Humanity is facing a global crisis fueled by human-impacted environmental conditions and reflected in the planetary expansion of urbanization processes worldwide. As a result, urban research, planning and design are called upon to play a relevant role in evaluating possible courses of action and ways out through imagination. The 20th N-AERUS conference, held in cooperation with the Habitat Unit as a digital event at the TU Berlin, sought answers to complex but indispensable questions under the guiding theme of “How to plan in a world of uncertainty?”.
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Planning in the context of uncertainty means that actors in urban development and architecture are confronted with massive challenges while attempting to sustainably plan for them. Climate change is a poignant example, transforming the underlying environmental circumstances, thereby increasing related risks. Such uncertainties within the environment are exacerbated and compounded by poverty, political instability and other factors, comprising further significant obstacles to sustainable urban development. This is a matter of concern for cities across the world, especially where people’s access to resources is limited or even restricted – a situation that can be predominantly observed in the Global South.
How to plan for and with uncertainty? This was the topic of a conference initiated by Paola Alfaro-d’Alençon, steering committee member of N-AERUS and DFG Research Fellow at the Habitat Unit of the TU Berlin, Institute of Architecture. From February 4th to 6th practitioners, researchers and academics from Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and Europe were invited as participants and speakers. Among them were members of N-AERUS, the “Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanization in the South”. The network deals with questions of planning in developing countries and the possible role institutions of higher learning, especially in Europe, can play to find adequate solutions.
“Forced eviction is seen to undermine the adaptive capacity to deal with stress and crisis.”
What did the presenters and speakers discover and propose? Ximena de la Barra (International Consultant) pointed out that those with access to financial resources don’t suffer from crisis, but instead, they profit. She concluded that without related accountability, democracy and its institutions are weakened in the process. Rene Hofmann (Cities Alliance) called for tenure security as a key to creating stability and counteracting uncertainties in cities. Especially forced eviction is seen to undermine the adaptive capacity to deal with stress and crisis.
“Rethinking current models and pedagogies related to how people make sense of urban space seem to be possible solutions.”
Loren Landau (Oxford Department of International Development and ACMS-University of Witwatersrand) asked how we can foster the right to the city and build a common future, if people are stuck in one place against their own will and unable to return home due to the pandemic.
Rethinking current models and pedagogies related to how people make sense of urban space seem to be possible solutions. Catalina Ortiz (Bartlett Development Unit, UCL) illustrated how co-production can serve to contest urban narratives, centered on a seemingly simple idea: cooking and places of cooking. Here, stories can function as learning devices that can be supported by digital architecture tools such as BIM.
Warren Smit (AURI Network) described poignantly how Capetown flood management specialists see flooding very differently. He emphasized that co-production offers a way to overcome such obstacles, e.g. by introducing long-term historical perspectives. He also stressed that co-production can support, yet not substitute public participation.
“Cities are the locus of crisis, yet also the places of coping with crisis through social infrastructure, planning and inter- and transdisciplinary learning.”
We asked the initiator, Paola Alfaro-d’Alençon about her views of the conference results: The international exchange between participants fostered a better understanding of the framework conditions in which uncertainties take place. In this context, vulnerabilities are seen to increase against the background of the privatization of public amenities. At the same time, this plays out differently according to cultures that have specific ways of dealing with natural resources. The conference also illustrated how cities are the locus of crisis, yet also the places of coping with crisis through social infrastructure, planning and inter- and transdisciplinary learning.
N-AERUS conference, TU Berlin
Click here to watch the conference.
This year’s ASLA Conference examined the US identity in turbulent times. A congress report
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The expression “the elephant in the room” is delightfully ambiguous. On the one hand, it refers to something important that everybody knows about, yet nobody addresses explicitly. On the other hand, however, it implies a huge, blundering something that can break down existing structures without being particularly sensitive about it. In terms of this ambiguity, the current US president Trump represented precisely that elephant at this year’s annual conference of the ASLA, the American Society of Landscape Architects, in San Diego. Although not much was explicitly said about the Donald and his, at times, elephantine politics, their consequences for present day America, however, played an implicit role all the time.
This certainly applied most directly to the numerous panels and talks on the consequences of climate change. The environmental politician and researcher Gina McCarthy laid the atmospheric foundation for this as it were. In her rhetorically brilliant talk, she clarified that the Obama government launched many specific legislative initiatives. Not all of these have been revised so far – and it is hardly possible for all of them to be revoked either. “The train is running”, was her ultimately optimistic message. The audience acknowledged the speech with standing ovations, while McCarthy’s preacher-like style required some getting used to for a fact-orientated European.
It’s a matter of spatial, but also historical integrity
Events such as the ASLA Conference almost inevitably transmit a kind of mitigated, fundamental ecological optimism, as they are dealing with concrete improvement steps. One field session, for instance, presented the regeneration of the “San Diego River” ecosystem. Other panels introduced solutions for areas in the hot and dry southwest of the USA, which are becoming partly uninhabitable due to global warming, as well as approaches for better air through landscape architecture. The impression: The field of landscape architecture recognises and assumes its responsibility even though the political climate may be rough.
This socio-political climate however also played another role. Many discussions addressed the identity-forming and negotiating role of spatial planning. The United States of America (and others) certainly appear to be a country in search of its “identity”. A kind of existential uncertainty prevails as far as society as a whole is concerned. This means that it is possible for the space in which we live to assume an orientation-providing function – for entire societies, for smaller cultural entities, but also for individuals and their direct social environment. Highly interesting in this context was a panel on US-American postwar sites.
The head of the “Parks Conservancy” of Pittsburgh presented the sensitive restructuring of the Mellow Square in Pittsburgh. The landscape architect Ken Smith, who is very well known in the USA, presented three different new designs from New York and San Francisco, including the exterior space in front of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Seagram Building in Manhattan. All of the presented projects involving outdoor spaces showed that these are a negotiation of the US-American collective memory. Post-war modernism shaped the US culture – and accordingly needs to be treated with care. According to Charles Birnbaum, head of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, it’s a matter of spatial, but also historical integrity.
The elephant “La Frontera”
Of course, the question here is, who assigns integrity or who does it apply to? The idea of society as a homogenous entity is falling apart at the moment, not just in the USA. Accordingly, different perspectives need to be brought together in landscape planning or at least listened to. Permitting heterogeneity was quasi the main subject of many panels. This would allow for the emergence of “Landscapes with an edge”, according to the tenor of a discussion on the significance of subculture in planning. The plea of planner and podcaster Michael Todoran (who runs the podcast “LArchitect”) was to allow for provocation and create space for subversion. The question here being where subculture and provocation end, and where mere commercialisation begins. It could for instance be discussed whether eScooters, which also fill the streets in the USA, can be considered a subculture, as was suggested in the panel.
Nevertheless – the cultural sensitivity of this year’s ASLA Conference was high. One culturally charged topic, however, which would have been obvious, given that the event was held in San Diego, was unfortunately largely left out: Mexico and the planning challenge of the border. While there was a (quickly booked up) field trip to Tijuana, the border almost never came up in the content considered by the panels. And that despite the new ASLA president Wendy Miller stating in an interview with Garten + Landschaft that the planners are certainly aware of the planning dimensions of “La Frontera” in mind (you can read the full interview at www.topos-magazine.com). But perhaps this border, too, represents some kind of elephant in the room in the thinking space of US culture. It’s there, it’s huge, but it gets blanked out tenaciously.
This year the Association for Borderlands Studies Annual Conference was held in April in San Diego, California, as part of the Western Social Science Association Annual Conference. With topics ranging from water management to globalization, gender, securitization, education, human rights, governance, and infrastructure, and research focusing on borders areas all over the world, the conference offered several perspectives on what border scholars are focusing on today.
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With the conference taking place in San Diego and moving to Tijuana for the final day, it was not surprising that the border between the U.S. and Mexico received special attention during the event. The first excursion, organized jointly by the Association for Borderlands Studies and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies of the University of California, San Diego, provided the participants with first-hand experience of the context interested by most of the following days’ discussions. Former California State Senator Denise Moreno Ducheny guided the conference participants in an intense day of exploration and professional reports from those who experience the border daily.
Starting point was the Cross Border Xpress (CBX), an airport terminal in the U.S. with a secure bridge over the border to the Tijuana International Airport. Designed by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta, the terminal building features elements of Mexican architecture. The bridge, which is the only pedestrian crossing subject to a fee, can be accessed only by people with a flight ticket, but it has promoted cross-border cooperation between the two countries and continues to facilitate traveling for people who need to reach various destinations in Mexico from the United States.
Although preposterous marks of securitization continue to permeate the border experience, like the fence of barbed wire marking where the line of the border passes over the roof of the bridge, CBX is an economic success. Future developments will include two hotels, a restaurant, a convention center, and additional parking.
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How to change the narrative of the border space?
The interesting case of this private border-crossing infrastructure was discussed during a panel on various dimensions of cross-border synergies. Talking about the concept of binational transfrontier metropolis, Lawrence Herzog highlighted the potential role of placemaking in the urban design of the cross-border landscape to activate the border space and change the narrative of alien, militarized space we witness today. Yet, while the CBX is certainly normalizing and reframing the space of the border, it belongs to the group of profit-driven practices trying to represent the border in a brighter light, a phenomenon well described in the same panel by Christophe Sohn. The question remains: How can we change the narrative of the border space through placemaking without letting profit-driven, business-like activities monopolize such a culturally rich venue of exchange?
After CBX, the next point of the guided tour was the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, where long lines of trucks were waiting to cross the border. The waiting times have recently grown exponentially in several ports of entry because hundreds of Customs and Border Protection officers were reassigned to Border Patrol in order to help dealing with the migrants crisis. Some say the actual reason behind this measure is to create a feeling of emergency at the border, and to generate dissent around the arrival of migrants from Central America. These motives are always very hard to prove, although it is undeniable that people’s perception of migratory phenomena has an extremely important role in the way they are dealt with by political authorities.
Space to talk about fears and expectations
During a keynote about the Migrant Caravan from Central America, Olivia T. Ruiz Marrujo described the response of local residents to the caravan’s arrival. In particular, she made a very poignant comparison between the arrival to Tijuana, where the population was not informed and the authorities were unprepared to deal with the situation, and the arrival to Piedra Negras, where the residents were informed and the authorities well organized. In the first case a narrative of danger spread, with language reminiscent of Trump’s, with meetings held on how to protect local families from the caravan. Even the authorities associated migrants with criminals. In the second case, the response was very well coordinated and enough spaces were made available to welcome the migrants. The response of locals was in turn much more positive. She concluded her keynote by saying that, if something was to be learned from the experience in Tijuana, is that it is really important to pay attention to people’s perception: in particular, authorities should make sure that local residents do not see migrants as opponents in a zero-sum game of resource acquisition. They should provide information, share what they know about the situation, and give people space to talk about their fears and expectations. Finally, they should pay attention to social media, keeping an eye on what people are sharing and how they are reacting.
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Role of water as a commodity
Finally, the excursion took the participants to the Tijuana River Watershed, where they had the opportunity to learn more about the importance of the transborder water management system in maintaining the biodiversity of the estuary. This area was also the object of several panels during the conference, touching on topics of great relevance today, not only from the perspective of border studies but also sustainability and globalization, providing historical perspectives on water management and the role of water as a commodity. The presentations highlighted how, the scarcer water becomes, the more violent are the conflicts people start in order to access it.
What the field of border studies is missing
Unfortunately, although the panels were cleverly combining different perspectives, their highly theoretical approaches often rendered exchanges difficult. Whenever a less academic approach was presented, the conversation immediately became more lively and fruitful, highlighting precisely what the field of border studies is missing today. The very notion of border requires a more integrated approach: non-academic professionals should be part of the discussion, both as speakers and audiences.
It is time to cross the border of academia
Although the ABS conference is definitely making an effort to become more inclusive in its selection of participants by welcoming researches not affiliated to universities, academic conferences remain largely unaccessible. This is due mainly to economic barriers: fees, flight tickets, and hotels in usually expensive locations discourage those who are not granted a research budget. Yet, financial issues might not be the only reason. If one is not a scholar in a conventional sense, one is unlikely to even hear about this kind of events.
If academic fields such as border studies wish to make an impact on the real world, it is time to cross the border of academia and organize events that foster collaboration and exchange between scholars, politicians, designers, educators, technicians, and other professionals.
“Building land tends to appear of its own accord, even when one is not looking to designate it. Open spaces on the other hand, have the tendency to disappear if one fails to take active care of them!” Fritz Schumacher, 1932.
With this, still up to date quotation, the Vienna University of Technology invites on 28 and 29 September 2017 to an international conference under the title „Urban Densification – The Challenge for Open Space“. The event is concerned with the sustained growth of European metropolitan areas and the resulting shortage of public free space. Well-known planners are invited and present various strategies for sustainable urban spatial planning.
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Urban Space Shortage
European city planners are confronted with a paradox: as the rural population continues to move into the cities, the desire for larger and higher-quality residential and leisure areas increases. Since the available space – especially in dense areas – is only available to a limited extent, this results in a space shortage. Dealing with this topic, the Department of Landscape Planning and Gardening at the Vienna University of Technology launched the conference. The following question is the focus:
How will it be possible to do justice to the increasing importance of urban green and open spaces despite the need for denser development in towns and cities? Can we resolve this apparent contradiction?
Lectures and Excursions
Strategies for dealing with the dwindling space reserves will be presented on the first day of the conference. Well-known experts from planning offices and city planning offices describe their approach in eight lectures. On the second day, the participants go outside: on two trips to the Stuwerviertel in Vienna and the Seestadt Aspern, various strategies of spacial planning are presented. Participants must pay a fee of 120 € (100 € early bird, until 31.05.17), whereby students can participate for free.
Registration is available here and is possible until 8th September 2017.
