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.
The sun is hidden away by darkening skies and a faint drizzle starts to fall. Suddenly my cellphone lights up: Flash Flood Warning. The rain starts pouring down and everybody out on foot starts to run for cover. From the white-painted window in a café I can see the manhole covers dancing on jets of water. New Orleans is in the same predicament as the Netherlands, it’s below sea-level, the entire downpour has to be pumped out. While at the end of the 19th century the drainage system managed to handle 85 per cent of the rainfall, today all the buildings and roads have reduced this capacity to 20 per cent. And now not only New Orleans but also the US government brings in Dutch experts in order to cope with the effects of global warming.
Although it’s almost ten years since Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 per cent of the city, with 103,000 lost homes, New Orleans is still far from being rebuilt. Architect and critic Michael Sorkin has, together with Carol McMichael Reese and Anthony Fontenot, assembled an imposingly rich anthology of voices in New Orleans Under Reconstruction: The Crisis of Planning. Along with a thorough, in-depth description of a variety of mostly green projects, which range from privately founded ones like Brad Pitt’s Make it Right, university initiated ones focusing on rebuilding and cultural landscaping, to the city’s so-called Goody Clancy master plan, the 544-page book gives an insight into the challenges of urban planning today, with in-depth analysis by the likes of Christine Boyer, David Dixon, Laura Kurgan, Byron Mouton and many others. Urban sociologist Mike Davis is, as usual, excellent when talking about demography, racism, economics and planning when in the foreword he states that 40 per cent of the New Orleans population, mainly Afro-Americans, has been forced into exile. The politically forced shrinking of the city’s socio-economical footprint was also an important part of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, from which a chapter is reprinted, describing the way business leaders and others tried to bypass the city council. Former mayor Ray Nagin, sentenced to ten years in prison for corruption, stated his own version of the war on poverty in an interview for the AP just after Katrina: “As a practical matter, these poor folks don’t have the resources to go back to our city, just like they didn’t have the resources to get out of our city. So we won’t get all those folks back. That’s not what I want, it’s just a fact.” But New Orleans is not an ordinary city, the protests were strong and Fats Domino’s defiant sign “Save Our Neighborhood: No Bulldozing!” is still up at Holy Cross in the vulnerable, low–lying Lower Ninth Ward. New Urbanism’s Andrés Duany writes that Chicago was rebuilt three years after the big fire 1871, but in New Orleans rebuilding hadn’t even started a year later. It took FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) nine months to decide which areas could be rebuilt, a slowness paired with rushed demolition that caused many people to leave the city once and for all.
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The book shows the richness of plans, but also how planning culture has been left to collapse since the days of Ronald Reagan in a pattern similar to the deregulation of Wall Street. As the rain stops, architect Daniel Winkert, who worked as a city planner before joining John Williams Architects, one of the most active -local offices, joins me. He sits down with a coffee and explains that such a varied and densely populated multicultural city like the old centre of New Orleans would be impossible to build with the suburban zoning code in place today. Planning culture has much to learn, not only with regard to coping with rising sea levels, but also concerning a re-evaluation of modernism. That insight resonates quite well with Michael Sorkin, who in his introduction to the anthology claims that the inability to achieve consensus around a single planning ideal is actually quite good, because it allows for different solutions which, in this case, can mirror New Orleans’ richness of cultural variety.
New Orleans Under Reconstruction: The Crisis of Planning.
Anthony Fontenot, Carol McMichael Reese and Michael Sorkin (eds.)
Verso (New York and London), 2014
