

Lessons learned provide insight into the role of architectural professionals and students as designers, makers and curators in partnering with the local NGO and settlement families. This study concludes with suggestions on how this partnering might be applied in other situations of rapid change and scarce resources where architect, NGO and local population might collaborate to provide shared infrastructure and community facilities, whilst creating opportunities for improving livelihoods and the quality of life within informal periurban settlements in India.





S5.1“The Arabs of Karmiel”: exploring the other side of manufactured land scarcity in Israel/PalestineNaama Blatman-Thomas | PhD Candidate Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Scarcity (i.e. of housing, water or public space) is often taken as fait accompli, an unfortunate coincidence impacting society’s most deprived members. While certain resources are indeed scarce, there are social, political and economic processes that cause this condition. Within this prism, scarcity may be considered a contrived phenomenon. To become a useful analytical tool, therefore, scarcity must be historicized. This paper focuses on land as one of the world’s ostensibly scarcest resources. I suggest that as early as the sixteen century, settler colonial movements contributed to the manufacture of its scarcity. Even in colonies with an abundance of land (such as in North America and Australia), settlers framed colonization as a zero sum game, expropriating land and eliminating the native in order to ensure their own dominion (Moran 2002; Wolfe 1994; 2006). Dichotomously, land could be occupied by either settlers or the indigenous, not both.

Focusing on processes of colonization in Israel, this paper highlights unforeseen consequences of manufactured land scarcity. In contrast to the expanses of North America and Australia, Israel and Palestine are indeed a limited territory. Following Israel’s establishment in 1948, Zionists targeted the country’s internal frontier for expansion and development. Predominantly Arab, the Galilee region is strategically located at the crossroads of Syria and Lebanon to the north and the center of Israel to the south. With a mere few hundred Jews residing in the Galilee in the early 1950s, Israel determined to tilt the region’s demographic scale. The Judaization of the Galilee applied two principal methods; broad expropriation of Arab land and large-scale Jewish migration (Falah 1989; Yiftachel and Rumley 1991; Yiftachel 1996). Concerted efforts yielded newly established Jewish cities and hundreds of Jewish communal settlements throughout the Galilee (Carmon et al. 1989). As the state maneuvered to take possession of hundreds of thousands of dunams and Jewish presence in the Galilee bloomed from a total of 7% in 1954 to 26.5% by 1986 (Forman 2006), the indigenous Palestinian population was contained.

Land had become scarce in the Galilee, but only for Palestinians. Suffocated by policy, land reserves for Arab housing rapidly dwindled. Searching for space, Palestinians began to settle within the newly established Jewish localities. Karmiel, for example, a city comprised of some 45,000 residents, is now home to an estimated 3000 Palestinians. From the adjacent Arab villages, the local economy has absorbed large numbers of laborers, who serve primarily as custodians, cashiers and stockers. Facing a dearth of open space in their own communities, local villagers come in droves to enjoy the city’s sprawling parks and playgrounds. Erected on confiscated Palestinian land as a buffer and idiom of separatism, Karmiel is now infused with Arab presence. Interestingly, the scarcity of land manufactured by the Zionist movement carved new spaces for Palestinians and led to the emergence of ‘Kamiel’s Arabs.’ This paper explores the appearance of this novel social category, as well as other unforeseen consequences of manufactured land scarcity sustained through settler colonization in Israel.





S5.2 Territorial Compromises: Limits of Morphological and Civic NegotiationTomaz Pipan | PhD Candidate London Metropolitan University, UK and Berlin Technical University, Germany

Shortage and scarcity breeds competition, cooperation and ingenuity. It is almost ironic that supposedly the most egalitarian system of communist China created the land with such a high degree of scarcity. From the huoku system to the Great Leap Forward; these and other “special” policies contributed to a fractured social landscape with uneven distribution of resources and rights. In an allegedly egalitarian society it does not get more “special” than a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), an incubator of free market and global economy. A political act in 1978 transformed the Pearl River Delta (PRD) into a first SEZ, a resource of liberal capitalism – an utterly scarce resource in otherwise socialist China.

This special situation and its exclusive character made the condition of PRD a highly desirable one. We could say that on the level of China, this kind of condition was scarce indeed. The following 30 years witnessed an unprecedented rural urbanization that fuelled a wild social, cultural and spatial experiment. A deregulated “land of the plenty” within the PRD experienced intense pressures and transformations and a subsequent creation of some of the most unique urban patterns we can imagine. These strained conditions unleashed creativity that produced an endemic urban form, one that accommodates change well and is highly flexible. Here traditional communities as well as migrant workers from other rural areas came face to face with technological and economic pressures of liberal capitalism. Rice paddies and fish farms were transformed overnight into a new industrial-rural landscape consisting of kilometres upon kilometres of fragments – interlocking low-end housing, factories, rudimentary services, walled villa estates and agriculture. This meshwork landscape is as varied in its social life as it is in its physical appearance. From afar it looks hopelessly disorganized and mishandled. However, if we look closer at the morphological organization and further into the patterns of civic negotiation, we see that this varied and mixed environment is anything but mismanaged. It accommodates disparate claims to the territory; from the order of local community all the way up to the regional order asserted from Beijing. Within the bounds of spatial scarcity, translating liberal economy into spatial policy, shortage of available land causes developmental pressures that bring out the creativity of individuals and groups, reconciling local and regional orders.

This research paper seeks to outline and identify an urban order that manages to test the limits of disparate claim appropriation on one single territory. In this sense we will be revisiting the question of institutionalization of civic conflict. We will argue that this new civic order does not only accommodate divergent political and social groups but also enables their moderate well-being within a very limited and scarce territory. A studied area in Pearl River Delta will be used as a prototype site that demonstrates a new kind of civic space – a space where scarcity breeds an arms race that in turn breeds new and intelligent morphological organizations. As an ordering device, idea of morphological fragments will be put forth. We will argue that the unfinished character of a fragment is its single most important quality that enables reconciliation of divergent programs or uses and gives a basis for a new civic order. As the West is trying to engineer this elusive quality, the rural industrialized areas of PRD have it engrained in order to survive.






S5.3 Architectural Acts of Redress: Articulating Scarcity of Resources and Rights in Cape Town During Apartheid and After Sharóne L. Tomer | PhD Candidate Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, U.S

The history of Cape Town, like many colonial cities in South Africa and further afield, is based upon asymmetries: of power, of access to resources, and thus, of rights. Space, and thus architecture have been key components of these social relations. As a discipline and profession, architecture has historically had a ambivalent relationship with structures of dominance: while architects personally professed opposition to apartheid, their professional livelihoods often relied upon designing the spaces essential to racialized separation and inequality. Beginning in the 1970s, however, we find examples of disciplinary resistance to apartheid, most visibly within institutions such as the Department of Architecture at the University of Cape Town. While these were initially limited to pedagogical practices and smallscale interventions, in the mid-1980s a small set of architects began to find opportunities to meaningfully engage and re-imagine the city’s spaces that profoundly articulated apartheid’s hegemony.

Such subversions can be understood as engagements with scarcity. The spaces and citizens attended to in these architectural engagements have historically experienced deep material scarcity. Space, shelter, resources such as water and electricity, and even the city itself were articulated as a ‘scarce’, through their denial to ‘Black’ and ‘Coloured’1 residents; scarcity was the material expression of apartheid governance in cities such as Cape Town. But, under apartheid, scarcity was not limited to material resources. If we understand scarcity’s definition to refer to lack or absence, or as an uneven distribution, scarcity also refers to rights. And it is at the site of architecture that the scarcity of resources and rights become bound together. This can be most clearly seen when examining architectural acts of addressing – or redressing –scarcity.

This paper will demonstrate this by linking together ‘moments’ of architectural engagement, drawing upon two architectural projects in Cape Town. The two projects, the Hostel Upgrades and District Six Pilot Project, each attended to spaces and citizens emblematic of apartheid’s techniques of racialized separation and control. Each moment will highlight architectural attempts to overcome and maneuver around ‘scarcity’, in ways that demonstrate how material depravity is both expressive and productive of the suppression of rights. By drawing attention to scarcity’s specific contours in Cape Town, and to efforts to create architectural forms that can adequately address material poverty and struggles to claim rights to the city, each moment will demonstrate how the scarcity of resources and rights become

1 In the South Africa apartheid lexicon, ‘Coloured’ refers to those of mixed race; although this nomenclature is controversial, it is still widely used, and is considered standard practice to utilize apartheid-era racial categories when discussing apartheid policies.




S5.4 Scarcity, Control and Third World Urban Form Sheikh Serajul Hakim | PhD Candidate Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture (CASA), Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore, Singapore

This paper emphasizes how the many conditions of scarcity have produced ordinary built environments of the transitioning societies following their decolonization and modernization. Drawing comparisons between a typology of informal property ownerships as found amongst numerous rural-urban migrant homes (i.e. slums, squatters, informal settlements) in a rapidly-urbanizing industrial city in Bangladesh, this paper highlights the socio-political ways in which both local and external actors have historically contributed to these settlements’ formation process and sustenance during migrants’ settling down. This context, which is characterized by a scarce presence of the public sector in land provisioning and housing delivery for the urban poor, provided ‘the condition’ instead for locally-based actors (e.g. local politicians, NGOs) to put themselves into the control of such provisioning and deliveries. Various spatio-physical manipulations took place in which these actors made strategic use of modern instruments (planning policies, institutional mechanism, terminologies etc.) as prescribed by supra-national (e.g. World Bank, Donors) actors. Production of scarcity at both migrants’ rural homes and in the transitioning city, and also the latter’s spatio-physical shaping thus appear to be conscious creations of these agencies and institutional mechanisms of modernity, that have systematically exploited scarcity as a concept.

Scarcity therefore is analyzed first, by discussing its twofold ‘creation’ under public policy environments for both rural and urban areas; while second, by highlighting how ‘situated scarcity’ is negotiated with in the city, as ordinary migrants continue to interact with various situations, personnel and spatialities. It shows how multi-level control and decision-making structure of migrant communities, household spatial practices, and resulting spatial environment of migrant settlements are all being structured by a larger framework of scarcity. Spatial practices – ranging from accessing to land to the defense of property ownership – have historically been decided, managed, lobbied, negotiated and distributed by influential local actors. Asymmetrical resource-allocation by these actors has also produced more scarcity, as the concept of control becomes a function of scarcity, while scarcity becomes an aspect that also affects migrants’ agency pertaining to citizenship. Additionally, scarcity goes on to produce further insufficiencies; with time and accumulated affluence in the city, one of its original forms (periods of ‘not having’) becomes a condition of ‘not having enough’.

Together, a historical reading of in-migration waves (that instigated third world urbanization), their driving forces in the manipulated forms of scarcity at both origin and destination, the recognition of the socio-political roles of local and external actors, and their spatio-physical consequences with regard to decision-making structure and control regarding the built environment - hints of the methodological framework, and offers another way to look at the production of built environments. Basing primarily on document analysis and in-depth study on ten (10) migrant settlement history and fifty (50) house-neighbourhood tissues from the aforementioned city, this paper aims to produce a conceptual framework. Pertaining chiefly to the spatio-physical consequences of migrancy through its essential settling down processes, this framework offers an alternative way of understanding the contemporary urbanisms of the global south.





03 CONFERENCE OVERVIEW | Important dates

JANUARY 27.2013Submission of full paper

FEBRUARY 22.2013Submission of paper presentation

Submission of response presentation (5 slides max)

FEBRUARY 26-28.2013Conference in London, UK

APRIL 2013Submission of revised paper for review with Places Journal


UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTERTUESDAY 26.02 | 1500h-1800h | Room CG42 | 35 Marylebone Road NW1 5LS

WEDNESDAY 27.02 | 0900h-1800h | Room MG14 | 35 Marylebone Road NW1 5LS

THURSDAY 28.02 | 0900h-1800h | Pavilion (1st Floor) | 115 New Cavendish St., W1W 6UW

For more information, visit: http://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/visit-us/directions

03 CONFERENCE OVERVIEW | Locations

Marylebone Campus 35 Marylebone Road London NW1 5LS

Located in front of Madame Tussauds, you can reach the Marylebone Campus by Tube through:

Baker street station (Bakerloo line, Circle line, Hammersmith & City line, Jubilee line, Metropolitan line).

Buses that stop nearby include 18, 27, 30, 74, 453, 205.

Cavendish Campus 115 New Cavendish Street London W1W 6UW

You can reach the Cavendish Campus by Tube through:

Great Portland Road Station (Circle line, Hammersmith & City line, and Metropolitan line).

Goodge Street Station (Northern line)

Buses stop nearby at Oxford street:

C2, 3, 10, 17, 18, 22, 32, 44, 55, 453, 205.

Cavendish CampusThursday 28 Feb0900h-1800h Pavilion (1st Floor)

Great Portland St. Station

Goodge St. Station

Marylebone CampusTue and Wed 26 Feb Room CG4227 Feb Room MG14

Baker St. StationMadame Tussauds


WITHIN THE LIMITS OF SCARCITYRETHINKING SPACE, CITY AND PRACTICES

PhD CONFERENCE

FEBRUARY 2013

26th - 28th February 2013 | University of Westminster

Documents

SCIBE Conference Programme | Within the Limits of Scarcity: Rethinking Space, City and Practices