Reading Response - 300 words (TOTAL)

architecture discussion question and need a sample draft to help me learn.

Brief reading response based on the provided reading materials
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– Please answer “How do these texts relate to the various critiques of power we’ve read so far? For example, do they put pressure on Escobar’s critique of development?”
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ArticlePeripheralurbanization:Autoconstruction,transversallogics,andpoliticsincitiesoftheglobalsouthTeresaPRCaldeiraUniversityofCalifornia,USAAbstractManycitiesaroundtheworldhavebeenlargelyconstructedbytheirresidents,whobuildnotonlytheirownhouses,butalsofrequentlytheirneighborhoods.Inthisarticle,Iusethenotionofperipheralurbanizationtoanalyzethiswayofproducingcitiesthatisquitepervasiveintheglobalsouth.Iarguethatperipheralurbanizationreferstomodesoftheproductionofspacethat(a)operatewithaspecifictemporalityandagency,(b)engagetransversallywithofficiallogics,(c)generatenewmodesofpolitics,and(d)createhighlyunequalandheterogeneouscities.Ialsoarguethatperipheralurbanizationnotonlyproducesheterogeneitywithinthecityasitunfoldsovertime,butalsovariesconsiderablyfromonecitytoanother.Ibuildmyargumentsbyjuxtaposingdissimilarcasesfromafewcitiesintheglobalsouth.Tofocusonperipheralurbanizationmeanssimultaneouslytode-centerurbantheoryandtoofferaboldcharacterizationofmodesoftheproductionofspacethataredifferentfromthosethatgeneratedthecitiesoftheNorthAtlantic.KeywordsAutoconstruction,peripheries,transversallogics,urbanizationintheglobalsouthManycitiesaroundtheworldhavebeenlargelyconstructedbytheirresidents,whobuildnotonlytheirownhouses,butalsofrequentlytheirneighborhoods.Theydonotnecessarilydosoinclandestinewaysandcertainlynotinisolation.Throughouttheprocess,theyinteractwiththestateanditsinstitutions,butusuallyintransversalways.Whiletheyhaveplansandpreparecarefullyeachstep,theiractionstypicallyescapetheframingofoﬃcialplanning.Theyoperateinsidecapitalistmarketsofland,credit,andconsumption,butusuallyinspecialnichesbypassedbythedominantlogicsofformalrealestate,ﬁnance,andcommoditycirculation.Intheprocessofhouse/citybuilding,manymakethemselvesintocitizensandpoliticalagents,becomeﬂuentinrightstalk,andclaimthecitiesastheirown.Inthisarticle,Irefertothismodeofmakingcitiesasperipheralurbanization.Correspondingauthor:TeresaPRCaldeira,DepartmentofCityandRegionalPlanning,UniversityofCalifornia,Berkeley,228WursterHall,CA94708,USA.Email:tcaldeira@berkeley.eduEnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpace2017,Vol.35(1)3–20!TheAuthor(s)2016Reprintsandpermissions:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI:10.1177/0263775816658479journals.sagepub.com/home/epd
Iusethenotionofperipheralurbanizationtocreateaproblem-spacethatallowsustoinvestigatelogicsoftheproductionoftheurbanthatdiﬀerfromthoseoftheNorthAtlantic.Iuseitasameansofexploringprocessesofbothsocio-spatialformationandtheorymaking.MyintentionistogobeyondthedeconstructionofNorthern-originatedaccountsofurbanizationarticulatedbyanowlongstreamofcritiques1and,inresponsetoMbembeandNuttall(2004:352),workwithnewarchivestooﬀeraboldcharacterizationandtheorizationofamodeoftheproductionofspacethatisprevalentincitiesoftheglobalsouth.Manyauthorshaveworkedwithnotionsofperipheriesandperipheralurbanizationtoanalyzecitiesintheglobalsouth.Iworkinconversationwiththemandcitemanyoftheirworksthroughoutthisarticle.Atthecoreofmycontributionaretwoarguments.First,Iarguethatperipheralurbanizationconsistsofasetofinterrelatedprocesses.Itreferstomodesoftheproductionofurbanspacethat(a)operatewithaspeciﬁcformofagencyandtemporality,(b)engagetransversallywithoﬃciallogics,(c)generatenewmodesofpoliticsthroughpracticesthatproducenewkindsofcitizens,claims,circuits,andcontestations,and(d)createhighlyunequalandheterogeneouscities.Second,Iarguethatperipheralurbanizationnotonlyproducesheterogeneitywithinthecityasitunfoldsovertime,butalsovariesconsiderablyfromonecitytoanother.Thus,asamodel,peripheralurbanizationmustremainopenandprovisionaltoaccountforvariationandforthewaysinwhichtheproductionofthecitiesitcharacterizesisconstantlybeingtransformed.Itisimportanttostressthatperipheralurbanizationdoesnotnecessarilyentailthegrowthofcitiestowardstheirhinterlands.Inotherwords,itdoesnotsimplyrefertoaspatiallocationinthecity—itsmargins—butrathertoawayofproducingspacethatcanbeanywhere.2Whatmakesthisprocessperipheralisnotitsphysicallocationbutratherthecrucialroleofresidentsintheproductionofspaceandhowasamodeofurbanizationitunfoldsslowly,transversallyinrelationtooﬃciallogics,andamidstpoliticalcontestations.Ideﬁnitelydonotclaimthatperipheralurbanizationistheonlymodeoftheproductionofurbanspaceoperatingincitiesoftheglobalsouth.NordoIclaimthatthereisauniﬁedmodelof‘‘Southernurbanism.’’Infact,theverydiﬀerentcasesIanalyzebelowdemonstratetheopposite,i.e.thatperipheralurbanizationunfoldsinquitediﬀerentways.WhatIdoclaimisthatperipheralurbanizationisremarkablypervasive,occurringinmanycitiesofthesouth,regardlessoftheirdiﬀerenthistoriesofurbanizationandpoliticalspeciﬁcities.Ialsoclaimthatitisnecessarytounderstandperipheralurbanizationasasetofinterrelatedprocessestoformulatenotonlybetteranalysesandtheories,butalsobetterurbanandplanningpractices.Ibuildmyargumentsbyjuxtaposingdissimilarcasesfromafewcitiesintheglobalsouth.Irelyextensivelyonmyownlong-terminvestigationsinSa˜oPauloalongsideothercasesofperipheralurbanization.Ihavechosenthelatterforthefollowingreasons.First,theyhavebeencarefullyanalyzed,mostlybyscholarsbasedinthesecities.Thus,theyrepresentnewarchives,bringingtothediscussionrobustknowledgeproducedfromnon-NorthAtlanticperspectives.Usually,thesestudiescirculatewithinthenationalcontextinwhichtheyareproducedbutarenotengagedbyeitherNorthernscholarsorresearchersworkingonotherpartsoftheglobalsouth.Toengagethesestudies,breakingtheirnationalbarriersandtheirisolationfromthenorth,isanecessarysteptocreateurbantheoriesthatcanaccountformodesofurbanizationwhoselogicisdiﬀerentfromthatoftheindustrialcitiesoftheNorth.Itistotakeseriouslytheideaofthinkingwithanaccent(Caldeira,2000:Chapter1).Second,theyareverydiﬀerentfromeachother,theirhistoriesarewellknown,andtheirsingularitiescanbeclearlycontextualized,thusallowingmetoconsiderhowdiﬀerenthistoriesmaylead4EnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpace35(1)
tosimilaroutcomes.Third,thesecasesindicateimportanttransformationsinprocessesofperipheralurbanization,pointingtodiﬀerentfutures.Iconceiveofmyanalysisintermsofjuxtaposition,akindofcomparison.Severalscholarshaveinsistedontheimportanceofcomparisoninurbanstudies,especiallyasonemovesawayfromNorthAtlanticmodels.3Themainreasontochoosejuxtapositionistoemphasizethequalitativelogicthatanchorsmyapproach,alogicstandardamonganthropologistsandethnographers.Toworkwiththejuxtapositionofdissimilarcasesmeanstousediﬀerenceandestrangementasmodesofanalysisandcritique,aperspectivethatcanbetracedbacktothepracticesoftheEuropeanartisticavant-gardesoftheearly20thcentury,andlatertothecritiqueofanthropologyinthe1980s(Cliﬀord,1981;MarcusandFischer,1986).Thisuseofjuxtapositionoperateswithaqualitative(analytical)logicthatisatoddswithastatisticaloneusedbymanycomparativists(Small,2009;Yin,2002).Itdoesnotlookfortherepresentative,typical,similar,orrepetitive.Instead,itproceedsinductively,exploringthediﬀerentialandinternalconditionsofcases,lookingforawiderangeofvariation,andaimingatsaturation(Small,2009).Thejuxtapositionofdissimilar,located,andhistoricizedcasesbroughttogethertoilluminateoneanotherdestabilizesunexaminedviewsandgeneralizationsandopensupnewpossibilitiesofunderstanding.4Thus,inwhatfollows,IjuxtaposeanalysesofIstanbul,Santiago,andSa˜oPaulo(withadditionalconsiderationsaboutMexicoCityandNewDelhi),exploringtheirdiﬀerentconﬁgurationstoanchormyargumentsaboutperipheralurbanization.Iﬁrstanalyzeeachofthefourinterrelateddimensionsofperipheralurbanizationandthendiscusssomeofthewaysinwhichtheyhavebeentransformedrecently.Throughouttheanalysis,Ibuildamodelbasedontheexplorationofdiﬀerences,insistingthatalthoughwecanidentifyprocessesofperipheralurbanizationinmanycities,eachiterationisparticularandshouldbeanalyzedassuch.Thechallengeoftheanalysisisthustodevelopamodel,peripheralurbanization,thatarticulatesgeneralfeatureswhileremainingopenandprovisionaltoaccountforthewaysinwhichthemodesofoperationitcharacterizesvaryandconstantlytransform.AgencyandtemporalityPeripheralurbanizationinvolvesadistinctiveformofagency.Residentsareagentsofurbanization,notsimplyconsumersofspacesdevelopedandregulatedbyothers.Theybuildtheirhousesandcitiesstep-by-stepaccordingtotheresourcestheyareabletoputtogetherateachmomentinaprocessthatIcallautoconstruction(followingtheLatinAmericantermforit).AsHolston(1991)hasalsoshown,eachphaseinvolvesagreatamountofimprovisationandbricolage;complexstrategiesandcalculations;andconstantimaginationofwhatanicehomemightlooklike.Sometimesresidentsrelyontheirownlabor;frequently,theyhirethelaborofothers.Theirspacesarealwaysinthemaking.Thus,peripheralurbanizationalsoinvolvesadistinctivetemporality;homesandneighborhoodsgrowlittle-by-little,inlong-termprocessesofincompletionandcontinuousimprovementledbytheirownresidents.Peripheralurbanizationdoesnotinvolvespacesalreadymadethatcanbeconsumedasﬁnishedproductsbeforetheyareeveninhabited.Rather,itinvolvesspacesthatareneverquitedone,alwaysbeingaltered,expanded,andelaboratedupon.Citiesareobviouslyalwaysbeingtransformed.Butperipherieschangeaccordingtoalogicoftheirown:slowly,progressively,unevenly.5Forlongperiodsoftime,peopleinhabitspacesthatareclearlyprecariousandunﬁnished,butwiththeexpectation,frequentlyrealized,thatthespaceswillimproveandonedaylooklikewealthierpartsofthecity.Peripherallandscapesaremarkedbyconstructionsandremodelings,resultinginacombinationofhousesandinfrastructureofquitediﬀerentlevelsofcompletionandCaldeira5
elaboration.Olderareasarebetteroﬀ;newerareasaremoreprecariousintermsofinfrastructure,services,andthecharacteristicsofindividualhouses.Asaresultofthispattern,peripheralurbanizationproducesquiteheterogeneouslandscapes.Thetransformationsaresimultaneouslyexpressedintheconditionsoftheurbanspaceandthehouses.Astheneighborhoodgrowsandthepopulationincreases,streetsarepaved;water,electricity,andsewagearrive;andlocalcommerceexpands.Withtime,fac¸adesareimproved,housesareenlarged,and,especially,spacesareconstantlyredecorated.Despiteindisputableprecariousnessandpersistingpoverty,theprocessesoftransformationofperipheralareasoﬀeramodelofsocialmobility,astheybecomethematerialembodimentsofnotionsofprogress.6Asperipheriesimprove,however,theymaybecomeinaccessibletothepoorestresidents.Thus,peripheralurbanizationisaprocessthatisalwaysbeingdisplaced,reproducedsomewhereelsewherelandischeaperbecauseitismoreprecariousordiﬃculttoaccess.Thispresentsmethodologicalchallengesforthestudyofperipheralurbanization.Tocaptureitstemporality,ithastobestudiedovertime.Tocaptureitscontinuousreproduction,ithastobestudiedacrossspace.ThisisespeciallyclearinAhonsi’s(2002)analysisofLagosDuhau’s(2014)ofMexicoCity,andHolston’s(2008)andmyown(Caldeira,2000)ofSa˜oPaulo.Studieslookingatoneplacemissthelateralreproductionofperipheries,gettingonlythepictureofimprovement,iffocusingonanolderarea,orprecariousness,iffocusingonanewerone.Peripherieshavetobestudiedovertimeandacrossspace.Itisonlybydoingthisthatonecancapturethesimultaneousprocessesofimprovementandthereproductionofinequalityandprecariousness.Figure1.TheautoconstructionofJardimdasCame´lias,Sa˜oPaulo.Picturestakenfromthesameterraceovera35yearperiod.Photosbytheauthor.6EnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpace35(1)
TransversallogicsPeripheriesarespacesthatfrequentlyunsettleoﬃciallogics—forexample,thoseoflegalproperty,formallabor,stateregulation,andmarketcapitalism.Nevertheless,theydonotcontesttheselogicsdirectlyasmuchastheyoperatewiththemintransversalways.Thatis,byengagingthemanyproblemsoflegalization,regulation,occupation,planning,andspeculation,theyredeﬁnethoselogicsand,insodoing,generateurbanizationsofheterogeneoustypesandremarkablepoliticalconsequences.Citiesthathaveundergoneperipheralurbanizationareusuallymarkedbysigniﬁcantspatialandsocialinequality.Nevertheless,becauseofthesetransversalengagements,inequalitiescannotalwaysbemappedoutinsimpledualisticoppositionssuchasregulatedversusunregulated,legalresidencesversusslums,formalversusinformal,etc.Rather,thesecitiesexhibitmultipleformationsofinequality,whereincategoriessuchas‘formal’and‘regulated’arealwaysshiftingandunstable.Thus,oneneedstosetasidethenotionofinformality(andthedualistreasoningitusuallyimplies)andthinkintermsoftransversallogicstounderstandthesecomplexurbanformationswhichareinherentlyunstableandcontingent.Peripheriesareimprovised.Butthefactthatthereisasigniﬁcantamountofimprovisationdoesnotmeanthattheyareeithertotallyunplannedandchaoticorillegalandunregulated.Peripheralurbanizationdoesnotmeananabsenceofthestateorplanning,butratheraprocessinwhichcitizensandgovernmentsinteractincomplexways.Whileresidentsarethemainagentsoftheproductionofspace,thestateispresentinnumerousways:itregulates,legislates,writesplans,providesinfrastructure,polices,andupgradesspaces.Quitefrequently,though,thestateactsafterthefacttomodifyspacesthatarealreadybuiltandinhabited.Manyperipheralandautoconstructedspacesinvolveasubstantialamountofplanning.Nezahualco´yotlorCiudadNezaintheMexicoCityMetropolitanRegion,forinstance,wasbuiltonaperfectgrid,asweremanyotherperipheralareasalloverLatinAmerica.Inthe1960s,itwaslaidoutbyadeveloperas150,000uniformbutirregularlyparceledouthousinglotsthatwerethenbuiltupbyindividualresidents(Duhau,2014:151,1998:145–146).Infact,countlessneighborhoodsinperipherieshavebeenlaidoutandsoldbydevelopersactingaccordingtoclearplansandlegalstandards.Ingeneral,however,theircreation,commercialization,anddevelopmentinvolveseverallayersofirregularity—sometimesquitediﬃculttountangle—andmanyturnsofnegotiationbetweenalltheagentsinvolvedintheprocess,includingthestate.InthecaseoftheMexicoCitymetropolitanregion,acommonsourceofirregularityisthecreationofurbandevelopmentsonejidoland—i.e.landthat,distributedtolandlesspeasantstoholdincommonaftertheMexicanRevolution,isillegaltosell,lease,orrent.7Thereisbroadagreementintheliteratureabouthousingintheglobalsouththatbothirregularityandillegalityarethemostcommonmeansthroughwhichthepoorsettleinandurbanizecities.Frequently,illegalityandirregularityaretheonlyoptionsavailableforthepoortobecomeurbandwellers,giventhatformalhousingisnotaﬀordableandpublichousingisnotsuﬃcient.Theconditionsofirregularityregardinglandtenureandconstructionvarywidely.8Theyrangefromswindlingofprivatepropertytolackofoﬃcialpermits;fromcorruptionintheallocationofcommunallandtofailuretofollowmunicipalcodes;fromdisputesoverparcelingoftriballandtotheappropriationofecologicallyprotectedareasforprivateconstructions.Inadditiontoirregularitiesrelatedtoland,thereareothersassociatedwithconstruction.Autoconstructorsanddeveloperstrytofollowcityordinancesandregulationsbutusuallydothisunevenly.Inspiteofthefactthatthereisagoodamountofirregularityregardinglandtenure,landuse,andconstructioninperipheralareas,theyareneithernecessarilyillegalnorinvaded.AlthoughtherearemanyCaldeira7
squattersettlementsinperipheralareasbuiltoninvadedland,9asigniﬁcantproportionofautoconstructorsactuallypayforandhaveclaimstotheirlots.InSa˜oPaulo,forexample,80%ofperipheralresidentshavelegitimateclaimstopropertyownership(Holston,2008).Legalityisacomplexissue,however.JamesHolston(2008)showsthat,inBrazil,illegalityisacommonconditionoftheurbanizationpatternsofthepoorbecauseitisadominantmeansofruleingeneral,notbecausethepoorhaveatendencytomarginalityandprecariousness.Moreover,whenthereisillegality,itisusuallynotbecausetheresidentshavetakenlandthatisnottheirown,butratherbecausetheyhavebeenswindledbydevelopersorbecauselegislativechangeshavemadeillegalwhatusedtobeacceptable.TunaKuyucu(2014)showsthat,inIstanbul,theuseoflegalambiguityandadministrativearbitrarinessbypublicandprivateactorshasbeenfundamentalfortheconstitutionofaprivatepropertyregimethatanchorsacapitalistmarketoflandandthedisplacementofgecekondusettlements.Whateverthecase,whattheseandotherstudiesdemonstrateisthatthelegalstatusofneighborhoodsbuiltbyperipheralurbanizationisfrequentlysubjecttotransformation.Residentsbetonthepossibilityoflegalizationandregularizationandmostfrequentlyeithersucceedinseeingithappenorlivewiththeconsequencesofongoingirregularity.Thus,thereisatemporalityrelatedtolegalizationaswell.Intheearly1970s,Nezahualco´yotlwastheobjectoftheﬁrstlarge-scalelandregularizationprojectbytheMexicanfederalandstategovernments(Duhau,2014:151).Now,mostLatinAmericancountrieshavelargeprogramsfortheregularizationofurbanlandandthequestionoflandpolicyiscentraltotheresearchagendasofseveralinstitutions(SmolkaandMullahy,2010).However,studieshavealsoshownthatthestateitselfisresponsibleforthecreationandre-creationofirregularityandillegality,asitpasseslawsandmasterplansthatalterthestatusoflandsandbuildings,makingtheirregularintotheregularandviceversa(forDelhi,seeBhan,2016).Asinglezoninglawcanrenderawholeareairregularorlegalizeitovernight.Obviously,theseshiftsengenderintensepoliticalstruggles,astheyinvolveimmediaterepercussionsintermsoftheproﬁtabilityofrealestateandthedislocationofresidents.Processesofregularizationhelptoilluminateboththeconstantexchangebetweenautoconstructorsandthestateandthelogicofplanningthatitembeds.Sa˜oPaulo’scaseillustratesthispoint.Duringtheperiodoflargestexpansionofthecityin1950–1970,privateentrepreneurslaidoutdevelopmentsindistantareas,leavingvaststretchesofemptylandbetweennewdevelopments(Caldeira,2000;Camargoetal.,1976).Theycreateddirtroadsandbuslinestoconnecttothecitythenewsettlements,usuallyirregular,thattheysoldtoworkerstryingtoavoidexorbitantrent.Theexpectationofbothresidentsanddevelopers,almostalwaysrealized,wasthatthestatewouldfollowupandinstallthenecessaryinfrastructure.Whenthishappened,developersbegantosellthelandtheyhadinitiallybypassed,beneﬁttingfromthevalorizationbroughtaboutbytheimprovedinfrastructuralconditionsandpreviousurbanization.Thesamehappenedasaresultofgovernmentalprogramsoflandregularization/legalization.Thesepracticesinitiatedcyclesoflanddevelopment/regularization/valorizationthatentangledthestate,investors,andcitizens.Intheprocess,stateplannersandagenciesactedroutinelyafterthefactinawaythatbeneﬁttedprivatedevelopers,improvedneighborhoods,andconsolidatedtherightsofresidents.Wecanrecognizethesamelogicinprogramsoflandregularizationandslumupgrading.Finally,thetransversallogicsofperipheralurbanizationappearinthemodesofconsumptionandcredit.Autoconstructioninvolvessubstantialconsumptionrelatedtotheacquisitionofbothbuildingmaterialsandappliances,furniture,anddecorativeitems.Butautoconstructorstypicallylackaccesstocreditfrominstitutions,suchasbanksandthestate,toﬁnancetheacquisitionoflandorconstructionofhomes.Thereiscredit,butitcomesfrom8EnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpace35(1)
developers,merchants,andpopulardepartmentstores,usuallywithveryhighinterestrates.Everythinghappensinakindofalternatemarketthatspecializesintheneedsoftheurbanpoorandbypassessomedominantoﬃciallogics.Maintainedinthismarket,urbanlandandhousingremainrelativelycheapandaccessible.ExperimentsinpoliticsanddemocracyTheperenniallyshiftingconditionsintheperipheries,andtheiraccompanyingconﬁgurationsofbothimprovementandthereproductionofinequality,haveentangledtheagentsthatproduceurbanspaceincomplexpoliticalrelationships.Peripheralurbanizationgeneratesnewmodesofpoliticsthroughpracticesthatproducenewkindsofcitizens,claims,andcontestations.Thesepoliticsarerootedintheproductionofurbanspaceitself—primarilyresidentialurbanspace—anditsqualities,deﬁciencies,andpractices(Caldeira,2015).Theunstableconditionsoftenure,theskewedpresenceofthestate,theprecariousnessofinfrastructures,theexploitationbydevelopersandmerchants,theconstantabuseofresidentsbytheinstitutionsoforder,andseveralprocessesofstigmatizationanddiscriminationagainstresidentsmakeperipheriesspacesofinventionofnewdemocraticpractices.Sometimes,thepoliticalrelationshipsthatdevelopinthesespacesarequiteclientelistic.Inmanyothercases,however,theybecomewhatJamesHolston(2008)calls‘spacesofinsurgentcitizenship’.Inmanypartsoftheworld,socialmovementsandgrassrootsorganizationsfromperipherieshavecreatednewdiscoursesofrightsandputforwarddemandsthatareatthebasisoftheriseofnewcitizenships,theformulationofnewconstitutions,theexperimentationwithnewformsoflocaladministration,andtheinventionofnewapproachestosocialpolicy,planning,law,andcitizenparticipation(Holston,2009).Theyhavealsometamorphosedovertimeandbeenanimportantpresenceintheproteststhathaveﬁlledthestreetsofseveralcitiesinrecentyears,suchasIstanbul(El-Kazaz,2013;Tugal,2013),Sa˜oPaulo(Caldeira,2013,2015),andCairo(Ismail,2014).Thesemovementshavecertainlygeneratedchangesintheeverydaylivesandqualitiesofurbanspace,astheyhaveforcedtheirimprovement.Buttheyhavealsoproduceddeeppoliticaltransformations.Theyhavetakenthematerialityofspacesofinhabitationtoanchormovementsthatcreatenewpoliticalsubjectivitiesandexposetheinequalitiesthatsustainthereproductionofperipheralurbanizationandthelimitsofdominantpoliticalarrangements.Intheprocess,theyhavealsoopenednewspacesofexperimentationthathavesubstantiallytransformedthecharacterofthepublicsphereintheirsocieties.HeterogeneityThus,peripheralurbanizationisaprocessthroughwhichresidentsengageinmodesofproductionofspacethatconstitutethemselvesassimultaneouslynewkindsofurbanresidents,consumers,subjects,andcitizens.Areasproducedbyperipheralurbanizationaredynamic,creative,andtransformative,asAbdouMaliqSimone(2004,2010,2014)hasinsistentlydemonstrated.Theseengagements,howevertransformativetheymaybe,obviouslyarenotabletoerasethegapthatseparatesperipheriesandtheirresidentsfromotherspacesandsocialgroups—agapthathasbeenconstantlyrecreatedandfrequentlyincreased,bothintermsofthedisparityofqualityofurbanspacesandtheincomeandresourcesofsocialgroups.Peripheriesare,undoubtedly,aboutinequality.Theyarepoor,precarious,discriminatedagainst,andfrequentlyviolent.Nevertheless,theyarenothomogeneouslypoorandprecarious;andusuallyaremuchbetterthantheywereinthepast.Theirinherentdynamismandpatternoftransformationcomplicateaccountsofsocio-spatialinequality.Caldeira9
Overtime,peripheralurbanizationgeneratesheterogeneousurbanspaces.ThisisespeciallyclearinLatinAmerica,wherethismodeofproducingthecityhasbeenprevalentforover50years.Severalstudiesdemonstratethat,astheygrowandimprove,thesocialandspatialheterogeneityofperipheralneighborhoodsgraduallyandpersistentlyincreases.Butbecauseeachareahasadynamicofitsown—andbecauseserviceandinfrastructurereachthematdiﬀerenttimesanddependingonvariousconditions,includingthelevelandpersistenceofpoliticalorganizationoftheirresidents—theresultisthatwhatusedtoberelativelyhomogeneousareas50yearsagoarenowquiteheterogeneous.Sa˜oPauloisagoodexample,asdemonstratedbythecontrastbetweenananalysisproducedin1977bySeplan,theSecretaryofEconomicsandPlanningoftheStateofSa˜oPaulo,andtworecentanalysisusingdatafromthe2010censusbyNeryatNEV/USP(2014)andMarques(2014).WhiletheSeplanstudyrevealedahomogeneousandvastperiphery,themorerecentstudiesrevealacitythatisakindofpatchwork.Sinceatleastthemiddleofthe20thcentury,peripheralurbanizationhasoﬀeredpoorresidentsofmetropolisesoftheglobalsouthopportunitiestoinhabitthesecitiesbymaintainingalternativemarketsandspacesinwhichhousingandurbanlifeareprecariousbutaﬀordable.Althoughthismodeofurbanizationcontinuestoprevailinseveralcities,inothersitisstartingtoshowitslimits.Simultaneously,somegovernmentalinterventionsinthehousingmarketintendedtoexpandlow-incomehousinghavebothincreasedtheavailabilityofhousingforthepoorestandaﬀectedthedynamicsofautoconstruction.Inthesecondpartofthisarticle,Idiscusssomecasesthatpointtotransformationsinprocessesofperipheralurbanization.Iamguidedbythefollowingquestion:whatconditionspermitthecontinuingimprovementofperipheralurbanspaceswhilesimultaneouslypreservingtheabilityofthepoortoinhabitthesespacesandthemetropolisestheybuild?Itseemsthattwoconditionsarefundamental:thestrongorganizationofresidentsandtheengagementofstatesthatarecompelledtocommittoprinciplesofsocialjustice.CreationofnewlandmarketsLetmestartwithIstanbul.Whileitisatextbookcaseofperipheralurbanization,italsoclearlyexempliﬁesthecurrenttrendtowardstheerasureofthetypesofspaceandhousingbuiltoverthelasthalfcenturythroughautoconstruction.10Asthepopulationofthecityincreasedexponentiallystartinginthe1950s,newmigrantswereincorporatedthroughadoublemechanism–employmentandhousing–whichentailedtheirintegrationinlocalsocialandpoliticalnetworks.Migrantsarrivinginthecitysettledinwhatbecameknownasgecekondu.Thesesquattersettlementswerebuiltinwhatwereoncedistantbutarenowcentrallylocatedareasofthecity.Thesettlementswereillegal,sincetheyweretypicallyinvasionsofwhatusedtobepublicland.Asthenewurbanitessettledintheseareasandconstructedtheirhousesstep-by-step,theyengagedinnetworksthatsimultaneouslyenhancedtheirchancesofgettingajob,providedalocalbasisofsupport,andultimatelyguaranteedthelegalizationoftheirlands.Thishappenedespeciallyfromthe1970sonwards,whenpopulistregimesorganizedtheseneighborhoods,exchangingvotesfortheprovisionofinfrastructureandlandtitles.Asaconsequence,explainsKeyder(2005:126–127),‘thelifecycleofasquatterneighborhoodwassuchthatafterafewelectionsitcouldbecomeanareaofmultiple-storeyapartmentbuildings…Urbanpoliticswasthenaturalarenainwhichimmigrantsengaged;theyelectedandsupportedpoliticianswhocouldcrediblypromiselocalreturns.Migrantsbecamecitizensthroughtheirallegiancetothespaceofresidence’.10EnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpace35(1)
Thisstoryofsuccess,however,alsohadcontradictoryeﬀects.Asthosewhohadoccupiedpubliclandsobtainedtitlesofeitherprivateownershiporuser’srights(taputahsisdeeds;seeKuyucu,2014:10),agoodamountoflandthathadbeenkeptoutsideofthecapitalistmarketwasincorporatedintoit.Theﬁrstconsequencesofthisshiftwerefeltbynewergenerationsofmigrantstothecity.Unabletoﬁndeasylandonwhichtoreproducethesameprocessofperipheralurbanization,theybecamerentersinthetwo-andthree-storybuildingsownedbytheearliergenerationofmigrants.Thisbroughtaboutasigniﬁcantantagonismbetweenthetwogroups,changingthesocialdynamicsingecekonduneighborhoods(Balaban,2011;Keyder,2005).ButthiscomprisedonlytheﬁrstwaveofcommodiﬁcationoflandinIstanbul.Thesecondandmoreaggressive,whichhascomemorerecently,isstillunfolding.AsIstanbulhasjoinedtheranksofcitieswithplanstobecome‘world-class’,andasthepressurefromrealestatedevelopersforaccesstolandhasincreased,thestatehasabandoneditsprevioustolerancefortheoccupationofpubliclandanditspracticeofprivatizingthislandinelectoralnegotiations.Instead,ithasactivelycontributedtothedestructionoftheseareasandtheirtransfertoprivatedevelopers.Severalprocessesareinvolved.Ontheonehand,landisnowsoldforaproﬁttobiggerdevelopersinaprocessofenclosureofurbanspace(Balaban,2011),propertytransfer(KuyucuandU¨nsal,2010),andpopulationdisplacement.Moreover,asupscalehigh-risedevelopmentsradicallychangethelandscapeofthecity,developersarriveattheoldgecekonduareastobuyouttheresidentsofdesirablylocatedneighborhoods.Butthereareotherandmoreaggressivemodesofconversionofgecekonduareas.Acrucialone,backedbynewlegislation,consistsoflargestate-ledprojectstodesignatetheseareasas‘urbantransformationzones’tobeclearedforthesakeofconversiontootherhigh-endandhigh-proﬁtuses.Thisdesignationallowsstateagenciestorelocategecekondufamiliestohousinginmoreremoteareas.Analyzingtheunfoldingofthesetransformationzones,Kuyucu(2014)brilliantlyshowshowﬂexibleandambiguousmodesoflandoccupationaretransformedintolegalpropertytobeusedforrealestatedevelopmentthroughprocessesthatoperatebyexploitinglegalambiguityandstatearbitrarinessembodiedinthenewlegislation.Althoughconversioninthiscaseclearlylegalizestheillegal,asiscommoninprocessesofperipheralurbanization,nowthelegalconversionnolongerbeneﬁtsautoconstructors,whoareforcedawayfromtheareastheyhavepreviouslyoccupied.11Thus,peripheralurbanizationinIstanbulhasassuredthesocialmobilityandintegrationofonegenerationofmigrants.Ifforamomentthisincorporationwasguaranteedbyaconﬁgurationthatkepturbanlandsoutsideofastrongcapitalistmarketandthestateonthesideofnewpoorurbanites,thetransformationofthisarrangement—thestate’sunwillingnesstopursuepopularhousingalternatives,promotionofprojectstodisplaceavailablegecekondu,andstrongerpushfortheincorporationoflandintoanupscalerealestatemarket—arenotonlytransforminganddestroyingoldperipheries,butalsoconstitutinganewregimeofprivateproperty(Kuyucu,2014)andmakingurbanlandinaccessibletonewmigrants,whoeitherbecomerentersorsquatinmoreremoteareas,reproducingtheperipheryelsewhere.Theprotestsof2013expressedinimportantwaystheculminationofcitizens’dissatisfactionwiththese‘urbantransformations’andtheprojectofcitytheyembed(El-Kazaz,2013;Tugal,2013).AlthoughIdonothavespacetoanalyzeothercasesoftheconstitutionoflandmarkets,IwanttomentionthatNewDelhishowstendenciesstrikinglysimilartoIstanbul(Bhan,2016;Ghertner,2015).InDelhi,asinothermetropolisesoftheglobalsouth,processessuchasevictionsofpreviouslyacceptedsettlements;enclosureorprivatizationofpublicorcommonableland;theaggregationofurbanlandinperiurbanfringes,sometimesthroughCaldeira11
violentmeans,anditsincorporationintoformalpropertymarkets;andtheuseofstateforcetoclearlandforprivatedevelopmentunderminethepossibilitiesofthecontinuationofperipheralurbanization.Theseprocessesprovokemarket-drivendisplacementsandforeclosealternativemarketsandspacesforhousingthepoor.ExpansionofsocialhousingThecaseofSantiago,Chile,anothermetropolisshapedbyperipheralurbanization,alsorevealsdeepchangesinthismodeoftheproductionofspace.Inparticular,ithasbeentransformedthroughrepressionandtheadoptionofneoliberalpoliciesthathavemadeChileintoa‘bestpractice’casefortheprovisionofsocialhousing.Thus,whilestrongstateinterventionsareatthebasisofthesechangesinpracticesofperipheralurbanization,theyarequitediﬀerentfromthoseinIstanbul.InSantiago,peripheralurbanizationwasnotstoppedbyeitherinterventionsinmarketsofprivatepropertyorambitionsofworld-classstatus,butratherbyatypeofstatepolicy,initiatedbythemilitaryregime,thattransformedhousingforthepoorintoanaﬀordablecommodity(althoughofverylowquality)tobeacquiredlegallyinareassuppliedwithservicesandinfrastructure.WhileSantiagogrewimmenselyinthesecondhalfofthetwentiethcentury,likeIstanbulandSa˜oPaulo,itsrateofpopulationgrowthhasslowedtolessthan1%peryear.12Itisnolongeraprecariouscity,asdistributionofurbaninfrastructure,fromwatertosewagetoelectricity,hasbecomebasicallyuniversal.Inthe1960s,theoccupationofpubliclandindistantareaswasthepredominantmodeofaccesstohousingforthepoor,andthegovernmentdidnottakelongtoimprovetheseareas.ThegovernmentofEduardoFrei(1964–1970)initiatedlargeprogramsoflandregularizationandhousingconstruction,whichwereintensiﬁedbysocialistpresidentSalvadorAllende(1970–1973).Organizedinvasionsofpubliclandmultipliedandbothgovernments‘increasedtheirsupportoftheorganizedpoorforsquattingoperations’(Salcedo,2010:94)atthesametimeastheytriedtoacceleratehousingproduction.Thus,duringthisperiod,thestatewassympathetictoperipheralurbanizationandactedinfavoroflegalizingtheillegal,improvinginfrastructure,andsupportingtheorganizationofthenewurbanresidents,whobecameimportantpoliticalforcessustainingtheregime.Expectedly,thescenariochangedradicallywiththeestablishmentofthemilitarydictatorshipin1973.Socialmovementswereseverelyrepressedandlandinvasionscametoahalt.Themilitaryregimedecidedtostopillegaloccupationoflandandtreathousingasaprivatemattertobeaddressedbythemarket.Unabletoignorethehousingdeﬁcit,however,itadoptedamodelinthemid-1970sbasedoncapitalsubsidiesandtheproductionoflow-incomehousingbytheprivatemarket.Thegovernmentstartedgivingcapitalsubsidiestofamilies,oneswhocouldprovethattheywerepoorbutabletosave,anddirectingthemtohousingunitsbuiltenmassebyprivaterealestatedevelopers.Italsostartedtoproducehousestobebuilt‘progressively’byowners.Thismeantbuildingrudimentarybathroomsandkitchensandaskingtheownerstodotherest,inakindofoﬃciallyorganizedautoconstruction.Thegoalofthisprogramwastoeradicateillegaloccupationsbyprovidinglegalandservicedhousing.Yearslater,thisprogramwouldbecomethemodelsupportedbytheWorldBankandotherinternationalagencies(Gilbert,2002:311).Ironically,though,thebestresultsofthisneoliberalprogramwereobtainedafterdemocratizationin1990,whenthemodelwasperfectedtoreachthepoorestsectorsofsociety,whichhadoriginallybeenignoredbyit.Inthisnewversion,houseswerecompletelysubsidizedandfamilieswouldreceivethetitledeedforfree,withnobankloanstorepay(Salcedo,2010:95).Thestatealsointensiﬁedtheproductionofhousingforthe12EnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpace35(1)
poorestsectors.TheprogrambecameahugesuccessandisindicatedasoneofthemainfactorsthathelpedtheproportionofpoorpeopleintheSantiagoMetropolitanRegiondropfrom33%to10%between1990and2006(Rodrı´guezandRodrı´guez,2009:15).In1990,thehousingdeﬁcitinSantiagowassigniﬁcant;around20%ofthepopulationlivedinshantytowns.Throughthenewhousingpolicies,however,morethanamillionChileanshavemovedfromshantytownstonewhousingunitswheretheyhavebecomepropertyowners(Salcedo,2010:90).Evencriticsofthepolicyagreethatthemajorityofthepoor(atleast80%)arenowlegalpropertyownersandonlyaround1.5%ofthepopulationcontinuestoliveinshantytowns(Salcedo,2010:91).Asonestudyputsit,homeownershiptodayis‘theminimumdecentcondition’(Salcedo,2010:111).However,thenarrationofthissuccessstoryintherecentliteraturecomeswithanenumerationofproblems.Oneofthemostobviousisintensiﬁedspatialsegregation,asthenewhousingcomplexesforthepoorhavebeenbuiltdisproportionatelyindistantlocalitiesandawayfromjobs.Additionally,apartmentsareverysmall(lessthan40m2),poorlyconstructed,andisolated,causingresidentstocomplainbitterly.Theliteratureanalyzingthenewhousingborrowstheimageryfromawell-knowndystopianrepertoiretodescribespacesofanomie,deterioration,mentalillness,lackofsociability,drugaddiction,alcoholism,andviolence(seeDucci,1997).Oneinterestingﬁndingofthesestudies,however,isthatresidentswhomovedtohousesandwereabletotransformthemarerelativelyhappy.Manymanagedtotransformevenapartmentunitsbyexpandingintocommonareasoraddingimprovisedbalconies.Realdiscontentexistsamongthosewhocannottransformtheirunitsandfeeltrappedinresidencesforwhichthereisnoclearrealestatemarket.Whatismissedisthepossibilityofautoconstruction.TheChileancaseshowsaclearinterventionofthestatetosolvethehousingdeﬁcitforthepoorandchangethecharacterofperipheralurbanization.Thisinterventionishybrid.Althoughitstartedasaneoliberalpolicytocreatepropertyownerswhoboughtresidencesproducedbyprivatedevelopersforthemarket,itsdecisivesuccesscamefrommodiﬁcationsprovidedbyastatewithastrongcommitmenttoeradicatingpovertyandreachingthepoorestwhohadotherwiseremainedatitsmargins.Chileisnottheonlycountrytohavetakendecisivestepstoenlargethesocialcapacityofthestateandreinventitssocialwelfaresystem.Manyothers—fromCostaRicaandColombiatoSouthAfrica,Mexico,andBrazil—haveborroweddirectlyfromChile’shousingmodel(Gilbert,2004a).Allthesecasesintroducenewdimensionstoperipheralurbanization,aﬀectingbothitstransversallogicsandthetypesofspacesproduced.Inthecontextoftheseprograms,theproductionofresidentialspacesincludesnotonlyinfrastructureandservices,butalsolegalandregularizedhousing.Moreover,withoﬃcialsubsidiesandloans,housingforthepoorexitsthealternativecircuitsofﬁnancingandproductiontojointheworldofbanks,realestatedevelopers,andoﬃcialmechanismsofﬁnancing.Incountriesthatadopttheseprocedures,thehousingmarketforthepoorchangessubstantially,astheprogramsintroducealevelofformalityandcapitalizationpreviouslyunknown.Asaconsequence,theytransformthehouseintoanothertypeofcommodity:nolongeraspacetobeautoconstructedandimprovedovertime,butratherone,oftenlimitedandlowquality,tobeconsumedasaﬁnishedproduct.Whatisnottransformed,however,isspatialsegregation,asthenewhousingcomplexesareinvariablybuiltinfarawayareas,consolidatingclassseparationandspatialinequality.MaintenanceofapopularlandmarketSa˜oPaulo,likeSantiago,explodedinthe1950sduringaperiodofrapidindustrialization,butnowgrowsverylittle,lessthan1%peryear.13ThelargemajorityofthemigrantworkersCaldeira13
whocametothecityautoconstructedtheirhousesintheperipheries,usuallyinplacesveryfarfromthecenter.Squattingandoccupationofpubliclandwerenotverycommon;intheearly1970s,only1%ofthepopulationlivedinfavelas,squattedsettlements,comparedto20%inSantiago.Mostofthepeoplewhomovedtotheperipheriesboughtapieceoflandand,asaresult,approximately80%oftheresidentsoftheperipheriestodayhaveclaimsofownershiptotheirlotsandhouses.Thus,althoughamarketoflandexistedinSa˜oPaulosinceatleastthe1950s,itwasakindofsegregatedmarket.Theportionofthismarketaccessibletothepoorinvolvednotonlylongdistancesfromthecenterandalackofinfrastructure,butalsoseverallayersofillegalityandirregularity—fromthedirectswindlingofland,tothelackofregistereddeedsandpermits,totheabsenceofinfrastructurerequiredbylaw.Theriskofbuyingapropertywithprecarioustitlewaspartofwhatmadeitaﬀordabletothepoor.Asinmanyothercities,theconditionsofirregularityandtheprecariousnessofurbaninfrastructurewereatthebasisoftheorganizationofresidentsoftheperipheriesintosocialmovements.Thesemovementssimultaneouslypressedthestatetoimproveinfrastructureandservicesintheperipheriesandenlargedtheirclaimsfordemocracy.Inthecontextofdemocratictransition,thestatedirectlyengagedthesemovementsandinvestedheavilyininfrastructuralimprovements.Bytheearly2000s,water,electricity,andasphaltwerealmostuniversallydistributedthroughoutthecity,asinSantiago.However,whatmakesSa˜oPaulo’scaseespeciallyinterestingisthewayinwhichorganizedmovementsanddiﬀerentgovernmentsatthelocal,state,andfederallevelshaveengagedinaprocessofexperimentationwithurbanpoliciesthathasfocusedsimultaneouslyontheregularizationoflandintheperipheries;thepreventionofthedisplacementoftheirinhabitants;thereproductionofimprovedspacesforlow-incomehousing;and,morerecently,theprovisionofsocialhousingthroughtheprogramMinhaCasa,MinhaVida,inspiredbytheChileanmodel.Thesepolicieshaveincorporatedtheimprovedspacesoftheperipheriesintotheregularizedcityandexpandedthehomeownershipofthepoor.Asiswellknown,oneofthemainachievementsofBraziliansocialmovementshasbeentoinﬂuencethe1988BrazilianConstitutionandaradicallyinnovativeurbanlegislation,the2001EstatutodaCidade(seeCaldeiraandHolston,2005).In2002,thecityofSa˜oPauloapprovedanewmasterplanaccordingtothisfederallegislation.Theplanhasmanyremarkableaspects,butoneofitsmostinterestingdimensionsisaclearattempttoaddresstheissueofillegalityandirregularityintheperipheriesofthecity.ManyoftheauthorsofSa˜oPaulo’sMasterPlanhadalonghistoryofadvocacyfortheperipheriesandlobbyingforprogressiveurbanlegislationandnewmodesofmunicipaladministrationthatincludedpopularparticipation.Havingadeepknowledgeoftheconditionsintheperipheries,andsometimesbeingorganizersofsocialmovementsandNGOsthemselves,manyplannerswereclearthattheywantedtolegislateforwhattheytermed‘therealcity’.Thismeantlegislatingforthecitywithitscomplexpatternsofurbanizationcombiningallgradationsofspaces,bringingthewholeheterogeneousandunequalcityintoaparameteroflegalityandregularity,improvingtheperipherieswithouteithermakingthemunaﬀordabletothepoorordisplacingtheirresidents.Intheﬁnalplan,whichresultedfromsigniﬁcantcontroversy,thecitywastreatedasbeingformedbydiscordantandunequalprocessofurbanizationthatrequireddiﬀerenttypesofplanninginstruments.Todealwiththeperipheries,the2002PlanusedaﬁgurecalledSpecialZonesofSocialInterests(ZEIS).Insideofthesevastzones,mostofthemperipheral,legislatorsgrantedexemptionsinlandusestandardsintheinterestofpromotinglow-incomehousing,acceptingasnormalsubstandardparametersthatwouldbeunacceptableinthebetteroﬀpartsofthecity(CaldeiraandHolston,2014).Plannerswereacutelyaware14EnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpace35(1)
thatiftheydidnotcreatespeciﬁcnormsforperipheralneighborhoods,itwouldbehardtocontrollandspeculationandtheexpulsionofpoorresidents.Thus,theperipherieshadtobelegalizedandimproved.Butinawaytheyhadtoremainperipheral,asaspeciﬁcmarketoflandnotviableforlargerealestatedevelopments.OnewayofdoingthiswastolimitthesizeandprohibitthecombinationoflotsinsideofZEIS.Inotherwords,intheircampaigntocontinuetoimproveandlegalizetheperipherieswithoutdisplacingtheirresidents,urbanreformersoﬃciallylegalizedinequalityintheproductionofspace.Thisplanhasnowbeenreplacedbyanotherfrom2014thatreinforcessomeofthesameprinciples.Despitethefactthatthenewplanistoonewforustoassessitseﬀects,andthattheoldonehasbeenthesubjectofseveralcriticismsandmanyofitsaspectshaveneverbeenenforced(CaldeiraandHolston,2014),itisevidentthatSa˜oPaulohasnotseenthesamelevelofmarketdrivendisplacementorunderminingoftherightsofthepoorasinIstanbulorNewDelhi,forexample.Sincethe1970s,theevictionoffavelasinSa˜oPaulohasbeenrare,andrecentlyslumupgradinghasbecomeroutine.AlthoughinequalityisstilltheunmistakablemarkofBraziliancities,thequalityoftheurbanenvironmenthassigniﬁcantlyimprovedandresidentsoftheperipherieshavebeenabletoremainintheneighborhoodstheybuilt,inlargemeasureduetotheirconstantorganizing.AlthoughautoconstructionhasbeenthedominantmodeofurbanizationandhousingforthepoorinBraziliancities,in2008thefederalgovernmentintroducedamassivehousingproject,inlinewiththoseinChileandMexico,calledMinhaCasa,MinhaVida.Itprovidessubsidiesforpoorfamiliestoacquirehousingproducedbyprivatedevelopers.Initsﬁrstﬁveyears,ithassupported557developmentsintheSa˜oPaulometropolitanregion,resultingintheproductionofaround110,000units,34%ofthemfortheverypoor(Marques,2014).AsinSantiago,theprogramoﬀerslegalhousinginservicedareas.Nevertheless,mostofthedevelopmentsforthelowestincomegroupareintheperipheries—notonlyofthecity,butofthebroadermetropolitanregion.Thus,althoughillegalityandirregularityarenotbeingreproduced,theseparationis,asthedevelopmentsareusuallylocatedinremotelocations,reinforcingapatternofspatialandsocialsegregation(LabCidade,2014).Insum,Sa˜oPauloisacaseinwhichperipheralurbanizationhasalwaysinvolvedamarketofland,butonethathasbeensegregatedandinwhichaﬀordabilityhasbeenassociatedwithdistance,precariousness,andillegality/irregularity.Itisalsoacaseinwhichcitizensandthestatehavebecomedeeplyinvolvedinsimultaneousexperimentsofregularizationoflandanddemocratizationthathaveshapednotonlythecity,butalsoBrazil.TemporalityandpoliticsintheproductionofcitiesandtheoriesPeripheralurbanizationconsistsofasetofinterrelatedprocessesthatentanglecitizensandstatesintheproductionofcitiesofgreatheterogeneityanddynamism.Atthecoreofthewayinwhichthesecitiesconstantlychangearetheeverydayeﬀortsofresidentstoautoconstructtheirdwellingsandimprovetheirneighborhoods.ButcentraltothewholeprocessarealsowhatIcalledtransversallogicsandthemodesofpoliticalengagementsthattheygenerate.Ihavearguedthatperipheralurbanizationengagestransversallylogicsoflegalproperty,formallabor,stateregulation,andmarketcapitalism.Actorsinthiswayofcreatingcities—residents,governmentoﬃcialsatvariouslevels,developers,speculators,activists—engagewitheachothernotnecessarilyoutsideofmainstreamlogics,butratherbytakingthemtransversallyasmatterofnegotiationandtransformation.Theunspokenassumptionofallinvolvedisthatprecariousness,irregularity,andillegalitymayconstitutethepresentconditionunderwhichtheyurbanizevastareasofthecity,butarenotpermanentCaldeira15
conditions.Theyareratheramatterofstruggle,negotiation,andespeciallyoftransformation;inshort,ofpolitics.Thediscussionsaboveshowthattheinstitutionsofthestatearecrucialincreatingconditionsforurbanization,regularization,legalization,andtheincorporationofthepoorinthecity.Butitisalsoclearthatthestatedoesnotactinthefavorofautoconstructorsoutofitsownheart.Itdoessowhenorganizedcitizensareabletoforceitintheirfavor,maintainingtheirdisturbingpresenceinpublicspacesanddemandingchangestoinstitutions,legislation,andwaysinwhichthestateoperatesandformulatespolicies.Whenthisorganizingbecomesimpossibleorisweakened,policiesmayturnintheoppositedirection,anddispossessionanddisplacementofautoconstructorsmayresult.Attemptstounderstandthedynamicsofprocessesofperipheralurbanizationmustthennecessarilydissectthetransversallogicsatplayineachsituationandthetensepoliticalengagementstheygenerate.Atthecoreofperipheralurbanizationisalsoacertaintemporality:thereisconstanttransformation.Ofcourse,citiesarealwaysbeingtransformed.Butwhenthepeopleinvolvedinproducingthemagreethatthepresentconditions—ofthehouse,theneighborhood,ortheirlegalstatus—areprovisionalandareconstantlyengagedinchangingthem,theattentiontoprocessesoftransformationiscritical.Infact,thecasesIanalyzedindicatenotonlythattheconditionsinperipheralareasalwayschange,butalsothatinseveralcitiesthismodeofproducingthecitymayhavechangedrecentlyinwaysthattestthelimitsofthenotionofperipheralurbanization.Thishappenswhenthestatesideswiththeformationofcapitalistmarketsoflandatthecostofdisplacingautoconstructorsinsteadofincorporatingthem,orwhenmassiveprojectsofsocialhousinggeneralizethepossibilityoftheacquisitionoflegalandﬁnishedhousingbythepoor,thuseclipsingautoconstruction.Peripheralurbanizationisawidespreadprocessthroughouttheglobalsouth,butitshapescitiesunevenly.AlthoughsimilarprocessesofurbanizationcanbeidentiﬁedinIstanbul,Santiago,andSa˜oPaulo,theirhistoriesarequitediﬀerent,asaretheirpresentconﬁgurationsandtheirtendenciesoftransformation.Theyaredissimilarcases.Theirjuxtapositionandtheexplorationofthetensionsandvariationsthatexistamongthemilluminateeachotherandopenupnewpossibilitiesofunderstanding.ThethreepointsIhavejusthighlighted—theroleplayedbytransversallogicsandtheirunpredictableoutcomes;theconstantprocessesoftransformation;andthedissimilarityamongcases—putspeciﬁcdemandsonanalysesofperipheralurbanization.Researchoftheseprocessesshouldcapturetheinstabilityofformationsoflegalityandregulationandasigniﬁcantamountofimprovisation,experimentation,andcontestationshapingtherelationshipsamongallinvolved,fromresidentstoagentsofthestate.Researchshouldalsoidentifyemergentconditions,conﬁgurationsinthemaking,andconstanttransformation.Finally,researchshouldexploresigniﬁcantdissimilarityamongcases.TheanalysisIprovidedinthisarticlepursuesthesepathsusingbothqualitativelogicandhistoricalinvestigation.Itapproachesthesetofprocessesthatconstituteperipheralurbanizationsimultaneouslyintheirinternalhistoricaltransformationsandacrosstheirdissimilarformations.Ifthemodelofperipheralurbanizationpresentedhereispowerful,itisbecauseittriestobringtotheforefrontthedoubleinstabilityofthismodeofproducingcitiesintheglobalsouth:itisstructuredbyambiguityandcontestation;anditisalwaysbeingtransformed.AcknowledgementsThispaperhasbeeninthemakingforawhile.Itsﬁrstincarnationwaspresentedattheconference‘Peripheries:DecenteringUrbanTheory’thatJamesHolstonandIorganizedatUCBerkeleyin2009,16EnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpace35(1)
sponsoredbyGlobalMetropolitanStudiesandincollaborationwiththeCenterforContemporaryCultureofBarcelona.AnotherversionwaspresentedatStanfordUniversityattheWorkshop‘DecenteringUrbanTheory:Peripheries,UrbanizationandPopularParticipation’in2013.Finally,alaterversionwaspresentedasaLSECitiesLectureinOctober2014.Ithanktheparticipantsintheseeventsfortheircomments,especiallyJamesHolston,JamesFerguson,ThomasBlomHansen,RickBurdett,andAustinZeiderman.IalsothankAyferBartuCandan,AsherGhertner,CarterKoppelman,MiguelPe´rez,AlexWerth,mystudentswhohaveengagedwithmeovertheyearsindiscussionsaboutperipheries,andmycolleaguesandcollaboratorsGautamBhan,KellyGillespie,andAbdouMaliqSimone.Finally,Iwouldliketothankthreeanonymousreviewersfortheirinsightfulcomments.DeclarationofconflictinginterestsTheauthor(s)declarednopotentialconﬂictsofinterestwithrespecttotheresearch,authorship,and/orpublicationofthisarticle.FundingTheauthor(s)receivednoﬁnancialsupportfortheresearch,authorship,and/orpublicationofthisarticle.Notes1.Someofthemainreferencesinanowwell-knownargumentthatmainstreamurbantheoriesareinadequatetoanalyzethetypesofurbanizationintheglobalsouthincludeRobinson(2002),Roy(2009),McFarlane(2008),MbembeandNuttall(2004),andWatson(2009).2.Nordoesperipheralrefertomacrorelationsofunevendevelopment,asinworldsystemtheory.3.Forexample:McFarlane(2010),Robinson(2011,2016),andWard(2010).4.Simone’sanalysisinFortheCityYettoCome(2004)isabrilliantexampleofthispracticeofthinkingthroughdissimilarcases.5.Iusesometimesthetermperipheriestorefertospacesproducedbyperipheralurbanization.6.SeeBondukiandRolnik(1979),Caldeira(1994),Holston(1991),andHolstonandCaldeira(2008).7.OnMexicoanditsvariouslayersoflandirregularity,seeAzuela(1987),Castillo(2001),Duhau(1998,2014),GilbertanddeJong(2015),andJonesandWard(1998).8.See,forinstance,Bhan(2016),Holston(2008),PayneandDurant-Lasserve(2012),andVarley(2002).9.Althoughterminologyisusuallynotveryprecise,residencesbuiltoninvadedlandtowhichresidentshavenoclaimtoownershipareusuallyreferredtowithspecialwords,suchasfavelas,invaso˜es,campamentos,etc.10.MydiscussionofIstanbulisbasedespeciallyontheworksofBalaban(2011),CandanandKolluoglu(2008),El-Kazaz(2013),Keyder(2005),Kuyucu(2014),KuyucuandU¨nsal(2010),andTugal(2013).11.Onemightbetemptedtousethelabel‘gentrification’todescribetheprocessesoflandrequalificationgoingoninIstanbul.TheTurkishscholarswhohavebeenanalyzingtheseprocessestendnottousethisterm.Instead,theytalkaboutenclosureofurbanspace(Balaban,2011),propertytransfer(KuyucuandU¨nsal,2010),institutionalizationofprivatepropertyregimes(Kuyucu,2014),andsocialexclusion(Keyder,2005).Thus,althoughtheydonotaddressthediscussiondirectly,itseemsthattheywouldbeinagreementwithGhertner’s(2014)argumentthatgentrificationtheoryshouldnotbeextendedintotheglobalsouth.Infact,theassumptionsofthistheoryarebasedontheEuro-Americancasesofpostindustrialsocietieswithwell-establishedprivatepropertyregimes.WhentransferredtodifferentcontextsinwhichthemaindynamicmayCaldeira17
beexactlytheconstitutionofsuchregimes,thenotionofgentrificationmay‘‘reducetheanalyticalclarity’’ofthestudies(Ghertner,2014:1556).12.MydiscussionoftheChileancaseisbasedespeciallyonDucci(1997),Gilbert(2002,2004a,2004b),Murphy(2014),Rodrı´guezandSugranyes(2005),Rodrı´guezandRodrı´guez(2009),Salcedo(2010),andTapiaZarricueta(2010).13.MyanalysisofSa˜oPauloisbasedmainlyonmyownresearchoverthelast30yearsaswellasonmyworkincollaborationwithJamesHolstonandonhisownresearch.ItisaworkconstructedinconstantdialoguewithourBraziliancolleagues,especiallyNabilBonduki,EduardoMarques,MarceloNery,ReginaProsperiMeyer,andRaquelRolniki.Inthelast40years,BraziliansocialscientistsandurbanistshavegeneratedaphenomenalproductionelucidatingtheprocessesofperipheralurbanizationthroughoutBrazil.Ideeplyregretonlybeenabletociteaminimalfractionofthisproductionhere.ReferencesAhonsiB(2002)PopularshapingofmetropolitanformsandprocessesinNigeria:GlimpsesandinterpretationsfromaninformedLagosian.In:EnwezorOkwui,etal.(eds)UnderSiege:FourAfricanCities:Freetown,Johannesburg,Kinshasa,Lagos.Ostﬁldern-Ruit:HatjeCantzPublishers,pp.129–152.AzuelaA(1987)LowincomesettlementsandthelawinMexicoCity.InternationalJournalofUrbanandRegionalResearch11:523–542.BalabanU(2011)TheenclosureofurbanspaceandconsolidationofthecapitalistlandregimeinTurkishcities.UrbanStudies48:2162–2179.BhanG(2016)InthePublic’sInterest:Evictions,CitizenshipandInequalityinContemporaryDelhi.Delhi:OrientBlackSwan.BondukiNandRolnikR(1979)Periferias:Ocupac¸a˜odoEspac¸oeReproduc¸a˜odaForc¸adeTrabalho.Sa˜oPaulo:FAU-USP.CaldeiraTPR(1994)APolı´ticadosOutros—OCotidianodosMoradoresdaPeriferiaeoquePensamdoPoderedosPoderosos.Sa˜oPaulo:Brasiliense.CaldeiraTPR(2000)CityofWalls:Crime,Segregation,andCitizenshipinSa˜oPaulo.Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress.CaldeiraTPR(2013)Sa˜oPaulo:Thecityanditsprotests.Availableat:http://kaﬁla.org/2013/07/05/sao-paulo-the-city-and-its-protests-teresa-caldeira/(accessed30July2015).CaldeiraTPR(2015)Socialmovements,culturalproduction,andprotests:Sa˜oPaulo’sshiftingpoliticallandscape.CurrentAnthropology56:S126–S136.CaldeiraTPRandHolstonJ(2005)StateandurbanspaceinBrazil:Frommodernistplanningtodemocraticinterventions.In:OngAandCollierSJ(eds)GlobalAssemblages:Technology,Politics,andEthicsasAnthropologicalProblems.London:Blackwell,pp.393–416.CaldeiraTPRandHolstonJ(2014)ParticipatoryurbanplanninginBrazil.UrbanStudies52:2001–2017.CamargoC,etal.(1976)Sa˜oPaulo1975:CrescimentoePobreza.Sa˜oPaulo:Loyola.CandanABandKolluogluB(2008)Emergingspacesofneoliberalism:AgatedtownandapublichousingprojectinIstanbul.NewPerspectivesonTurkey39:5–46.CastilloJ(2001)Urbanismsoftheinformal:TransformationsintheurbanfringesofMexicoCity.Praxis:JournalofWritingandBuilding2:102–111.CliﬀordJ(1981)Onethnographicsurrealism.ComparativeStudiesinSocietyandHistory23:539–564.DucciME(1997)Chile:elladooscurodeunapolı´ticadeviviendaexitosa.RevistaEURE23:99–115.DuhauE(1998)Ha´bitatPopularyPolı´ticaUrbana.MexicoCity:UniversidadAutonomaMetropolitana.DuhauE(2014)Theinformalcity:Anenduringslumoraprogressivehabitat?In:FischerB,McCannBandAuyeroJ(eds)CitiesfromScratch:PovertyandInformalityinUrbanLatinAmericaDurham,NC:DukeUniversityPress,pp.150–169.El-KazazS(2013)It’saboutthepark:AstruggleforTurkey’scities.Availableat:http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12259/it-is-about-the-park_a-struggle-for-turkey%E2%80%99s-citie18EnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpace35(1)
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RobinsonJ(2016)Thinkingcitiesthroughelsewhere:Comparativetacticsforamoreglobalurbanstudies.ProgressinHumanGeography40:3–29.Rodrı´guezAandRodrı´guezP(eds)(2009)Santiago,UnaCiudadNeoliberal.Quito:OLACCHI.Rodrı´guezAandSugranyesA(eds)(2005)LosConTecho:UnDesafı´oparalaPolı´ticadeViviendaSocial.Santiago:EdicionesSUR.RoyA(2009)The21st-centurymetropolis:Newgeographiesoftheory.RegionalStudies43:819–830.SalcedoR(2010)Thelastslum:MovingfromillegalsettlementstosubsidizedhomeownershipinChile.UrbanAﬀairsReview46:90–118.SecretariadeEconomiaePlanejamentodoEstadodeSa˜oPaulo(Seplan).(1977).Subdivisa˜odoMunicı´piodeSa˜oPauloemA´reasHomogeˆneas.Sa˜oPaulo:Seplan.SimoneA(2004)FortheCityYettoCome—ChangingAfricanLifeinFourCities.Durham,NC:Duke.SimoneA(2010)CityLifefromJakartatoDakar:MovementsattheCrossroads.London:Routledge.SimoneA(2014)Jakarta:DrawingtheCityNear.Minneapolis:UniversityofMinnesotaPress.SmallML(2009)‘HowmanycasesdoIneed?’Onscienceandthelogicofcaseselectioninﬁeld-basedresearch.Ethnography10:5–38.SmolkaMOandMullahyL(eds)(2010)PerspectivasUrbanas:TemasCrı´ticosenPolı´ticasdeSueloenAme´ricaLatina.Cambridge:LincolnInstituteofLandPolicy.TapiaZarricuetaR(2010)ViviendasocialenSantiagodeChile:ana´lisisdesucomportamientolocacional,perı´odo1980–2002.RevistaInvi73:105–131.TugalC(2013)OccupyGezi:ThelimitsofTurkey’sneoliberalsuccess.Availableat:http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12009/occupy-gezi_the-limits-of-turkey%E2%80%99s-neoliberal-succ(accessed25August2013).VarleyA(2002)Privateorpublic:Debatingthemeaningoftenurelegalization.InternationalJournalofUrbanandRegionalResearch26:449–461.WardK(2010)Towardsarelationalcomparativeapproachtothestudyofcities.ProgressinHumanGeography34:471–487.WatsonV(2009)SeeingfromtheSouth:Refocusingurbanplanningontheglobe’scentralurbanissues.UrbanStudies46:2259–2275.YinR(2002)CaseStudyResearch:DesignandMethods.ThousandOaks,CA:Sage.TeresaPRCaldeiraisananthropologistandprofessorofCityandRegionalPlanningattheUniversityofCalifornia,Berkeley.Herresearchfocusesonpredicamentsofurbanizationandreconﬁgurationsofspatialsegregationandsocialdiscrimination,mostlyincitiesoftheglobalsouth.Sheisinterestedinstudyingtherelationshipsbetweenurbanformandpoliticaltransformation,particularlyinthecontextofdemocratization.20EnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpace35(1)
PAULO FREIRE PEDAGOGY of the OPPRESSED * 30TH ANNFVERSARY EDITION * Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos With an Introduction by Donaldo Macedo BLOOMSBURY NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEYFreire, P. (2014). Pedagogy of the oppressed : 30th anniversary edition. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:38:46.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 3 As we attempt to analyze dialogue as a human phenomenon, we discover something which is the essence of dialogue itself: the word. But the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible; accordingly, we must seek its constitutive elements. Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed—even in part—the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis.1 Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.2 An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah.” It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action. 1. Action 1JI Reflection ) word = work = prax1S Sacrifice of action = verbalism Sacrifice of reflection = activism 2. Some of these reflections emerged as a result of conversations with Professor Ernani Maria Fiori. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
88’PAULO FREIRE On the other hand, if action is emphasized exclusively, to the detriment of reflection, the word is converted into activism. The latter—action for actions sake—negates the true praxis and makes dialogue impossible. Either dichotomy, by creating unauthentic forms of existence, creates also unauthentic forms of thought, which reinforce the original dichotomy. Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in it’s turn reappears to the nam-ers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence,3 but in word, in work, in action-reflection. But while to say the true word—which is work, which is praxis—is to transform the world, saying that word is not the privilege of some few persons, but the right of everyone. Consequently, no one can say a true word alone—nor can she say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words. Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming—between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression. If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings. Dialogue is thus an existential necessity. And since dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed to the world which 3. I obviously do not refer to the silence of profound meditation, in which men only apparently leave the world, withdrawing from it in order to consider it in its totality, and thus remaining with it. But this type of retreat is only authentic when the meditator is “bathed” in reality; not when the retreat signifies contempt for the world and flight from it, in a type of “historical schizophrenia.” Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ’89 is to be transformed and humanized, this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s “depositing” ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be “consumed” by the discussants. Nor yet is it a hostile, polemical argument between those who are committed neither to the naming of the world, nor to the search for truth, but rather to the imposition of their own truth. Because dialogue is an encounter among women and men who name the world, it must not be a situation where some name on behalf of others. It is an act of creation; it must not serve as a crafty instrument for the domination of one person by another. The domination implicit in dialogue is that of the world by the dialogues; it is conquest of the world for the liberation of humankind. Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation, is not possible if it is not infused with love.4 Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. It is thus necessarily the task of responsible Subjects and cannot exist in a relation of domination. Domination reveals the pathology of love: sadism in the dominator and masochism in the dominated. Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical. As an act 4. I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love. For me, the revolution, which is not possible without a theory of revolution—and therefore science—is not irreconcilable with love. On the contrary: the revolution is made by people to achieve their humanization. What, indeed, is the deeper motive which moves individuals to become revolutionaries, but the dehumanization of people? The distortion imposed on the word “love” by the capitalist world cannot prevent the revolution from being essentially loving in character, nor can it prevent the revolutionaries from affirming their love of life. Guevara (while admitting the “risk of seeming ridiculous”) was not afraid to affirm it: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.” Venceremos—The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara, edited by John Gerassi (New York, 1969), p. 398. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
90-PAULO FREIRE of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love. Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue. On the other hand, dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance. Dialogue, as the encounter of those addressed to the common task of learning and acting, is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility. How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own? How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart from others—mere “its” in whom I cannot recognize other “I”s? How can I dialogue if I consider myself a member of the in-group of “pure” men, the owners of truth and knowledge, for whom all non-members are “these people” or “the great unwashed”? How can I dialogue if I start from the premise that naming the world is the task of an elite and that the presence of the people in history is a sign of deterioration, thus to be avoided? How can I dialogue if I am closed to—and even offended by—the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced, the mere possibility causing me torment and weakness? Self-sufficiency is incompatible with dialogue. Men and women who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world. Someone who cannot acknowledge himself to be as mortal as everyone else still has a long way to go before he can reach the point of encounter. At the point of encounter there are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know. Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all). Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue; the “dialogical man” believes in others Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ’91 even before he meets them face to face. His faith, however, is not naive. The “dialogical man” is critical and knows that although it is within the power of humans to create and transform, in a concrete situation of alienation individuals may be impaired in the use of that power. Far from destroying his faith in the people, however, this possibility strikes him as a challenge to which he must respond He is convinced that the power to create and transform, even when thwarted in concrete situations, tends to be reborn. And that rebirth can occur—not gratuitously, but in and through the struggle for liberation—in the supersedence of slave labor by emancipated labor which gives zest to life. Without this faith in people, dialogue is a farce which inevitably degenerates into paternalistic manipulation. Founding itself upon love, humility, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialogues is the logical consequence. It would be a contradiction in terms if dialogue—loving, humble, and full of faith—did not produce this climate of mutual trust, which leads the dialoguers into ever closer partnership in the naming of the world. Conversely, such trust is obviously absent in the anti-dialogics of the banking method of education. Whereas faith in humankind is an a priori requirement for dialogue, trust is established by dialogue. Should it founder, it will be seen that the preconditions were lacking. False love, false humility, and feeble faith in others cannot create trust. Trust is contingent on the evidence which one party provides the others of his true, concrete intentions; it cannot exist if that party’s words do not coincide with their actions. To say one thing and do another—to take one’s own word lightly—cannot inspire trust. To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie. Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope. Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search—a search which can be carried out only in communion with others. Hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeing from it. The dehumanization resulting from an unjust order is not a cause for despair but for hope, leading to the incessant pursuit of Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
92’PAULO FREIRE the humanity denied by injustice. Hope, however, does not consist in crossing one’s arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait. As the encounter of women and men seeking to be more fully human, dialogue cannot be carried on in a climate of hopelessness. If the dialoguers expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious. Finally, true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking—thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people and admits of no dichotomy between them—thinking which perceives reality as process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity—thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved. Critical thinking contrasts with naive thinking, which sees “historical time as a weight, a stratification of the acquisitions and experiences of the past,”5 from which the present should emerge normalized and “well-behaved.” For the naive thinker, the important thing is accommodation to this normalized “today.” For the critic, the important thing is the continuing transformation of reality, in behalf of the continuing hu-manization of men. In the words of Pierre Furter: The goal will no longer be to eliminate the risks of temporality by clutching to guaranteed space, but rather to temporalize space . . . The universe is revealed to me not as space, imposing a massive presence to which I can but adapt, but as a scope, a domain which takes shape as I act upon it.6 For naive thinking, the goal is precisely to hold fast to this guaranteed space and adjust to it. By thus denying temporality, it denies itself as well. Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue there is no communi-5. From the letter of a friend. 6. Pierre Furter, Educagdo e Vida (Rio, 1966), pp. 26-27. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ’93 cation, and without communication there can be no true education. Education which is able to resolve the contradiction between teacher and student takes place in a situation in which both address their act of cognition to the object by which they are mediated. Thus, the dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom does not begin when the teacher-student meets with the students-teachers in a pedagogical situation, but rather when the former first asks herself or himself what she or he will dialogue with the latter about. And preoccupation with the content of dialogue is really preoccupation with the program content of education. For the anti-dialogical banking educator, the question of content simply concerns the program about which he will discourse to his students; and he answers his own question, by organizing his own program. For the dialogical, problem-posing teacher-student, the program content of education is neither a gift nor an imposition— bits of information to be deposited in the students—but rather the organized, systematized, and developed “re-presentation” to individuals of the things about which they want to know more.7 Authentic education is not carried on by “A” for “B” or by “A” about “B,” but rather by “A” with “B,” mediated by the world—a world which impresses and challenges both parties, giving rise to views or opinions about it. These views, impregnated with anxieties, doubts, hopes, or hopelessness, imply significant themes on the basis of which the program content of education can be built. In its desire to create an ideal model of the “good man,” a naively conceived humanism often overlooks the concrete, existential, present situation of real people. Authentic humanism, in Pierre Furter’s words, “consists in permitting the emergence of the awareness of our full humanity, as a condition and as an obligation, as a situation 7. In a long conversation with Malraux, Mao-Tse-Tung declared, “You know I’ve proclaimed for a long time: we must teach the masses clearly what we have received from them confusedly.” Andre Malraux, Anti-Memoirs (New York, 1968), pp. 361-362. This affirmation contains an entire dialogical theory of how to construct the program content of education, which cannot be elaborated according to what the educator thinks best for the students. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
94-PAULO FREIRE and as a project.”8 We simply cannot go to the laborers—urban or peasant9—in the banking style, to give them “knowledge” or to impose upon them the model of the “good man” contained in a program whose content we have ourselves organized. Many political and educational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to their own personal views of reality, never once taking into account (except as mere objects of their actions) the men-in-a-situation to whom their program was ostensibly directed. For the truly humanist educator and the authentic revolutionary, the object of action is the reality to be transformed by them together with other people—not other men and women themselves. The oppressors are the ones who act upon the people to indoctrinate them and adjust them to a reality which must remain untouched. Unfortunately, however, in their desire to obtain the support of the people for revolutionary action, revolutionary leaders often fall for the banking line of planning program content from the top down. They approach the peasant or urban masses with projects which may correspond to their own view of the world, but not to that of the people.10 They forget that their fundamental objective is to fight 8. Furter, op. cit.y p. 165. 9. The latter, usually submerged in a colonial context, are almost umhilically linked to the world of nature, in relation to which they feel themselves to be component parts rather than shapers. 10. “Our cultural workers must serve the people with great enthusiasm and devotion, and they must link themselves with the masses, not divorce themselves from the masses. In order to do so, they must act in accordance with the needs and wishes of the masses. All work done for the masses must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. . . . There are two principles here: one is the actual needs of the masses rather than what we fancy they need, and the other is the wishes of the masses, who must make up their own minds instead of our making up their minds for them.” From the Selected Works of Mao-Tse-Tung, Vol. III. “The United Front in Cultural Work” (October 30, 1944) (Peking, 1967), pp. 186-187. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED -95 alongside the people for the recovery of the people’s stolen humanity, not to “win the people over” to their side. Such a phrase does not belong in the vocabulary of revolutionary leaders, but in that of the oppressor. The revolutionary’s role is to liberate, and be liberated, with the people—not to win them over. In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter’s “submerged” state of consciousness, and take advantage of that passivity to “fill” that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action, which, by presenting the oppressors’ slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to “eject” those slogans from within themselves. After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the testing ground, “housing” the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the fact that as dual beings, “housing” the oppressors within themselves, they cannot be truly human. This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of “salvation,” but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situ-ation and their awareness of that situation—the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which and with which they exist. One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion,11 good intentions notwithstanding. The starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people. Utilizing certain basic contradictions, we must pose this existential, concrete, present situation to the people as a problem which challenges them and requires 11. This point will be analyzed in detail in chapter 4. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
96’PAULO FREIRE a response—not just at the intellectual level, but at the level of action.12 We must never merely discourse on the present situation, must never provide the people with programs which have little or nothing to do with their own preoccupations, doubts, hopes, and fears— programs which at times in fact increase the fears of the oppressed consciousness. It is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours. We must realize that their view of the world, manifested variously in their action, reflects their situation in the world. Educational and political action which is not critically aware of this situation runs the risk either of “banking” or of preaching in the desert. Often, educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the people they address. Accordingly, their talk is just alienated and alienating rhetoric. The language of the educator or the politician (and it seems more and more clear that the latter must also become an educator, in the broadest sense of the word), like the language of the people, cannot exist without thought; and neither language nor thought can exist without a structure to which they refer. In order to communicate effectively, educator and politician must understand the structural conditions in which the thought and language of the people are dialectically framed. It is to the reality which mediates men, and to the perception of that reality held by educators and people, that we must go to find the program content of education. The investigation of what I have termed the people’s “thematic universe”13—the complex of their “generative themes”—inaugurates the dialogue of education as the practice of freedom. The methodology of that investigation must likewise be dialogical, affording the opportunity both to discover 12. It is as self-contradictory for true humanists to use the banking method as it would be for rightists to engage in problem-posing education. (The latter are always consistent—they never use a problem-posing pedagogy.) 13. The expression “meaningful thematics” is used with the same connotation. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED • 97 generative themes and to stimulate people’s awareness in regard to these themes. Consistent with the liberating purpose of dialogical education, the object of the investigation is not persons (as if they were anatomical fragments), but rather the thought-language with which men and women refer to reality, the levels at which they perceive that reality, and their view of the world, in which their generative themes are found. Before describing a “generative theme” more precisely, which will also clarify what is meant by a “minimum thematic universe,” it seems to me indispensable to present a few preliminary reflections. The concept of a generative theme is neither an arbitrary invention nor a working hypothesis to be proved. If it were a hypothesis to be proved, the initial investigation would seek not to ascertain the nature of the theme, but rather the very existence or non-existence of themes themselves. In that event, before attempting to understand the theme in its richness, its significance, its plurality, its transformations, and its historical composition, we would first have to verify whether or not it is an objective fact; only then could we proceed to apprehend it. Although an attitude of critical doubt is legitimate, it does appear possible to verify the reality of the generative theme—not only through one’s own existential experience, but also through critical reflection on the human-world relationship and on the relationships between people implicit in the former. This point deserves more attention. One may well remember— trite as it seems—that, of the uncompleted beings, man is the only one to treat not only his actions but his very self as the object of his reflection; this capacity distinguishes him from the animals, which are unable to separate themselves from their activity and thus are unable to reflect upon it. In this apparently superficial distinction lie the boundaries which delimit the action of each in his life space. Because the animals activity is an extension of themselves, the results of that activity are also inseparable from themselves: animals can neither set objectives nor infuse their transformation of nature with any significance beyond itself. Moreover, the “decision” to perform this activity belongs not to them but to their species. Animals are, accordingly, fundamentally “beings in themselves.” Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
98-PAULO FREIRE Unable to decide for themselves, unable to objectify either themselves or their activity, lacking objectives which they themselves have set, living “submerged” in a world to which they can give no meaning, lacking a “tomorrow” and a “today” because they exist in an overwhelming present, animals are ahistorical. Their ahistorical life does not occur in the “world,” taken in its strict meaning; for the animal, the world does not constitute a “not-I” which could set him apart as an “I.” The human world, which is historical, serves as a mere prop for the “being in itself.” Animals are not challenged by the configuration which confronts them; they are merely stimulated. Their life is not one of risk-taking, for they are not aware of taking risks. Risks are not challenges perceived upon reflection, but merely “noted” by the signs which indicate them; they accordingly do not require decision-making responses. Consequently, animals cannot commit themselves. Their ahistorical condition does not permit them to “take on” life. Because they do not “take it on,” they cannot construct it; and if they do not construct it, they cannot transform its configuration. Nor can they know themselves to be destroyed by life, for they cannot expand their “prop” world into a meaningful, symbolic world which includes culture and history. As a result, animals do not “animalize” their configuration in order to animalize themselves—nor do they “de-animalize” themselves. Even in the forest, they remain “beings-in-themselves,” as animal-like there as in the zoo. In contrast, the people—aware of their activity and the world in which they are situated, acting in function of the objectives which they propose, having the seat of their decisions located in themselves and in their relations with the world and with others, infusing the world with their creative presence by means of the transformation they effect upon it—unlike animals, not only live but exist;14 and their existence is historical. Animals live out their lives on an atemp-oral, flat, uniform “prop”; humans exist in a world which they are 14. In the English language, the terms “live” and “exist” have assumed implications opposite to their etymological origins. As used here, “live” is the more basic term, implying only survival; “exist” implies a deeper involvement in the process of “becoming.” Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED -99 constantly re-creating and transforming. For animals, “here” is only a habitat with which they enter into contact; for people, “here” signifies not merely a physical space, but also an historical space. Strictly speaking, “here,” “now,” “there,” “tomorrow,” and “yesterday” do not exist for the animal, whose life, lacking self-consciousness, is totally determined. Animals cannot surmount the limits imposed by the “here,” the “now,” or the “there.” Humans, however, because they are aware of themselves and thus of the world—because they are conscious beings—exist in a dialectical relationship between the determination of limits and their own freedom. As they separate themselves from the world, which they objectify, as they separate themselves from their own activity, as they locate the seat of their decisions in themselves and in their relations with the world and others, people overcome the situations which limit them: the “limit-situations.”15 Once perceived by individuals as fetters, as obstacles to their liberation, these situations stand out in relief from the background, revealing their true nature as concrete historical dimensions of a given reality. Men and women respond to the challenge with actions which Vieira Pinto calls “limit-acts”: those directed at negating and overcoming, rather than passively accepting, the “given.” Thus, it is not the limit-situations in and of themselves which create a climate of hopelessness, but rather how they are perceived by women and men at a given historical moment: whether they appear as fetters or as insurmountable barriers. As critical perception is embodied in action, a climate of hope and confidence develops which leads men to attempt to overcome the limit-situations. This objective can be achieved only through action upon the con-15. Professor Alvaro Vieira Pinto analyzes with clarity the problem of “limit-situations/’ using the concept without the pessimistic aspect originally found in Jaspers. For Vieira Pinto, the “limit-situations” are not “the impassable boundaries where possibilities end, but the real boundaries where all possibilities begin”; they are not “the frontier which separates being from nothingness, but the frontier which separates being from nothingness but the frontier which separates being from being more.” Alvaro Vieira Pinto, Consciencia e Realidade Nacional (Rio de Janeiro, 1960), Vol. II, p. 284. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
100-PAULO FREIRE Crete, historical reality in which limit-situations historically are found. As reality is transformed and these situations are superseded, new ones will appear, which in turn will evoke new limit-acts. The prop world of animals contains no limit-situations, due to its ahistorical character. Similarly, animals lack the ability to exercise limit-acts, which require a decisive attitude towards the world: separation from and objectification of the world in order to transform it. Organically bound to their prop, animals do not distinguish between themselves and the world. Accordingly, animals are not limited by limit-situations—which are historical—but rather by the entire prop. And the appropriate role for animals is not to relate to their prop (in that event, the prop would be a world), but to adapt to it. Thus, when animals “produce” a nest, a hive, or a burrow, they are not creating products which result from “limit-acts,” that is, transforming responses. Their productive activity is subordinated to the satisfaction of a physical necessity which is simply stimulating, rather than challenging. “An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product.”16 Only products which result from the activity of a being but do not belong to its physical body (though these products may bear its seal), can give a dimension of meaning to the context, which thus becomes a world. A being capable of such production (who thereby is necessarily aware of himself, is a “being for himself”) could no longer be if she or he were not in the process of being in the world with which he or she relates; just as the world would no longer exist if this being did not exist. The difference between animals—who (because their activity does not constitute limit-acts) cannot create products detached from themselves—and humankind—who through their action upon the world create the realm of culture and history—is that only the latter are beings of the praxis. Only human beings are praxis—the praxis which, as the reflection and action which truly transform reality, is 16. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Dirk Struik, ed (New York, 1964), p. 113. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRE S S E D • 101 the source of knowledge and creation. Animal activity, which occurs without a praxis, is not creative; peoples transforming activity is. It is as transforming and creative beings that humans, in their permanent relations with reality, produce not only material goods— tangible objects—but also social institutions, ideas, and concepts.17 Through their continuing praxis, men and women simultaneously create history and become historical-social beings. Because—in contrast to animals—people can tri-dimensionalize time into the past, the present, and the future, their history, in function of their own creations, develops as a constant process of transformation within which epochal units materialize. These epochal units are not closed periods of time, static compartments within which people are confined. Were this the case, a fundamental condition of history—its continuity—would disappear. On the contrary, epochal units interrelate in the dynamics of historical continuity.18 An epoch is characterized by a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values, and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites, striving towards plenitude. The concrete representation of many of these ideas, values, concepts, and hopes, as well as the obstacles which impede the people’s full humanization, constitute the themes of that epoch. These themes imply others which are opposing or even antithetical; they also indicate tasks to be carried out and fulfilled. Thus, historical themes are never isolated, independent, disconnected, or static; they are always interacting dialecti-cally with their opposites. Nor can these themes be found anywhere except in the human-world relationship. The complex of interacting themes of an epoch constitutes its “thematic universe/’ Confronted by this “universe of themes” in dialectical contradiction, persons take equally contradictory positions: some work to maintain the structures, others to change them. As antagonism deepens between themes which are the expression of reality, there 17. Regarding this point, see Karel Kosik, Dialetica de lo Concreto (Mexico, 1967). 18. On the question of historical epochs, see Hans Freyer, Teoria de la epoca atual (Mexico). Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
102-PAULO FREIRE is a tendency for the themes and for reality itself to be mythicized, establishing a climate of irrationality and sectarianism. This climate threatens to drain the themes of their deeper significance and to deprive them of their characteristically dynamic aspect. In such a situation, myth-creating irrationality itself becomes a fundamental theme. Its opposing theme, the critical and dynamic view of the world, strives to unveil reality, unmask its mythicization, and achieve a full realization of the human task: the permanent transformation of reality in favor of the liberation of people. In the last analysis, the themes19 both contain and are contained in limit-situations; the tasks they imply require limit-acts. When the themes are concealed by the limit-situations and thus are not clearly perceived, the corresponding tasks—peoples responses in the form of historical action—can be neither authentically nor critically fulfilled. In this situation, humans are unable to transcend the limit-situations to discover that beyond these situations—and in contradiction to them—lies an untested feasibility. In sum, limit-situations imply the existence of persons who are directly or indirectly served by these situations, and of those who are negated and curbed by them. Once the latter come to perceive these situations as the frontier between being and being more human, rather than the frontier between being and nothingness, they begin to direct their increasingly critical actions towards achieving the untested feasibility implicit in that perception. On the other hand, those who are served by the present limit-situation regard the untested feasibility as a threatening limit-situation which must not be allowed to materialize, and act to maintain the status quo. Consequently, liberating actions upon an historical milieu must correspond not only to the generative themes but to the way in which these themes are perceived. This requirement in turn implies another: the investigation of meaningful thematics. 19. I have termed these themes “generative” because (however they are comprehended and whatever action they may evoke) they contain the possibility of unfolding into again as many themes, which in their turn call for new tasks to be fulfilled. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.Created from socal on 2022-03-31 17:26:48.Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
University of Pittsburgh PressChapter Title: Boundary Games: Ecochard, Doxiadis, and the Refugee Housing Projects under Military Rule in Pakistan, 1953–1959 Chapter Author(s): M. IJLAL MUZAFFAR Book Title: Governing by Design Book Subtitle: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century Book Author(s): AGGREGATE Published by: University of Pittsburgh Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hjpbr.10JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsUniversity of Pittsburgh Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Governing by DesignThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
147ON May 20, 1963, some 150,000 residents of the newly built Ko-rangi housing colony in Karachi sat outside their houses with their belongings, hoisting black flags to protest the eviction of one “Yusuf Bhutock” from his house by the Karachi Development Authority (KDA).1 At any other location the protestors would have been dispersed with the baton if not the bulldozer. Korangi, however, had special status. It was built by the military government of Ayub Khan, the self-appointed field marshal and presi-dent of Pakistan from 1958 to1969, as a model housing project for refugees from India who had crowded the streets of Karachi since the partition of the subcontinent, and the end of British rule, in 1947 (figure 7.1). A clash with those refugee groups now would have delegitimized the project as well the govern-ment that had celebrated it. A confrontation would have also been a setback for the two American aid agencies, USAID and the Ford Foundation, that had sponsored the project as an experiment into social “pacification” designed to save Karachi’s large migrant and refugee population from communist influence. These concerns were not lost to the project’s designer, the famous Greek architect-planner, and global consultant par excellence at the time, Constantine Doxiadis. In a letter to Colonel Nasser Humayune, the military director of the National Housing and Settlement Agency, and Harry Case, the Ford Foundation representative in Karachi, Doxiadis wrote:In the four and a half years of my acquaintance with the urban problems of Pakistan it is the first time that I have seen such an enthusiasm, inspiration and coordination of effort under a unique command for the achievement of a natural goal in this field. The 7Boundary GamesEcochard, Doxiadis, and the Refugee Housing Projects under Military Rule in Pakistan, 1953–1959◾M. IJLAL MUZAFFAR147BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
148“Operation Korangi” as I think it should be called has all the charac-teristics of a beachhead started by commandos in hostile terri-tory—by commandos who have the desire to achieve a national goal even by deciding to have greater sacrifices and casualties than normally. . . . Even more: it should be turned into the beachhead that is going to open the enemy land for conquest.2Doxiadis’s statement speaks to the founding claim of authoritarian rule in Paki-stan: the framing of a heterogeneous polity as an enemy that must be fought in the present so that a unified nation could be preserved for the future. More important, it shows how this task is to be carried out: by casting modernization as a “natural goal” while framing all politics as unnatural hindrances that must be fought with unshakable resolve.3 Described as “natural” process, moderniza-tion is imbued with an internal logic and unity. In contrast, politics is equated with the fragmentation of this unity. The unified logic of modernization is lost in the arena of political interruptions. Only the para-political and centralized authority of military rule can carry out the coordination demanded by the mod-ernization process.Projects of refugee settlement, like Korangi, were a critical component in consolidating this image. They constituted the representative face of the pro-Figure 7.1. Ayub Khan, field marshall and president of Pakistan, Karachi, 1959. Touring the Korangi project during construction. Source: Ford Foundation Archives, New York.M. IJLAL MUZAFFARThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
149claimed coordinated enterprise: custodianship. The refugee formed the transi-tory figure that needed to be incrementally guided into modernity outside of the political arena. The Ayub government too had framed its rule in similar terms when it launched its “basic democracy” program. The program had banned all political parties with the claim that the public first needed to be trained for modern political participation under a centrally administered program of mu-nicipal elections. Continuity of administration superseded the interruptions of politics. This framing allowed the military government to forge an alliance with Pakistan’s influential civil bureaucracy, extending the latter’s powers and giving the military government a civil face.4 The basic democracy program projected the transitory status of the refugee onto the entire country, turning the entire national population as refugees into democratic politics.What, however, set this mode of authoritarian power apart was its con-struction around the idea of transition. Despite the emphasis on centralized authority, that authority is presented as a transitory custodianship of a figure, a nation in transition, who despite its present derailment into political contesta-tions, possesses the key to modernization. Presenting itself as an emancipatory custodian of a transitory figure, the military government was able to have its cake and eat it too. Architecture and planning served as apt tools to tread the line between authority and custodianship, between centralized power and its often disseminated application. But before we look at the process of refugee settlement, its different framings, and their currency in securing authoritarian rule in Pakistan, let us first consider the historical context that had made refugee settlement such a potent issue in the post-partition national political discourse.Partition The partition of India and Pakistan had been both unpredictable and violent, displacing more than twelve million people and leaving over a million dead. One major factor of this toll had been the ensuing unpredictability of the partition itself, concerning not only whether the subcontinent would be divided into a Hindu majority India and Muslim majority Pakistan but also regarding where the exact boundaries of the new nation-states would fall.5 The struggle for inde-pendence had produced entrenched divisions between the two major political parties, the Muslim League and the Congress. The political impasse over the sharing of power had led the Muslim League to present a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, Pakistan, in the Muslim majority areas of the subcontinent. The difficulty and costs, both material and human, of such a division in a het-erogeneous population was evident to leaders on both sides. Because of these challenges, the status of Pakistan—whether it was to be a confederated set of provinces within a united India or a separate nation-state—remained undeter-BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
150mined. Initially, the British were open to the resolution of political differences before independence, a path particularly stressed by the second to last viceroy, Archibald Wavell.The Second World War, however, changed the British posture in India. Marred by the political and financial cost of the war, the British government wanted an expedient decolonization with minimum political costs. Using the political impasse as an opportunity, the postwar British government of Clement Attlee pressed for a quick resolution, sending in a new viceroy, Louis Mount-batten (Lord Mountbatten of Burma), with the explicit mission of quickly un-tangling British involvement with the deteriorating political situation in India. Mountbatten dismissed the long time line proposed by his predecessor, Wavell, and appointed a Boundary Commission led by a London lawyer, Cyril Radcliff. The commission was to provisionally divide the contested states on “notional division” and then hold appeals from different sides claiming majority in particu-lar areas.6 This process, bounded by the commission’s deadline to give its delibera-tions, created a crisis. The demands for separation, which were initially used for political maneuvering and for building popular support, became occasions for staging communal riots, giving legitimacy to the haste for decolonization created by the British. Each push for demarcation, in areas with heterogeneous populations, betrayed its impossibility. Till the last tick of the clock to inde-pendence, the exact boundaries of the partition remained unresolved. Even though independence was declared on the preannounced deadline, the ques-tion of partition lingered on. The status of cities like Amritsar and Lahore, the traditional capital of the state of the Punjab, which had near equal Muslim and Hindu populations, remained unclear. Major population groups held onto their properties in hope. Rulers of many princely states were given the choice to decide their own fate. This created further confrontations between populations in those areas. When the Radcliff commission finally produced its adhoc report, the results were astonishingly disastrous. Finding themselves on the wrong side of the bor-der, countless people were turned into refugees in their own homes. Massive population movements were combined with widespread massacres. Trainloads of dead arrived on both sides. Villages perished and burned, the dead disap-peared into mass graves. More than a million people lost their lives. These dislo-cations would come to be best remembered in the postwar political culture on both sides of the border through the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White, the famous American photojournalist known for her uncanny ability to be pres-ent before unfolding catastrophes. She had been present at the allied liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany in 1945; she had taken the famous image of Gandhi at the spinning wheel hours before his assassination; and she was now present in India before the partition. M. IJLAL MUZAFFARThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
151In Bourke-White’s images of the partition, one characteristic stands out: the juxtaposition of opposing scales, the grand and the immediate, the national and the personal (figures 7.2 and 7.3). Distraught faces are set against grand vistas, blank skies, and historical sites. It is as if the partition had opened a chasm that had swallowed all that mediated between the personal and the national, bring-ing the former into grating adjacency with the latter without the intervening layers of the social, the common, the familial, and the familiar. Bourke-White stressed this forced coupling by highlighting the overburdened and inadequate means of transportation, infrastructure, or simply the makeshift objects that are employed to make the historical crossing. The inadequacy of the means at the individuals’ disposal, to meet this historic and spatial challenge, gives the images an air of incertitude. The refugees appear to us to not only be passing through a catastrophic transition but also as if they would forever remain caught in this moment. And indeed they would. This transitory status would continue to define the idea of the refugees in national political discourse even when they had reached their destinations. Arguably, the popularity of Bourke-White’s images in na-tional politics stems from their ability to resonate the perceived uncertainty of space/time/identity that the partition ushered, an uncertainly that still contin-ues to inhabit the contested border between India and Pakistan, making it one of the most monitored boundaries in the world.7Figure 7.2. Margaret Bourke-White, Partition of India, 1947. Source: Time & Life Pic-tures/Getty Images. © Time Life Pictures.BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
152In Pakistan the figure representing the qualities memorialized by the parti-tion would be the refugee in Karachi. Even though the most intense violence and majority of migration occurred across the border in the Punjab—the di-vided province to the North—those who migrated there were not considered refugees for long in the political discourse. This perception was molded by the fact that displaced Punjabis still had a “homeland” left in the Pakistani half of the Punjab. The same held true for other ethnic and linguistic groups, such as Pathans in the North West and Sindhis in the South, who were seen to belong to the linguistic majorities in the other three provinces of West Pakistan. The refugees in Karachi, however, had migrated from Urdu-speaking urban areas in India and had no corresponding Urdu-speaking province in Pakistan. Most of them were settled in Karachi, the first capital of Pakistan. They soon acquired the curious status of permanent refugees within the country.8 This framing was taken on by the refugees themselves to claim a separate political identity. Yet it was also projected onto them by others seeking national leadership, particularly the federal government. Because the refugees did not belong to any of the na-tional provincial majorities, the question of their settlement could be taken up to claim impartiality and nonpartisanship.9The refugee in Karachi represented an impartial and transitory subject. Be-Figure 7.3. Margaret Bourke-White, Partition of India, 1947. Source: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images. © Time Life Pictures.M. IJLAL MUZAFFARThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
153cause she appeared outside of national politics, she rendered the politics of as-sociations and alliances transparent. Her future represented the nation’s future. If Bourke-White’s images depicted the uncertainty that haunted the refugees during the course of their journey, the projects of their settlement betrayed the political currency this uncertainty held after the refugees reached their sup-posed destinations. Settlement was no longer a question of providing shelter but of transforming the refugees—and through them the nation itself. The refu-gee became the future national subject, and refugee settlement, the representa-tive project of national modernization. As the Korangi project would make evident, the Ayub government also deployed the project of refugee settlement to justify its rule. It framed refugee settlement in Karachi as part of a carefully guided process of national modern-ization that demanded long-term administrative custodianship rather than po-litical representation. The legitimacy of the Ayub government’s leadership hung in this coupling between settlement and modernization. It existed as long as this connection was perpetuated, as long as the project of refugee settlement was incomplete, as long as the refugee (and the nation) was depicted in the process of perpetual settlement. Doxiadis had judged these larger political requirements correctly, describing his designs from the beginning as experimental “processes” rather than concrete plans.10 Each proposal emphasized the systemic coordina-tion of parts, centralized administrative control, and incremental growth. This approach won him several projects from the Ayub government, including the commissions for a new campus for the University of Punjab and, in 1962, for the new capital of Pakistan, Islamabad.11EcochardKorangi, however, was not the first attempt at setting in place a process of refugee settlement in Karachi. Although he was prominent, Doxiadis was a latecomer on this scene. It was Michel Ecochard, the director of town planning of the French protectorate in Morocco, who was first invited to propose a solution for settling refugees in Karachi in 1953. Together with George Can-dilis, Shadrach Woods, and Vladimir Bodiansky—the other members of Atbat Afrique, the African offshoot of CIAM (Congres International de Modern)—Ecochard had recently designed massive housing projects for different migrant populations around Casablanca.12 The projects were highly praised at CIAM’s meeting in Aix-en-Provence, the first after the war, as a new culturally spe-cific form of modernism. In his report to the United Nations and the Pakistani government, Ecochard himself presented the projects as suitable precedents for Karachi’s refugee situation.13 Despite its apparent suitability, however, Eco-chard’s project for Karachi was not realized, unable to take hold in the turbulent BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
154political climate of Pakistan. Yet this failure highlights, just as importantly as Doxiadis’s later proposal, the viability of different models of intervention and change in relation to particular structures of the postcolonial state. Ecochard had arrived in Karachi as a consultant for the United Nations Tech-nical Assistance Administration (UN-TAA) on the recommendation of Ernest Weissman, an active CIAM member and the head of the Housing and Planning Section at the UN headquarters in New York.14 Weissman’s recommendation proved timely for Ecochard. Even though the Casablanca projects were highly praised in CIAM circles for their cultural “sensitivity,” they had received severe criticism in Morocco and France for being just the opposite: overly “function-alist” and not sensitive enough to the “cultural requirements” of the native Muslim populations. When Morocco gained independence in 1954, this criti-cism became Ecochard’s Achilles heal, ousting him to Paris when many colo-nial administrators remained behind. The Karachi project gave the Casablanca schemes a new lease on life, providing an opportunity to maintain the status they had acquired in modern architectural debates. These differing perceptions of the Casablanca projects in different circles stem from Ecochard’s own framing of culture and function as interrelated yet distinct spheres. Following the conventions of colonial anthropology, Atbat had classified the city’s migrant population according to different cultural and reli-gious profiles. Their varying characteristics, however, were seen to be trans-formable under proper regulation, eventually fitting into a normative model of modern nuclear family that was to constitute the building block of the extended French imperial realm. This process of transformation, however, was to happen incrementally, with cultural habits of the native subjects modified periodically, without causing, as it were, a sudden “break” in their cultural “patterns.” Ecochard’s and Atbat’s schemes sought to attain this goal by slowly moving the native population through different “functional” arrangements representing different population densities—from high-density lowrises reminiscent of native living arrangements to low-density modern highrises. The Casablanca housing blocks, so appreciated at the CIAM conferences, represented different archi-tectural containers in which functional calculations periodically maintained and transformed perceived cultural practices. Culture, in this mode of intervention, becomes an alibi for a particular model of administrative control that appears indirect and distant but is ever present and all encompassing.The dual focus on culture and function as categories of design is often taken as a sign of contradictory sympathies of the designers by many historians in their evaluation of Ecochard and Atbat’s work. But this is not, as Monique Eleb would have it, a sign of an ethically torn, “schizophrenic” mind-set of a colonial administrator, unable to decide what is more important, colonial science or native culture.15 Schizophrenia was precisely the mode of administration under M. IJLAL MUZAFFARThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
155“inclusive” French colonialism. Modernity was presented as a project of only periodically calibrating the movements of a loosely defined, varied, and dis-persed cultural sphere of the French imperial domain. Perpetuated in the name of protecting native populations from sudden influence of modernization, this dual approach allowed colonial administrators to take both a preservationist and transformative stance, emphasizing the dimension demanded by the cir-cumstances: preservationist if labor reserves were required, transformative if displacement was warranted. The dialectic of culture and function seen in play in the Casablanca housing projects reflects this dual strategy of imperial admin-istration. For Ecochard the logic of incremental organization employed in Casablanca was apt for the problem of refugees in Pakistan as well. Pakistan too needed a model of cultural custodianship built on a system of administrative manage-ment, one that was distant yet ever present, inclusive yet centralized. This mod-el had allowed the colonial government to maintain low investment in public welfare in the name of preserving existing cultural practices. It now allowed a third world government to maintain political and administrative control in the face of limited available resources, to fill the gap between what the government could provide and what it must plan to retain political legitimacy.Ecochard’s initial proposal for Karachi constituted of a series of independent satellite “cities” at Landhi, a site adjacent to Doxiadis’s future Korangi project.16 These cities were to be developed over time, along the main railway line that linked Karachi to the outlying industrial areas. This multiple-city approach, how-ever, quickly changed to a more centralized design, composed of a single large city with multiple subunits, or “neighborhoods” (figure 7.4). Although each of these units were to have a fixed periphery—and a fixed “framework” of roads, shopping centers dispensaries, schools, and gardens—they were meant to ac-commodate changing types and arrangements of housing. The commercial and community areas were to be located at the intersection of multiple housing sec-tors, leaving minimal restrictions for different possible organization of houses in large swaths of open green. What’s curious here is that Ecochard does not settle on a particular organi-zation scheme for the houses until the very end (figure 7.5). In fact, the possibil-ity of ever-new reorganization is presented as the main feature of the plan. Fol-lowing Casablanca, Ecochard expected the new city to grow from provisionary shelter to an intermediary stage of “hutments”—that could be arranged and rearranged in different conglomerations within open green space—to other housing types (medium- to high-rise blocks). As the economic and social profile of the inhabitants changed over time, Ecochard argued, the entire settlement would move toward lower densities and more open space. The city plan is here composed as an infrastructural field that forms both BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
156Figure 7.4. Michel Ecochard, Landhi, Karachi, 1953–1954. Site plan of the revised proposal of a single “city” with a “neighborhood” de-tail showing housing organization possibilities within open space. Source: United Nations Archives, New York.Figure 7.5. Michel Ecochard, Landhi, Karachi, 1953–1954. “Evolutive principles” for refugee housing. Source: United Nations Archives, New York.M. IJLAL MUZAFFARThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
157the condition of transformation of the houses and their telos, the moment when transforming environment would catch up with the full potential of the framework. The scheme outlines a process of evolution whose final form is already visible. The inhabitants are caught simply in the process of filling in the details.17 This approach points to Ecochard’s background as an archeologist. A graduate of Ecole des Beaux Arts, Ecochard had begun his career working on the restoration of historical buildings in Damascus.18 There, Ecochard began to formulate a continuity between archeology and planning. For Ecochard, his archeological projects were in fact planning exercises that gave old structures new functions. Working on a restoration of the Azem Palace in Damascus—a project that would lead to the commission for a master plan for Damascus itself—Ecochard asserted that an archeological project “[was] an experiment . . . to bring back to life a building both through visual stimulation and through use of the plan.”19 The plan therefore did not simply authenticate a past and restore a supposed original function to a building; rather, the plan set an experi-mental path within a new set of forces. A certain parallel can be established between Ecochard’s training as an ar-cheologist and his design approach in Karachi. Ecochard imagined the process of establishing the presence of the state in Karachi as itself an archeological project, only it was an archeology in reverse. Instead of uncovering sedimented layers of the past, the Karachi plan built up the future as sedimented layers of the present. Planning as archeology began like an archeological project with making visible the contours of the site whose contents were yet unknown. In time, planning added new layers to articulate the potential promised by the site. Yet, similar to an archeological exploration, each layer required dismantling the last to dig deeper. The future was to be constructed by a continuous process of dismantling and reassembling. The open green areas surrounding the buildings represented the space of this calibrated transformation. At Korangi this process came to be articulated in the language of CIAM’s famous four functions of “circulation,” “work,” “living,” and “public facilities”—the last modified here as “the care of body and spirit” to include a jama masjid (community mosque) and a hospital in the national context (figure 7.6). The four functions announced in advance the profile of modern life whose par-ticular form was to be discovered in time. The city is literally imagined as a palimpsest of these different functional layers, each influencing and nudging the process of culture change toward incremental modernization. Culture is the stuff that happened between the functional layers, incrementally transformed by their dismantling and reassembling in accordance with the requirements and values of modern life. The houses in Karachi then become spatial frameworks that transform the inhabitants as they traverse the modernization process. The project provided BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
158Figure 7.6a. Michel Ecochard, Landhi, Karachi, 1953–1954. Final proposal for the first city showing “circulation,” “living,” “working,” and “body and spirit.” Source: United Nations Archives, New York.M. IJLAL MUZAFFARThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
159BOUNDARY GAMESFigure 7.6 bThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
160M. IJLAL MUZAFFARFigure 7.6 cThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
161BOUNDARY GAMESFigure 7.6 dThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
162the comprehensive frame within which these transformations took place. Eco-chard extended this logic to map the entire city of Karachi, mapping its density as indicative of different stages of modernization of the inhabitants and how they could be set on path to the next stage under the guidance of a compre-hensive and visible administrative framework. By setting up a framework for what is not yet there, and may never be, Ecochard’s proposal addressed the dilemma faced by the postcolonial state: the difference between the promise and the plan, between what the state can provide and what it must claim to provide to ward off political challenges. Yet Ecochard’s approach could not find the same currency in Pakistan as it had in colonial Casablanca. As Paul Rabinow has argued, even in the colonial context of Morocco, the central government did not constitute a homogeneous power.20 The comprehensive framework of inclusive imperialism was always open to contestations from within. The idea of unified imperial power was primarily advanced by the different elements in the government to justify their positions.Ecochard assumed that just as it had done in Casablanca, the emphasis on the presence of a comprehensive armature of a central power could serve equally well in negotiating the contestations of governance in the national con-text of Pakistan. In Pakistan, however, the idea of central government had never acquired the historical and ideological weight that different parties could invoke to advance their agendas. A design emphasizing the need for a comprehensive and visible armature of organization, however open, produced the opposite ef-fect, making the very power attained through such a strategy open to attack. In a protracted exchange, Ecochard kept accusing the Refugee Settlement Agency of ignoring the comprehensive nature of the plan and picking and choosing indi-vidual parts for piecemeal implementation. Soon the project came to be framed in the political debate as an idealized scheme beyond the means of a developing nation and disconnected from local concerns and politics.DoxiadisThe most striking difference between Doxiadis’s and Ecochard’s plans is their different approach to boundaries. Ecochard had placed particular empha-sis on delineating clear boundaries for his proposed refugee settlements. The proposal by Doxiadis’s firm, Doxiadis and Associates (DA), however, purport-ed to an idea of continuous expansion. DA’s proposed settlement was to grow linearly over time out of its present site and direct the growth of the entire city of Karachi (figure 7.7). This approach reflected a different idea of consolidating state power than the one proposed by Ecochard. In setting a predefined scale for the entire project, Ecochard designated the state as the ultimate agent of change. The open interior of the refugee city, M. IJLAL MUZAFFARThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
163enclosed within predefined boundaries, proclaimed all possibilities of change in advance. Indeed, the process of change could take many paths, as Ecochard’s multiple housing arrangements made apparent. But all these possibilities were outlined by the state (all houses were to be allocated on a transitory basis). The state designated the end as well as the multiple paths that reached that end. In contrast, Doxiadis’s approach, in eradicating the fixed boundaries of the plan, worked toward erasing precisely the scale at which the state made itself visible as the agent of social reform. In Doxiadis’s plan, the inhabitant herself is proclaimed as the agent of change. The state’s role is deliberately projected to the background, limited to providing only the administrative framework for the inhabitant’s self-mobilized emergence into modernity. Doxiadis’s scheme proposed a nestled model of social organization con-trolled by a disseminated administrative structure, without an identifiable au-thority (figure 7.8). The population was to be divided into different “community sectors,” beginning with the basic unit of “community class I,” which included ten to twenty households of similar income levels. Three to seven of such communities grouped together formed the next administrative level of “class BOUNDARY GAMESFigure 7.7. Doxiadis Associates, Korangi, Karachi, 1959. Presumed direction of growth (from left to right) connecting other areas of the city. Source: Ford Foundation Archives, New York.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
164II.” When an elementary school was added to a grouping of class II, it formed a community of “class III.” Each class III community was supposed to be eco-nomically uniform, but they could differ in their income level relative to each other. A grouping of different income level class III communities plus a mosque, a teahouse, market, shops, and a cinema, formed a class IV community. Class IV communities were in turn combined to form class V, which formed the basic “community sector” of the Korangi plan.21 Even though the structure was hierarchically organized, in Doxiadis’s esti-mation the purpose of this organization was to serve as a basis for “consolidat-ing,” and not “centralizing,” the structure of public administration.22 Korangi was to be built through the cooperation of both public and private enterprise. Various private industries pooled together their resources and formed coop-erative bodies. These cooperatives were part of the Korangi’s board of man-agement and were to fund Korangi’s housing sectors according to the needs of their surrounding industries. As a 1959 Doxiadis and Associates progress report on Korangi showed, of the ensemble of housing sectors and community center in the entire settlement, the government was only to build the lowest income housing sectors, and even those only partially. The rest, including major parts of the community centers, including the community mosque, were to be M. IJLAL MUZAFFARFigure 7.8. Doxiadis Associates, Korangi master plan, 1959. Source: Ford Foundation Archives, New York.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
165built by providing “incentives” to the private sector at the right moment in the development of the scheme. Doxiadis hailed his scheme as a structure of “coordinating” public and pri-vate interests, a coordination that remained disseminated and largely transpar-ent, providing opportunities of self-mobilization for the inhabitant themselves. Yet “coordination” here serves as a euphemism for managing a certain risk for the government and its allied “private interests.” Korangi provided massive la-bor housing for the surrounding industries. In the past, if the government or the industry provided direct housing to the workers on mortgage, they, instead of paying down the debt, held the debt as employment security.23 Korangi’s nestled spatial organization and administrative structure of coordinated and dis-seminated authority made it nearly impossible to challenge any policy on a limit-ed scale, while making coordinated evictions expedient. As the city grew, so did the network of mutually dependent spatial relationships and the disseminated administrative structure. The nestled space made the centralized authority of the military government and its allied private interests appear as distant manag-ers of a self-mobilized modernization process, making them both ever present and unidentifiable. What might appear as a contradiction—the dual focus on centralized authority and disseminated application of power—actually formed the very mode through which power was preserved. Such contradictions didn’t undo power but made its stable exercise possible.The dissemination of state authority is premised on the framing of the refu-gee as a subject in transition between tradition and modernity. Although seen to be dislocated in the modern national landscape, she is not simply claimed as a subject in need of rigid control. Rather, she is presented as subject who pos-sesses the potential of modernization herself. The state simply serves to eman-cipate this potential. The more the state is able to serve this role from afar, the less it is susceptible to constrain the refugee’s capacity to constitute a seamless link between tradition and modernity.Doxiadis is often accused of abstracting traditional architectural elements—such as the courtyard or windscreens—into standardized elements, rearranged onto grids for logistical convenience, in a way that they lose their social even climatic purpose. Indeed, that was the case in Korangi as well (figure 7.9). As it had previously done in Iraq, Doxiadis and Associates placed the courtyards on the side or in the back of the houses. In its new place the courtyard no longer appears to provide cool air to the surrounding rooms or form a multipurpose social space supposedly shared across gender and age. The courtyard in DA designs only appears to provide space for storage, livestock, or future expan-sion of the house. Yet the spatial and symbolic criticism in focusing on what is missed in this ab-BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
166M. IJLAL MUZAFFARFigure 7.9. Doxiadis Associates, Korangi, Karachi, 1959. Housing plans for different income groups, to be expanded through individual incentive. Source: Ford Foundation Archives, New York.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
167stracting enterprise misses what these abstractions actually do: present culture as a self-regulating and transforming sphere. In Doxiadis’s proposals culture is always being transformed by individual agents to bridge the gap between tradi-tion and modernity; it is always already an image of a self-regulating market. For Ecochard, culture also constituted an intervening layer between tradition and modernity. But it was a layer that did not inhere any agency of change itself. It was necessary to preserve culture so as not to expose the native populations too quickly to modern life. Layers of culture were to be dismantled and reas-sembled by the colonial and the nation-state over time to ensure that all cultural identities slowly transformed toward greater integration and modernization. For Doxiadis, state did not need to claim this role. It was only a custodian of culture that itself bore the potential of modernization as long as it was not hijacked by political contestations. Culture too, like modernization, possessed a self-regulating internal unity and logic that, given the right circumstances, com-plemented (not opposed) modernization. Moving the courtyard to the side of the house provided precisely such an opportunity of unleashing the potential of modernization within the cultural sphere. The courtyard could now be recog-nized by the cultural agent herself as an opportunity for expanding the house or for providing storage for a small home-run business. The houses at Korangi, nestled in the ever-expanding grid, reflected the nar-rative of culturally driven entry into the market economy. The grid of streets es-tablished individual property lots and a permanent structure of ownership. The houses too were based on a uniform grid system. This allowed the minimum inhabitable house provided by the state to differ in size for different “classes” of inhabitants, while maintaining the lot size to be more or less the same (see fig-ure 7.9). This uniformity, Doxiadis argued, provided the poor classes with more potential of investment in the house in the future. The empty portion of the lot thus served, Doxiadis asserted, as a credit-building device as well as a basis for establishing demand for the building industry. As individual owners combined modern living habits with their cultural mores, they expanded their houses and built credit, generating further economic activity, extending both the linearly growing commercial center and housing sectors. The houses allowed the indi-viduals to enter the market economy as cultural agents of change, incrementally making their own choices that tied them in a unique manner to the modern industrial and financial systems. For Doxiadis, this individuated, culturally driven entry celebrated the unique standing of the third world in the globalizing world. Its cultural agents enriched the global market economy, preventing it from taking the form of mind-numbing uniformity that characterized Western modernization.This view stemmed from Doxiadis’s understanding of culture as an organic-biological force, not a process of sedimentation of certain values and practices BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
168over time, as Ecochard had imagined. Culture followed the dynamic, shifting, and sometimes aggressive logic of biological evolution. Human settlements were the continuous trace left behind by this force whose operative principles were otherwise hidden from view. Doxiadis kept referring to cities as bod-ies with arteries, heart, lungs, and nerves that grew with the multiplication of cells. The basic units of this multiplication process were cells called “shells,” an elementary cultural unit, filled with multifarious potentials that were tested out against other shells in the wider field of the social realm. New ideas emerged from a shell and came into contact with others outside it. Over time, the de-structive ideas were eliminated and productive ones were strengthened, shap-ing the contours of the larger society. But this evolutionary process entailed immense waste. Cultural evolution sometimes followed dead and destructive ends. These potentials could be guid-ed, Doxiadis asserted, if we understood and shaped the urbanizing environ-ments in terms of particular programmatic dimensions of “man,” “nature,” “so-ciety,” “shells,” and “networks” (figure 7.10). These broadly conceived spatial categories could be used to provide cultural force fields across the world with certain developmental pathways. This managerial approach was to be called “Ekistics, the science of human settlements” and was given a home in the 1950s at the Athens Technological Institute. There has been considerable critical at-tention paid to Doxiadis’s programmatic categories, particularly his idea of net-M. IJLAL MUZAFFARFigure 7.10. Constantine Doxiadis, holding the 3-D model of Ekistics with spheres representing its basic elements of “man,” “society,” “shell,” “nature,” and “networks.” Each element is connected to the other four. Source: Doxiadis Archives, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
169work as a category that not only held its own independent sphere but was also connected to and embedded in all the other categories. This critique, however, has ignored the nature of the space implied between the network lines. This is the space of culture, triangulated within the connecting rods of Doxiadis’s three-dimensional model of Ekistics. For Doxiadis the essential quality of culture in the non-Western world was its transitory status. Suddenly brought to the world stage through rapid decolo-nization and modern communication, culture in this sphere was susceptible to lose its self-correcting qualities and be suppressed in the haste for moderniza-tion. In this view Doxiadis could be seen to be in line with other conservative theorists of development that saw the postwar era as being ridden with con-flicts of mutually exclusive forces. What sets Doxiadis apart, however, is that instead of seeing this duality as hindrance to modernization, he saw it as provid-ing a particular advantage for developing countries in the networked world of the future. Transition was the moment when cultural differences and similarities be-came unhinged and lost their meaning as absolutes. The cultures in transition provided a solution—on the one hand, to the ever-present threat of exag-gerated difference that led to global conflicts such as the World Wars, and on the other hand, from the haunting prospect of global homogenization and boredom. Cultures in transition held the potential of both preserving differ-ence while encouraging integration. The goal of development then was not to resolve transition as quickly as possible but to highlight and prolong it. Seen this way, cultures in transition were not only the terrains on which the network lines were to be stretched; they were also the spaces that collectively formed the condition of a stable networked world.24The refugee as a figure in transition was the prototype subject for the proj-ect of global integration. Yet this framing also allowed for the sleight of hand that made Doxiadis’s proposal so desirable to authoritarian regimes and their sponsors around the world. The transitory subject also provided an alibi for a system of perpetual management, of continuous design and infinite transition. We see this dimension valued in the idea of custodianship sketched out by the Ayub government, a custodianship that wanted to usher in market economics but withhold the supposedly accompanying process of political participation. A particular idea of the pre-political consumer is constructed in the Ekistical world, one who is available for adventures in the market but is declared unsuit-able for those in politics. This consumer can best understand the language of culture and for this reason warrants political management. Culture becomes an alibi for pushing entry into the market while delaying entry into politics. The subject becomes the generator of demands but not a patron of democratic politics.BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
170The argument for the cultural entry into modernity presented in the design of the houses at Korangi leaves out the fact that individuated change, when cast primarily in the language of culture, also ensures that the cultural subject for-ever remained caught in his or her transitory stage. Refugee is a figure that can host the idea of delay in political representation. Both seen as being out of sync with the action in the national political theater and valorized for it, he or she can perpetually celebrate the idea of soft modernization cast in the language of culture. Returning to Doxiadis’s militaristic statement in the aftermath of the Ko-rangi protest, we can now discern another dimension of the curious framing of the public as a certain enemy: in Pakistan, as would be the case in many military postcolonial states seeking U.S. alignment, the shifting status of the public from friend to enemy was a function of scale, not of category. It is the individual that is the subject of urbanism and development while the social is equated with socialist politics. In Doxiadis’s proposed program, the object of state interven-tion is no longer the social but the individual. From the very onset, Korangi is imagined as a project that could prevent the socialization of refugees as a politi-cal group. Doxiadis and the Ayub government did not consider, however, that such delaying strategies could not be continually masked with architecture. As the Korangi protest showed, the very sites of supposed transition could just as eas-ily be turned into sites of social organization, reframing the system of perpetual transition as one of perpetual crisis. It would take almost another decade, a tainted election, and an economic crisis for the political opposition to mobilize the mass protests that would eventually unseat Ayub Khan. Yet the inherent po-litical crisis of Pakistan stemming from the attempts to keep ethnic and linguis-tic divisions in check through centralized control would continue to resurface. Ayub handed over power to a transitory military government that promised to hold immediate elections. The election, however, resulted in conflicting claims to power that led to the separation of East Pakistan from the western part in 1971.25 It was not long before the national and international fault lines that brought Ayub into power created another opening for a military coup. In 1977 the socialist civilian government was disposed by a U.S.-leaning military dicta-torship just when the Soviet Union began to increase its influence in neighboring Afghanistan.26 What is critical to note in these reiterating crises of power is the manner in which the international and the national embed themselves within each other to advance their agendas, rather than imposing them independently. Indeed, power is secured abruptly. Yet its maintenance requires continuous tactical maneuvers. In this realm development is repeatedly advanced as a problem of coordination of different cultural forces by both national and international M. IJLAL MUZAFFARThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
171forces. Architecture is claimed as the behavioral turf on which this coordina-tion takes place. Development is often simply seen as a form of neoimperialism imposed from the outside. An external power imposes its will on a subjugated society. This model of oppressor-oppressed does not adequately explain the mutually legitimizing modes of power in the development arena, just as it does not explain the complexities of colonial governance. It is here that architectural and urban projects, such as Doxiadis’s and Ecochard’s, provide critical archives for understanding the new and emerging modes of intervention. It is here that they also betray a history of modern architecture’s intimate relationship with structures of power in the postwar international arena.Notes1. See “K. D. A. Ejectment Drive Cut Short,” Dawn, May 21, 1963. 2. Constantine Doxiadis, “On the problem of rehabilitation of displaced persons and urban development of Pakistan,” undated letter, Ford Foundation Archives, New York.3. Doxiadis, undated letter; reports for Korangi’s progress over the years had carried the title “a project for cultural evolution of a nation.” This title was also adopted as the key phrase of President Ayub’s speech at the project’s inauguration.4. For a detail discussion of the Ayub government’s “basic democracy” program, see Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5. For a detailed account of the unpredictability surrounding the partition, see Hassan Amtul, Impact of Partition, RCSS Policy Studies 37 (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2006).6. For a detailed account of the “Radcliff line,” see Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).7. This continued perception of Bourke-White’s photographs as representative images of the partition’s uncertainty is evident in their appearance on the cover of many recent studies of the partition. See, for example, see Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Mak-ing of India and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Stanley Wolpert, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).8. This dislocation of the “Urdu-speaking” population indeed was a curious phenome-non, pointing not so much to the marginalization of a minority but to uncertainty surround-ing the status of the central government itself in a politically heterogeneous landscape. Urdu was declared by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League and Pakistan’s first governor general, as the national language because it did not belong to, and hence favor, any of the country’s four provinces. But because of this para-provincial status, the language also operated as a mark of marginalization. 9. For a discussion of the politicization of the refugee question in different international context, including South Asia, see Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari, eds., The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007).10. Doxiadis had first presented his firm’s planning approach as an open-ended experi-ment in his proposals for Iraq. Between 1955 and 1958, Doxiadis had proposed a large-scale national planning program for then contested monarchical government in the country. The BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
172program was carried out with the help of U.S. aid agencies as part of the Cold War foreign policy of “containment” of communist influence. Although Doxiadis’s ambitious plan was left incomplete when Iraq’s monarchical government was overthrown in 1958, it presented for Pakistan’s Ayub government, which was also supported by United States under the contain-ment policy, a viable model for managing the refugee question. For Doxiadis and Associates’ designs for Iraq, see Panayiota Pyla, “Rebuilding Iraq, 1955–58: Modernist Housing, National Aspirations, and Global Ambitions,” International Working-Party for Documentation and Conser-vation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement 35 (2006): 71–77.11. The securing of Islamabad project presented a major validation of Doxiadis and Associates’ agendas and approach. Doxiadis publicized the commission heavily in modern architectural circles and publications and media, including dedicating a special issue of Ekistics on it. Also see Doxiadis’s interview with Deena Clark on NBC’s “A Moment with” on March 1, 1968, which focuses on Islamabad as a global solution to the crisis of an urbanizing world, available online at (Part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSQWS9WcCQs; (Part 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKvY6iRirJs&feature=related; and (Part 3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvstRTw2aaU&feature=related. 12. For a detailed history of Atbat Afrique and its projects in Morocco, see Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb, Casablanca: Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures (New York: Monacelli Press, 2002). Also see Jean-Louis Cohen’s “Architectural History and the Colonial Question: Casablanca, Algiers, and Beyond,” Architectural History 49 (2006): 349–68; “The Whiteness of the Surf: Casablanca,” Any 16 (1996): 16–19; and “The Moroccan Group and the Theme of Habitat,” Rassegna 52, no. 4 (December 1992): 58–67.13. “These proposals [for Karachi],” Ecochard argued in Pakistan, “are not theoretical; these principles have been applied on a very large scale in another country [Morocco].” Michel Ecochard, “The Problem of Refugees in Karachi, First and Second Reports,” 1953, United Nations Archives, New York.14. As a UN consultant, Ecochard’s contract was much shorter (six months) than Doxiadis’s protracted engagement that not only produced initial plans and reports for the project but also consultancy services for the scheme’s construction as well as for setting up parallel research and education institutions. Yet the two modes—the long-term and the short-term—work as complementary vectors, each creating the space and legitimacy for the other. This fact is made evident by the change in Ecochard’s position, when he stayed on in Pakistan on several private and government projects after the Landhi project was cancelled. Two large commissions secured by Ecochard from his stay in Pakistan were the projects of Karachi University campus and the museum at the ruins of the 2600 B.C. settlement Muhenjo-daro, now a famous UNESCO World Heritage site. Securing of these projects by Ecochard raised concerns within the UN headquarters in New York on the ethical implications of UN consultants using their “mission” assignments as platforms for expanding their private practices. The concerns, however, were dismissed by Weissman when he argued that Ecochard’s prolonged stay in Pakistan, though private in nature, was still providing consultancy service for Pakistan’s development program.15. See Monique Eleb, “An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism: Écochard, Candilis, and ATBAT-Afrique,” in Anxious Modernisms, edited by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). Eleb sees the dual emphasis on “culture” and density in Atbat’s work as a sign of a “schizophrenic” colonial approach to social reform that was unable to resolve the dichotomous demands of tradition and modernity. M. IJLAL MUZAFFARThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
173What is ignored in this argument is the consideration that colonialism always operates in a schizophrenic manner. Framing modernization as a problem of setting in “balance” the vectors of “tradition” and “modernity” reasserts the authority of the colonial government as an inclusive power and the ultimate custodian of multicultural change. The schizophrenic approach betrayed by late French imperialism in Morocco was particularly pertinent in responding to the emerging national movement and was a critical aspect of French associan-ism, the correlate of British “indirect” rule in central Africa rule that constructed a system of native authority armed with oppressive powers in the name of cultural preservation. For the British policy of “decentralized despotism” in Africa, see Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). In a similar vein as Eleb, Nathalie de Mazières has also described “contradictory” tendencies in colonial governance as a shortcoming rather than a mode of power itself. See Nathalie de Mazières, “Homage,” Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 1 (1985): 22–25.16. Landhi, the area east of Karachi, was chosen by the government as the site for refugee colonies as a favor to industrialist interests, such as the Dhada Bhoy family, that wanted easy labor access for their factories in the area. In this context, turning political questions into problems of administration formed the very basis of the government of civil bureaucrats.17. Surely the scheme is also presented as an example of the social and climatic ad-vances brought about by modernist planning practices (open green spaces promoting health and exercise, allowing prevailing wind to enter the houses, etc.). Instead of criticizing these claims, I have chosen to highlight the particular model of administration embodied in the design that is often ignored in the assessments of architectural modernism.18. After graduating from Ecole des Beaux-Arts, under a curriculum that privileged the primacy of archeological knowledge, Ecochard’s first job was in the Public Works depart-ment in Damascus. Although he began as a draftsman, he quickly moved on to work with prominent colonial archeologists on the restoration of important historical buildings, from the temple of Bel in Palmyra to the mosque of Bosrah. These restoration and planning projects launched Ecochard’s career as an architect and planner in the Middle East. His next project was the restoration of the Azem Palace in Damascus, a prominent project that led to a series of private commissions in the city, leading to the commission for preparing the master plan for Damascus itself.19. Quoted in de Mazières, “Homage,” 22. 20. See Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cam-bridge: MIT Press, 1989).21. Constantine Doxiadis, “Progress Report on Korangi, 1959,” Ford Foundation Archives, New York.22. Doxiadis’s undated letter to Ford Foundation, Karachi, “Observation on two report-proposals to strengthen western policy toward developing areas,” Ford Foundation Archives, New York.23. Doxiadis learned this point from a previous UN mission report on Pakistan by Charles Abrams and Otto Koenigsberger, “A Housing Program for Pakistan with Special Reference to Refugee Rehabilitation, prepared for the Government of Pakistan by Charles Abrams and Otto Koenigsberger,” September 14, 1957, United Nations Technical Assis-tance Administration, New York. BOUNDARY GAMESThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
17424. From this perspective Greece was the new center of this transitory world. Doxiadis argued that as a developing country, Greece not only was experiencing the current historical transition, but because of its particular geographical location, Greece had the added histori-cal experience of always having been in transition between opposing cultural forces of East and West. 25. After years of political contestations, the Ayub government handed over rule to the interim military government of Yahya Khan in 1969. The following election in 1970 resulted in conflicting claims to power. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, previously Ayub’s foreign minister and now the leader of the opposition party Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), claimed victory in Western Pakistan, and Mujib-ur-Rahman, leader of the Awami League, claimed power in East Pakistan. The ensuing contestation between Bhutto and Mujib resulted in the continua-tion of military rule. This in turn led to popular unrest in East Pakistan. Attempts at suppres-sion led to Indian involvement and a war between Pakistan and India. The war ended with East Pakistan claiming independence as Bangladesh in 1971 and Bhutto coming to power in West Pakistan.26. The Bhutto government’s initial socialist policies were greatly feared by the United States as a turn toward the Soviet Union. Bhutto’s suppression of opposition and increas-ingly authoritative measures created a window for a military coup that brought General Zia-ul-Haq to power for the next eleven years. Zia’s regime was strongly supported by the United States during the proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation. Bhutto was executed by Zia’s regime in 1979 on charges of masterminding the murder of an opposition leader.Selected BibliographyAbrams, Charles, and Otto Koenigsberger. A Housing Program for Pakistan with Special Refer-ence to Refugee Rehabilitation. Prepared for the Government of Pakistan by Charles Abrams and Otto Koenigsberger, September 14, 1957. New York: United Nations Technical Assistance Administration, 1957.Amtul, Hassan. Impact of Partition. RCSS Policy Studies 37. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2006.Cohen, Jean-Louis, and Monique Eleb. “Architectural History and the Colonial Question: Casablanca, Algiers, and Beyond.” Architectural History 49 (2006): 349–68. ———. Casablanca: Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures. New York: Monacelli Press, 2002. ———. “The Moroccan Group and the Theme of Habitat.” Rassegna 52, no. 4 (1992): 58–67. ———. “The Whiteness of the Surf: Casablanca.” Any 16 (1996): 16–19.de Mazières, Nathalie. “Homage.” Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 1 (1985): 22–25.Eleb, Monique. “An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism: Écochard, Candilis, and ATBAT-Afrique.” In Anxious Modernisms. Edited by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, pp. 55–73. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.Jalal, Ayesha. Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.Jassal, Smita Tewari, and Eyal Ben-Ari, eds. The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007.M. IJLAL MUZAFFARThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
175BOUNDARY GAMESKhan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 2007.Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonial-ism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.Pyla, Panayiota. “Rebuilding Iraq, 1955–58: Modernist Housing, National Aspirations, and Global Ambitions.” International Working-Party for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement 35 (2006): 71–77.Rabinow, Paul. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.Wolpert, Stanley. Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.This content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
176LUCIA ALLAISThis content downloaded from 132.174.255.3 on Tue, 17 Aug 2021 18:31:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
THE PUBLICBEYOND
44Beyond the Public a Commonspace in Fawaar Refugee CampSandi Hilal and Alessandro PettiSandi Hilal was born in Bethlehem, Palestine. She is an architect and researcher in trans border policies of daily life at the University of Trieste, also working with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. Alessandro Petti is a research architect based in Bethlehem and is co-director of the Centre for Architecture Media and Politics at the Bard/Al-Quds University in Abu Dis-Jerusalem. The Decolonizing Architecture Institute (DAi) was founded by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman in 2007.
45In Western political tradition, the public has always been associated with collective interest. The public has been the space where the rights of the citizens have been inscribed and represented. The very idea of the city as a democratic space has been measured by the degree of inclusiveness and values expressed in the public space. Today, however, public spaces throughout the world are being “occupied” by institutional powers obsessed with security, surveillance and control. Defending the public against the massive privatization imposed by the neo-liberal regimes has been the only way to preserve a minimum sense of collectivity and the common good. The ongoing attack on the public has left little room for a critical understanding of the very nature of contemporary public space. In colonial and post-colonial contexts, the public has more clearly shown its ambiguous and controversial nature. Massive expropriations of land and house demolitions have often been legitimized by a presupposed “collective interest”. The public, hostage of state authorities already undermined in their powers by emerging transnational bodies, seems to increasingly operate for the interests of the few. In the name of the public, common spaces that are not mediated by state apparatus have been expropriated and placed under the control of the few.Traditionally in Palestine there have been several categories of communal land. These lands not only existed as legal categories of communal ownership but also as forms of communal life. The Israeli state has leveled the different categories of communal land into one single category, state land. Manipulating the legal basis of Ottoman Land Law, Israel has nationalized Palestinian land. Today 90% of the Beyond the Public: A Common Space in Fawaar Refugee Camp Sandi Hilal + Alessandro PettiIn Western political tradition, the public has always been associated with collective interest. The public has been the space where the rights of the citizens have been inscribed and represented. The very idea of the city as a democratic space has been measured by the degree of inclusiveness and values expressed in the public space. Today, however, public spaces throughout the world are being “occupied” by institutional powers obsessed with security, surveillance and control. Defending the public against the massive privatization imposed by the neo-liberal regimes has been the only way to preserve a minimum sense of collectivity and the common good. The ongoing attack on the public has left little room for a critical understanding of the very nature of contemporary public space. In colonial and post-colonial contexts, the public has more clearly shown its ambiguous and controversial nature. Massive expropriations of land and house demolitions have often been legitimized by a presupposed “collective interest”. The public, hostage of state authorities already undermined in their powers by emerging transnational bodies, seems to increasingly operate for the interests of the few. In the name of the public, common spaces that are not mediated by state apparatus have been expropriated and placed under the control of the few.Traditionally in Palestine there have been several categories of communal land. These lands not only existed as legal categories of communal ownership but also as forms of communal life. The Israeli state has leveled the different categories of communal land into one single category, state land. Manipulating the legal basis of Ottoman Land Law, Israel has nationalized Palestinian land. Today 90% of the
46land in Israel is, in fact, state land and the state prohibits ownership transfer[1]. The Israeli appropriation of these territories led to the transformation of communal land into public state territory for the exclusive use of the Israeli Jewish population, entirely excluding Palestinians. This expropriation is evident through the establishment of Israeli settlements, the majority of which are built on what was once communally used land. Consequently, colonization brought on not only material expropriation, but also imposed changes to the forms of communal land use, relegating Palestinian land to private use.We would like to propose a critical understanding of the contemporary notion of the public by re-imagining the notion of the common. Rather than the term “commons,” more familiar in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, we prefer to use “common” in order to refer to its Latin origin communi. The latin communem is composed of com=cum “together “and mòinis, originally meaning “obliged to participate”. This fundamental aspect of the common, a demand for active participation, is also present in the Arabic term masha, which refers to communal land equally distributed among farmers. This form of “common land use” was not fully recognized under Ottoman laws – for this reason, masha was not acknowledged under a written title in the Ottoman Code – and was dismissed by colonial authorities for its supposed economical inefficiency, yet it surprisingly still exists today in much of the West Bank. Colonial regimes, interested in territorial control, see in masha land a collective dimension beyond state control. Consequently, masha have been transformed into state land and therefore fall under the control of public land managed by state apparatus. Masha is shared land, which was recognized through practice in the Islamic world. It emerged as a combination of Islamic property conceptions and customary practices of communal or tribal land. Masha could only
47exits if people decided to cultivate the land together. The moment they stop cultivating it, they loose its possession. It is possession through a common use. Thus what appears to be fundamental is that, in order for this category to exist, it must be activated by common uses. Today we may ask if it is possible to reactivate the common cultivation, expanding the meaning of cultivation to other human activities that imply the common taking care of life (cultivation from Latin colere=taking care of life).Reimagining the CommonThe Arab Revolts since December 2010 have shown various ways in which the common can be reclaimed and reactivated. In the Arab world, what is defined as public has always been regarded with suspicion; the public often has been associated with repressive political regimes and colonial history. Rarely have people felt fully represented by the public, never really owning it.During the weeks following the Egyptian revolt that began on January 25, 2011, we observed a public plaza transform into a common space owned by the people themselves. Tahrir Square became the political space where new claims were invented, represented, and translated into political actions. The day after President Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down, protesters began cleaning the space, an act that highlighted the end of a regime and the beginning of a possible new era for the Egyptian people. The space was no longer perceived as public—the space of authority—but rather as the space of the people. Owning the space implied owning the future of the country. Cleaning the square was a gesture of reappropriation, ownership, and care. In fact, this apparently banal act demonstrated a sense of reconstituted community and collective ownership.
48The power of people gathering and transforming public space into a constituent common space manifested itself in other places throughout the Arab world. In February 2011, people began assembling around the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, Bahrain, converting the anonymous infrastructure into a political arena. As in Cairo, this roundabout became a constituent assembly capable of undermining the political regime. Consequently, on March 18, local authorities brutally intervened, completely destroying the roundabout. This demonstrates the importance of a physical space where people can assemble and assert their rights—without it, the virtual space of social networks is ineffective.The ambiguous nature of contemporary public space can also be observed in Western society. During the summer of 2011, a group of protesters tried in vain to assemble and camp out in several public spaces of New York. Paradoxically, their attempts were limited by regulations and curfews imposed on these spaces. Only on September 17 were the protesters able to set up camp in Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public space. This crack between the public and private perhaps represents all that remains of a shared collective space, what we call a common space, nether public nor private.The Refugee Camp as Site of Political InventionRefugee camps are definitely sites where the categories of public and private no longer make sense. Within camps, neither public nor private property exists. After sixty-four years, Palestinian refugees still cannot legally own their houses (though in practice they do) and the camp is a space carved from the territorial state. Though states and non-governmental organizations are actively participating in conceiving and managing camps, we are still struggling to fully comprehend how the camp form has contaminated and radically transformed the very
49idea of the city as an organized and functional political community. Thus, the birth of the camp calls into question the very idea of the city as a democratic space. If the political representation of a citizen is to be found in public space, in the camp we find its inverse: here, a citizen is stripped of his or her political rights. In this sense, the camp represents a sort of anti-city, but also a potential counter-site in which a new form of urbanism is emerging beyond the idea of the nation-state.Despite the fact that the camp form has been used as an instrument for regulating the refugees’ “excess of the political dimension”, the camp, as an exceptional space, is also a site for political practices yet to come. Similarly, although more recent scholarly work highlights the refugee figure as a central critical category of our present political organizations, these very conceptualizations have reduced the refugee to a passive subject, created by the exercise of power and lacking an independent and autonomous political subjectivity.By investigating emerging social and political practices in West Bank refugee camps, we would like to challenge the idea of refugees as passive subjects[2]. We aim to invert the conceptualization that sees refugees’ everyday practices as, at best, a reaction or resistance to a sovereign power. We argue that the everyday political dimension of refugees comes first, followed by the military, control and disciplinary apparatus built by authorities in order to repress and expropriate what is produced or lived by refugees. These practices in Palestinian West Bank refugee camps are emerging under specific and historical conditions.The Palestinian refugee camps, which first appeared after the 1948 Nakba, were conceived as emergency assistance to the massive expulsion, operated by Jewish militias, of almost the entire Palestinian population of that time. The first pictures of these camps, in Jordan,
50Lebanon, Syria, West Bank and Gaza, showed small villages made of tents, arranged according to the same regular grids used for military encampments.As the years passed, and no political solution was found for the plight of the displaced Palestinians, tents were substituted with shelters in an attempt to respond to the growing needs of the camp population without undermining the temporary condition of the camp, and therefore undermining the right to return. However, with a growing population, the condition in the camps worsened. The terrible situation in which Palestinian refugees were forced to live was used by the Palestinian political leadership to pressure Israel and the international community in terms of the urgency of the refugees’ right to return. The precariousness and temporariness of the camp structure was not simply a technical problem, but also the material-symbolic embodiment of the principle that its inhabitants be allowed to return as soon as possible to their place of origin.Most refugees’ stories hinging on the process of replacing tents with houses begin with the description of an extremely rigorous winter that obliged them to think about substituting their tents with concrete walls. After erecting the four walls, they realized they were constructing something tangible: they were building a camp. Hence, the roof, the last architectural element defining “a home”, gained importance. The refugees recognized that the process of building the roof introduced the fear of tawtin (settling down), incorporating the camp into the city and transforming refugees into citizens of host countries.The state of Israel denies the internationally recognized right of return of Palestinian refugees. Consequently, Palestinian refugee camps have become magnetic force fields in which competing and unequally
51matched political entities – the host states, international governmental and non-governmental agencies, and the refugees themselves – attempt to exercise influence. Every single banal act, from building a roof to opening a new street, becomes a political statement concerning the right of return. In the camp, there is nothing that can be considered without political implications.However, during the Nineties and within the framework of the “peace process”, which subsequently led to the creation of an interim Palestinian Authority, the right of return was increasingly marginalized under the pressure of the unwillingness of successive Israeli governments to acknowledge Israel’s responsibility in the Palestinian Nakba. At the same time, the withdrawal of the Israeli army from most Palestinian urban areas created the conditions for some West Bank camps to become relatively autonomous and independent socio-political communities.For decades, the political discourse around the right of return, and the associated imperative to stagnate living conditions, imposed by different political actors in order to reaffirm the camp’s ephemerality, forced refugees to live in terrible conditions. From 1948-49 to the present, official political discourse has sought to prohibit any development in, or formalization of, the refugee camps. The fear was that any transformation of the camps would bring about an integration of the refugee community with the local environment and thus the political motivation for the right to return would be lost. This discourse was also based on the assumption that as long as refugees were living in appalling conditions, their suffering would pressure the international community to enact their right to return. Thus, any improvement to camp infrastructure and housing was seen as jeopardizing the right to
52return.Today this imperative is being reconsidered: the latest urban transformation have demonstrated that improved living conditions in refugee camps do not necessarily conflict with the right to return. No longer a simple recipient of humanitarian intervention, the refugee is seen as an active political subject, through his or her participation in the development of autonomous governance for the camp. Today, refugees are re-inventing social and political practices that improve their everyday life; the refugee camp has been transformed from a marginalized holding area to an interconnected center of social and political life. It is however crucial that this radical transformation has not normalized the political condition of being exiled.A Common Space in Fawaar Refugee CampMore than sixty years after the ‘roof debate’, or rather, whether building a roof implies blurring the distinction between the camp and the rest of the city and, consequently, normalizing its exceptional political condition –and its embodiment of the right of return– a somewhat similar discussion took place in the Fawwar refugee camp in the south West Bank. However, this time the discussion did not revolve around the replacement of tents with walls or the construction of a roof, but rather around the meaning of a public space within the camp.This discussion was initiated by a UNRWA Camp Improvement Programme[3] proposal to create a common space in the camp. The team organized numerous assemblies with the camp community in order to discuss the implications and possibilities of such a transformation. In the beginning, the very idea of creating a “public square” was outright suspicious for the people of Fawwar. If the camp
53is the testimony of over sixty years of exile, would the “public square” signify that refugees were giving up the right of return and accepting their life in the camp? Would the “public square” create a distance from the classic image of a camp constituted of miserable living condition? Or, on the contrary, would a “public square” create a physical space where public issues can be more openly represented and discussed?Over five years have passed since the UNRWA camp improvement team based in Bethlehem, partook in numerous assemblies with the camp community. What follow is a brief account of problems and opportunities arisen during the meetings. Among the participants were Abu Rami and Abu Rabiah, considered to be the living memory of the evolution and transformation of the camp. They are among those who saw the tents of Fawwar replaced by concrete houses and were now witnessing the inhabitants beginning to consider the transformation of the spaces between the houses as well. The decision to do so evidently was not so easy. Abu Rabih’s preoccupations concerning the very idea of the “public square” and its possible social implications were expressed as follows:“If you think that this plaza would be open to anyone, whoever he is, to come and bring his chair and sit, or to have fun or to stay during the night, you are absolutely on the wrong track. This is unacceptable in Fawwar camp. Mixing between men and women would be unacceptable, especially mixing between young ladies and young men”These words were followed by those of another elderly man who described the way the plaza should look:“This plaza should be organized. We should have a guard on duty at all times because our kids will not be able to take care of it without
54supervision. If this plaza were to be open for people to come and go as they pleased, it would never work. People would steal and destroy everything. They would rip up the pavement, they would take the ironwork, and nothing would stay put. The plaza needs to be organized and official. It has to have a door, it has to have a lock, it has to have a key and it has to have a guard”These statements touch upon the limits of notions of private, public and common that are nearly impossible to clearly define in the realm of the camp. What is the public in a temporary camp? After all, what is claimed to be private is not really private since homes are not registered as private property. Likewise, what is claimed as public is not really public either. The host government does not have sovereignty in camps and the UNRWA mandate is to provide services to the camp inhabitants, not to administer its population. Therefore, the public in camps does not have a political body responsible for the collective interest.Different generations perceive the public in different ways: the younger generation see the public as an opportunity for expanding their social interaction beyond the private space of their congested and family controlled houses. The “public square” being discussed has become the physical site for the young generation to negotiate their rights with the older generation, the place to discuss what is right and what is wrong, what is possible and what is not. A young man reacted to the suggestion made by the elderly to close in and lock up the public space as follows:“I don’t think that the idea of enclosing the plaza is a very good one. I am against keys, I am against locks, I am against doors, I am against the idea that this plaza would open and close at certain hours. How
55could we feel that we own this place? I am not against having a guard to take care of this place, but no keys, no locks, no closing time. Because if we use it this way, we will cancel out any idea of a common plaza and it will function like a private space.”A more traditionalist-oriented elderly man would interpret the public space as posing the risk of “losing control” of women who are relegated to the home and family. Meanwhile, some women would interpret the new public space as an extension of their domestic space, therefore not open to all members of the camp, but only to their neighbors. This is the way one woman described the plaza:“There is no problem with building a plaza for our neighborhood. But it has to be only for the people of our neighborhood and not for all the people of the camp. Casual passersby cannot use this plaza. Young males that have nothing to do can’t just come and hang out in our plaza. Yes for the neighborhood, no for the all camp”.Younger members of the community supported the position of the women. One young man claimed:“This plaza will serve this neighborhood very well; here the kids will play, here we will have our important occasions, here we will have our weddings and funerals. It is the only open space in this big neighborhood: how come you think that we will not take care of it? This plaza will be a treasure for all of us.”In an attempt to understand the difference between a public square for a neighborhood and a public square destined to an entire camp, the question was posed as to how women imagined they might use the space. Would they ever come to the plaza and have morning coffee
56together in the sunshine? The answer, though expressed by one, was fully agreed upon by most of the others:“What woman would leave her home, her kids, and come to drink coffee in a plaza? It would be a shame for a woman to leave her home without a proper reason. Do you want us all to come here in the plaza and have coffee and tea? Do you want them to write about us in Al Ah’hiram newspaper? We already cannot deal with our husbands; never mind us going out and having tea and coffee in the plaza! “After several meetings and discussions, we began designing the form of this “public square”. The essential element emerging during the discussions was the definition of the “borders” of the space, interpreted as a home without a roof, made of four walls clearly demarcating its limits. In this way, passersby should feel that entering the plaza was like entering someone’s house – entailing the same sense of respect and responsibility – rather than a space that does not belong to anyone. Each household located in front of the plaza decided the height of the walls and the permeability. The result is a variegated limit, sensitive to the different desires of privacy or publicness of its inhabitants. This also creates pockets of private life between the walls of the homes, as one woman pointed out:“Thank God the wall in front of our home is the highest of them all. It gave my husband and me the chance to create a private terrace in front of our home where we can sit outside without being seen. You didn’t just create the plaza, but you also created very small plazas in front of all of the homes that flank it! Now, we can be outside in the sunshine and still enjoy some privacy. If the wall were not so high, my husband would not have let me come out and get some sun and have coffee outside while the youth are playing nearby. Also, for me, it’s not at all a closed
57plaza – why are we speaking about closed plazas? It has entrances and exits. We can easily come and go.”Paradoxically, the reactivation of a shared place, so problematized in the beginning, was then considered connected to old communal camp life. In the words of Imad, a man in his forties:“The habit of sitting out of doors is not new for us in Fawwar. On the contrary, it is an old tradition that all of us used to do when I was a kid: we would sit outside our small homes and have a bit of fresh air. I think that the main reason that this habit faded is the crowdedness of the camp. As people expanded their homes, the streets became narrower and narrower, until they became very tight alleys. If I were to take a chair outside and sit in the alley, I would block the entire street. This is why I think we lost this tradition, and people became unused to taking leisure time and having activities out of doors. For me, the main reason is therefore that we didn’t have any adequate space where we could sit without feeling that we are basically sitting in the streets and blocking traffic. I think that the plaza is giving us the possibility to recreate that culture of using outside spaces, especially because, if you look at us as a society, we are a society where the relationships between neighbors are very close.”Built as a house without a roof, the “public square” embodies the fertile ambiguity between public and private space within the camps. Conceived as an enclosed space protected by four walls, it is dedicated to the surrounding neighborhood. Through direct participation from the refugee community, the space has already been put to use even before its completion, inundated with a range of new activities.[4]
58[1] Basic Law: Israel Lands, July 25, 1960[2] www.campusincamps.ps[3] See www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=31[4] see http://www.campusincamps.ps/entransnational bodies, seems to increasingly operate for the interests of the few. In the name of the public, common spaces that are not mediated by state apparatus have been expropriated and placed under the control of the few.Traditionally in Palestine there have been several categories of communal land. These lands not only existed as legal categories of communal ownership but also as forms of communal life. The Israeli state has leveled the different categories of communal land into one single category, state land. Manipulating the legal basis of Ottoman Land Law, Israel has nationalized Palestinian land. Today 90% of the land in Israel is, in fact, state land and the state prohibits ownership transfer[1]. The Israeli appropriation of these territories led to the transformation of communal land into public state territory for the exclusive use of the Israeli Jewish population, entirely excluding Palestinians. This expropriation is evident through the establishment of Israeli settlements, the majority of which are built on what was once communally used land. Consequently, colonization brought on not only material expropriation, but also imposed changes to the forms of communal land use, relegating Palestinian land to private use.We would like to propose a critical understanding of the contemporary
87EditorsAdam Kaasa, London Manager, Theatrum Mundi Kiera Blakey, Programme Coordinator, Theatrum MundiContributionsFrauke Behrendt, Clementine Deliss, Francesca Gavin, Gry Worre Hallberg, Sandi Hilal + Alessendro Petti, Susanne Seitinger, Matthew Skjonsberg, Matthias Sperling,, Ionna Theocharopoulou, Andrew Todd, Wilfried WangWith thanks toJames Anderson, Catarina HeecktContactTheatrum Mundi LSE Cities London School of Economics Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE+44 (0) 20 3486 2883info@theatrum-mundi.org www.theatrum-mundi.org

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