"Considering ideal conditions is a waste of time," Alfredo Brillembourg and
Hubert Klumpner write in their 2005 book, Informal City. "The point is to avoid
catastrophe." The two architects, partners in the international practice
Urban-Think Tank, are known for the cable car system they designed for Caracas,
connecting barrios in the hills with the city in the valley. Part of the allure
of these cable cars, and U-TT's work in general, is the way they make a virtue
of leftover spaces. A shelter for a football field becomes a "vertical
gymnasium". A shelter for street children, built under an overpass, gets another
football pitch on its roof. As design critic Justin McGuirk writes in Radical
Cities, his survey of urban experiments in Latin America, in "engaging with the
informal city, U-TT developed a methodology of maximising the amount of social
activity that a tiny plot of land could deliver". They went small – "strategic"
and "urban acupuncture" are the terms du jour – looking at what the city had
become, and what individual neighbourhoods needed, rather than masterplanning a
cycle of demolition and straight lines.
Urban-Think Tank's remark seems the obverse of another, more famous planner's
words: "Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood." That is
Daniel Burnham, whose 1909 plan of Chicago depicted a set of grand boulevards
radiating from a proposed lakeshore civic centre, with ring roads and parks at
the city boundary. McGuirk reverses Burnham's emphasis, focusing on the
in-between spaces in that dream of 20th-century city organisation. He chronicles
the history of post-modernist development in cities across Latin America,
setting up, again and again, a contrast between the planned and the made,
top-down versus bottom-up, high versus low and, most important, centre versus
periphery. The strongest argument he makes, backed by examples in Bogotá,
Caracas and Rio, is the importance of access to transportation. If modernist
Latin American architects, often following in the footsteps of Le Corbusier's
concrete blocks, saw housing as the way to democratise the city, 21st-century
politicians and planners should be thinking about motion, with cable cars and
bus rapid transit giving people in the slums more time and more
opportunities.
McGuirk's mission statement, somewhat buried in a first chapter that begins
in Mexico City, travels to Lima and namechecks both the "Bilbao effect" and
Henri Lefebvre's "right to the city", is this: "Accepting the informal city as
an unavoidable feature of the urban condition, and not as a city-in-waiting, is
the key lesson that this generation of Latin American architecture can offer the
world." Looking only at the big picture and bringing solutions from outside has
failed to keep up with economic crisis and population growth. How can the old
institutions, governments, banks, utilities and planners learn from conditions
on the ground and prevent the violence, riots and mudslides that would count as
catastrophe? A parallel project is under way in landscape architecture, where
theorists such as Pierre Bélanger suggest that solutions for climate change will
come from countries that have done less to their coastlines rather than
more.
Many of the projects McGuirk describes will be familiar to readers of
architecture magazines, frequenters of design biennales, and even visitors to
New York's Museum of Modern Art, which featured a number of these projects in
its 2010 exhibition Small Scale, Big Change. Chilean architect Alejandro
Aravena's Quinta Monroy, a rare example of a successful housing project in the
book, has proved to be catnip to the design press. The scheme is brilliantly
simple: $7,500, the government housing subsidy, was not enough to both acquire
land and build a family a house. So Aravena designed a set of half-houses,
cinder block with basic services installed. Each house was set adjacent to a
vacant site of equal footprint. As families saved more money they could expand
horizontally. McGuirk visited the first of these houses, built in 2003, and
experienced "the mild taste of disappointment that comes from travelling
thousands of miles to see something that is simply what it is – a handful of
cheap houses, not the Pyramids".
Radical Cities is at its best when it offers a journalist's view of facts on
the ground: real people, real observation, as opposed to the aestheticised
drive-by of magazines and exhibitions. In these cases McGuirk is doing the work
of the old-fashioned urban critic, describing and not relying on photography. I
was particularly touched by a couple of living-room scenes, in very different
settings. The first was in a house designed by Danish architect Knud Svenssons
in Lima in the mid-1970s, as part of Previ, a rare example of a successful
modernist housing development. Under a white, waffle-concrete ceiling, the
homeowner has installed a baroque mirror, lace antimacassars and bilious green
wallpaper.
McGuirk writes: "The house has three patios – three! – each looking on to a
walled courtyard, making it bright and yet private. She feels privileged to live
here, she says." Previ also boasts houses by James Stirling, Aldo van Eyck and
Fumihiko Maki, making it a laboratory of late-modernist ideas about housing,
privacy and replicability. Previ succeeds, McGuirk writes, because the houses
were conceived as frameworks for expansion. The courtyards could be roofed over
to make more bedrooms. No one told the homeowner she couldn't have a brutalist
ceiling and a chandelier.
The second example is from La Torre de David, an abandoned skyscraper in the
centre of Caracas that has slowly been inhabited by a highly organised set of
squatters; it featured in the TV series Homeland. McGuirk and U-TT organised an
award-winning exhibition about the tower, with photographs by Iwan Baan, for the
2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. I always had doubts about its presentation
there: it seems obvious that living on the 28th floor of a building without
elevators and without walls is closer to catastrophe than utopia. Indeed,
Venezuelan architects criticised it as such in 2012. McGuirk discusses their
critique of the Tower of David by arguing for it as a "paradigm of human
ingenuity, adaptability and resourcefulness – of citizens exercising their right
to the city". Even with the emphasis on the social over the architectural (a
fine distinction in the context of an architecture biennial), I did not find
McGuirk's admiration entirely convincing. Here's his description of life on the
tower's top occupied floor, the 28th. Once you get up there, you don't go down
that often. "With kids in tow, it wouldn't be a surprise if his family had
simply given up the street altogether. A sort of Swiss Family Robinson,
castaways in mid-air, the children only discovering the street when they come of
age." This is a different, but no less utopian, vision.
Even after reading Radical Cities, I had similar questions about those cable
cars to the slums: we see that they bring new civitas and new opportunity, but
we don't hear much about the living conditions around them. McGuirk's
city-hopping doesn't always give him, or the reader, the means to evaluate these
interventions. Just as every modernist housing block is not Pruitt-Igoe in St
Louis, Missouri – demolished after years of neglect in 1972 – some urban
acupuncture fails, or merely looks good in an exhibition. More counterexamples
would have created a better set of criteria for evaluation. In addition, many
reforms seem to be just as connected to compelling personalities, whether in
politics or design, as they were in the last century. (And where are the women?
Milagro Sala, founder of the revolutionary Argentinian group Tupac Amaru, is the
only woman interviewed at length.)
Yet patterns do persist. Perhaps you can see the radical city as a set of
waves, infiltrating, rather than washing over or cutting through, a la Burnham,
what exists today. The first wave is transportation, then public space and
public buildings, and, finally, housing. McGuirk does a service by collecting
and connecting these ideas, making a movement out of pieces, and showing an
alternative way to shape the city.
