Slum Urbanism
Somewhat belatedly I’d like to link to this piece about slum urbanism: how environmentalists and other city-lovers can learn from the way slums are pieced together. “Slum” here is used to mean an informal settlement within a city, usually in the developing world. Spending time in these slums is a revelation to any American, I think, partly for the expected reasons, namely that they’re squalid, dangerous on account of the ubiquitously shoddy construction and exposed electrical wire. Less expected is that the streets of these slums often seem full of life and happy, not only in comparison to American urban ghettos, but also compared to our wealthy suburbs. Often there are a multitude of small shops, neighbors pausing in their daily errands to gossip, and children playing. It’s worth thinking about what a tremendous indictment of our built environment that this fact represents. Unlike the slum-dwellers we are subject to laws ensuring our buildings are built safely, but also unlike them we’re subject to laws that make our neighborhoods isolating, ugly, environmentally disastrous and hostile to all forms of retail except the big box stores we’ve been talking about on the blog. As Austen Bramwell writes:
sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations.
My own experiences with slums contributed mightily to my conviction that the built environment is a major determinant of our politics, culture, and even our religion. I wrote a post some time ago about urban form and religion by a particular slum, and since almost no one was reading Plumb Lines back then, I’ll take the liberty of quoting it in full:
I recall walking through a slum once in India, girdled by a wide moat doubling as a sewer, where the buildings were built so close to one another that at times I had to turn sideways to fit between them. Occasionally I had to duck while turning to avoid the naked electrical wires strung overhead. No street ran in a straight line for more than twenty feet without careening off at a random, vertiginous angle.
After advancing through this maze for several minutes, I emerged into a courtyard built up to two stories on all sides, not more than 500 feet square, with a great blue god in the middle, twice the size of a human being. This was the only space in the slum where the watery sun could illuminate the pavement without passing through a trellis of clothes lines, power lines, and architectural promontories, and the only space wide enough to walk with comparable ease for more than a few paces. The effect was intoxicating and over-awing, long before the arrival of the inevitable and cliched am-I-the-first-Westerner-to-see-this moment.
This memory returned to me as I was reading Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, when he discusses the invention of the formal axis terminating in a church or some other monument. This is a familiar form in our age, since it was considered the exemplar of civic grandeur for several centuries in Europe (it is also a natural, if rarely employed form in a gridded city built of skyscrapers — the view up Park towards Grand Central in New York and the view down LaSalle towards the Board of Trade in Chicago being notable examples).
According to Mumford, the axis was the quintessential urban form of the Baroque city, first employed in the approach to Santa Croce in Florence and spreading from Florence like a disease to the rest of Europe. His contempt for the form is obvious, and he laments in particular the “dreary” approaches opened up in front of the old cathedrals, which used to be approachable only by twists and turns, like the idol in the slum. Certainly, even if used in the service of the Church, the linear approach to Santa Croce testifies to the glory of Man, not G-d. Mystery has been conspicuously eradicated; every form is patent and legible. From the formal axis it’s a short step to van der Rohe.
There is much to be said for the beauty of straight lines, and for Baroque urbanism in general, but the slum-dwellers and the medieval Europeans understood religion better than the Florentines. A visitor to a medieval European town looking for its church would stumble suddenly into a small open space in the presence of a tremendous vertical element whose face was a mass of flowers, monsters and saints. Like my sudden stumbling onto Krishna, this slow, difficult approach to the transcendent could be read as an allegory of Augustine’s approach to G-d: a slow, difficult inward movement until you come to the very center of yourself and find G-d pulling you up and outside.
While I appreciate the aesthetic of a community that grows organically, such growth makes it very difficult to install water, sewer, and utilities in any manageable manner. Is the giddy chaos of an organic community (and we won’t even talk about the violence of the slums in places like India) worth the lack of sanitation?Report
Agreed, but surely there has to be something of a happy medium. We could lose a lot of restrictive regulations of form (not to mention terrible and counter-productive regulations of parking) without compromising sanitation.
And it’s worth noting that the slums in India are not really violent at all (in contrast to the slums in, say, Rio).Report
“We could lose a lot of restrictive regulations of form…”
Does this mean you oppose form-based zoning?Report
I meant form in a general sense, including regulations about minimum lot acreage, maximum lot coverage, minimum setback lines and height restrictions. Form-based codes are definitely better than use-based zoning, but form-based codes are at best a concession to cultural degeneracy. They do set a low bar of ugliness and hostility to pedestrians below which developments cannot fall. They certainly don’t guarantee, and can sometimes inhibit, forms that make a city really beautiful.Report
I’ve seen sources that say Indian zoning regulations are stricter on the whole than those in the U.S., but much less strictly enforced.Report
I don’t know about zoning specifically, but land-use regulations are definitely very tight in Mumbai, at least, where this slum was. That’s one of the reasons there are so many slums, some of which are fairly opulent.Report
From what I’ve read, one major problem in bringing public infrastructure (roads, power, water, sewage) to these communities is a lack of clear title to the land. Not surprisingly, none (well, few) residents have a deed. And the public resistance to selecting a utility corridor and just bulldozing everyone in the way can be quite strong. So local government (which might be quite deferential to the family claiming title to the land on which the slum is located) can find itself tied up in knots when it tries to bring services to these communities.
There are a few nonprofits that focus on these issues. One I’m aware of is the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.Report
Francis,
Are you in the planning field in some way, or just an interested observer? Your comments about witnessing left-of-center New Urbanist types is one thing — that is, something that a lot of people could experience —, but I’ve heard few references to the Lincoln Institute.Report
This was actually what brought me to the slum in the first place. I was working with a non-profit that tried to serve as an intermediary between the slums and the formal structures of Indian governments. One of the first things they always did when entering a new slum was talk to every resident and draw up a map of “properties.”Report
Ms. Jacobs on North End, Boston’s so-called slum:
The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people talking. Had it not been a cold January day, there would surely have been people sitting. The general street atmosphere of buoyancy, friendliness, and good health was so infectious that I began asking directions of people just for the fun of getting in on some talk.
Great post.Report
Hmmm… not sure how to do links well, but here is a picture I took in Marseille of a church that is only accessible by a long alleyway leading to a small space between buildings (visible in the picture)
http://gradstudentmadness.blogspot.com/2008/06/hidden-back-alley-church-in-marseille.htmlReport
Interesting. Somewhere I’ve got an almost identical picture of a church in Vienna.Report
This is what more bloggers should be doing, writing idiosyncratic pieces that are unlikely to be written by anyone else. Well done.Report
Someone else has read The City in History! I don’t feel like such a nerd anymore!
And yeah, this is an excellent post and something I think aspiring urban planning departments really need better experience with. Organically built cities without the benefit of central planning or national infrastructure + high wealth give us an interesting perspective on how people like to live, or even how people are inclined to live in communities.Report
I believe I have seen approximations of your organic cities in the US and Canada where small towns have grown and incorporated adjacent small agricultural homesteads or mining claims over time. Streets and roads run haphazardly, housing enclaves exist surrounded by fields and paddocks, etc. It is sprawl, yes, but the winding roads do lead to a coherent CBD and usually abandoned rail line. Unless the original town has really increased in size and population, it still lacks a mall or big box store. The architecture may not be aesthetically pleasing in all cases but the snse of community is there.Report
Related (re zoning regs having adverse outcomes)
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/03/libertarians-sprawl-and-land-use.phpReport