I presented my course, “Urban Fragments: Form and Politics of American Cities” at Cities of the Americas, a workshop organized by the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities.
2014/04/02 • 17:29 0
#CartaNebot
Una carta para el alcalde de Guayaquil, escrita entre todos. A pedido del Storefront for Art and Architecture, estoy elaborando una carta al alcalde de Guayaquil, Ab. Jaime Nebot. He creado un hashtag, #CartaNebot y lo difundí en colaboración con los amigos de Gkillcity.com. Ahora estoy en el proceso de recoger los tuits y editar la carta. Pueden leer una descripción completa del pedido aquí y ver la curadoría en proceso acá. Acaban de publicar una nota en el diario Hoy!!
2013/05/05 • 21:31 0
thresholds 41: REVOLUTION!
i just edited thresholds, the journal of the MIT department of architecture. thresholds 41: REVOLUTION! is available for download here.
What actions are prompted by revolution in the space of the city? Which publics take part in this struggle, and who are the agents that mobilize it? And after a revolution has subsided, how is it remembered, represented and memorialized? thresholds 41: REVOLUTION! turns to the history, design, and cultural production of the public realm as a site of dissensus. Rather than focusing on a specific revolutionary time and place, we have strived to include different periods and regions, organizing contributions in terms of the relations they establish between sites, actors, and contexts. In the essays and designs featured in these pages, political struggle often shifts established roles—agitators create new types of public space, designers become activists and fundraisers, individual figures fade in favor of collectives or groups, and actions are best remembered through misrepresentation. How do we write revolution, who writes it and for whom? And, in turn, how does urban conflict inform writing, design, and cultural production at large? Our authors, designers, and artists open up revolution as subject, as event, and as historiographical problem—a problem complicated by discrete actions, multiple publics, critical practices, and the politics of display and remembrance. [keep reading on issuu]
Filed under: ., cities, cv, jarzombek, kant, koolhaas, le corbusier, memory, participation, politics, ruins
2013/03/31 • 00:28 0
buell dissertation colloquium 2013
i’ll be presenting my dissertation research at the buell dissertation colloquium, at columbia university, on april 6. my paper is titled “the machine in the pampas: buenos aires, 1943” and examines antonio bonet’s unbuilt project, casa amarilla, in the context of the large-scale urban works taking place in buenos aires and the military dictatorship installed in 1943. i argue casa amarilla attempted to resist the centralization of power by shifting formal characteristics of monumentality and centrality from the elites to the disenfranchised masses. the complete program is available here.
2012/07/10 • 16:57 0
what’s your project?
dpr_barcelona invited me to participate in this digital publication—my piece is titled “what’s your project?” and it’s in english and spanish. it has a great line-up if i say so myself, check it out! cover above by klaustoon.
2012/06/21 • 20:59 0
urbanisms: a guide
new urbanism. pitch: it’s not new. cons: nobody likes duany, particularly after those weird comments about asia.
everyday urbanism. pitch: it’s what you see every day. cons: name not sexy enough, came out in middle of pomo recap, everyone forgot about it.
landscape urbanism. pitch: you guys, landscape architects are urban too. cons: waldheim also not that charismatic.
ecological urbanism pitch: must brand + must sell books. and it’s ecological, baby. cons: how many urbanisms can one school hold?
tactical urbanism. pitch: it’s everyday urbanism with a sexier name and diy attitude! cons: the hipster urbanism, easily appropriated. think street vendors turned into cupcake carts, and occupy actions turned into street yoga.
post-ideological urbanism. pitch: honestly i don’t get it. looks like made-up brand for journal. cons: go read althusser.
planetary urbanism. pitch: it’s at the scale of the planet!! cons: but looking at lefebvre? how does that work? go take the class i guess.
kickstarter urbanism. pitch: it’s crowdsourced project-ing. cons: popularity-based.
i keed because i love (only some of you guys, obviously). which ones am i missing?
2012/02/28 • 03:35 0
¿guayaquil, menos ciudad?
“¿guayaquil, menos ciudad?“ mi artículo sobre los problemas del crecimiento horizontal de guayaquil está en el número 36 de gkillcity.com.
2011/12/26 • 23:40 0
shelter as symbol
architecture—and the expanded, overlapping disciplines of urban planning, art, and other types of cultural production—has played a prominent role in the development of the occupy movement. from tahrir square—a protest known primarily for the name of its site, an urban square—to the acampadas—encampments, meaning the act of camping out, of settling a shelter on the outdoors—the occupations of 2011 have been very much based on the appropriation of space as the vehicle for protest.
because the basic need for shelter has prompted some of the occupations in the us—houses foreclosed, houses without people and people without homes—settling usually private activities in the public realm takes on a special poignancy. by displaying the private act of dwelling on the public realm, protestors have made visible the disparities and inequalities of the system. the problems generated by dealing with homeless people trying to find a refuge at occupy camps only highlight these disparities.
however, it is important to distinguish this type of conflictive appropriation from more phenomenological discourses of clearing space and making place. in the excitement of the protests, some critics have seen occupy as an argument for more heideggerian strategies, without understanding that the tactics of the movement have been, from the start, discursive, argumentative, and political—and therefore incompatible with such objectives. that is, physical occupation has been one of many tactics of occupying different types of space (including the space of the media, and digital space) and the movement should not be reduced to the purely physical act of bodies on the commons. in other words, the occupation has included both the physical realm of the commons (as theorized by hannah arendt) and the public realm of media (as theorized by jürgen habermas).
perhaps because of this, within these protests, the tent—a very fragile, small shelter—has gone beyond its utilitarian role to become the symbol of the movement. for now i’ll end with some examples of tent tactics:
the beautiful floating tents of occupy cal at uc berkeley, on 18 november 2011
ows marched to duarte plaza using lit tents as their banners on 20 november 2011
protesters were asked to pitch a tent in their own lawns as symbolic protest by occupy la around 30 nov 2011:
the wonderful dancing tents of melbourne confused the hell out of police on 3 dec 2011.
the night after occupy boston got evicted, the general assembly was held at the boston common. the crowd had mixed feelings until someone brought out a tent—this tent was not evicted! it was all a bit ridiculous and sentimental, but also very direct. yes, they didn’t take it all. yes, we will still occupy.
occupy boston makes a miniature tent city in front of the fed on 24 december 2011—they got evicted!
finally, the movement to occupy symbolically by pitching a tent in your own private space has been reinforced with these diy tiny tents. i like this one occupying an atm:
as the movement hunkers down to strategize over the winter, there is some time to reflect on what has happened and what comes next. i’d like to say that what comes next has to do with going from symbol to action—architecture as protest, is it possible? can architecture ever truly be revolutionary? some say no. yet at the same time, following chantal mouffe, architecture always inevitably has a political dimension—it is for us to decide which one.
2011/11/19 • 17:29 0
on slums and farms
the recent urbanism wars have focused on the problems of urban and suburban united states. however, on a broader scope, the globe is facing more pressing problems in slum growth and rural abandonment. how these problems are related is an example on how discussions between new and landscape urbanism should be rerouted into more productive conversations.
slums,* or to be precise, illegal settlements, are often romanticized as sites of individual entrepreneurship and spontaneous growth. they are actually examples of ruthless big (illegal) business where the few take advantage of the many. i’ll be specific and address the situation i’m more familiar in (though hardly an expert). in guayaquil, illegal settlements have been developed by a few savvy individuals, who have organized private land takeover under the premise that unproductive land must be reverted to the needy (details in spanish here). however valid these claims might be, this stolen land is then sold off, usually to rural migrants looking for opportunities they lack in the countryside. slums are privatized ventures, where everything is sold at a profit: public transportation and infrastructure comes later, as city halls start grappling with the needs of these unplanned areas. the profit made in such operations in not only economic: the control over these large populations also gives these land traffickers enormous electoral power, and many of them have gone on to weigh in in presidential elections or even participate as local candidates.
the other side of this problem is the diminishing rural workforce. in a primarily agricultural country, large areas of high premium land remain uncultivated. years of abandonment have perpetuated the idea that the countryside holds no future. recent increased attention to medium and small-sized communities holds some promise, but land ownership is still a complicated problem—too few own too much, leading to unsustainable models in which the land either sits unused or demands a pattern of work force exploitation that seems (at least from the outside) closer to medieval feudalism.
we know that the problems of the city are tied to the problems of the countryside—it’s just basic logic. but migrations don’t stop there—the problems of the ‘third world’ (compromise quotations—can’t think of suitable word much as i dislike this one) are tied to those of the ‘first.’ or did you think we’re migrating north for the weather?
* let’s not call them favelas—they are favelas in brazil, villas miseria in argentina, pueblos jovenes in peru, invasiones in ecuador. the generalized use of the word favela is regrettable.
2011/11/19 • 17:25 0
notes from a trip: slums in south america
disclaimer: not meant to be comprehensive or scientific in any way, this post just consolidates my impressions while traveling through brazil, argentina, and uruguay in the summer of 2011, plus my experiences from ecuador, where i’m from. it is a response to my concern with the tendency to generalize slums as sites of democracy and political horizontality. my intention here is to problematize that misconception and to show how property ownership and land occupation alter the ways in which slums operate, although my knowledge of these sites is uneven.
the favela tour in rio (as awful as it sounds) actually managed things very gracefully—by the simple act of not allowing pictures of people, the whole thing worked out better than i expected. they took us to rocinha and canoas, two older and well-established favelas in the morros, the very steep hills that you can see in most rio de janeiro postcards. the morros are quite beautiful, right against the backdrop of the ocean, and understandably the images of the favelas there have become incredibly seductive for designers. this is design from the bottom-up, design of the people—in contrast to the monotone aesthetic of brasilia, the favelas offer the alluring appearance of democracy and collaboration.
i found my guide’s pink-colored vision of the favela system hard to believe, but it might be true. she said the brazilian state is supposed to take care of housing according to the constitution. since they don’t, they allow the appropriation of the public land in the morros. each favela is governed by either drug lords, policemen, or former policemen-turned favela lords, crime being higher outside than inside favelas because of their tight control. some are being intervened in advance of the brazil world cup/olympics extravaganza coming up.
the following day i saw some favelas on my own as i walked to pedregulho—but these were not the colorful and picturesque favelas of the morros. like most of the slums surrounding rio, these are makeshift settlements sprawling around major highways, with all the inconvenience of long expensive commutes. they reminded me of the slums in guayaquil—some smaller pockets were also much more precarious and similar to what i am used to considering slums, versus the concrete block buildings of the more established, older favelas.
similar to rio, slums in guayaquil (ecuador) started in the hills (not as high and dramatic as the brazilian ones) but once those were gone, they spread to the periphery. they are now eating up the valuable mangrove that originally acted as the land’s natural protection against seasonal floods, a porous barrier that—as slums are legalized—is being transformed into cement and man-made drainage that is often not enough to resist the floods of el nino. thus while the city depends on the slums as it houses its workforce, the gradual legalization of the land and improvement of their conditions contributes to an ecological threat.
the land occupation problem in guayaquil is well-known to all. slums are usually not in public land: they occupy very large properties, usually old farmland that has been absorbed into the city’s periphery. the illegal occupation of the land is not free—land sharks sell the land in advance and organize the settlers to take over, usually overnight. this is not bottom-up urbanism, but organized control in which the settlers have little say. the organization that results is a sprawling, thin layer that spreads, rhizome-like, beyond the horizon. it is also a political problem—these large populations are coerced or seduced into voting blocks, and controlling the land also means controlling the politicians that get elected thanks to it. far from an exercise in democracy, it is often the authority of capital that decides elections.
buenos aires is a great city—a large core of apartment buildings with retail in the lower floor, with a surprising amount built in the 1930s and 40s. it is both modern and urban—rationalist buildings squeezed into mostly dense, walkable streets, albeit with some mega-avenues that don’t make much sense except as vanity projects. it is only when you leave the city that you first encounter slums. the only one i saw within the core is right next to the bus station, but once outside, they are a reflection of the horizontality of the pampa landscape—if slums in rio and guayaquil are sprawling, they still obey the logic of the grid—the sign of planning. outside buenos aires, they seemed strewn around, almost like the result of a natural disaster. as the bus leaves the city, you can see them loosening. i walked through a small settlement outside montevideo, in uruguay that had similar characteristics (again looking for an architectural site)—it seemed more like a rural town intruded upon by a large highway. these slums seemed to hover in some limbo with the worst qualities of both city and country: pollution mixed with sprawl and distance to basic needs.
finally, the slums that surround guarulhos are perhaps the most surreal of all. guarulhos is the city that houses the sao paulo international airport—it has a propensity to fog up (my sao paulo host: that’s why they built the airport there [/irony]). i had to make several bus trips from guarulhos to sao paulo, often very early in the morning, and the landscape looks like that scene in terry gilliam’s brazil (appropriately) where very tall skyscrapers start bursting from the ground. skyscrapers seem to rise from the fog, but when it clears up you realize they are surrounded by slums—the demand for housing is so large that the slums are being replaced by skyscrapers, but there is no transition—they just seem to have landed in the middle of the seemingly infinite landscape of the slums.
friends that visit me in guayaquil often question how can anyone live in the sight of such misery. perhaps it is the magnitude of the problem that makes it bearable—it disarms you. but the fact is, we all live with such misery: you, who may have never been in guayaquil, as much as i. we are all part of the global capitalist cycle that churns out slums in south america and in the rest of the world—some more evident than others.
