Working Outside the Existing System

The planning and building system as it exists today creates and perpetuates a dependence that is difficult — and in most cases, impossible — to break. By raising building standards beyond the point that can be reasonably satisfied by self-builders, it shifts the whole housing industry from being local and small-scale, to being large-scale. Building-code standards have evolved in response to real and serious threats to health and safety. Like many such technological systems, however, their unintended consequences are not trivial, and can be disastrous. This is happening today in the rebuilding of the American Gulf region after Hurricane Katrina.

The system in place works to benefit both government bureaucrats and larger contractors, who are often tied by mutual support. But what is seen as a benefit to a commercial/government system can spell disaster for another, major segment of society. One of us (AMD) has argued for a reconstruction of the Katrina devastation, using a strategy that allows the same social processes to flourish as before. That strategy faces daunting challenges because of the building, financing, and regulatory system now in place.

Many of the houses destroyed in the hurricane, particularly those in lower-income neighborhoods, were self-built and did not meet current code or financing standards. The urban fabric was the product of a relaxed process of self-building over generations, with the advantage that it was not based on debt. This was a society of debt-free homeowners, whose lives could be structured around activities of their choice. Those houses were outside the system, because their non-conforming construction made them impossible to mortgage. The system now requires a contract of debt, since the new building standards cannot be met without commercial intervention. In most cases, this means that the government has to step in and build social housing, solving a problem that it itself has created. The cycle of unintended consequences goes on. 

To quote from Duany (2007): “The hurdle of drawings, permitting, contractors, inspections — the professionalism of it all — eliminates self-building. Somehow there must be a process whereupon people can build simple, functional houses for themselves, either by themselves or by barter with professionals. There must be free house designs that can be built in small stages and that do not require an architect, complicated permits, or inspections; there must be common-sense technical standards. Without this there will be the pall of debt for everyone. And debt in the Caribbean doesn’t mean just owing money — it is the elimination of the culture that arises from leisure.” 

While this may be “leisure” by today’s middle-class standards, it represents a hard life for a thriving and vibrant cultural fabric that is simply neglected by (even though it is a direct part of) the conventional economy. Inhabitants of the modern middle-class the world over take a debt-driven system for granted: much of their working life is spent just to pay off the house mortgage. In fact, the system works to preclude other options for putting a roof over one’s head. The middle class attains liberation from the financial system only after retirement, when the 30-year mortgage has been finally paid off. Self-built housing erected by cash and barter is an escape from this system, and is viewed by the government and big contractors as a threat to their hegemony. It’s a structural problem, not one of malevolent intent. Debt is key, but is just one variable of an interlocking system. 

It is not easy to implement such innovations, because most countries and regions already have a well-established system that produces rigidly inhuman social housing (but which it believes, on the contrary, to be an enlightened and progressive solution). Many times in our projects, the first thing that we had to do is to begin studying the existing housing delivery systems so that we can override them. Those systems are created by interlocked bureaucracies, specialists, financial institutions, political entities, etc. You can build on the physical tangibles, but not on the systems. There is much that must be bypassed first — and they will resist their own dismissal. 

We (the team of urbanists) cannot get directly involved in these strategies, which are the responsibility of the client and supporting organizations. The local entities have to solve procedural problems and forge alliances that will sustain the project, with us acting as a catalyst for change. One small section, or various independent units within the government could be promoting our project, while facing opposition from the rest of the bureaucracy. Most of the time, the problems with innovative social housing solutions are not technical, social, or even financial: they are almost always political.

Working Within the Existing System

You can try to force changes in design approach, and some good might come of it, but that only gets you so far. A project tends to become a power struggle, taking time and effort away from building. Alternatively, we can try to cooperate with the system, bringing stakeholders and facilitators together in unexpected ways. But this requires that we recognize working with an existing system as a different kind of problem — not linear, but multi-variable, and “cultural”. It is necessary to be more embedded into the local operating system (a strong existing culture) in order to solve those problems, to have any chance of seeing where the levers are (so we can pull them to affect changes), and to see how decisions are made at various levels. 

In most cases, a successful strategy will combine aspects of “working within the system” and reforming the system from the outside. In making an assessment, the first crucial step is to lay out the critical limitations we find in an existing system of production. Then we should work to negotiate a “workaround” that addresses those limitations from the beginning, before attempting to dismantle the existing system entirely. It may indeed be necessary to radically transform the existing system, but that is a separate problem from the design and building of urban fabric, and we don’t want to spend all our energies on fighting the system. On the other hand, if workarounds are not possible, there may be little alternative but to press for systemic reform. 

Alexander (2001-2005: Volume 2, page 536) shares his own experience with this struggle. In generating projects over a thirty-year period, he realized that a major shortcoming was that their implementation demanded too much. “In our early experiments, we often went to almost unbelievable lengths to get some new process to be implemented, and to get it to work. But the amount of effort we had to make to get it to work — the very source of our success — was also the weakness of what we achieved. In too many cases, the magnitude of special effort that had to be made to shore up a new process was massive — too great, to be easily or reasonably copied.”

Alexander in each case succeeded by replacing an existing system combining procedure, process, attitude, and working rules with an entirely different system. But the effort required to change the entire system, even in cases where it succeeded, was not easily repeatable. He concludes that here, like in a scientific experiment, it is the REPEATABILITY that is important, not the unique occurrence. If the process is not easily repeatable, then ultimately it is not as useful. Therefore, if a production method has too many components that are totally different from the previously working system, then it is not easily accommodated within the old method. It cannot be copied widely in regions where the old methodology still applies. 

A genetic analogy, proposed by Alexander, suggests ways of achieving success in the long term. A process presented as a complete, complex system (like the genetic code for a whole organism), requires that its implementation must be either all or none. In that case, the existing system of implementation must change so as to allow the project to be built. If, on the other hand, our process is presented (and understood) as a collection of semi-independent pieces, each of which can be implemented rather easily, then there is a greater chance that one of more of those pieces will catch on. Small groups of practitioners, moreover, could apply each piece of the process, without requiring the support of the system. It is Alexander’s hope that easily copied pieces of the methodology will spread independently, and that eventually this diffusion process will lead to an entire new “operating system” over time.