Jarillas, elsewhere better known as Caña Brava (a type of cane), is a reed that usually grows on the marshy banks of rivers. Tlacotal, the Nahuatl name for the place where jarillas grow, is a community in Iztacalco, one of the mayorships in the southeast of Mexico City. The Miramontes River, at that time emblematic for Tlacotal, became a canal; but the jarillas are still in the orchard of the Cultural Center that bears the same name. This cultural center is a reference for Mexico City for being managed from the territorial community, cohesioning the social fabric and the sense of community at the scale of the neighborhood locality, with a tireless work from the culture and urban identity. It is an icon for the development and self-determination of an urban community, involving the third generation, giving tangible form to the demands of the people of Tlacotal in their struggle for the right to the city.
Can we imagine a future where every city and its citizens claim a deep connection with its surroundings, history, heritage, culture, knowledge systems and the commons? A future where every individual shares a convivial and compassionate relationship with each other and the rest of nature? A future where its people are taken care of and journey towards a more inclusive and just world? This article seeks to explore some of the activities and processes that can be worked out in a city space from an individual action level to the community level and a governance level to achieve the same, through some of the existing initiatives in the country.
A pragmatic management team and highly motivated young people ensure that the now outdated association Fabrik für Handwerk, Kultur und Ökologie eV does not begin to stuff under the alternative economic robe.
An association of young designers finds space where there seems to be none at first glance. There they create places of encounter, experience and exchange and transform the structures of their hometown.
Stuttgart. A surrounded city in Baden-Württemberg with a questionable reputation. The most traffic jams in Germany that pollute the air, a train station that could hardly be more controversial (Stuttgart21), rents that are going through the roof, a shortage of living space, no space. This image dominated the public at least a few years ago. The city was “completely privatized,” says Hanna, “there was no opportunity to shape it.” Since then, Stuttgart’s appearance has improved significantly. And Hanna was instrumental in that. As part of their master’s thesis, the architecture student and her fellow student Sebastian sat down with Urban about five years agoCommonsapart, i.e. common areas in the urban space. Where can you create this in a city so overbuilt? How can young people without a large financial budget get involved in urban design? And they found space. Albeit in a figurative sense.
Because vacant lots, at least affordable ones, hardly revealed themselves to the two students during their research. Instead, they found gaps in time, gaps in knowledge, gaps in communication, and the like. In an open discourse format, Hanna and Sebastian invited other interested parties to “collect gaps” every month. The rush was great, which was not surprising given the three architecture faculties in Stuttgart. Sarah also studied at one of these three faculties and took part in the discussion rounds at the time. “During the conversations, a mother gap quickly became apparent,” recalls the former student. This gap, which was mentioned again and again, was the Austrian square.
The square doesn’t look like a gap at first, it’s huge and central, a junction between the center and the southern part of the city. It is covered by two main roads, framed by a Catholic church and the building of a large insurance company, and also a meeting place for many homeless people. “An exciting place, very active and hybrid,” says Sarah. And yet a few years ago there was still a gap in knowledge and communication. “Everyone knew the subway station of the same name. But nobody knew the place itself,” says Hanna. That may be because Österreichischer Platz is owned by the city but was leased to a parking lot company for over thirty years. Only a small free area remained next to the parking lot. A gap from which Hanna, Sarah, Sebastian and the collective began to shake up the city life. The non-profit associationCity Gaps was born.
The aim of the association is not to fill gaps. The city is small enough as it is. On the contrary, the activists are concerned with opening up the gaps that have been found. This means making them visible and making the unused space accessible and usable for people and their needs, as stated on the association’s website. “We see it as an opportunity to create awareness for a common space and for the right to the city,” they write. The team tries to do this in an accessible way, with funny ideas, irritations – and above all with an appealing design.
“Design has something to do with appreciation,” says Hanna. And Sarah adds: “It takes careful design of processes to arouse interest. Simply placing Ikea furniture in public space and then sitting down is not enough.” In order to draw the attention of the city’s residents to Österreichischer Platz, the young designers designed and built a souvenir shop, for example. From then on, lovingly designed souvenirs such as scarves, jute bags and beer coasters helped the people of Stuttgart to remember a place that most of them had never known before.
Unlike in the usual souvenir shops, the memorabilia were not sold, but wandered over the counter for a voluntary donation. All Stadtlücke actions are basically free of charge so that they are accessible to as many people as possible. Another motto of the association: Never finish designing, but leave processes open. Idea cards were also laid out at the souvenir shop. “What could be better here?” It said, as well as a collection of suggestions for improvement for the Österreichischer Platz, which could be voted on locally and online. Within a few days, 12,000 people voted, and in the end a skate park won the race.
Beyond that, everyone was and is invited to get involved. “We have space and electricity. Who wants to do something?” Hanna summarizes the club’s approach. In the two weeks that Stadtlücken was initially on site at Österreichischer Platz, light shows and herb tours were held, and students from the neighboring high school curated an exhibition. And with the members of the Catholic St. Maria Church, who brought the active coffee, the next cooperation came about.
For two weeks in the following year, the premises of the church became the setting for a motley programme. A trampoline was set up there, a DJ put on tunes, and tango was danced. Everything one after the other, of course. “Of course there were also church services,” says Sarah. “But they were designed to be interactive, with a round table at which the future of St. Mary’s Church was discussed.”
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“What is happening here” on the Österreichischer Platz in Stuttgart?
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You could buy souvenirs, for example.
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Or dine together – pre-corona.
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The gaps in the city also found space in the St. Maria Church.
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If you didn’t feel like talking, you could jump on the trampoline instead.
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You can also work out on the Österreichischer Platz – at the first public bouldering opportunity in Stuttgart-Mitte.
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To then have the leisure to talk again. With the format “Once a month – who owns the city?”. Here on the banks of the Neckar.
Again and again the Stadtlücken would like to invite people to see themselves as part of the public space and to get involved in its design. A concept that works and inspires, even beyond the city limits. For example, the campaign in the St. Maria Church received a positive response from the entire Catholic community in southern Germany. And the young designers and activists are also diligently networking with similar projects, Hanna and Sarah name the Platzprojekt in Hanover and the Raumstation collective with offices in Weimar, Berlin and Vienna. But back to Stuttgart. There, in its homeland, the young club has already cleaned up the dusty structures of the speculative city.
You don’t necessarily see how much at first glance. If you enter the Österreichischer Platz today, you won’t see much of the bustling experimental field that filled the square with life for at least a year and a half. At the end of 2019, the experimentation was over for the time being, two table tennis tables and the first public bouldering opportunity in Stuttgart-Mitte remain. A rather quieter place, the new Ösi. But things have been going on behind the scenes ever since. An “Office for Public Space” is to be created on the Österreichischer Platz, and the city gaps have more than one million euros in fundingfor the (further) development of your overall project. “We’ve gotten into the mainstream of urban planning,” says Sarah with a grin. In a one-year break, structures for this “interest group for public urban space” are now being developed. Some of these are quite lengthy processes, says Hanna. But the designers of public space don’t get bored – the next gap has already been found, this time in the middle of the river. On the Neckarinsel (“Yes, Stuttgart actually has a river!”), the discussion format “Once a month – Who owns the city?” Among other things, we discussed who owns the river, who should own it and how its banks can be used as spaces of opportunity. During Corona, the events will take place online on Zoominstead of. Everyone is invited – of course.
It all started when the Muyu Chakana Foundation, in the middle of the pandemic, decided not to put band-aids on the biggest wounds, the other words, instead of handing out food baskets, give native seeds and promote family gardens. Vegetable gardens and native seeds that change lives, young former gang members and indigenous people in the process of becoming seed growers and permaculturists, understanding the true importance of native and indigenous creole seeds.
Arched windows, reflecting on floor surface, likely at old palace in Jaipur, India. The design helps keep heat out.
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
Benny Kuriakose remembers when his father built the first house in his village in the southern Indian state of Kerala with a concrete roof. It was 1968, and the family was proud to use the material, he says, which was becoming a “status symbol” among villagers: the new home resembled the modern buildings cropping up in Indian cities, which in turn resembled those in images of Western cities.
But inside, the house was sweltering. The solid concrete absorbed heat throughout the day and radiated it inside at night. Meanwhile, neighboring thatch-roofed houses stayed cool: the air trapped between gaps in the thatch was a poor conductor of heat.
The Kuriakoses’ experience was an early taste of a phenomenon that, over the next few decades, spread across most of India’s big cities. As a more standardized international approach to building design emerged, many Indian architects abandoned the vernacular traditions that had been developed over thousands of years to cope with the weather extremes of different regions. The earthen walls and shady verandas of the humid south, and the thick insulating walls and intricate window shades of the hot dry northwest, were swapped for a boxy modern style. Today, buildings in downtown Bangalore often look like those in Ahmedabad, in the north, or Chennai, in the east—or those in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Manchester, England.
“In most cities, people have blindly followed the Western model,” says Kuriakose, an architect now based in Chennai. “There was no attempt to look at the local climate. There was no attempt to look at the materials which are available.”
In the climate change era, that uniformity is looking like a mistake. Large parts of India have been stifled by a spring heatwave since April, with temperatures lingering close to 110°F for weeks in some places, and topping 120°F in Delhi this week, making it dangerous to go to work or school—all weeks before the official start of summer. Spiking energy demand for cooling has helped trigger daily blackouts in cities, and what AC units are running are belching hot air into streets, worsening the urban heat island effect. As such heatwaves become increasingly common and long-lasting, experts say India’s modern building stock will make it harder for Indians to adapt.
Environmentalists are calling for a fundamental rethink of how India builds its cities. There are some positive signs. A growing number of sustainability-minded architects are reviving vernacular approaches. And in February the Indian government pledged to revise urban planning guidelines and investments to train planners to better design cities. Progress is slow, though, says Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), a research-focused university. “We need to essentially affect the entire fabric of our cities, from planning to land use, to building, to transportation systems,” he says. “We are only at the start of that conversation.”
Western-style skyscrapers in Kolkata, India, April 3, 2022.
Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto—Getty Images
How traditional architecture lost ground in Indian cities
The architecture of Indian cities began to change rapidly in the 1990s, when the country transitioned to a market-based economy. As construction boomed, Western or globalized styles became the norm. The shift was partly aesthetic; developers favored the glassy skyscrapers and straight lines deemed prestigious in the U.S. or Europe, and young architects brought home ideas they learned while studying abroad. Economic considerations also played a role. As land became more expensive in cities, there was pressure to expand floorspace by eliminating thick walls and courtyards. And it was faster and easier to throw up tall structures using steel and concrete, rather than use traditional earth blocks which are suited to lower-rise structures.
The consequence of that cookie-cutter approach was to make buildings less resilient to India’s high temperatures. The impact of that once seemed minimal. It could easily be offset by electric fans and air conditioning, and the energy costs of cooling were not developers’ problems once they sold their buildings. “Where a home [built in the vernacular style] needs around 20 to 40 kilowatt hours per meter squared of energy for cooling, today some commercial places need 15 times that,” says Yatin Pandya, an architect based in Ahmedabad. When AC units are turned on to help people sleep at night, they release heat into the streets, which can increase the local temperature by around 2°F according to U.S.-based studies. During the day, depending on their orientation, glassy facades can reflect sunlight onto footpaths. “You’re creating [problems] in every direction.”
The shift away from climate-specific architecture hasn’t only affected offices and luxury flats, whose owners can afford to cool them. To maximize urban space and budgets, a massive government housing program launched in 2015 has relied largely on concrete frames and flat roofs, which absorb more heat throughout the day than sloped roofs. “We’re building hot houses. In certain parts of the year, they will require cooling to be habitable,” says Chandra Bhushan, a Delhi-based environmental policy expert. He estimates that roughly 90% of the buildings under construction today are in a modern style that pays little attention to a region’s climate—locking in increased heat risk for decades to come.
Even small artisanal construction crews, which are responsible for the majority of homes in India, have leaned into more modern, standardized styles, says Revi, the IIHS director. These teams rarely have a trained architect or designer. “So they build what they see,” he says. “They might build traditional elements into their village houses, but when they come to the city, they’re driven by the imperatives of the city, the imaginaries of the city. And there the international style is the aspiration.”
Similar shifts have happened in developing countries all over the world, with cities from the Middle East to Latin America taking on the “copy and paste texture of globalized architecture,” says Sandra Piesik, a Netherlands-based architect and author of Habitat: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet. As the global construction industry embraced concrete and steel, local materials, designs, and technologies became displaced—with lasting consequences. “Some of these traditional methods didn’t undergo the technological revolution that they needed,” to make them more durable and easier to use on a massive urban scale, Piesek says. “We focused instead on [perfecting] the use of concrete and steel.”
A climate comeback for vernacular architecture
A movement to revive more regionally-specific styles of architecture—and combine them with modern technologies—is well underway in India. Over the last decade, thousands of architects, particularly in the experimental township Auroville on the east coast of Tamil Nadu state, have promoted the use of earth walls and roofs; earth absorbs heat and humidity, and it can now be used to build larger and more complex structures thanks to the development of more stable compressed blocks. In the dry hot northern city of Ahmedabad, which has suffered some of the country’s deadliest heatwaves in recent decades, Pandya’s firm Footprints E.A.R.T.H., uses careful orientation and overhanging roofs and walls to shade its buildings from heat, and central courtyards for ventilation.
“We are course-correcting now,” says Bangalore-based architect Chitra Vishwanath, who built her own home and hundreds of other buildings using earth. Larger universities are teaching students to build in a climate-specific way, she says, while nonprofits and artisanal construction firms are running workshops teaching this approach to architects and small-scale builders. “Younger architects who are graduating today are extremely sensitive to climate,” Vishwanath adds. “I would say in another 5, 10 years westernized style buildings won’t be built so much.”
Wider adoption of climate-sensitive architecture would greatly reduce the energy needed to cool buildings, Vishwanath says. That could be crucial for India in the coming years. While only around 8% of Indians had air conditioning in their homes in 2018, as more people enter the middle class and can afford to buy their first unit, that figure is expected to climb to 40% by 2038, according to the government’s 2019 National Cooling Plan. Health experts say AC can no longer be considered a “luxury” in India’s increasingly brutal climate, and that expanding use for low-income households is essential to both saving lives and supporting India’s economic development. But it will come at a high cost in terms of India’s greenhouse gas emissions—unless cleaner cooling technologies can be developed and rolled out rapidly.
Increasing the use of traditional materials in India’s sprawling construction sector would also make a dent in the country’s emissions. Vernacular architecture tends to use more natural, locally-sourced substances like earth or timber, rather than concrete and steel, which are created through carbon-intensive industrial processes and transported from thousands of miles away. A 2020 paper published by Indian researchers in the International Journal of Architecture found that the production of vernacular materials required between 0.11 MJ and 18 MJ of energy per kilo, compared to 2.6 MJ to 360 MJ per kilo for modern materials.
It wouldn’t be feasible to replace all the modern materials used in India’s buildings with vernacular counterparts. Though technological advances are making it possible to build larger, multi-storey buildings with earth, it wouldn’t work in a skyscraper. And some traditional features, like sloping roofs and detailed window shades are too expensive for many people to consider when building their homes. Perhaps most importantly: in cities, the high cost of land makes it extremely difficult to find space for verandas and courtyards.
Given those challenges, Kuriakose says the future of Indian architecture won’t be simply reverting to how things were fifty years ago, before his grandfather installed their concrete roof. The way forward is to channel the locally-rooted problem solving strategies of traditional architects. His firm, for example, has found ways to build traditional sloped roofs, which allow water runoff during
monsoon seasons and prevent heat absorption, while incorporating concrete in some elements to make them cheaper. “We are trying to use the knowledge system which has been passed on from generation to generation over the centuries,” he says. “Not to blindly follow how villagers used to do things.”
Pandya, the Ahmedabad architect, puts it another way. “Sustainability is not a formula—what works in Europe might not work here,” he says. “Like a doctor, you have to understand the patient, the symptoms, the conditions—before you arrive at the cure.“
The vegetable heroes want to make Frankfurt edible by jointly creating permaculture gardens across the city. Despite adversity, they have expanded enormously in a short period of time. Her recipe for success: serenity, cohesion – and a pinch of megalomania.
Adaptation to climate change and resilience to risks has the face of a woman. In the neighborhoods of El Alto and the hillsides of La Paz, women not only train in risk management but also become builders of rainwater harvesting systems. THEY are the ones that guarantee life, building the future.
The Circles of Sustainability fi gure used throughout this book provides a relatively simple view of the sustainability of a particular city, urban settlement, or region. The circular fi gure is divided into four domains: ecology, economics, politics and culture. Each of these domains is divided in seven subdomains, with the names of each of these subdomains read from top to bottom in the lists under each domain name. Assessment is conducted on a nine-point scale. The scale ranges from ‘critical sustainability’, the fi rst step, to ‘vibrant sustainability’, the ninth step. When the fi gure is presented in colour it is based on a traffi c-light range with critical sustainability marked in red and vibrant sustainability marked in green. The centre step, basic sustainability, is coloured amber – with other steps ranging in between amber and red or amber and green. The grey-scale used here is intended to simulate the colour range.
