Professor in Residence, Department of Architecture, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA
Policy
Open Access
Type
Article
Section
HOUSING
ABSTRACT -
The lack of attention paid to the disempowerment of the residents has been a shortcoming of the modern mass housing model. Even today, no policies promote and support the residents’ efforts to continue improving their quality of life through actions involving changing the physical environment. Following a brief history of the origins of mass housing in the West through the discourse in the modern movement, the paper expands on implementing these modern ideas in the post-War non-Western region and how they were received and appropriated there. The article presents the case study from the author’s work on Korangi Town in Karachi, Pakistan, to show that the residents’ changes reflect their active agency. However, it was an unintentional outcome of modernist design and planning. This paper is more than just a critique of the cultural apathy of modernism. It questions what happens to a modernist project after the expert leaves the arena. How do residents adapt to or cope with their physical environment? Moreover, is there a way to include human agency in mass housing?
To be an agent is to intentionally make things happen by one’s actions. Agency embodies the endowments, belief systems, self-regulatory capabilities and distributed structures and functions through which personal influence is exercised, rather than residing as a discrete entity in a particular place.1
In 2005, the United Nations reported on million people as homeless worldwide. Later, in 2015, the UN-Habitat reported that 1.6 billion of the world’s population required adequate housing, and the latest reports from the World Economic Forum estimated 150 million people still homeless in 2021.2 These numbers indicate that the shortage of adequate housing for the urban low-income population and the refugees is still a problem as it was in the post-World War II years. The condition is more evident in the non-Western region. So why have we not overcome the gap in housing still?
We could argue that the nation-states afflicted with territorial conflicts continue to produce stateless people and refugees, persistently aggravating the housing crisis. We can also hold responsible the lack of political will in some situations. However, the burgeoning scale and urgency of the housing demand make us question the approach of the disciplines of architecture and planning as well.
The concept of housing the masses worldwide through the mass construction of homes was an outcome of the post-World War exigency. Today when we look at mass housing as a solution to fill the gaping housing need, especially in the non-West, we must look back and learn from the history of the mass housing model, the roots of which lie in modernist thought.3 The disciplines of architecture and planning influenced by Western rationalism produced modernist housing solutions that could be mass-produced and repeated in the non-West to accommodate the displaced and refugee populations after World Wars I and II.
This paper posits that the roots of modernist planning and architectural ideas lay in the Kantian school of thought following the Enlightenment dogma, that the faculty of reason releases man from all kinds of external dominations and leads to emancipation from unjust authority.4 On this premise, various models of reasoning and mathematical rules were favored in the quest for universal reason and logic, transcendental to humans.5 Systemization processes were emphasized, as they could unite all logic into a single governing principle. Such a principle could provide a schema or a blueprint to produce and reproduce synthesized rational mass housing solutions.6 The Modernist housing plans organized society at three scales through regional planning, land use planning, and architecture design. However, contradictory to modernism’s claim of emancipating the individual, the modern project of mass housing did not leave any space for individualism and individual capacity.7 Following a brief history of the origins of mass housing in the West through the discourse that took place in the Modern Movement, the paper expands on the implementation of these modern ideas in the post-War non-Western region and how they were received and appropriated there. The paper presents a case study to show that the changes the residents made reflect their active agency, although it was an unintentional outcome of modernist design and planning.
BEGINNINGS OF MASS HOUSING AND THE DEATH OF INDIVIDUALISM
Architectural history documents two specific moments when the world faced a major urban housing deficit crisis. The first phase was during the industrial revolution that continued into the post-World War I epoch and the second was the reconstruction phase after World War II.8 Enough evidence has been documented to support the position that the exchange of ideas between Europe and North America during these phases of the twentieth century influenced architecture and planning in the West.9 This paper briefly describes Western modernist ideas on the urban mass housing since this time and the transportation of these ideas to South Asia.
Even before the First World War, the premise of modern architecture was to generate a physical environment that was reflective of modern industrial society. The Western industrial cities had already changed the living patterns of humanity from rural to urban. Modern architecture sought to remediate the resultant chaotic and unhygienic conditions of the late nineteenth-century European industrial cities, especially of the working class in the tenement housing. Space was organized both within the dwelling unit and outside to optimize efficiency in transportation to work and production of work. The emphasis on rational thought in architecture contributed to the standardized model of housing and dwelling units that could be replicated and mass-produced industrially. It was thought that modern architecture could produce more equitable living conditions by setting minimum living standards. The premise was that a minimum-adequate standard would allow a person access to the minimum of those things that permit him/her conformity with the set of values of the group to which he/she attaches. A minimum-wage class would have at least a minimum of those things in their housing considered standard for their group.
Rational generalizations, mass production, and standardization were intrinsic to the modernist architecture doctrine that followed through the interwar period up until the 1960s. This doctrine was promoted by the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne platform or the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM).10 The Congresses were formed when twenty-four architects from eight European countries, including Le Corbusier, signed a joint declaration at the Chateau of La Sarraz in Switzerland in June 1928. The ideas on urban planning and housing that emerged out of CIAM mostly evoke the imagery of high-rise, standardized apartment blocks, which came to signify high modernism.
Architectural modernism’s faith in technology and industrial prowess is evident from the axiom: “The house is a machine for living in,” coined by Le Corbusier (1887–1965), one of the most influential modernist architects during the interwar period.11 Corbusier’s proposal of X-shaped free-standing tall towers in reinforced concrete as a modern solution for housing in Plan Voisin for Paris (1925) signaled the beginning of a new era that showed no connections to the past.12 This model laid the foundations of ‘the functional city’ that separated dwelling, transportation, and economic activity functions. The separation of functions through planning was not practiced in prewar cities but had traces in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City proposals. The idea of the “functional city” was promoted soon from the forum of the CIAM.
MINIMUM STANDARDS OF LIVING DEFINING THE NEW NORMAL
The other dominant idea by CIAM was the standardization of housing. As mentioned earlier, the root of the standardization of urban housing and planning using minimum standards lies in dissatisfaction with industrial cities’ late nineteenth-century tenement housing. In the 1920s, Western cities also experienced increased government intervention in public affairs. The inability of the free market to deal with congestion and blight during industrial city crises made the reform-minded voters of the middle-class demand better living conditions, holding the state accountable for the dire circumstances. Therefore, as a reaction to these social movements, governments began to take responsibility for enforcing regulations and exercising their power to control and develop property. Building regulations were passed to improve building standards, starting with public health and safety legislation (New York Tenement Act of 1901, the Netherlands’ Housing Law of 1901, and other similar acts in England and Germany).
A consensus among modernist architects at the time was that a minimum standard space based on empirical and technical logic was necessary for all human beings, regardless of culture. They presented a universal idea about the extent of space necessary for an ideal society. The purpose of CIAM was defined in one of its documents as “to set up universal standards for the development of community and to get them accepted” (Fig. 1).13 The era of mass-produced social housing in the West began in the 1920s and 1930s. The topic of discussion at the second CIAM, held in Germany in 1929, was Existenzminimum, meaning “minimum standards of existence” possible only through standardizing living accommodations. Henry Ford’s mass production of automobiles was referred to at the Conference by Walter Gropius, who sought to achieve similar production and cost reduction in the housing sector (Conrads, 1964). Modernist ideas in art and architecture were pioneered at the Bauhaus, a new design school then (1919–1933).
Le Corbusier (1931) proposed 14 m2 [140 sq. ft.] space per person and referred to it as a “biological unit” or “a cell.” 14 The unit space could be used to create anything from a single-user bachelor’s apartment to a larger apartment for more family members. Ernst May from Germany, paving the way for the standardization of housing, used a similar unit to define minimum space.15 He shaped a comprehensive set of housing standards for the fabrication of housing in Frankfurt—these standards were named Frankfurter Normen (Frankfurt Standards); they presented twenty-four dwelling types, ranging from single-family units to multi-family types. Building elements from windows, doors, and built-in furnishings to construction details were standardized and implemented in Frankfurt while Ernst May was in charge of housing as the planning commissioner. Twelve thousand units were built within five years under him (in the 1920s) through the social housing construction program of the Weimar Republic.
Figure 1.
1
Draft of Outline of Statement of Purpose of CIAM,1928.
LATE MODERNISM AND THE END OF CIAM
After the Second World War, however, there was a shift in architectural modernism. The exposure of the newer generation of architects working in different parts of the world on the postwar housing reconstruction brought a new wave of ideas to the discipline. The following section describes the change in modernist thought and the creation of new ideas that combined the old functional city paradigm and a move toward contextual planning.
Situating Modernism in the Non-west: Groupe d’Architectes Modernes Marocains (Gamma) – 1953
The change in the modernist thought within the CIAM that influenced the post-World War II reconstruction around the globe was influenced by some key figures who were at the heart of the Congress and were also closely linked to the international development scene through the United Nations. Through them, a cross-fertilization of ideas took place that not only altered the mood of CIAM towards the mid-century before its termination but also shaped the international development standards that were applied to the non-West for post-World War II housing.
A new set of values for modern architecture had emerged within CIAM by the 1950s (post World War II). The internal conflict in CIAM vis-à-vis Le Corbusier’s preference for the “machine dominant and rational” planning practice had, however, not wholly surfaced until CIAM’s 9th Conference: this Conference underpinned the shifting of ideologies away from those advocated by CIAM’s “pioneers” since the beginning. Later these ideologies were personified by a group of younger architects who were later called Team Ten (Team X). This group was responsible for conducting the CIAM’s 10th Annual Conference, which is how they got their name. One significant voice in the group was of French architects working in colonized North Africa, including CIAM Alger in Algeria and the Moroccan section of CIAM, called GAMMA (Groupe d’Architectes Modernes Marocains). The GAMMA group presented studies and their work at CIAM 9 from a recently completed housing project, Carrieres-Centrales, in Casablanca, Morocco. The project was a joint venture of ATBAT Afrique, a French architecture engineering firm set up by Le Corbusier himself in 1947, that had worked on Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and Ecochard’s Services de l’Urbanisme. The group presented a collection of observations of the “primitive” style of living of the local Moroccan population and the vernacular architecture of casbahs and the bidonvilles. They posed a case of how they used this knowledge of traditional living methods to create modern housing for the locals.
On the other hand, CIAM’s British chapter MARS had also been questioning CIAM’s universalizing agenda through the CIAM grid dividing habitat into four distinct functions: dwellings; places of work; places of recreation; places of circulation. It was decided to keep “habitat” as the topic for the CIAM 9 Congress. The CIAM 9 experience shocked the older modernist members but created new discussions among the younger architects. Instead of pure modern architecture, an analysis of the shantytowns in the periphery of Casablanca introduced a new wave of practice to modern planning. The presentation highlighted the positives, demanding a response from the modern planner and architect other than just replacement with new model housing. It was also suggested that there was a need to move toward a solution for a habitat that was culturally based and environmentally responsive.16 The majority of the poor working-class community lived in shanty towns in Morocco; their culture and their living conditions were worth looking at, as they represented an expression of life.
There is no doubt that in Carrieres-Centrales, in Casablanca, Ecochard and his fellow members of the GAMA chapter were looking for pragmatic solutions to contemporary urban problems. They were advocating for an active role for architecture in responding to the specific human conditions in a particular cultural context. In their attempt to reject universal solutions to contemporary problems, they made a few decisions based on their understanding of adjusted modernism. They divided the population into ethnic and religious categories, like Jews and Muslims. The third category was Europeans, which was a more heterogeneous group. They provided unique design solutions for each group: for example, initially, Muslims were offered the most straightforward one-story courtyard houses on an 8x8 m [26.2 x 26.2 ft.] grid. Similar ethnic and cultural designs were offered to the Jews, while modern projects were designed for Europeans. Inspired by the traditional casbahs of the Atlas Mountains, where people lived nearby while respecting each other’s privacy, Candilis (one of the ATBAT architects) equated the traditional courtyard with the hearth or the modern family room that brings people together. Thus, multi-story solutions were proposed, accommodating the courtyard at times centrally and as suspended patios, for example, in the three towers later added to the Carrieres Centrales project (Fig. 2).
Figure 2.
2
Carrieres Centrales project (1952), at Hay Mohammadi in Casablanca, Morocco.
With their good intentions, the architects believed that all humans have some intrinsic needs that are the same and that anthropological differences based on tradition and culture are transitional and could be gradually changed. Ultimately, the modernist agenda of changing the “other” or demanding a “specific way of life” did surface, even in the Carrieres-Centrales Casablanca project. The architects vacillated between choosing the intrinsic vital needs and the project of accommodating culture while disregarding that needs are also shaped by culture. “The goal of adapted architecture was to induce inhabitants to gradually adopt modern lifestyles.” 17 GAMA architects in Morocco stayed connected to the functionalist approach, and the anthropological aspect was accommodated as a mere transitional stage.
Eventually, CIAM did move in its trajectory toward a more specific form of modernism with cultural adaptation after these developments and the CIAM 9 display.18 However, this cultural adaptation was a combination “of the universalist approach of modern architecture and of the wish to adapt to local cultures and identities characteristic of the Team Ten generation.” 19 Even though the Congress did not last beyond 1959, the ideas that emerged from the elite group of experts associated with it continue to influence urban design in one way or another, even today.20 CIAM is considered instrumental in propagating globally the revolutionary ideas that were developing in Europe during the 1920s in architecture and urban planning. The organization aimed to promote modernism and internationalism in architecture and urban planning. These ideas aspired to improve the world and served economic and political purposes.
The early “functionalist” ideas in high-rise apartment buildings arranged in superblocks were applied extensively in Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, but the most noteworthy example is Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil. However, this Western “functionalist” ideology of modernism had a cousin in the form of low-rise high-density mass housing; it resulted from the changing ideology in modernist thought and became known as late modernism. The low-rise mass housing model, which purported to be more culturally adaptive in the mid-century, was a hybrid between the United Nations post-war development discourse (to provide adequate housing to the urban poor) and CIAM’s social reform agenda (through “standardized” housing). The United Nations—a creation of Western thought—promoted an international coalition of the leading (Western) nation-states. The UN was created to bring peace and social order to the world after World War II and support the new nation-states dealing with a refugee crisis in the aftermath of the newly formed borders. Within the first two decades, the UN experts (from their observations and experiences in the post-war countries) developed policies mixed with the modernist program of social reform to promote single-family, one-story, standardized dwellings that could be mass-produced.
This paper is more than just a critique of the cultural apathy of the post-war modern mass housing model. It questions what happens to a modernist project after the expert leaves the arena. How do residents adapt to or cope with their physical environment? Moreover, is there a way to include human agency in mass housing?
MASS HOUSING PUSHING THE POST-WAR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AGENDA IN THE NON-WEST
After World War II, mass housing became a part of the post-war international development agenda. It was organized and implemented globally. The United States began fostering the idea of strengthening free states with a capitalist mode of production, in contrast to the communist ideology of Russia and China. During the Cold War, the United States promoted the ‘development model’ internationally, ensuring the weaker states would not succumb to the communist threat. Ideals of freedom, democracy, and technological and industrial prowess were applied universally, irrespective of the national context of the new states. The United States equated the freedom of nation-states to their economic progress that could be achieved through development projects with the help of the philanthropic Ford Foundation as its non-government arm.
The details of the United States and the Ford Foundation’s involvement in the development years of the most vulnerable countries through monetary aid and technical expertise are present in the Ford Foundation’s reports and Congress proceedings of the time.21 An analysis of the history of mass housing shows that most of these projects belong to the phase after the Second World War. The aftermath of both World Wars provided a fertile ground where the utopian dreams of professionals could be realized. Both the modernist architect and the modernist planner aspired to create the most perfectly planned cities at the time.22 On this premise, a mass housing project called Korangi Town was funded by the Ford Foundation and designed by a Greek architect and town planner, Constantinos Doxiadis. Doxiadis is considered one of the late moderns by some scholars; he was undoubtedly one of the most active architects in the post-World War II era. He designed capital cities for some of the newly decolonized countries in the Global South and many townships for mass housing projects during that time.
Projects like Doxiadis’ Korangi Town in Karachi, Pakistan, and Ecochard’s Carrières Centrales in Casablanca, Morocco, have been called modernist mass housing experiments of the 1950s-both implemented in the postcolonial context of the respective countries. Doxiadis envisioned Korangi Town as a model self-sustaining city based on his so-called scientific methods named Ekistics. Doxiadis designed single-story row housing with courtyards, and Echochard in Carrieres Centrales designed a combination of low to mid-rise buildings with courtyards. Both projects were laid out on a rigid and efficient grid; the master plans, in both cases, neatly demarcated the areas for distinct functions like residences, shops, schools, and recreation.
The details of the Korangi Town project are discussed in the next section. The point is that both projects are now more than seventy years old. Some published post-occupancy assessments, case studies, and outside observations are available. In both cases, it is evident that the settlements are alive, bursting with population much more than what they were designed for. They both have gone through significant transformations. However, the residents changed the physical environment in both cases over the years, and the changes are about economic dimensions. In both cases, the residents used their agency to generate income by changing their physical environment.
The post-war development model for the non-Western Countries, the scientific methods applied by the architects to accommodate hundreds and thousands of households within the standardized spaces, and an attempt to contextualize modernist ideas through mass housing failed to consider the agency of the residents. There needed to be more consideration of the economic aspect in the original modernist plan. It is evident in both cases that the residents satisfied their familial, economic, and cultural needs through adaptation, expansion, and appropriation of their built environments. This section follows some observations from the author’s work on Korangi Town in Karachi, Pakistan. It highlights the shortcomings of the architecture, urban design, and planning professions that discourage low-income residents’ active agency from being realized. All three professions must engage more with the actions and processes intrinsic to residents’ agency. A discussion of the potential role of the professionals working to support the residents’ agency and the benefit of such collaboration follows. The paper discusses how the state, the professionals, and residents can work together to create fair housing and extend people’s agency.
MASS HOUSING AND THE AGENCY OF RESIDENTS
In order to interpret the changes made by the residents of Korangi Town (or other mass housing projects like Carrières Centrales), it is imperative to understand what active agency means. The quote by Bandura at the beginning of the article suggests that “active agency” can be defined as the ability of people to exercise influence and make things happen. In such a case, people are both “producers and products of a social system.” The core features of the agency are the same as those that define what it is to be human: intentionality, forethought, motivation, and self-regulation. Intentionality is to guide or represent a future course of action; it is not just a mere prediction of a future event. Through forethought, people set goals and anticipate the consequences of their potential actions. They can choose and formulate their courses of action. Their behavior is motivated and directed by projected goals and prospective outcomes. Therefore, the active agency calls for motivation and self-regulation. Throughout life, people plan, prioritize, and restructure their lives events.23
The Agency of Residents Emerges in the Absence of Good Governance
Korangi Town, a part of the United States’ grand international development project, was implemented as the Greater Karachi Resettlement program.24 Korangi Town was planned to house the 500,000 first-generation immigrant and refugee population a decade after independence from the British Raj and separation from India. Upon the request of General Ayub Khan, the then president of Pakistan, Korangi Town was situated outside of Karachi, about 9 miles [15 km] away from the city center in 1958; this desired location was also connected to the industrial vision for the country. A seven-mile-long strip of land zoned for the industry was to create factory jobs for the refugees accommodated in the human-scale sectors designed by Doxiadis (see figure 3). Although Doxiadis’s plan for Korangi Town was based on his philosophy of ekistics, in spirit, it was similar to Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model or Frederick Osborne’s New Towns of England.25 It required the same degree of paternalistic support from the state as in the other models for its success.
It was a package delivery model where readymade single-story housing units were delivered to the residents. Based on the requirements of industrialization of the 1950s, the gridiron plan reflected some social ordering in Korangi Town and the will of the state. Doxiadis’s desire to create a self-sustaining town assumed that the residents would depend on the jobs provided by the industrial zone in Korangi Town.26 In this model, there is no accommodation for the agency of people. Everything is preplanned and predestined. The model’s success was heavily dependent upon infrastructure and industry, the provision of which was the state’s responsibility. The history of Korangi Town reflects the labor party organization and struggle to later ethnic regrouping and representations.27 However, these are topics for another discussion, how the Korangi Town plan provided the landscape for the labor party to organize and protest against the oppression of the industrial sector in the 1970s (Fig. 3).
Figure 3.
3
Master Plan of Korangi Town.
Residents’ Agency to Increase their Monthly Incomes
The most evident alterations by Korangi Town residents are land use changes related to the need to increase their monthly incomes. The residents built extra rooms to accommodate their expanding families, rented them out, and appropriated their one-story houses or apartment buildings to create four-story apartment buildings (Figs. 4, 5). They made shops on the ground floor wherever they could, started workshops in their homes, and ran other private businesses like schools and daycare centers from home. The streets of Korangi Town are alive even at night as youngsters gather to play pool in rooms that are turned into clubs with pool tables (Fig. 6). The marketplaces, open-air markets, housing units, and streets are places in Korangi Town where merchandise or services are constantly exchanged (see Fig. 7). Here the exchange value is as significant as the use value. As Richard Sennet describes in Building and Dwelling, the connection between “cite,” the act of living, and “ville,” the built and planned environment; through acts of appropriation, the Korangi Town residents can create “cite” over the “ville.” 28
Residents’ active agency in the production of space can also be seen in other parts of the world. The Nehru Place in Delhi, mentioned in Sennett’s book, has an alternate informal market evolved on the top of an underground garage. Many small shops occupy the spaces intended for housing startup companies in mid-rise buildings, with few startups squeezed between the shops. Similar examples emerge in other post-occupancy scenarios of formally designed projects like Korangi Town.
Figure 4.
4
Street view of Korangi Town in the 1950s and street view after appropriations in 2021.
Figure 5.
5
A 3D model was generated using building heights data at 0.5 m [1.64 ft.] resolution (the average height of the tallest building is 45 m [148 ft.]).
Figure 6.
6
Youngsters playing pool at night in a pool club made in a portion of a house of Sector 36A in Korangi Town.
Figure 7.
7
Market growing outside the original planned shopping area in Sector 36A also called the K Market in KorangTown.
The ownership of a house is a low-income person’s biggest asset. From this asset, he/she can generate much-needed extra income to sustain their family. Traditionally, people have lived where they worked. The traditional pre-colonial Muslim neighborhoods called mohallas were also examples of how, traditionally, people lived close to their workspaces or carried out work from home.29
FACTORS THAT DISCOURAGE LOW-INCOME RESIDENTS’ ACTIVE AGENCY
In a capitalist economic system, commodities are valued for their exchange value rather than their use value; the same goes for housing stock. Now those who can afford, buy houses based on the predicted resale (exchange) value instead of the use value. Privatization and commodification of housing and land lead people with money and resources to purchase land and housing for speculative purposes instead of for use, depriving low-income populations of affordable housing.30 The shortage of adequate, affordable housing is a by-product of the neo-liberal capitalist economic system that further engenders poverty. The alternate means through which the low-income population gets access to housing are deemed informal or illegal. As seen in Korangi Town, residents have added more rooms or shops to their units outside of regulations, which is considered illegal.
The negative connotation of impermanence in the term “informal” or “illegal” used interchangeably to describe the living conditions of the low-income population further aggravates the issue of urban inequality and social segregation. Because of this practice, many aspects of the agency of residents are not only ignored by the state and the professions but also discredited. Following this trajectory, in Karachi, Pakistan, the municipality undertook a significant demolition project in 2017,31 under the shadow of a new government that had promised to revive Karachi city to its past glory. Many areas of Korangi town were affected, and shops and rooms were demolished as they were considered encroachments or built illegally by the residents without permission. However, after some demolitions, removing all encroachments and structures built without permission was deemed impossible, so the process was halted. Such portrayal of low-income communities overshadows the fact that pervasive poverty is a product of structural problems, including industrialization and inequitable distribution of wealth. Unless these structural changes are altered, the abilities of low-income populations to fill the gap and take care of their problems must be realized.32
DISCUSSION ON RESIDENTS’ AGENCY AND THE DISCIPLINES
The Korangi Town case reflects how housing a displaced populace experiencing poverty was not resolved by providing housing units and a neighborhood center through an extensive master plan. Administrative and legislative measures were also necessary to guarantee the project’s success over time. Doxiadis had called a ‘long-term Master Program,’ the fourth dimension, time. In the planning of Korangi Town, Doxiadis Associates collected data about the citizens as future residents and observed the residents’ ways of life. Experts, architects, and planners from Doxiadis Associates would exchange and document the data they collected through the observations using these to make plans for shopping areas and housing units.33 From the Korangi Town case study, it can be gathered that this method needs to be revised; the component of active participation of residents needs to be introduced. Residents should have a say in the decision-making regarding their community.34 To meet the residents’ needs, architects and planners need to accommodate the residents’ active agency and further empower them to act on their behalf.
The critical issue is how architects, planners, and urban designers can help low-income residents fill this gap while promoting and supporting policies making housing more affordable. Also, remember that big cities’ sociodynamics is very complex. The task is immense for the professional architect, planner, or urban designer unless they collaborate with professionals of other disciplines.35 How can architects, urban designers, and planners facilitate low-income people’s active agency in design and development projects? How can we decrease their marginalization, increase the likelihood that the development will meet their needs, and further empower them to act and change their housing and neighborhood environs? The answer lies in practices that promote self-help and self-built environments built through participation and that engage human capital (skill) and social capital (relationships between human beings).36
An example of self-help, participatory planning, and architecture in the non-West is the Community Architects Network (CAN), an organized group of architects, planners, engineers, academicians, and academic institutions from Asia that supports community-driven projects under the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA). With their motto “Let people be the solution,” they work on projects like housing for low-income communities, city-wide upgrading, and disaster recovery projects. Their objective is capacity building through community-driven design and planning. Since their first meeting in Thailand (2010), the network has expanded to twenty-seven groups of young professionals in seventeen Asian countries. They use participatory design and planning, conduct city-wide mapping and surveys, seek community-driven design solutions to improve the community’s quality of life and health and train community builders. Kritish Shah, a senior advisor of CAN from India, defines a community architect as one:
…who sees people, who works with people, who sees their wisdom, who sees their solutions, who builds his (their) solutions on people’s solution, who respects tradition, culture, people’s skills and people’s knowledge in design and construction -believes in and practices participatory methods-who is committed to low cost and appropriate technology and local wisdom and contacts… whose creative struggle is confined not so much to inventing new forms and designing daring and bold structures but doing more with less and seeing big in small, (and who) work together. Togetherness is their ethos, and synergies are their mantra.37
The dilemma of working with low-income populations is that they need help to afford to hire architects or planners to tackle the issues related to their professions. Most community architects and advocacy planners work pro bono through nonprofits and with private or state-funded grants. For design and development professionals to work successfully with communities, the communities must be organized. Cooperative Housing models offer an example of a functional organizational structure for participatory planning and design methods to be effective. The Cooperative Housing model allows professionals to tap into the active agency of residents, encourage them, and provide them with opportunities to act on their behalf collectively. Through shared ownership of housing, Cooperatives have long been recognized as a means of providing affordable housing through the efforts and collaboration of residents. Since the residents own cooperatives, they offer continuing economic incentives and social opportunities for residents interested in controlling their home environment, sharing their financial burden, and improving the quality of their lives.
The Cooperative Housing movement began in Europe in the nineteenth century (primarily in Great Britain and France) to provide affordable housing to the working class. It liberated people from renting rooms or flats in tenement housing where the landlord had sole control. Cooperatives solved housing shortages during industrial development that attracted people to cities. It allowed working-class families who could not afford to purchase a home or a proper shelter at affordable prices to depend on the self-help efforts of member-owners to reduce costs. Cooperatives’ success in South America shows that this self-help and self-organization is an alternative housing model to the mere Site and Service programs that often miss out on mobilizing human power by keeping people from actual decision-making.38 In the coop model of housing, coop members’ active agency is called upon to engage more effectively in making decisions and acting upon them to create and sustain environs that are better suited for the individual and community.
CONCLUSION
Korangi Town is an example of the modernization project of the West implemented through mass housing for a newly formed country that resulted from decolonization. The will of the state and the promise of the industrial growth of the 1950s dictated the social order in Korangi Town. Doxiadis’ optimism in the country’s industrial growth and the promise of progress was the premise for his intended self-sustaining town. His neighborhood planning in the form of human-scale sectors (blocks) fulfilled the requirements of industrialization by putting future workers close to the factories.39 Korangi Town’s gridiron plan provided the roadmap for the lives of low-income residents, directing where they would live, play, and work. It was assumed that they would mostly work in the factories, and their earnings should be enough. The Korangi Town plan, as initially conceived, did not provide any other options for income generation to the residents. The morphological study of the town shows the innovative ways residents can generate income using their active agency. The residents should have used the dedicated areas for shops and businesses as planned. However, they favored running most of their businesses from a portion of their homes because renting or buying the spaces in these designated areas was too expensive for them.
A fair city cannot be produced unless “value” is added to all members and the objects involved in the production and reproduction of urbanized daily life. To give that value, the “rights” of the people, including immigrants and refugees, must be acknowledged. From this position, modernism needed to realize human agency in building human-scale settlements. From its standardized and normalizing designs, it characterizes the acts of human agency as scattered, unorganized, and temporary. The Korangi Town case presented here also suggests that professional actions intended to serve a particular purpose can result in unexpected outcomes as consequences of agentive acts. For example, some well-intended social policies and practices can turn out deleterious because their harmful effects are unforeseen. Still, residents are not passive recipients of these policies and practices. They are active agents in making necessary adjustments to meet their needs to the best of their capabilities.
Nevertheless, the residents’ agency may only achieve complete fruition with the expert; one example would be the structurally weak buildings that collapse or are prone to fires when built without expert knowledge. As happened in Korangi town recently (in September 2020), a mid-rise building collapsed in Sector 31 B (now called Allahwala Town).40 The building was constructed without plans approved by the relevant authorities. Irrespective, it is evident that a paradigm shift is required in how we design housing projects.
The existing forms of urban organization based on theories and studies of urban governance and administrations constructed on bureaucratic and capitalist governmentality must prioritize low-income communities’ interests.41 Architects and planners have recently called for more profound participation methods (community engagement). While remarkable in their efforts, research on the various forms and adequate historical records of evolving participatory political practices is yet to be available to base generalizations. While both planners and architects have viewed participation as an alternate solution to housing and neighborhood development for the low-income population, there needs to be guidance about where and when to use the various participatory processes.42 No matter how well designed, housing is likely to meet the needs of the disenfranchised populace if they are meaningfully engaged in the housing design and development processes.
Poverty is the most common feature among distinct cultural and ethnic communities, significantly when internally or internationally displaced. Therefore, some standard necessities emerge out of such research, such as commercial activities from house-live-work arrangements or home-based business enterprise; the need for venues for affordable credits so residents can invest in the improvement of their houses; resident training about how to pay back the credit; training about how to build sound, fireproof structures; and access to affordable land in appropriate locations. What we learn from the findings can be used for future planning strategies for housing the disenfranchised. Moreover, for the housing architects, we learn that normalization attempts to provide the same housing and neighborhood for all do not work, as has been documented previously by G. K. Payne (1984), Robert Potter and Sally Lloyd Evans (1998), Jan Bredenoord, Paul van Lindert, and Peer Smets (2014).43
In short, the power to originate actions for given purposes is the key feature of personal agency. Whether the exercise of that agency has beneficial or detrimental effects or produces unintended consequences is essential; the issue can be resolved by effective communication between all involved actors. We must remember that mass housing is an external solution to housing problems. It is an intervention from the outside that involves making design decisions for a culture, using technologies, and inferences by builders, contractors, service engineers, and developers not part of the community. On the other hand, the design and practices of residents are based on their needs, most of all on the necessity to survive.44 In postwar and post-disaster cases like Korangi Town, external intervention is necessitated and even demanded to meet long-term housing needs. However, we need to move away from the development expert who has all the answers to an expert who is ready to have conversations and collaborate with residents to understand the communities with whom they work.45 Despite the lack of evaluative research, we can draw some generalizations from existing knowledge of past projects towards this trajectory:
(1) Communities could organize as cooperatives under guidelines for national cooperatives.
(2) Infrastructure and transportation are a necessity that the state should ensure through public and private partnerships.
(3) A credit system should be available for low-income people to invest in housing.
(4) A credit system designed to support land and housing purchase for low-income people should be a part of public policy.
(5)People with low incomes should have the right to affordable land as a part of a policy that curtails speculation.
(6) Affordable materials should be easily accessed.
(7) Expert knowledge of professional architects, planners, and urban designers should be availed.
(8) Architects understand the need and the existing relationship between the supplier of land, the supplier of materials, and the house builder to engage the residents’ agency in the formal building processes.
(9 )Training workshops should be framed around this knowledge to build the capacity of the residents.
(10) Housing units should be designed to provide live/work opportunities.
Notes
1
Albert Bandura, “Human Agency in Social Cognitive Theory,” American Psychologist 44, no. 9 (1989): 1175-84 - doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.44.9.1175.
2
Homeless World Cup Foundation, “Global Homeless Statistics” -
https://www.homelessworldcup.org/homelessness-statistics.
3
Rosemary Wakeman, Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).
4
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason: The Critique of Practical Reason and OT Other Ethical Treatises. The Critique of Judgement (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952).
5
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 2016).
6
Peter Rowe, Modernity and Housing (Cambridge MA, USA: MIT Press, 1995), 48-9.
7
Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge MA, USA: MIT Press, 2000), 10-71.
8
Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 695-719.
9
Eric Mumford, Designing the Modern City: Urbanism since 1850 (New Haven CT, USA: Yale University Press, 2018),10.
10
Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (Cambridge MA, USA: MIT Press, 2002).
11
Le Corbusier-Jeanneret-Gris, Charles Edouard, and Frederick Etchells, Towards a New Architecture (London: J. Rodker, 1931).
12
Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (London: Penguin Books, 2019).
13
“Draft of Outline of Statement of Purpose of CIAM,1928,” Papers of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 1928–1970 (Gifts of Josep Lluis Sert, 1981 and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 1982; folder A003: Frances Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design).
14
Max Bill, ed., Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. The Complete Architectural Works 1934-1938 Volume III (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), 163.
15
Rowe, Modernity and Housing, 58.
16
Monique Eleb, “An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism,” in Anxious Modernisms, eds. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (Cambridge MA, USA: MIT Press, 2001).
17
Ibid.
18
Alison Smithson, Team 10 Meetings: 1953-1981 (New York: Rizzoli, 1991).
19
M. Ijlal Muzaffar, “Boundary Games,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh PA, USA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 147–76.
20
Mumford, The CIAM Discourse.
21
Ford Foundation, “The Report of the Trustees of the Ford Foundation” (September 27, 1950), 11.
22
Mumford, Designing the Modern City; and Rowe, Modernity and Housing, 218-20.
23
Albert Bandura, “Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 2, no. 1 (1999): 21-41 – doi: 10.1111/1467-839X.00024.
24
Arif Hasan, Seven Reports on Housing: Government Policies and Informal Sector and Community Response (Karachi, Pak.: OPP-RTI, 1992).
25
Wakeman, Practicing Utopia.
26
Constantinos Doxiadis, Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
27
Kamran Asdar Ali, Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan, 1947-1972 (Karachi, Pak.: Oxford University Press, 2015), 221.
28
Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (London: Penguin Books, 2019).
29
Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639-1739 (Cambridge MA, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
30
David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, no. 4 (2003): 939-41 – doi: 10.1111/j.0309-1317.2003.00492.x.
31
Tahir Siddiqui, “300 Shops Built on Drains in Korangi Razed by KDA,” DAWN -
https://www.dawn.com/news/1455094, accessed January 3, 2019.
32
Geoffrey K. Payne, Low-Income Housing in the Developing World: The Role of Sites and Services and Settlement Upgrading (Hoboken NJ, USA: Wiley, 1984).
33
Doxiadis Associates, “The Development of the Korangi Area,” Periodical Report 2. Korangi Development within the Greater Karachi Area (1960), 17.
John Forester, The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes (Cambridge MA, USA: MIT Press, 2006).
35
Paul Davidoff, “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning,” in A Reader in Planning Theory (1973): 277-96 – doi: 10.1016/B978-0-08-017066-4.50024-2.
36
Roger Katan and Ronald Shiffman, Building Together: Case Studies in Participatory Planning and Community Building (New York: New Village Press, 2014); Roberta M. Feldman and Susan Stall, The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents’ Activism in Chicago Public Housing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Ken Reardon, Building Bridges: Community and University Partnerships in East St. Louis (New Orleans MS, USA: Social Policy Press, 2019); and Forester, The Deliberative Practitioner.
37
Kirtee Shah, “CAN Story” - http://communityarchitectsnetwork.info/about.php.
38
Nadia Shah, “Mutual-Aid Cooperative Housing as a Bridge between Self-Provisioned and the Formal Product Delivery Model - Lessons from Uruguay,” Alternatives to the Present. AMPS Proceedings Series 16 (2018): 109-16.
39
Doxiadis Associates, “The Development of Korangi Town Area,” Ekistics 8, no. 47 (1959): 207–35.
40
Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA) confirmed the information about the building that was covered in the Express Tribune newspaper article by Munawar Khan. At least four killed as a residential building collapse in Karachi’s Korangi Rescue operations underway to take residents out from the debris. September 10, 2020.
41
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76 (New York: Penguin Books, 2020).
42
Robert Potter and Sally Lloyd-Evans, The City in the Developing World (London: Routledge, 2016); Jan Bredenoord, Paul van Lindert, and Peer Smets, Affordable Housing in the Urban Global South: Seeking Sustainable Solutions (London: Routledge, 2014).
43
Payne, Low-Income Housing; and Robert Potter and S Lloyd-Evans, “Housing and Shelter in Third World Cities: Rags and Riches,” in City in the Developing World (London: Prentice Hall, 1998), 137–58; Bredenoord, van Lindert and Smets, Affordable Housing.
44
Paul Oliver, Built to Meet Needs: Cultural Issues in Vernacular Architecture (London: Routledge, 2007).
45
Manfred A. Max-Neef, Antonio Elizalde, and Hopenhayn Martín, Human Scale Development: Conception, Application and Further Reflections (New York: Zed Books, 1991); Colin Ward, Housing: An Anarchist Approach (London: Freedom Press, 1976).
Credits
Figure 1: sourced from Papers of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 1928–1970. Gifts of José Luis Sert, 1981 and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 1982. Folder A003. Frances Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Figure 2: photo licensed under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.
Figure 3: sourced from © Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.
Figure 4: sourced from © Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation. Korangi (Slides 9885, no.884) and appropriated street view now; photograph by © the Author.
Figure 5: digital elevation model generated by © the Author with data retrieved from Vricon.
Figures 6 and 7: photographs by © the Author.
1
Nadia Shah currently works at Community Partners for Affordable Housing. She holds a PhD in Architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning, and a bachelor’s degree in Architecture. She also teaches architecture studio at IIT. Her research interest is equitable housing through inter- and transdisciplinary approaches in policy and design. Her research focuses on cost-efficient and affordable housing solutions in the transcontinental context. Additionally, she has worked for community development corporations. E-mail: nshah99@iit.edu
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Print Publication Date
June, 2023
Electronic Publication Date
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
