Reviewed by Melanie Lombard, Global Urban Research Centre, University of Manchester (UK)

[cc image credit: eflon]

The authors of this edited volume make a worthwhile and timely contribution to the field of Latin American urban studies, which will help to fill the current gap in literature on the Latin American city. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to “reimagining the informal in Latin America,” with an emphasis on architectural and urban design perspectives, but also incorporating themes from cultural studies, human geography and anthropology. Interrogating the contemporary conditions of informality in Latin American cities, the authors present ‘the informal’ as a complex set of processes embracing spatial, social, cultural, political and economic aspects. The contributions suggest that we need to rethink our understandings of informality if we are to deal with the informal and particularly “with an urban informality that has become constitutive of the urban condition itself” (Hernandez et al. 2010: 184).

Eleven chapters are organised into two sections, Critical Perspectives and Critical Practices, according to whether contributions are theoretical-historical, or more practical and intervention-based. In fact, both sections present current work by scholars, practitioners, and government institutions, meaning both will have a broad appeal to theorists and practitioners alike. The collection will also hold more a general attraction for those interested in urban issues in the global South, as it provides a useful introduction to some of the key debates in this area, particularly relating to urban informal settlements and housing. Most notably, Chapter 1 takes readers on a whirlwind tour of developments in approaches to urban informal settlements from the 1960s to the present day. Starting with the widespread policies of eradication that characterised responses in the 1950s and 60s, it then touches on the Habitat I conference that took place in Vancouver in 1976 and the self-help debate that precipitated this, discusses the shift in the role of the state from housing provider to enabler, and ends with the ‘return of the slum’ (Gilbert 2007). This chapter will be of particular use to those unfamiliar with these debates, while other chapters discuss specific approaches in more detail, depending on their particular focus.

Despite the proclaimed theoretical bent of the first section, illustrative case studies are employed throughout. The first three chapters discuss Brazilian cities, and are united by a concern with the relationship between informality and modernism. Chapter 2 argues that the influence of modernist architecture can be seen throughout Brazilian favelas, based on Le Corbusier’s Domino template. Chapter 3 explores the informal within the formal, through the activities of urban social movements in Sao Paulo’s public spaces. Chapter 4 offers an interesting exploration of the encroachment of informality in Brasilia, an “exceptional” modernist city. The focus of the next two chapters is on Chile. Chapter 5 explores issues around quality of life in low-income settlements, showing how formal housing policies do not necessarily offer a comprehensive solution. Chapter 6 discusses showing how good design, participation and government subsidies can mitigate the effects of gentrification, using the case of Santiago.

In the book’s second section, contributions focus more heavily on the material outcomes of practice. Using case studies from Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil and Argentina, the authors explore some of the successes and failures of upgrading, urban design and architecture in this context. Chapter 7 offers an excellent discussion of the pragmatic realities of working with informality, based on the experiences of the Urban Think Tank in Caracas. Chapter 8 takes a similarly grounded view on informality as a means of survival in a socialist society. Chapters 9, 10 and 11 return to the Brazilian example, offering diverse reflections on the Favela Bairro upgrading programme. In particular, Chapter 10 makes a convincing and highly engaging case for incorporating both spatial and social elements into planning for informality, arguing that the social emphasis which has dominated upgrading programmes would benefit from a stronger urban design element, enabling the connection of informal areas with the rest of the city – for example through walkways and multi-level platforms – rather than seeking to ‘resolve’ informality.

The authors’ central argument is that the informal and the formal have become entrenched categories within the urban setting, but that these categories must be rethought if policymakers and researchers are to succeed in understanding and addressing informality. They call for an understanding that goes beyond reductive categories of formal and informal to engage with the multitude of factors that shape Latin American cities, emphasising in particular the agency of settlement dwellers as city builders. The introductory chapter posits an innovative postcolonial theoretical framework as an alternative means of understanding informality, which is implicitly rather than explicitly engaged with by most of the book’s contributors. Despite calls for a ‘postcolonial urban studies’ (Robinson 2006), such a perspective is as yet under-utilised in the Latin American context. Here, the postcolonial approach encompasses both a historical dimension – based on the parallels that exist between today’s urban informality and precolonial urban forms – and a conceptual one, inverting entrenched categories and narrow understandings equating informality with poverty and marginalisation, to celebrate the urban informal.

Indeed, the celebration of the informal is one of the book’s main themes, and this is something it does extremely convincingly. In the most part, the authors avoid ‘favela chic’ stereotyping – in other words, the romanticisation of life in urban informal settlements – as ‘the daily violence of economic exclusion’ (Davis 2006: 202) is always present as context. Indeed, as this book suggests, such places cannot be reduced to symbols of either urban crisis or heroism; they contain everyday struggles, but also complexity, and immense creativity on the part of their residents who construct them in extremely constrained circumstances. The holistic treatment applied here, from a diverse range of perspectives, serves to highlight the prevailing narrowness of most contemporary understandings of the informal city. Given the diversity of approaches, the volume would have occasionally benefited from greater editorial input: for example, some chapters contain a large amount of historical detail that eclipses the extremely interesting case study and empirical material. Most importantly, a concluding chapter would have helped to bring together the disparate threads from across the book’s two halves, and draw out some of the cross-cutting themes arising from the variety of case studies presented. However, despite these minor weaknesses, this book’s major contribution is in its exploration of the social, spatial, cultural and aesthetic processes which constitute the informal city, which is (re)presented as fluid, dynamic, and most importantly, as part of the city. This aspect should ensure its interest to scholars of space and culture; as in rethinking the informal city, we are forced to re-evaluate our understandings of the city itself.

References

Davis M, Planet of Slums. Verso: London, 2006.

Gilbert A, “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 31:697-713, 2007.

Robinson, J., Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development, London: Routledge, 2006.

Reviewed by Nurri Kim, Do Projects

My first significant personal exposure to Mexican culture (and Mexican people) was after I moved to the United States in 2003. As a Korean educated in Japan, and with no previous experience of America beyond what I knew from popular media, I remember wondering what these bright yellow “Piso Mojado” signs were supposed to mean and, from there, slowly unfolding the enormous significance of this culture for Californian and American life. I was especially fascinated by those Mexican men with big cowboy hats I saw standing in groups by the side of the highway, waiting stoically for day jobs that might or might not come.

Five years of living in New York have taught me that these men and the millions of other Mexican men and women in similar positions are an indispensible part of the American economy. The flows of the city are hugely dependent on their delivering, making, operating, or fixing things, in a way that reminds me of Do-Ho Suh’s sculpture series. It’s hard to imagine passing through any commercial service in New York that doesn’t depend on these efforts in some way. You name it: even the most downhome-looking Korean restaurant in Koreatown, with the ajumma cooking handmade tofu in the storefront to show off its authenticity, has a line of Mexican guys busy in the steamy hot back of the kitchen cooking and delivering the bulgogi and kimchijigae to the tune of salsa music. But especially as compared to their ubiquitous contributions to the culture, they’re virtually invisible in it — the mainstream, anyway, will never help you understand who these people are, where they’re from, how they got here and how they survive on the interface of two (or more) cultures.

[cc image credit: Nathan Gibbs]

That’s why I was so curious to discover Fiamma Montezemolo, René Peralta and Heriberto Yepez’s “Here Is Tijuana!” Of course, Tijuana is literally and figuratively an edge case within Mexico, but as a node of transition between cultures and the first place on Mexican soil physically encountered by many visitors, I thought a book about the city would be an excellent place for me to begin my investigations, its title announcing the reader’s arrival like a tollgate traffic sign at the borderline.

The format of the book and the content

“Here Is Tijuana!” is organized in three chapters (”Avatars,” “Desires,” and “Permutations”) written by authors from three disciplines (an anthropologist, an architect, and a writer/psychotherapist) with three different relationships with the city (having either been born, studied, or currently living there). I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to write this book. From the preface:

“One afternoon three friends were discussing nothing else, but Tijuana. The three of them conducted one of those discussions that ultimately tend to abolish friendship. At the end of the discussion, there were two very clear issues: one, that the three of them would never be in agreement about Tijuana; and the other, that it was necessary to produce a book that would reunite the different postures about the city in order to extend the conflict to others as well.”

And so it seems that the process of making the book itself reflected the nature of its subject. Instead of writing an anthology with separate signed contributions, they apparently decided to let the city tell its own story through a succession of static images juxtaposed against quotations, statistical data and other figures, short interviews, and correspondence (e-mail, letters, notes, etc.). It’s very ambiguous as to whose viewpoint is being expressed at any particular moment, or if the authors even wish to endorse a specific viewpoint at all, and the overall effect is to emphasize that whatever opinions or impressions one holds about Tijuana, however jumbled or even contradictory, they might all simultaneously be true.

Emerging codependences

Often this use of supposedly neutral “data” requires some knowledge of origins — the name of an institution, for example, or a URL — to decode the meaning apparently intended by the authors. At first I had a hard time reading between the lines, often helped where an image added texture and flesh to the flattened “facts” and figures (a price list of services provided by prostitutes in Tijuana, a schedule of assembly-plant salaries, counts of inbound and outbound passengers at the airport and bus depot, and so on). I certainly don’t think you have to read this book linearly, but I followed the conventional page order, and by the time I was reading the “Permutation” section, all of these fragments had slowly built up, connected with one another and developed a weave that resembled narrative.

And something else slowly revealed itself, too: Tijuana’s conjoined twin city across the border. San Diego emerges from the trip into Tijuana like the other surface of a Möbius strip. It’s not simply that the Mexican city becomes the site of displaced industries and repressed desires, though this is inarguably the case. It’s that the two places depend on one another, each place made possible by certain kinds of flows across this most extreme of borders. And while voice after voice here are entirely correct to insist on the place’s singularity (”It’s not even Mexico, it’s Tijuana”), in the end it’s also clear that like the countries they belong to, both cities are part of a single binary system. And that is something I’ll remember the next time I catch a glimpse into a Korean-restaurant kitchen in Manhattan.

An arrow in the recreation yard at Camp Delta, Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba points the direction to Mecca, the Islamic holy city, so the detainees know which way to face if the call to prayer sounds while they are outside. Every cell and recreation yard has similar arrows. Photo taken in April, 2006. (U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood)

All detainees at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are given a copy of the Koran. Surgical masks are provided to the detainees so they can keep the Koran off the floor and prevent guards from touching it. Photo taken in April, 2006. (U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood)

(via)

- Anne

In person, Rushdie is relaxed, wittier and far better read than one would expect. He is funny, almost like a comic who can’t help himself but make jokes that push the limits just past the conventional mores of his audience by saying publicly what might be thought privately. His ability to sustain conversations on history and ethics is also a surprise. I have just time to put up some of his comments on mobilities, frontiers, movement, cities, space and culture, based on my brief notes.

Home:

‘Many of us now come from many places… Its ok to feel at home in different places.’

‘Once you’ve packed and unpacked as many books [as I have in my move to New York in 1999], then that’s where you live!’

[Home is where there are] ‘Echos of home which you never have anywhere elses…’

Travel

To the question about what are the most difficult frontiers in a person’s life, regarding a quote from one of his books that humans are ‘frontier crossing’ people:

‘The most difficult…most important frontier…my father asked if I wanted to go to boarding school in England. My decision when I was 12…’

And later: ‘In ‘Ground Beneath our Feet’ [the argument is made that]…There are two great dreams: the dream of home and of leaving…the direction of away, our imaginings, what excites us is that, …the outcast. … What if Odysseus had stayed home… the journey of the person who departs is absolutely at the heart of our dreams…’

Religion

‘Despite the storehouse of powerful narratives which religions are …[there is, we live in a] Twilight of the gods. A time comes when we have to take on for ourselves our responsibility for our fate…this is a kind of growing up… found in both Nordid and Greek mythologies.’

The last time the Gods appear… intervene in the affairs of man… is the wedding of Cadmus the inventor of the alphabet and the nymph Harmonia – the union of writing and peace.’

Later, Rushdie contrasts the foundations of contemporary European and American political cultures: ‘the Western European idea of freedomn is freedom from religion, not to be declared ‘anathema’ by the church. In the United States liberty is freedom to have religion…. the main preoccupation of the First Amendment.’

Islam:

‘It is important to understand that Islam has never created a free society…’

‘In an open society, people constantly questions their first foundations on which they are based and disagrees on them. [Thus] it shifts and those disagreements shift. …. Societies that don’t allow you to question the fundamental principals on which they are based are not free.’

‘Literalists who insist [that religion is based on] the actual word of god… Once can’t be quesitoned other things atrophy. …Questions are considered to be blasphemy.  A stultifying atmosphere results.’

 And later, recommending the book of David Eggers What is the What: ‘as for the question of ethics, I don’t want to be told by some priest how to live… it is the Mystery’

Freedom

‘An open society requires the ability to quesiton. If you can’t ask difficult questions, quesitons people don’t want asked… you can’t grow.’

‘If you look at the cites of the Muslim world in the 50s and 60s… very different from today… Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East… Cairo. If have witnessed their backsliding into a bog of narrow mindedness during my lifetime… in part a self-inflicted wound.’

‘Who would you rather be, a heretic, apostate or a blasphemer?’

The Global: East and West

‘Amerigo Vespucci was one of the first to understand that this [American continents] was a new thing, it was not India. It was very very big and another big ocean was on the other side… [The 1400s are] a world in which one can see our world at the moment of its birth. [The natives of the New World had a very different sense of time, which didn't invovle progress].. The time included the collision of two different existential ideas of how one lived … either …in a sense of eternity or in a Western European sy in dynamic linear time.’

‘What united these worlds [the Mughal and Florentine Courts] was a belief in magic, even more than god. If you gell in love…you went and got a love potion to make the other person love you back. …[It was a time of the] use of sexual charms. …how to manuals.’

‘The division of East and West is a retro notion which is broken down inside me. Bombay was built in India as an English city on Indian soil. [There is no ancient] Bombay… Old bombay was a fishing village.’

Rushdie’s hilarious comments on American politics and the election of Obama can be found in the broadcast version of this interview.

Salman Rushdi was in Edmonton to launch the inaugural Festival of Ideas and as part of the University of Alberta Centenary. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel at a full house in the Winspear Centre. Their conversation will be broadcast on CBC Radio’s ‘Writers and Company‘.

- Rob

 Photo: Praga Anca Moanta, in bifurcaciones 7

bifurcaciones, an online review of urban cultural studies, has released its much anticipated issue 7.

This project of Ricardo Greene, LorenaPérez, Diego Campos and Tomas Errazuriz synthesizes the atmospheres of Santiago-Sao Paulo-Buenos Aires-London-New York. We have already remarked ont he quality and significance of Spanish language urban and cultural publication. and with babelfish, systran or Google translator, one cannot seriously avoid grappling with material regardless of language. bifurcaciones is Chile’s calling card on the web as a locus for design avant gardes. My experience of Chile as a Canadian was always via it superb exiled architects, whom I enountered working as usually the best designers in architects’ offices in the early 1980s. Like a memory of a conversation overhead, this was a kind of promise of Chile. The editorial team is better organized and each issue represents a kind of virtual South America – mobile between countries, between institutions and between reflection and practice. In effect, this online journal produces an original South American global public sphere.  bifurcaciones maps in words, diagrams and images, the shifting topologies of culture in the great cities of South America.  It is a prerequisite for local mappings because it shows how cultural space is not smooth and easily accessed but structured, striated and scrumpled.  Recommended reading.

 -Rob

If, for the better part of the 20th century, it was New York and its glistening imitations that symbolised the future, it is now the stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world. The idea of the total, centralised, maximally efficient city plan has long since lost its futuristic appeal: its confidence and ambition have turned to anxiety and besiegement, its homogenising obsession has constricted the horizons of spiritual possibility and induced counter-fantasies of insubordination, excess, and life-forms in chaotic variety. Such desires flee the West’s surveillance cameras and bureaucratised consumption to find in the Third World metropolis a scope, a speed, a more fecund ecology … [But] in the erotic delectation of these yawning life forms, which rise up with such titanic ambition, with such indifference to the history of western ethics and aesthetics, is the terror, the exhilaration, of a death wish. – Rana Dasgupta, The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City

When I showed photographs of Rio’s favelas in class earlier this term, one of the things we talked about was the aesthetics of poverty. Surely the use of so many pretty colours indicates a certain amount of hope and joy, the students said. A sort of “scrapped-together beauty,” as Jeff Ferrell would have it, I said. But in the case of slums, isn’t that also part of what the privileged-but-sensitive foreigner needs and wants to see?

Instead, the photographs of Dionisio González can be seen to play with the notion that favelas are exotic. Subtopia’s Bryan Finoki writes that his photos “immediately question the viewer’s knowledge of what a ’slum’ actually looks like… [and] despite the way they may look to us, how is it that those from the outside want to view these images in some way, and digest them as accurate portraits of squatter settlements?”

Journalist Roberto Marinho suggests the photos are both “a way to recover the landscape … [and] a Utopian reconstruction of places that are impossible to save unless it’s done in the artistic terrain of dreams and wishes.” But Bryan claims that these images eloquently express the tensions between contemporary urban order and chaos, and challenge the viewer to imagine the broader implications of favela “development” or “re-housing” plans.

I wish I could share Bryan’s enthusiastic reading of them, but I’m having difficulty understanding what makes these photo-collages different from cinematic slumsploitation that “celebrates the slum as a dangerous but creative place where people improvise solutions.” Any thoughts?

- Anne