Auto-diagnosis and collective action: The Permanent Workshop for Participatory Design.

Los Comités de Tierra Urbana:

The Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Councils, CTUs) are self-organising federations of families living in the barrios. The CTUs, officially enabled by a presidential decree in 2002, are a direct continuation of the struggle by groups which began to form in the late 1980s around the campaign for rights to water and land.

These CTUs, enabled by government land reforms, gain collective ownership of the land they occupy for housing. By granting security of tenure and removing the threat of eviction a fertile situation is created where incremental improvements of the barrios can occur under the guidance of the communities themselves and with the assistance of a wide range of urban professionals, including architects. The CTUs also form around the creation of new settlements (Campamentos de Pioneros). These settlements offer the chance to create new, customised living environments driven by the ideas and desires of people themselves.

Crucial to the development of the new settlements is the fundamental participation of the community members at every level of the development of the place. The Taller permanente de Diseño Participativo (Permanent Workshop for Participatory Design) are a group of architects and planners drawn from universities and the public sector who are committed to providing communities with the resources they need to collectively develop their new homes.

A group of pioneros visit the site of their future community at Hoyo de La Puerta. Image courtesy of Taller Permanente de Diseño Participativo

At Hoyo de la Puerta, a new settlement being developed on the southern outskirts of Caracas, the process of designing new houses for 200 families has expanded to encompass a survey of all aspects of community life. The Taller describes this process as Auto-diagnosis, where the community members themselves research their own problems and situation and generate solutions from that understanding.

At Hoyo de la Puerta the auto-diagnosis began with a thorough analysis of the site, its connections to other parts of the city, as well as its local connections and characteristics (water, slope, orientation, access etc). The participants then began to ask many questions of themselves: How will we move around the new community? what areas do we need? what services? what kinds of production? how will we look after children? What emerged was a complex and richly layered vision for the community, a dense programmatic brief detailing all the requirements for the new community including housing, gas-lines, hostels for visitors, community childcare, workshops, clinics, orchards, chicken-houses, hairdressers, pathways, places for playing dominos and many other things. From this brief they then discussed how much of the site should be used for each purpose, how programs could be combined and spaces shared.

The group then returned to the site to begin to plan how these various functions could be applied to the specific piece of land. During multiple site visits and through the process of constructing a contour model of the land they identified the best locations for building (with low slope and without environmental protection constraints). With the use of the model they then began to arrange the various programs on the site, considering which programs needed to be physically linked, centrally located, public or private and in proximity to transport and services.

Participants plan where the specific parts of their new community will be located. Image courtesy of Taller Permanente de Diseño Participativo

With the large scale vision for the entire community now sketched out the workshop shifted focus to the micro-scale, that of the individual house. Continuing with the process of auto-diagnosis the participants began with an analysis of their current living situation. They compiled the demographics of who was in each house, studied what activities those people did, recorded the sizes and characteristics of spaces in which those activities took place and commented on the quality and practicality of those spaces. After this they discussed ways in which things could be done better and what they would change in their houses and surrounding areas. From these exercises the group was able to produce some model house designs drawn from the needs identified by the people themselves.

Participants use an analysis of their existing houses to create plans for some new house types. Images courtesy of Taller Permanente de Diseño Participativo

The project is still in its early stages, waiting for approvals and funding to come through complicated bureaucratic channels, but the community now has a concrete plan for the development of their land. It is a plan which they own and understand inside-out because they created it, making it a powerful tool for argument. One participant mentioned to me that through the process she had learned to question everything about her situation. Not just the physical conditions but also social and political ones: “Why are we living in tiny shacks on the edge of a crumbly mountain when others have more than they could possibly use?

Urban Acupuncture: Chacao’s Vertical Gymnasium.

One of Villanueva’s former students and long-time collaborators is Mateo Pinto. Together with his brother Matias and Austrian architect Hubert Klumpner, Mateo designed the Vertical Gymnasium, built on the edge of the small inner-city Barrio Santa Cruz by the municipality of Chacao.

The Vertical Gymnasium draws on the barrio practice of maximising the available resources by taking a single open air basketball court and raising it to the roof thereby creating 3 levels for multiple overlapping programs below. These include: a judo area, an indoor basketball court, an indoor running track, a weights gym, a medical centre, meeting rooms and a rooftop basketball court.

The intention of the Vertical Gymnasium is to provide a dense bundle of services and recreational opportunities to the residents of Barrio Santa Cruz. The centre is used by local schools and sporting teams and even those not actively engaging with the centre are accommodated by the undercroft seating where motorcycle couriers congregate and local men gather to read newspapers shaded from the heat of the midday sun.

The Vertical Gymnasium could be seen in a number of ways. On one hand it is the generous gesture of the formal city stepping into the barrio to provide it with services. On the other hand, given that Barrio Santa Cruz is a relatively small barrio completely surrounded by formal development and that the Vertical Gymnasium presents a hard wall and opaque screens to the barrio, opening to and connecting more strongly with the formal street, it could equally be seen as the formal city encroaching on the barrio as providing services for it.

This raises questions more generally about the often non-participatory projects of ‘urban acupuncture’, which aim to connect the informal city more strongly with the formal city by inserting formal elements into it. But is it a connection or an invasion? Is it acupuncture or just a jab with a pin?

Informal Inventories: the tactics of Federico Villanueva:

Federico Villanueva is an architect, educator and activist. Together with his partner, Josefina Baldo, he has been researching and working on projects in the barrios for over 30 years. Together they oversaw CONAVI (Consejo Nacional de la Vivienda - National Housing Council) from 1999-2002.

The following is a summary of Villanueva’s ideas and tactics for architects working in the barrios. It is based on an interview with Federico Villanueva at his home in Caracas. Through our conversation I was able to learn some of the knowledge and tactics which he has developed through his long experience.

The barrio is more common, more successful and more efficient: The barrio is often viewed as an aberration, but it is the barrios where more than half the people of Venezuela live. In reality it is the formal city which is strange. The barrios are also much more productive. Over the last 20 years the barrios have grown each year by an average of 3.1% almost double the growth rate of housing in the formal city of 1.6%!

Getting many horses to run together: The key to successful projects is to get government, community movements and trained professions such as architects to all go in the same direction at the same time. This requires delicate negotiation and careful combining of often very different agendas.

The Architect and the Community: The architect brings the knowledge of alternative structures, materials and processes and the skills to analyse technical factors, manage multiple agendas, to see the big picture and coordinate individual actions. The community brings the knowledge of local conditions and relationships as well as the skills derived from constantly reconstructing their homes and facilities. Neither of these should be underestimated.

Architects at invasion: If it is possible the best time for the architect to get involved is during the initial land invasion. If the architect can have input at this initial stage then things will not need to be redone later.

Counting the stairs: The basis of any work must be a detailed study. Analyse the area, record the dimensions of every house, the slope of every road and path, the number of streetlights and stairs, the width and length of all the drainage channels. Then, when proposing improvements everything can be calculated and budgeted for: the length of electric cable required for new street lights, the amount of concrete to pave new pathways and so on.

Starting small: After the detailed study, begin with a small project: one house, one day-care centre. The people may be dubious at first but once they begin to see results they will be much more open to get involved. A successful small project can create an explosion in community participation.

Staying separate: When working with a community is it important to remain professional, don’t try to become part of the community. Treat them as you would any other client, explain the alternatives then leave the room. If you get too involved you may start to influence the outcome.

Build before you demolish: If relocation or rehousing is unavoidable, make sure you build the substitution house before you tear the old one down.

Building the City Twice: An Introduction to Venezuela’s Barrios.

View to Barrio San Agustín from Parque Central  in the centre of Caracas.

In Venezuela more than 50% of the population lives in the barrios, those sectors of the city built by residents themselves without official rights or provision of services, on unstable land, under constant threat of eviction and with no legal rights to the homes which they have, in many cases, occupied for generations.*

Barrio Mamera as seen from the Metro station.

The barrios are the spatial expression of a deep segregation within Venezuelan society. They contain within them many other types of exclusion; unemployment, lack of access to medical services and education, exposure to crime and violence.

The official city has always had an ambiguous relationship with the barrios. The barrios are home to the builders, drivers, nurses, teachers, cooks and cleaners on which the official city depends. It is a vast pool of cheap labour. Yet the official city refuses to recognise the crucial function of the barrio, referring to it only as a problem, a source of crime, an eyesore, and an urban blight. On most official maps the barrios do not exist at all, they are depicted as blank ‘green zones’.

A view from central Caracas towards the surrounding barrio

In Caracas they say the residents of the barrios had to build the city two times. First, brought into the city as cheap labour, they came as the construction workers who built the highways, stadiums and apartment buildings of the official city. Secondly, on finding no place for themselves in that city, they also worked by night, in solidarity, with rough materials and much imagination, to make their own city - the barrios.

In such a way the barrios are on one hand the expression of segregation and on the other the expression of the fight against that segregation. The residents of the barrios have had to fight over many generations to claim their right to occupy land, their rights to clean water, sewerage and electricity, their rights to medical care, to affordable, good quality food, to education and employment. This struggle continues in Venezuela today with growing support from the government as well as many urban professionals, including architects. 

SOUTH-NORTH. Transgressing Borders & Emerging Forms of Activist Architecture in the Americas.

In the second part of Working with the Informal, Learning from the Informal the exploration of ways that architects engage with and learn from communities broadens to encompass case studies from three very different contexts accross South, Central and North America. What is interesting is that despite the very different approaches taken by the practices described here, common threads emerge. Despite being situated on different ends of the old first world/third world, formal/informal spectrum of ‘development’, they are able to influence and inform one another - often not as one would expect.

Venezuela, particularly its capital Caracas, provides a clear example of the forces which give rise to informal settlements and which perpetuate the dynamic of simultaneous neglect and exploitation which take place in almost any city, made more potent by the fact that more than half the population are housing themselves informally in the precarious, self-built settlements know locally as barrios. This ongoing situation has given rise to two concurrent movements which are resetting the way residents of the barrios relate to their city. On one hand architects are becoming more interested in the barrios, in the way they form and operate and in the way that architecture can be used to provide a better living situation for their residents. On the other hand the residents of the barrios themselves, through collective organisation and with the support of government reforms, are taking a central role in how their communities develop and relate to the rest of the city. These two movements have produced an wealth of ideas and models of participation, becoming particularly interesting where they intersect.

The divided city of Tijuana/San Diego is split by the border of Mexico and the USA. As such it is a microcosm of the unequal exchange which occurs between the nations more generally of North and South. It is also the site of a much more fruitful exchange: between individuals and communities coming from very different contexts but sharing the same physical landscape. On one side of the border waves of Latino immigrants are transforming mundane Anglo-American suburbia into something more dense, lively and communal. On the other side, the exploitative practices of transnational corporations are being used to fuel new, pre-fabricated housing solutions. Perhaps most interesting is the way tactics are drawn from the informal settlements of Tijuana to inform proposals for the improvement of San Diego, a reversal of the traditional ‘knowledge flows’. Architects and artists such as Teddy Cruz working in this bi-polar context have developed some very potent tactics for revealing the contradictions of their context and harnessing them to create proposals for change. The nature of the city is such that by commenting on local conditions they are simultaneously commenting on much broader, global concerns.

If Caracas is the archetypal informal city then New York City is perhaps the archetypal formal city. Yet architects in both contexts are working with local communities toward strikingly similar aims. In fact the questions of ‘how-to-engage’ become even more pressing in a context where the majority of people live out their lives without having the smallest involvement in how their environment is created around them. In this context the tactics of participatory design, developed and refined by practitioners working mainly in informal settlements worldwide, take on a new flavour as they are imported into the very different context of the formal city. As such they are another interesting example of the reversal of the traditional view of knowledge flows between the ‘developing’ and the ‘developed’ worlds. The practices working in New York are also interesting in that, through their determination to pass maximum autonomy to the ordinary citizen, that they have shifted their role from the design of physical places into the design of the tools-of-change themselves.

Although superficially employing very different strategies to address very different problems, all these practices can be regarded as examples of a new kind of ‘activist architecture’. A way of practicing architecture which takes the whole city as a client. A practice which pairs the skills and resources of architects, artists and designers with the motivation and drive of strong community organisations to change the places we live our lives, working towards better cities for all.