Closing Comments - Emergent Fabric of the Slums

Words and Cities, Closing Comments

One might argue that it is not our words, but our actions, that are of relevance to the cities of today and tomorrow. Without words though, one would have a tough time making that argument.

Before this class, I had no idea that the word fabric was appropriated from building craft to cloth, and not vice versa, or that in Italian, the word tessuto or tissue, which has quite a different implication to us, is used. Words, expecially metaphors it seems, have conceptual potency that drive ways of thinking, and thus action. Before this class, I thought emergence was a buzzword more abused than sustainability to justify the inexplicable. As of last year, but no longer, Wikipedia's entry for emergence ended with 'Often the word is used in place of something more meaningful.' It's definition and conceptual relevance, it would seem, has emerged.

We started the semester witha word with perhaps longest tenure as a word relevant to architecture, 'Modern'. While I still find this meaning of this word (and of all other words for that matter) to be elusive, it seems to me that the Modern purified and refined its environs, while the contemporary, for lack of a better word, emerges from its environs. ‘In the history of architecture, the emergence of downtown fabric as we have known it for more then a century did not come from an act of volition but from a condition thrust upon the profession.’ (Habraken, 71) While this may seem a historicist way of thinking, we can embrace the power of digital media and look at the factors of growth in much greater detail. We can see a much clearer picture of the organized complexity. In my mind, the most intirguing example of this that we have discussed is the informal settlements and cities. These places became real, no longer the 'rackets' and places of crime discussed by Mike Davis. The people “have the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, the perseverance of pioneers, and the values of patriots... What they do not have is an opportunity to fulfill their aspirations.” (Perlman, 21) Seeing the shear ubiqity of slums (3.3 Billion without clean water), alongside the pictures of the cared for homes in Colors magazine, one has to believe in these people's pride and discover that that there is something essential to these places, something fundamental in the emergent infrastructures that develop, both political and physical.

In the early 20th century, the informal sector (at the time, I would argue all lower class urbanity) met with a tidal wave of prescriptive modernism in the form of mass housing. Shlomo Angel and Stan Benjamin discussed “the largely unsuccessful attempt to take housing solutions from developed societies and modify them for application in the developing world... It has the great advantage of fitting well into elite middle-class aspirations. But it fails on three important counts; lack of realism…a complete misunderstanding of people’s needs and poor use of available resources” (Angel & Benjamin, 20) In the discussion of Fabric, Habrakken offers us a way of understanding why modern housing attempts have largely failed. ‘[Mass housing] represented a new process broadly applied to the ongoing piecemeal transformation of the fine grained fabric. . . Fine grained transformation in response to life, itself, was effectively excluded. . . Mass housing did not evolve out of historical ways of building. Nor did it embody universal cultural understanding.’ (Habraken, 76-77)

The distinction between Modern with a capital 'M' and contemporary can be seen as a [not-so-]simple one-and-many distinction. The Modern seems to me to embrace the singular: A singular concept, a singular beauty, a singular truth. The contemporary meanwhile, accepts complexity, multiplicity and mess. The emergent fabric of the slums is a messy one, but not a mess to be cleaned. It is one to be accepted, embraced, studied, understood, and incrementally improved and developed, but not replaced, for surely it will be the fabric that contains most of the worlds housing within our lifetimes.