Soaring Land Prices, Grand Schemes, and National Destabilization
We would like to foresee some of the problems that could arise in an imperfect system (such as the real estate environment), in order to handle the hard realities of the market. The decision on whether to destroy, help to reinforce, or just ignore a favela is up to the government. We are faced with uncomfortable decisions, which affect the lives of many people already in a desperate situation. There is no simple solution, and no universal method can be applied in all cases. The best we can suggest is a cautious approach, without ideological prejudice, that will benefit the entire population as a whole. So often, anonymous but meaningful settlements have been destroyed in the name of “rational” design, which is nothing more than a tool to preserve the status quo.
Squatters require proximity to the city, which is why they move there in the first place. Proximity is essential for them, more so than for the more mobile middle class. Presenting poor people with well-built residences far away from town is not an automatic gift. Transferring the poor to government-built social housing outside the city may plunge them even deeper into destitution, as they then have to spend a greater portion of their earnings for transportation.
Our own recommendation of establishing ownership contributes to undo the envisioned solutions, since well-built housing is often re-sold to middle-class residents, while the poor return to squatter settlements (either to their original one, or they build a new one). They prefer to use the profit from selling their new government-sponsored dwelling. In the rental economy, a system of sub-renting substitutes middle-class residents for the very poor.
As soon as a piece of real estate is legally registered, the transferable land title becomes a tradable commodity, and enters the free market (which could be an illegal submarket). Even if a plot is located in the middle of a slum, or in a not-so-desirable social housing project, its price could soar. Opportunities for gain can drive the consolidation of these land parcels into a few hands, not those of the original residents. This has in fact happened in many countries around the world, leading to a corrupt after-market in slum real estate. Ironically, adding infrastructure to a favela raises its value, which can drive its original settlers out. In anticipation of such a process, speculation can run wild on unbuilt land.
A pervasive system linking corrupt officials with criminal organizations finds ways of profiteering from both slums and social housing. Despite the apparently insoluble socio-legal nature of this problem, we believe that our method actually helps in the long term. Firstly, establishing a tighter ownership of the urban fabric (in both social and emotional terms) reduces the opportunities for exploitation by trading it away. Secondly, much of the exploitation centers on offering services that the government refuses to provide to slum dwellers — it is simply supplying to demand, although at exorbitant prices.
A very different concern comes with our recommendation for engaging Non-Governmental Organizations. While they may be a better choice than an inflexible government bureaucracy, we face a potential problem with grave consequences. The largest NGOs often promote technological “development” in the form of very large projects such as electrification, infrastructure, and building. They see the picture in large-scale terms, and would like to see major construction contracts awarded to foreign companies that have the necessary proven experience in undertaking complex projects of this type. The problem is that many countries cannot afford large-scale interventions.
Despite this reality, a government often gets seduced into entering such a contract, which it ultimately cannot repay. A developing country is counting upon its natural resources to pay the bill for rapid modernization. Nevertheless, economic fluctuations and unexpected events are usually enough to trip the fragile stability of such a deal. The result is that the country gets plunged into debt. By becoming a debtor nation, the nation can only be stabilized by help from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Economic restructuring via Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposes harsh economic conditions that worsen the lives of the poorer sectors of society. Not only does the country lose part of its sovereignty, but also from that point on, it is in no position to help its poor in any way.
The lesson to be learned from this — a lesson that many nations have unfortunately failed to learn — is the need to work on the small scale. A vast and costly new project is feasible for the wealthy nations, but very risky for the developing nations. (Large-scale projects are most always based on unsustainable processes that waste vast amounts of energy and resources). Social housing should grow from the bottom up, applying local solutions to small-scale projects. If those solutions work, they can be repeated indefinitely.
There are many independent NGOs who can help, and foreign experts who offer knowledge and expertise for free. It is better to rely as much as possible on local financial capital, know-how, and resources. A long-term solution, based on the adaptive evolution of housing patterns and construction, is more sustainable than a technological quick fix.
Architects Contribute to Make Existing Projects Alienating
A number of projects built in Latin America have solved the myriad problems of how to deal with government bureaucracy, having come to terms with practical factors and with the existing political structure. Groups have involved private construction companies with non-governmental organizations and local government to construct and finance social housing. Nevertheless, there is still a distance between techniques for implementation, and how the final product actually feels. As noted before, the scientific evidence suggests this is not a matter of “mere personal taste”, but rather there are broad areas of consensus in human assessments, rooted in universal processes of perception and human biology. These areas of consensus can be established through “consensus methodologies”, of the sort that we use routinely in our collaborative design processes.
On this point we are less enthusiastic about what has been achieved so far in Latin America. Despite all the best intentions and an enormous amount of work invested, we see many projects having a qualitative character that is, in a widely shared assessment, impersonal and industrial. Of course, they don’t all have the “deadly” feeling of totalitarian high-rise housing blocks, but the ambience of the built environment ranges from dreary to neutral. In our judgment, the form and layout fail to connect emotionally to the users. It’s interesting to search for the reasons why these solutions were not carried through all the adaptive design steps.
Our explanation is as follows: those projects are directed by architects, who still carry their intellectual baggage of industrial design typologies and relativity of personal tastes, even as they try to help people in a personal way. The architect’s language is influenced by his/her design ideology and is not universal. Very few architects have escaped from the modernist aesthetic that formed a pivotal part of their training (a tradition in architecture schools now going on for several decades).
It is extremely difficult to rid oneself of those ingrained architectural images — to break out of the fundamentalist typologies of cubes, horizontal windows, modular blocks, etc., and the logic of abstracted functionalism that often serves as the ideological justification for self-aggrandizing aesthetic posturing (Alexander, 2001-2005; Salingaros, 2006). Especially in Latin America, modernist architectural typologies are adopted as part of the national architectural style, popularly though erroneously linked to progressive political beliefs.
Making some of our criticisms explicit helps readers know what we are talking about. We find modest human-scaled buildings (which is good), but they are arranged on a strict rectangular grid that has no other purpose than to express the “clarity of the conception”. The plan looks perfectly regular from the air (being planned for such unperceivable symmetry), and expresses modularity instead of variation. The mathematically precise arrangement is arbitrary as far as human circulation and perception of space are concerned, hence it does not contribute to urban coherence.
On the scale of individual buildings, we see the usual obsessively flat walls without surface articulation; strict rectangularity; flat roofs; doors and windows without frames; slit windows; houses raised on pilotis; useless building setbacks; no curves in places where they would reinforce the tectonic structure but curved walls put in for aesthetic effect; fractured or oversized urban space; etc.
These are the identifying characteristics of the 1920s’ modernist typology. An underlying assumption behind imposing this formal vocabulary on people’s homes is that an ordinary person without training is incapable of shaping form and space, and only an architect (acting as the “expert”) is capable of doing so. It all goes back to the arrogance openly expressed by modernist architects, who showed their contempt for organic urban fabric.