To resolve such problems, people don’t usually resort to architects. Probably nobody thinks of them as professionals willing to help, or to interpret the case history of a person or a residential community that requires on-the-spot analysis.

Arquitectes de Capçalera (General Practitioners in Architecture) offers the Raval neighbourhood’s neediest residents the possibility of collaboration with future architects in imagining, planning and studying the viability of such changes to their houses and residential buildings, improving both their habitat and relations between them.

The idea is to accompany them in charting their needs and diagnosing possible solutions, guiding them towards the start-up of the necessary rectifications, both in terms of planning and legal management, as well as the obtaining of financial subsidies for implementing them. The idea is to establish close contact, in line with the main goal of reconnecting architecture with society. This is an opportunity to place emphasis on cooperation models where learning intervenes directly in actions directed towards and by citizens.

Arquitectes de Capçalera at Piso Piloto exhibition

In the CCCB’s patio, during the period that the exhibition “Piso Piloto” (Show Home) was running, a Free Residents’ Advice Office opened allowing a limited series of cases to be tackled. A team of students and lecturers from the Housing and City course at Barcelona’s Higher Technical School of Architecture (ETSAB) was assigned to attend queries from the residents.

At university we are trained in an ABC that supposedly equips us with the instruments necessary to exercise as architects. Diverse and simultaneous study plans show the enormous difficulty in setting basic criteria aiming to make what the profession needs compatible with what is ordered by the European, national or autonomous community regulations, often governed by generalist bases that do not recognise the uniqueness of these studies that swing between the technical, the artistic and the social. Individual teaching units, even individual lecturers, have the responsibility and authority to accentuate the few levers remaining to them in order to gear studies towards wherever they believe is appropriate at a time when the dual crisis – economic and professional – is pushing us to reformulate the fundamentals of architectural training.

Some teaching staff believe that the important thing is to learn techniques consisting of tools and construction elements and supposed laws of composition that allow the planning, and ultimately, the construction of buildings. Others lay stress on cultural and artistic aspects, understanding that an architect acts as a creative director who has essential technical knowledge that allows him to run and coordinate the project’s conceptual and stylistic materialisation. Still others, in contrast, include architecture in a more diffuse field where the architect (whether he builds or not) mediates in a more complex society where technical experience is at the service of a collective aspiration influenced by other agents who demand complicity from the social sciences with the aim of exhausting reality through the design project.

All these simultaneous and complementary visions accentuate the nature of each study plan according to its traditions, and, of course, the labour context in which each operates. Because, let’s not forget, they should all share a common aim: offering studies that guarantee that their students achieve entry into the labour market.

Today, in Barcelona and the rest of the country, this target is far from being reached. One only has to review the statistics to realise the enormous and dramatic difficulties architects face in finding work, not to mention in embarking on their own entrepreneurial adventures.

Some will say that the problem is circumstantial, which means universities do not need to adapt to such ups and downs. “Everything will revert to normal”, they say, suggesting that the architect’s profile need not be substantially modified because sooner or later architects will recover their original status and society will continue needing talented (higher?) technical architects who will retake the sceptre and crown of the built environment. Others demand in-depth revision of the contents and assignments of a profession that has changed forever; whether assuming the remains of a certain technical responsibility, sharing it with other professional collectives that by simplifying and specialising their knowledge have demonstrated the same efficiency, or by demanding of themselves greater commitment to a disaffected society that is demanding bottom-up transformation, where the architect has not yet become fully incorporated as an agent in city policy, or in community management, negotiation or communication processes.

The level of disorientation is considerable and every teaching unit tackles it by emphasising its own criteria. In the case of the ETSAB – undeniably the star of the glory years of a Barcelona influential in architecture and urban design matters – the changes seem to be coming in fits and starts. Left orphaned of reference figures (due to deaths, retirements and departures), today nobody exists who can push and give a unitary sense to an in-depth transformation. In fact, we do not even believe that such a unitary vision is desirable in a profession that has diversified and is increasingly distant from society, and in a school that is in decline (in terms of students, resources and influence) and is resisting the renewal of its structures.

Something similar is happening in the whole of society, where the degeneration of democracy and of political parties is causing a systemic disorder. We are living through a crucial time where citizens who do not feel properly represented are demanding greater participation, transparency and a decided course towards a new model. At the university, which has many qualities of a laboratory but has never completely lost its link to the social reality, in-depth changes are also augured. The first symptoms have been experienced in recent years with emotive assemblies where many students have demanded greater participation in the definition of the studies model, with greater contingency in a pressing reality and with perspectives complementary to that of the invariable builder architect. Hopeful students who continue believing that the university is the best bridge for strengthening the contract that the profession has with a society that, these days, sees us as distracted with a supposed beautification of our environment, under the orders of the political powers or the pressure of runaway capitalism.

And although students are demanding changes, it is surprising that – for example – academic plans on housing are still so close to the “commission” and so distant from the emergencies that are shaking our city and by extension the world. One only has to ask associations such as Cáritas, Arrels, the PAH, Médicos Sin Fronteras, or even the military, how many architects are cooperating with them. But even more important is asking them what added or intrinsic value they believe architects can bring to the vast task of helping improve the habitats of collectives that suffer or are at risk of suffering exclusion and that, today, can not count on us.

They barely need us and this is hard to accept, despite the fact that the raw materials with which they work (subjects and objects) are also concerns of ours. At the university we remain ill-prepared to show capabilities in these issues or rather, we remain unwilling to accept that these matters also form part of our capabilities.

Coderch, in his oft-cited article for Domus in 1961, “It’s not geniuses that we need now”, reminded us of this contract with reality: “Open you eyes wide, look, it is much simpler than you imagine.”

I doubt that it is simpler, but undoubtedly it is more urgent, useful, surprising, impassioned and educational than many of us teachers imagine. Reality outdoes fiction and, in my opinion, the school is living in a determined fiction and being dowsed with a reality imposed by an inherited script that few will be able to put into practice in the future. The architect that does not yet exist (at least in the academic plans) is a different architect who should be able to work without a closed script that prejudges problems and solutions, instead being someone who investigates by opening their eyes wide, converting each project into a kind of documentary where, step by step, the usefulness (and the beauty!) of the project design is described.

The best examples are outside the university, in the hands of multidisciplinary collectives that day by day invent small-scale pilot proposals – real and utopian – that reveal truisms that academia does not see, does not look at, or that are at most relegated to “optional” status. These show us the enormous potential for cooperation in the gestation and co-management of projects with people. Knowing how to ask, demand, communicate and, in short, share knowledge, making private laboratory research work compatible with a clear vocation to open up the process by going down into the ring to contaminate it with harsh reality.

We do not know what will happen with the ETSAB and the ETSAV. Every day new and intriguing voices emerge that augur a progressive disappearance of one or the other, the sale of their premises to reduce the UPC’s enormous debt, cuts in the already miserly financial remuneration of their associated teaching staff, the impossibility of incorporating new staff or the refusal of resources for research projects already under way… Today, inviting somebody to give lecture is fundamentally a commitment based on personal favours that it is difficult to maintain, while publishing anything becomes an exhausting nightmare. The new management at the ETSAB is trying to tackle these evident shortfalls with fresh and promising ideas that we hope will maintain their freshness and a commitment to not justifying changes only through cuts. But I do not believe today that solutions will emerge from subtle adjustments and even less so from internal debates between professional classes who wave the flag of authorship and supposed responsibility for the “commission”.

Political expert Joan Subirats in his article “Repolitizar la Arquitectura” (Repoliticising Architecture), published in El País in relation to the project “Barraca Barcelona” (Barcelona Hut) of 2003, reminded us that from the 1990s onward, architecture abandoned its social and political commitment, becoming solely concerned with stylistic issues. We have abundant evidence of this when we see how the starchitects move around the world taking advantage of the major opportunities offered by a globalised economy and a technology that allows them unprecedented audacity. Architects, like any other technical experts, should start experiencing problems with their conscience if they totally sever technical solutions from social problems or from explicit or implicit objectives in relation to what is requested. We need to introduce politics into what we do and it is imperative that universities accept the challenge of re-politicising architecture and of asking themselves what is the use of what is done, who wins and who loses out because of it, and at the service of what reality we are placing our work.

—Josep Bohigas, architect. Curator of “Barraca Barcelona”, “APTM” and “Piso Piloto” and promoter of Arquitectes de Capçalera

***

In Febrero, 2016, the project Arquitectes de Capçalera has been awarded with the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona 2015. From Quaderns, we want to congratulate all the team and people involved in the project.

More info at Arquitectes de Capçalera

The result is that foreclosures and forcible evictions have left thousands of homes empty and in the hands of financial institutions, while at the same time many thousands of people are denied access to housing by the requirements of the systems of access previously in force, such as that they constitute a stable family, couple or household with an income guaranteed by a permanent employment contract.

In light of the above, housing policies need to be rethought in response to the new conditions, and not only in terms of architectural design but also in terms of programmes, of the people and agencies involved, of systems of tenancy and economic models, and of the structure of the city.

All of this means that housing policies today need to be highly diversified and complementary, pivoting on a series of priority axes:

-The incorporation of empty homes for social use on a rental basis;
-The construction of homes with new models of management, tenancy and morphology-typology;
-Small-scale interventions attuned to the logic of the renovation and rehabilitation of neighbourhoods and actively embracing the different capacities and capabilities of the future residents, not only their ability to pay rent but also their potential for generating work.

In this respect, grassroots citizen’s movements have taken the lead in coming up with workable alternatives. The first of these, in legislative terms, is acceptance of the option of handing back the keys in termination of the mortgage in order to protect people against the situation of total and permanent exclusion, in time and space, in which households unable to meet the repayments find themselves; the guarantee of rehousing; and the fight against exclusion in the form of energy poverty.

Another crucial contribution is being made by experiments with new forms of cooperative organization, which involve active grassroots participation and will result in alternative architectural typologies and construction systems, given that they must adapt from the outset to a real diversity of lifestyles and economic and technical capacities. In this new context of a self-managed cooperative economy, if these homes are not flexible and sustainable then they are not possible. Among the characteristics that are beginning to reveal themselves in the new housing resulting from cooperative and participatory processes is a focus on austerity and efficiency in the space-durability-technology-beauty correlation, in so far as housing is clearly a utility that has no need of the superfluous and the merely cosmetic, the formal qualities of which derive from its essence and its process.

Social rent, directly related to people’s actual economic capacity, is the fairest legal way to implementing the right to adequate housing, in a society which ever fewer people have a permanent work contract, a condition of stability that was the basis for access to housing prior to the collapse of the former model.

This change in policy is essential to address the critical situation created by the system of social precarity that has been imposed by neoliberalism and poses a grave threat to people’s human and social rights.

—Zaida Muxí and Josep Maria Montaner. Montaner is architect and Councillor for Housing, Barcelona City Council; Muxí is architect and Director of Urbanism, Santa Coloma de Gramenet Town Council.

/// This text is part of the book Connection_Import Zurich. Cooperative Housing: New Ways of Inhabiting, catalogue of the exhibition with the same name, edited by Nicola Regusci, Xavier Bustos (CCP). First edition dpr-barcelona, 2015.
/// More info about the publication: dpr-barcelona
/// More info about Cities Connection Project, at their web-site.

Exhibition and book launch at COAC on October 22nd, 2015 7pm, Plaça Nova, 5, 08002 Barcelona.

Lotus Park is one of the informal settlements of Cape Town. Almost 1/5th of Cape Town is composed of informal settlements and these are not on the outskirts of the city, but right at the heart of it. Mandela’s admirable restructuring and development program has hardly helped their upgrading, for the reason that the program is top down, formalized and subsidize housing as product, i.e. ignorant to [incremental] processes. Greater transformation projects in country and city scale, like the Cities without Slums [3] and the N2 Gateway project seem to favor capital accumulation but not the inhabitants of the informal settlements. Displacement attempts and protests are regularly on the news. One inhabitant who took us around Lotus Park resembled urban renewal in South Africa to the pressure cooker on the boil. [How] do you do urban upgrading or renewal in such a context?

Edge condition 1: Scrape yard

Edge condition 2: Dwelling production

Mbembe says the most social struggle of these times in South Africa can be read as the attempt towards the right to be urban [4]. In a city like Cape Town, where many are possibly ‘citizens without a city’ [5], the right to the city and the freedom of organizing collective capacities need to go hand in hand towards an open city and society.

Richard Sennett talks about the two main spatial elements of democracy in his reading of ancient Athens [6], Pnyx and Agora: “… the agora consisted of a large open space crossed diagonally by the main street of Athens; at the sides of which were temples and Stoa[s], shed[s] that opened sideways onto the agora… Perhaps the most interesting feature of the stoa and the agora was the transition space just under the shelter of the stoa… What import did the complex, teeming space of the agora have on the practice of democracy?” The agora was the place in the city for the tolerance of difference, diversity: “If the same persons or activities are merely concentrated but remain isolated and segregated, diversity loses its force. To count, differences must interact.” The Athenian agora made different citizens interact in two ways, the second, being the important one in our context: “…the agora established a space for stepping back from such engagement – at the edge, under the roof of the stoa; was a fluid, liminal zone between private and public. This edge was where change would start.”

Edge condition 3: The river, terraces and the neighbouring houses

Edge condition 4: The market

The edge, the stoa is what we are interested in the context of Lotus Park, Cape Town: Touching the neighbourhood on its edge, creating spaces for interaction with the city and the surrounding neighbourhoods, creating potential spaces of diversity at these edges, and expecting this to cause an impact in Lotus Park and Cape Town in the long run. An attempt of transforming the edges of the neighbourhood is also an attempt towards breaking the apartheid’s invisible borders and isolation. In Lotus Park, we propose to realize this transformation through creating collective economical capacity. Many informal settlements also suffer from unemployment, in our case half of the inhabitants of Lotus Park don’t have a job. Organizing the spaces collective economical capacity at the edges of the neighbourhood could increase the sense of ownership/belonging to the neighbourhood, while solving a practical, yet crucial problem of unemployment.

The second wave of post-apartheid urbanization will reshape the nature of cities in South Africa, which will most probably be characterized by the informal settlements and ‘urbanization of poverty’, a mutually reinforcing process, as the place of poverty moves from rural to urban areas6. In our opinion, initiating change at edges by creating spaces of diversity and organizing collective capacities have the potential of translating into an alternative, not only for the informal settlements but the post-apartheid city.

—Merve Bedir. PhD candidate I Delft University of Technology. Partner at Land+Civilization Compositions

[1] Robinson, J. [1996] The Power of Apartheid: State, Power and Space in South African Cities. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann
[2] UN-Habitat [2010] State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide. Nairobi
[3] The “Cities Without Slums” action plan was developed by the Cities Alliance in July 1999 and launched by Nelson Mandela at the inaugural meeting of the Cities Alliance in Berlin in December 1999: www.citiesalliance.org/cws-action-plan
[4] Mbembe, A. Nuttall, S. [2004] Writing the World from an African Metropolis. Public Culture, 16 [3], 347-372
[5] Appadurai, A. [2002] Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizion of Politics. Public Culture, 14 [1] 21-47.
[6] Richard Sennett describes the details of the spatial prominence of stoa in his article, Democracy and Its Spaces. There, he explains the details of contemporary design projects, which work with the principles of stoa’s transformative spatiality at its edge.

/// Land+Civilization Compositions is involved in the ongoing Density Syndicate project by African Center for Cities and International New Town Institute. This contribution would not have been possible without their invitation. We would also like to thank VPUU, South African NGO for informal settlements.

However, without eluding the potentialities of form, there are essential problems that escape its dominion. Contradictions – whether political, social or economic – should act as triggers capable of pulling all the strings of architecture, however indifferently and comfortably it sometimes seems to develop in the interior of an autonomous world, far removed from the pressing nature of political decisions, wherein tensions and disagreements often end up reduced to strictly rhetorical problems, exercises in style for which the economy represents merely the establishment
of pre-established hygienic and abstract margins within which to operate.

II
But originally, economy – οἰκονομία – was the term used to denote the administration of domestic resources, the management of the household (οἶκος). The economy belonged, therefore, albeit not exclusively, to the accessible scale of the home, to the boundaries of the familiar. Yet despite this, domesticity, as has recently been made manifest, is also related in an immediate and fragile way to the great scale of the macro-economy, over which politics and power exercise their liberal safeguard. Evictions, the abandoning of housing blocks, entire neighbourhoods standing vacant with a myriad of interiors awaiting use, all connect small universes with a global machinery over which society is demanding new control, a reformulation of all that is public, and, with that, of the boundary between the individual and the collective.

III
We are devoting this issue of Quaderns to domesticity. But we would be deceiving ourselves if we believed that behind what we understand by domestic lie only notions such as house, home, shelter or privacy. The domestic combines politics with form, connecting differing scales and extending its domain from the macroeconomy to the most irreducible form of architecture in usage terms: the room, to which we have devoted a part of this issue. The house, understood as an aggregation of rooms, predetermines, from the way these relate to each other or from their different sizes, how it will be occupied and what kind of relationships will be established within it over time. This is how the conception of the domestic form approaches politics: to the extent that it can perpetuate certain stereotypes and condition over time the transformation of the domestic sphere.

It is precisely in this ambivalence of scales, where we can see how the definition of domesticity describes the limit that lies between what is individual and what is public, between the urban world and the home, concepts demarcated by a blurred and continually moving boundary.

If the philosopher Jürgen Habermas — as Francesc Magrinyà reminds us in one of the texts that opens this issue —, described the genesis and transformation of the public sphere under the auspices of the emerging bourgeoisie and, with it, the transformation of the public space that sustained it [1], we can confirm, analogously, a gradual confusion between public and private spheres, accompanied by a growing gap between what is individual and what is collective, as described by Sennett in his famous The Fall of Public Man. [2]

Nevertheless, as we see how in the executing of evictions, it is precisely from the street, i.e. from the public space, that a part of society, through its presence, heightens the visibility of the private world [3], we can’t help but think about the perverse ideological logic of slogans that, strengthening these boundaries, aim to make our home a fictitious independent republic.

Perhaps, ultimately, domesticity is no more than an excuse to consider how, based on all these contradictions, architecture needs to reflect in order to come up with renewed ideas that will allow it to advance towards the reconquest of what is public.

—Gillermo López, José Zabala, Anna Puigjaner, Ethel Baraona. Editors

[1] Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffenlichkeit [The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere], Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1962.
[2] Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man, Knopf, New York, 1977.
[3] We would like to thank Xavier Monteys for this suggestion.

/// Header image: Modern Ruins, a Topography of Lucre, Julia Schulz-Dornburg.
/// Contents of Quaderns #265 House and Contradiction, here.

What follows is Tiago’s article:

Since the troika’s arrival, Portugal has undergone a revolution in the State’s spending structure.

Health and Education are no longer the State Budget’s largest spending areas, with debt payment, the cost of saving a bank and the payment of public-private partnerships (PPPs) gaining prominence. In 2013, 47,50% of the State’s budget was reserved for these last three items, with cuts in Health [27,10%], Education [21,50%] and Social Security [19,90%].

The State tends to disappear as an actor in public and social politics, taking on the role of tax collector for debt payment. It is not hard to imagine that, in the current scenario, there is no place for a national housing policy.
But what is going on with the private sector?

State Budget 2013
. Source: CGTP – Intersindical Nacional.

By virtue of an old law, which froze rents for decades, the real estate renting market dwindled until 2012. Houses to rent were scarce and the prices were prohibitive. The biggest beneficiaries of this imbalance were the banks. Both the financial collapse and the sudden lifting of frozen rents, as demanded by the troika, raised considerable fears, which led to old rents being abruptly bumped up. Thousands of citizens, especially among the aged population, are now having to abandon their lifelong homes.

Although it does not show in the official data, the housing market is in turmoil, with the informal sector echoing this turbulence. A common practice in non-legalized neighborhoods, key-selling, is often the only solution. These operations are carried out outside any and all real estate transaction taxes and do not require the certifications requested by EU directives. All you need to do is hand over the money. Originally an illegal settlement built on the seaside, in an idyllic location 10 km away from Lisbon, the Cova do Vapor neighborhood is an example of this real estate effervescence. With half the neighbourhood duly licensed, it is exactly the houses without legal documents that are available. Key-selling for a 50m2 house might cost between 10.000€ and 20.000€, while legal ones would cost upwards of 50.000€.

The actual size of this market is yet to be studied but it seems clear that the austerity policies being enforced on the country are stimulating a return to the informal. Buying a non-legalized home carries its risks but does not entail a loan, a mortgage, a bank and substantially reduces the value of the investment.

/// *originally created for “Homeland – News from Portugal” newspaper – Portuguese representation at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2014
/// All the info about on their web-site homeland.pt

That’s why we are publishing here a text by ateliermob, originally written for “Homeland – News from Portugal” newspaper.

A trial definition

In the academic community, the discussion over what constitutes informal construction is far from over; in fact, it is most commonly perceived as and identified with slums or favelas. If in the case of the former it is not up to us to solve the equation, especially as we do not think the definition should be static, timeless or universal, in the case of the latter, we should decline any attempt to reduce the concept of informality to slums and precarious housing settlements. For the time span between 1914 and 2014, it seems to us that the most accurate understanding of the matter is that informal is everything that is not formal, which is to say, everything that does not fall within the State’s legal sphere, pertaining either private or public initiative.

Departing from a clearly identifiable centre, this broad definition qualifies and groups disparate fringes. We are therefore writing about constructions and neighbourhoods that might even have been properly planned, often by technicians or construction foremen aiding local inhabitants, or that house more than just the most underprivileged social classes.

State of the art

In Portugal, the most thriving periods in informal construction dynamics are linked to historical moments marked both by migratory movements and the ensuing housing problems.

But informal construction is not limited to housing. Depending on the area and neighborhood, we often find workshops, small shops and businesses or rented annexes. If the first step is to build a house, the next is to build an extension or new units associated with work activity or familiar income. These phenomena are less frequent when local residents’ associations are established and given some level of authority over the territory; there are fewer exceptions to housing, and these are usually the local recreational centre, the café, the residents’ association or a building that serves all these purposes.

On the other hand, as a result of Portugal’s financial context, it often happens that formal context is taken by the informal. Portugal Novo neighborhood, designed by Manuel Vicente [1977], is a good example. Over the last couple of years, several members of one gipsy community have settled into the neighborhood and occupied the empty houses, significantly changing their typologies and structure to suit their needs.
In the Portuguese context, it is not easy to identify the overall architectural and morphological characteristics of informal construction. With some exceptions, built structures do not exceed two stories in height and in the case of neighborhoods, copying local built solutions is common practice, in spite of a desire for decorative and identity differentiation.

Also, the geography on which construction takes place is determinant in the choice of building materials and solutions, owing to thermal and weather conditions, financial constraints or the building experience of the site’s construction foremen.
Over the last couple of years, the reality of informal construction in Portugal has been changing. Actually, it is our belief that it is growing in parallel with the country’s economic situation. When we are asked whether there is work for architects in Portugal, our answer is always yes. This is one of the domains where there is a lot to be done.

/// Ateliermob is a multidisciplinary platform for the development of ideas, research and projects in the areas of architecture, design and urbanism. The company was founded in 2005 in Lisbon, as a result of several works carried out by its founding partners. In parallel, they have been developing research work to support the project-oriented practice, an architecture blog, design, urban planning and participation in several national and international competitions. More info: ateliermob

[This is an extract from a series of interviews conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Kazuo Shinohara.]

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In our last interview we discussed the “beauty of chaos” and “progressive anarchy”. This time around I’d like to ask you about the “mathematical city”. Designing a city generally involves all kinds of calculations and planning. But once built, it is very difficult to calibrate the city that exists. In this sense, the concept of the “mathematical city” sounds both paradoxical and extremely interesting.

Kazuo Shinohara: I majored in mathematics before studying architecture. Therefore, for me, thinking about mathematics is almost the same as thinking about architecture. It is like two sides of the same coin. I first started to talk about the “mathematical city” around 1967. At that time I had completed the House in White and my thinking was still deeply related to Japanese tradition. So, I started to say that the composition of a city should be based on the abstract and the neutral, which both include mathematical thinking. In short, I was now talking about something completely the opposite of Japanese tradition. These two directions are not in direct confrontation. But they do have an ambivalent relationship. The concept first provides a reason for small houses to exist; and then an opposing aspect emerges, so that the huge urban space of the city itself surfaces.

Until the 1960s, I had no direct experience in handling a city, and I said simply that the city could be left in chaos. In other words, we could only describe a city as an aesthetic of chaos. After that, I stated that the composition of a huge city could not be controlled without mathematics. It was impossible to achieve a real city composition by formal means, as was fashionable at the time. It was useless. And then, some ten or twenty years later on, chaos theory appeared in the field of mathematics. Therefore, my point of view, i.e. that the composition of a city has a complex mathematical nature, was given theoretical support by mathematical progress after a decade or two. Since chaos theory in mathematics was very new at the time, the rest of the architectural community reacted coldly during the 1970s and 1980s. Then, the theory suddenly became highly influential. My own vision, which I had stated around 1967, was perfectly synchronized with it. It was a mathematical approach positing that very state of confusion, or lack of unity, as its essential significance.

House in Yokohama by Kazuo Shinohara. Photo by Enric Massip-Bosch

HUO: In your opinion, what is the ideal model for living?

KS: The central concept of modernism in the 20th century has been to unify. One of the concepts was an “international style”, by which architects tried to unify everything making use of its clarion principles. To take an extreme example, the Bauhaus even tried to coordinate table linens.

Now we’re approaching the 21st century and I am writing a series of articles, which say that the “un-unified” will assume superior value over humdrum unity. Restoring disjunction will become more important during the next century. After World War II, Tokyo had become a heap of ashes, and many progressive Japanese architects thought that they could completely transform it making use of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin. They were dreaming. But I didn’t agree with their view. I stated that there is beauty in chaos. That was in the early 1960s, forty years ago. Nobody agreed with me, it was such an un-avant-garde idea for those times. The area surrounding Shibuya station was a typical example, with its sprawling, inconsistent, messy and natural conditions. But in fact, ten years later, a newspaper interview with younger people and foreign tourists asked them what they considered the most exciting area in Tokyo. Many answered, “Shibuya”. However, for progressive architects, Shibuya had always been one of the most ugly spots in Tokyo.

HUO: Could you tell us about your ideas of myth and chaos?

KS: In every myth, wherever it derives, there is a chaotic state. A great deal of energy is wasted. And, at first glance, that seems a negative loss. However upon reaching a certain level, it will be condensed into a powerful force. To achieve this, one must jettison all the force so far expended when this energy is sublated. What is created at that moment is a new first order. Take the example of an older period when ancient empire is the first order. But as this order gradually expands, it begins to break up. Then, a chaotic state starts to seek the next step. Through a repetition of confusion and conflict, the next order will appear. Thus, I can also say that chaos is a force or activity that advances toward the future. But, intentionally, I try not to use such words, because they sound too vague for what I want to convey. Anyway… although I do not know how the mechanism works, concentrated energy is actually converted into order whenever I introduce extraneous matter. The word “stimulation”, or “intervention”, might be better.

Kazuo Shinohara house in Yokohama, 1984. Photograph: Terutaka Hoashi

Interpreter: In scientific fields, and especially in complex systems, they use the word “emergence”, not “generation”, when describing something new. Your term is thus very close to science.

KS: I wanted nothing to do with the city when I was young, and that fact gives me a unique stance. But after working with smaller spaces that I tried to purify or to unify, I was able to take an opposite approach in my thinking. However, whatever I design, the world itself does not become beautiful. Formerly, I succeeded in generating opposition and I frankly stated my attitude as a “manifesto”. Since I examined our chaotic situation from an opposing point of view, by means of small houses, I gained an understanding of the structure of chaos. And I would like to add one more important point. I may design individual buildings but I am unable to design a city. In my opinion these are two completely separate things. People, culture, and climate generate cities. Not individuals. That was the biggest mistake made by Modernism.

HUO: What can you say about the self-organizing city?

KS: Oscar Niemeyer designed Brasilia as a very beautiful city, which is also well organized. At the same time, a slum area grew up, where the construction workers were living outside the designed area of the city. Soon after the city was completed, people began to prefer this older area to the new part because it was more comfortable. This is a typical example of what Modernism tried to eliminate. If a city becomes over orderly, you can always uncover an opposite and contradictory system. Therefore, there is clearly some other more complex structure of the city at work. Brasilia itself has a perfect design, but when a residential zone springs up alongside it, this latter is regarded as agglomerative or confusing. My idea is just the reverse. My small houses have a clear principle, whilst Tokyo is itself confusion. But we should be wary in construing the meaning of “confusion”, which isn’t the same as “disorder”.

HUO: When I talked with Cedric Price, he suggested that we use the word “city” too frequently and with so many different meanings that we are losing the original sense of the word. It becomes ever more blurred. So, it might be better to create a new term instead of “city”. If you have any good ideas, please tell me.

KS: I do not use the word “city” that much these days. In Japanese there is the notion of machi. I prefer this concept; it is closer to the term “neighborhood” or “district” in English.

Kazuo Shinohara, House in White, 1966. Photograph: Hiroshi Ueda.

HUO: What exactly is this notion?

KS: There are so many houses everywhere in Tokyo. And these houses will generate a street. The important point is that a street doesn’t generate houses. Houses make the street. So, to be more precise, machi implies houses producing the street as “house-scape” or as townscape.

HUO: Is that something organic?

KS: Well, for example, Europe’s older towns came into being naturally. And I do not know what the process was; a situation where houses stand beside each other as a matter of course is really something that just happens. This situation generates a street. In this sense, a street is no empty thing, in terms of figure and ground. Thus houses become the figures, so I prefer this view. That is why I use machi or “housescape”.

HUO: So is the line more important than the points?

KS: Rather, the façade line of the houses. I recall whole small villages I saw in southern Spain. In those little villages, the street seemed like a floor and the houses on either side like walls. I felt surrounded by white walls, and I liked that feeling very much.

HUO: You have written about chaos in the city, and at the same time you have influenced a couple of generations of architects when it comes to designing small urban houses. Would you tell me more about this?

KS: It is hugely important to understand the process of designing a tiny work. On the one hand, there are so many tall buildings around us, such as in Shinjuku, but they possess no power. Then there is the tiny house I constructed on a small budget making use of inexpensive materials, and somehow this tiny house exerts influence. A French architect based in Bordeaux who had seen this House in Uehara published was so impressed that she came all the way to Japan to study it. I perform experiments within a tiny space. I put extraneous elements into that tiny space to see what will happen. It is like a scientific experiment, and it is great because you can follow the process visually. It’s like the theory of elementary particles in physics, where a particle reflects the structure of the whole world.

/// Header image: House in Yokohama by Kazuo Shinohara [model]. Photo by Enric Massip-Bosch.
Special thanks to Enric Massip-Bosch for his wonderful contribution with the photographs of Kazuo Shinohara, Office and own house in Yokohama, 1984.
/// More info about the work of Kazuo Shinohara can be found in the latest issue of JA+U, Kazuo Shinohara Complete Works in Original Publications.

Roberto Soundy: When we think about a profoundly divided and disputed territory like Diyarbakir, displacement is the first thing that springs to mind. With over 3,000 villages destroyed, the social and political conflict that has pounded the region over the last thirty years has caused a deep gash in national and municipal policy on housing. In your opinion, what is the significance of housing and what are the possibilities for a project for the city in the face of conflict?

Martino Tattara and Caglayan Ayhan-Day: Everyone has a right to adequate housing and shelter. It does not matter whether you are in the middle of a conflict zone or a festival; everyone needs a safe house, a place to call home. However, especially during prolonged political conflicts, one sees whole settlements being evacuated, villages burned, civilians forced to relocate overnight, from rural to urban settlements, leaving their livelihoods behind, and left with only memories.

Diyarbakir, we wanted to bring international and local architects, academics, central government, local government, and local NGOs together around the same table, and get them to collaborate on how to provide adequate housing for the displaced communities who had been living in impoverished and unhealthy conditions – usually in squatter houses – in Diyarbakir. We thought that if we could incorporate the displaced communities into the project as arbitrators, to guide us regarding where to start, to tell us what they want, to review the work we have done, perhaps we could open a space for a therapeutic process of sorts.

After all, talking about buildings, gardens, courtyards and urban plans has the potential to be less confrontational and less biased than talking about imprisonment, ongoing conflict in the mountains, bans on the native language or unfair economic and social policies. Still, talking about housing can be equally productive: it juxtaposes stories about village and city, past and present, suffering and joy. So, we thought housing was a good place to start: it is an urgent need for the displaced communities living in squatter houses, and providing it is an indisputable obligation for the local and central government bodies. It is an academic and technical issue where professional expertise is required, and it is a social issue in which the experience and mediating role of NGOs are vital.

Destruction of a village; scorched-earth military campaign.

Urbanisation of Diyarbakir; gecekondu (barracks settlement) towards inner city wall.

RS: Understanding the role of typology becomes critical, considering the continuous influx of forced rural migrations, especially since the 1990s. How can alternative forms of domestic architecture accommodate for the culturally disparate needs of the population?

MT/CA: Diyarbakir presents many challenges related with housing typologies and domestic architecture and their links to the needs and desires of the current population. Current housing production, whether the result of speculative real-estate forces or of the governmental agency for social housing [TOKI], is dominated by one unique ‘global’ model – a multi-apartment concrete block unit with approximately 10 to 15 floors – that in the case of Diyarbakir has monopolised housing development over the last decade or two. This typology has no relation with the traditional urban structure of the region – characterised by a dense pattern of narrow alleys and two-courtyard houses – nor with the local climate, characterised by extremely hot and long summers. Despite the poor construction and the poor climatic performances of these ‘modern’ units, this model still represents, for the majority of the population, the symbol of modern urban living. Proposing alternative forms of domestic architecture in Diyarbakir is therefore a social and anthropological challenge as well as an urban and architectural one. In our work, we approached the housing and domestic architecture project as inseparable from the possibility of changing the lives and livelihoods of affected people. We tried to understand the socioeconomic practices and living spaces of people in Diyarbakir, and we explored ways of opening up spaces of possibility within existing urban conditions. We also tried to emphasise that the conditions of Diyarbakir today have to be understood on their own terms, and dealt with as such.

RS: Beyond housing intended as a solution for offering higher living standards to a displaced and general population, the possibility of constructing a new idea of the city is at stake. What roles may national and municipal stakeholders, but also developers, NGOs and civil society play in questioning traditional modes of urban renewal?

MT/CA: The issue of urban renewal of the inner parts of Turkish cities is of paramount importance today, since TOKI has recently been assigned the new and urgent task of carrying out urban transformation projects all over Turkey, instead of just adding new, large-scale residential estates on the outskirts of Turkish cities. As many international cases have shown, and as many sociologists have already described, urban renewal often triggers processes of gentrification and displacement of the existing population living in certain parts of the city. In the case of Diyarbakir, the risk of gentrification is indeed present, especially in the ancient walled city – Suriçi, a neighbourhood with approximately 71,000 inhabitants – where land prices are currently greatly devalued and where speculative purchasing of land would begin as soon as there are any indications that the area might be improved.

Aerial picture of Suriçi. A large number of vacant parcels have become the location for the new proposed housing units.

With our project, we attempted to propose an alternative way of addressing the current urban landscape of the city, focusing on the potential of architecture to engage in both the economic and the social logic of the transformation process, striking a balance between investments for new middle-class enterprises and the potential that the current inhabitants could offer. This was particularly difficult as the current community moved into the neighbourhood during the migration waves of the last three decades and is not recognised by the city’s authorities as ‘autochthonous’. Indeed, for many local citizens, current inhabitants should simply be relocated to other parts of the city, leaving their houses and neighbourhoods for more prosperous, local, wealthy inhabitants. In order to counter this approach, we tried to show how it was especially this migrant population, with a rural background and view of life, that has been able to adapt to the older structures of the old city and its decaying courtyard houses. They established patterns of formal and informal economy and of solidarity that were directly linked to the urban and architectural form of this part of the city. Their self-built houses did not look as beautiful as their historical counterparts, and they may have further damaged some of the original structures in the historical houses they occupied. But it is also thanks to them that the old city is still socially very exciting and inviting. Thanks to them, the old city is still able to survive as a unique and lively habitat facilitating a specific mode of social solidarity and organisation.

Avoiding discussion on ‘origins’ and on whether someone has more ‘right’ to be a dweller in a certain part of the city than someone else, it seemed to us that triggering a new process of displacement would be devastating not only for those affected, but primarily for the neighbourhood and the process of renewal that is, especially in this case, associated with its preservation. This principle was and still is difficult to get across, and we feel that it is the task of NGOs and civil society initiatives – the most progressive component of Turkey – to question traditional modes of urban renewal before municipal and national stakeholders.

A courtyard house in Suriçi.

A new courtyard house for a vacant site in Suriçi. [project by Gabriel Cuéllar].

RS: As negotiations between the PKK [Kurdistan Workers' Party] and the Turkish government advance, the prospects of a negotiated settlement grow for Kurdish families separated by decades of conflict. Diyarbakir may yet again find another influx of inhabitants, only this time in the form of repatriation. In this respect, what purpose may local government policy represent in the social production of housing as a project?

MT/CA: It might be a little early to talk about such repatriation for the Kurds in Turkey. But if there will ever be an example of social housing being produced in Turkey, that will most likely take place in a city run by the Kurdish political party. Probably as a result of long years of political struggle and suffering, Kurds in Turkey have a unique passion, engagement and longing for a beautiful, peaceful and egalitarian urban and cultural environment. In cities run by the Kurdish political party in the Southeast and East of Turkey, the local governments seem to have a greater influence on public opinion and attitudes, and a more active role in creating a lively social and cultural urban environment. This is indeed a great advantage that facilitates the social and collective production of urban landscape.

However, housing projects take up a lot of time and resources for any local government. A local government determined to maximise public benefit rather than financial profit in urban planning policies would be taking great political and economic risks. But once local government’s resistance to undue urban profit is supported with actual examples of withheld building permits, increasing urban green areas right within the city centre and so on, this might slowly pave the way for a change in local people’s demands for different types of housing as well. If there are local incentives such as faster or less municipal paperwork for housing cooperatives that promise to build social facilities as part of their projects, if the municipality further develops a small scale multi-stakeholder partnership to set an example of such a collectively designed social housing project, then public opinion might also change towards developing multi-stakeholder partnerships, maximising social rather than economic urban capital.

In other words, we could also envision a situation in which powerful local governmental and nongovernmental actors have the upper hand in channelling desires related to urban landscape and planning. In such a situation, private interests, regardless of their economic capital, would be unable to sidestep local interests in their pursuit of accumulation and profit, and would have to devise and develop their projects bearing in mind the need to win the approval of a deeply democratic local governmental structure.

/// Martino Tattara and Caglayan Ayhan-Day led the research studio ‘Designing for Surici: Rethinking Urban Renewal.’ at The Berlage.
/// The large-scale strategic plan for Diyarbakir has been developed within the framework of the Berlage Institute research studio ‘After Displacement: Large-Scale Housing Solutions for Diyarbakir‘ led by Martino Tattara and Joachim Declerck.
/// This text is part of the research project Posconflicto Laboratory. The complete research material will be published in a forthcoming book with the same name.