…Except it never left. Just a quick observation. I’ll copy-paste and modify a bit of what I just put up on Archinect, because it’s been a recent interest area on this blog. The NYTimes reports on the surge of what they’re calling “Shanty Towns” (aka “Hoovervilles”) or as the reporter says: “illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shanty towns”. It’s interesting to note how the crisis mode of thinking nevertheless still draws that traditional border between informality or informal housing ‘over there’, somewhere south of the border or across an ocean, and “homelessness” over here in the good ol’ homeland. Or…Slum dwellers there, homeless people here. More from this blog
Javier Arbona
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Tagged with informality …
Who’s Afraid of ‘Slumdog’ (and in love with the slums)? – Part III: The End
In my earlier two posts on informality [I, II], I was trying to say that informality is a late-20th century discourse on the “natural” course of development that draws significant boundaries between “in-process” and “finished” stages of modern progress. Architects, inheriting this discourse without much question, are often interested in addressing informality either as a temporary ailment of global cities that can and should be fixed (thus helping cities “leapfrog” into the finished plethora of modernity)–or–as an information-rich source for learning. This second approach runs the danger of naturalizing the slums as if doing them a favor (‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’).
Not to imply that it is innocent but one of the recent outcries about the movie Slumdog Millionaire had to do with the fact that this fictional narrative doesn’t take a bow to either course, causing much consternation and scandal. It supposedly shifted attention from India’s economic progress, thought to be a final endpoint to modernity’s difficulties. And yet it was also chastised for not poeticizing the life of the citizens of Dahravi. Go figure.
But forget what Slumdog does for a minute. What is architecture to do? By asking this question I flip around the question I asked at the start Part I: What does informality ‘do’ for architects? Both of these questions are related to each other, but to answer the first, let’s start with the second. Continue reading
Who’s Afraid of ‘Slumdog’ (and in love with the slums)? – Part II
(What “informality” once perhaps looked like). Eagle Fruit Store and Capital Hotel, Lincoln, Nebraska. 1942 [LOC].
Informality, as Nezar Alsayyad explains, comes into being as its own standalone concept in the 1970s, yet it has much in common with past forms of rural-urban migration and labor. In fact, he questions what is “new” about it at all (∞). For example, the development of American cities thrived on the pull of a rural population to the cities which performed day labor or “trade services”. Think of transients, hobos, journeymen carpenters and many others that today might fit the category. As Paul Groth explores, this (mostly-male) population often lived in flop houses, single-occupancy hotels, and rooming houses. As of the 1970s, especially with the work of Caroline Moser, “informality” as a term grouped together a combination of urban poverty, lack of property rights, and situations of unsafe dwellings (§).
Who’s Afraid of ‘Slumdog’ (and in love with the slums)? – Part I
What does “informality” do for architects and why do they get so turned on by it? To many architects and planners, when it comes to housing and entrepreneurship, nobody does it better than those who shoulder the worst burdens of poverty. It’s an extreme spectator sport, watching in awe—often just through the web, the Economist, or the movies—as people build out of fridges, scrap metal or whatever comes along. Not to deny the skill of these folks; hey, I wish I could build like that. But once again, what does this fetish really ‘do’ for architects, planners, and even artists? Is it that it challenges our notions (us Westerners, that is) of scale and time?* I’ll come back to this question later (in a future post, maybe) but first, a step back. Continue reading
