Rua Gen. Carneiro, Sao Paulo, Brazil

I’ve always liked mega cities. I lived a year in Mexico City in the eighties, a few months in Cairo in the nineties, and a week in Chongqing in the noughties. So I had high expectations of São Paulo even before I’d arrived. São Paulo is Latin America’s largest city by far, and also one of the largest in the world, with 29 million in its metropolitan area. It’s also in the top ten of the most expensive cities in the world: a side dish of french fries in a greasy spoon costs a fiver, but luckily there are better things on offer: roasted palm heart, smoked cat fish, strong Brazilian coffee.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, here in the 1930s, saw São Paulo still as an ordinary town, about which you could make coherent generalizations. Sao Paulo, he said, was a city “feverishly in the grip of a chronic disease: perpetually young, yet never healthy,” and whose districts “pass from freshness to decay without ever being simply old.” This still stands, yet now it is so big, so complex, so multifarious, so much a city of oppositions – ugly beautiful, rich poor, crazy sane, experimental yet deeply conservative – that almost anything you can grandly deduce about it is likely to be both utterly true and simultaneously demonstrably false.

Unlike Rio where the near vertical topography tips the favelas up into your line of sight in every part of the city, the relative flatness of São Paulo, its size, and the location of most favelas on its outskirts mean that their picturesque (and to Sao Paulo’s middle classes, increasingly desirable) qualities are mostly invisible. What you see instead is a city of acutely differentiated districts which have grown radially and sequentially from its original core, swallowing up pre-existing settlements along the way and transforming them into satellite centres with the city’s relentless expansion. Each district has its own grid, coherent in itself but often unconnected with the greater whole, and what is serendipitous is the interaction of the strictly Cartesian grid with the city’s often extreme topography, so an ordinary road suddenly topples over the edge of an escarpment or rises up at one in four. This is most extreme on either side of the city’s main boulevard, the Avenida Paulista, which runs along the ridgeline between São Paulo’s two main river basins. Lined with big, shiny, unremarkable office buildings, it seems the model of twenty first century mainstream urban propriety, but turn left or right onto its cross streets and you hurtle downwards roller coaster style.

Talking to the locals, one gathers that doing architecture here is hard graft, with procurement following US models of conformity, economy, appropriateness and rectitude: no surprises please. And yet some have managed to break through. Niemeyer of course unpacks his bizarrely workable mix of fantasy and reality in Edificio Copan, an enormous yet elegant apartment building, and in a crazy and highly popular linear folly at Ibirapuera Park. Joao Artigas’s Faculty of Architecture, all in concrete with wonderfully generous ramps and a leaky roof, has an enviable interpenetration of inside and out which you suspect is impractical even here in this benign climate, and yet deeply to be desired.

Meanwhile the great heroine, Lina Bo Bardi, has a magnificent and moving trio of works here: her own Glass House on a jungly hillside; the art museum MASP with a fabulous collection of almost everyone who matters from Mantegna to Cezanne, and best of all, SESC Pompeia, a startlingly good community cultural centre where people fight for pebbled concrete to be restored, eighty year olds dance with abandon, and everyone looks beautiful bathed in a flattering light: a place to hang out without feeling lost. It is a refurbished factory, with a new insertion on the grandest scale imaginable in the form of two mega-tower gymnasia of in situ concrete linked by fantastically unlikely diagonal aerial bridges. If it has any sense, São Paulo will make her its Gaudí, or its Mackintosh, because her work, where ethos and architecture unite, is the very best thing in this surprising city.

And the most surprising thing of all is something no one had said about São Paulo. Sitting on a rooftop one sunset looking north to the ridge of Avenida Paulista, the entire horizon was a bristling citadel of hundreds or perhaps thousands of mini-skyscrapers, so closely spaced that there was not an inch of sky between them, some of them topped with Eiffel Tower-like telecommunication masts, and the whole foregrounded by the deep green jungle moat of the gardens of Jardim. São Paulo, at least then, and from there, was a place of overwhelming beauty.

We have recently been developing the idea of adaptable neighbourhoods, that is to say the notion that sustainable development of challenged city areas is best carried out incrementally, using existing economic and social networks as its basis. This model deliberately opposes itself to the more orthodox form of comprehensive redevelopment, which requires the erasure by means of wholesale demolition of pre-existing urban and social patterns. This paper looks at how temporary projects can embed that crucial ingredient of adaptability which alone can enable blighted neighbourhoods to thrive in difficult economic times.

Over the last year, three Occupy sites in Madrid, New York, and London (as well as a myriad of smaller ones) have activated discussion and demonstrated a version of live negotiation about space in the city – who owns it and how it should be used. In all three cities, protesters occupied sensitive public spaces, and camped out in them. In Madrid, Plaza del Sol became a compass and miniature map of the larger city, with each neighbourhood hub as an embassy relating back to its barrio. In New York the issue of so-called public space turning out in fact to be private was acted out in real space and time. Ironically the fuzzy red line of the police barricades not only sustained the protest site, but the discussions about territory actualized and dramatized the underlying issues behind that protest. The surprise in London was that the issue of the sacred and profane could play out on a rather small patch of paving around St Paul’s, revealing the cracks in a truce between the state and church brokered in the sixteenth century. The Church of England is territorially strong but appeared suddenly uncertain of both its powers and, more fundamentally, of its remit. For a while these three places will have had a heightened psycho-geographical presence for participants, other citizens and tourists. Is this enrichment a form of urbanism? Clearly the answer has to be yes, but it must also be acknowledged that the activities of these protesters illuminated a profound nervousness on the part of the city authorities and other vested interests about the issue of change instigated bottom up.

Another form of occupation of the city, long hallowed by tradition and tightly controlled by city authorities, is the street market. Is a regular street market a form of urbanism? Clearly again the answer is yes, and we want to argue that if the ebb and flow of goods, services and people is the life-blood of cities, then shouldn’t urban designers focus more on the implications of interim uses such as protests, festivals and markets? Three current projects we have initiated at Ash Sakula explore the urban possibilities of temporary or interim uses. Leicester Waterside is an unnecessarily blighted brownfield site ripe for incremental development. Canning Town Caravanserai on the site of some over hasty housing demolition in east London has a five year temporary life. Leather Lane Stars is the attempt to use social networking to help save a rapidly shrinking traditional London street market. The value of sharing these three stories is the opportunity for concrete anecdotes to shed light on aspects of temporary urbanism, to argue for recognition and support of bottom-up urban shaping, and to challenge the currently unhelpful rhetoric of place making used by the regeneration industry.

All three projects occupy ‘difficult’ urban territory, places generally ignored or patronized by the development industry. Abandoned buildings and landscapes are fickle. In dull light their neediness is unattractive, but in the right company, at the right moment, they offer a promise of freedom. Then momentarily escaping the normative plans of the landowners, new urban inventions can take root. The problem is these cracks in the system are all too rare. Under normal circumstances, property is just not a place where people can try things out. Novelty in the serious world of real estate is restricted to marketing tactics rather than any fundamental rethinking about how we live, work, and consume. This contrasts with, for example, drug development, manufacturing and even advertising, where ways are devised to mock up future scenarios; and running back to new starting points with data to launch improved variants is completely respectable. By contrast, in property development, we have built an ossified system around the business of making cities, and with every year the burden of more risk registers, more ‘commercial confidentiality’ and more planning consultants’ fearmongering means that it gets more rigid and further away from people.

Trying things out on the ground is an antidote to the mystification latent in most twentieth century manifestos of architecture and urbanism, where there was insufficient room for anecdote, or for evidence that refused to settle into the expected patterns. As a result, over the last fifty years every city in Britain has produced inexplicable barriers to urban life: giant objects which have been insufficiently loved, mass housing that doesn’t hold its value, confusing disjunctions where one urban nostrum hits another. Jane Jacobs was amazed by the rejection of urban vitality and the failure to absorb in your face evidence. As she presciently wrote half a century ago, ‘The pseudoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.’

Leather Lane

British street markets are temporary urbanisms of an often successful kind. They may be less elegant than French or Spanish markets, but they make up for this with a more raucous vitality: places of theatrical trade. Leather Lane Stars is a project to promote, publicize and reinvigorate the historic market of Leather Lane in the Holborn district of London. The traders are the real stars of Leather Lane, Camden’s longest street market, playing a key role as hosts and animators of the public realm within the city. We have identified three different types of star. Established Stars: traders who have been on Leather Lane for more than 10 years, and the ones who really know how the market has changed over the years: some have been here their whole lives. Rising Stars: some have been here for months, others for years, the relatively more recent traders that make up the community of Leather Lane market. And Supporting Stars, the shops who exist on this side street because of the market, but also bring people to the street and sustain longer trading hours. Leather Lane has recently lost half its stalls. However it is in the interests of this symbiotic mix of networked Stars that it should thrive.  During Green Sky Thinking Week in September 2011 we set up stalls and events which led to the Friends of Leather Lane run by a mix of local business, stall traders and shopkeepers with the aim of attracting new kinds of commerce and publicity. We are looking at a Business Improvement District for Leather Lane and Hatton Garden which will focus on street level activity and local employment. We have made strong connections with other London street markets who are further along this road. We are convinced that real change must come from the Stars themselves, but they need a vocal fanbase to turn around the fortunes of the market. http://leatherlanestars.wordpress.com/

Canning Town Caravanserai

Last year we won the Meanwhile London competition run by the London Borough of Newham with a project called the Canning Town Caravanserai. The project takes a large, barren site on Silvertown Way, opposite Canning Town train station, where old housing has recently been demolished. Redevelopment will not take place for at least five years, and in the meantime we have been given the site to attempt an urban experiment.

Our proposal is for the creation of a new public space filled with many different complementary activities designed to be relevant to and to engage with the needs of locals and visitors, kickstarted during the 2012 London Olympic summer. These activities include small creative micro-enterprises involved with trading, making, cooking and eating, housed in containers and  some innovative integrally printed lightweight enclosures; a café; a performance space; a garden; a mini-golf course; and a small caretakers’ residence consisting of three eccentrically stacked shipping containers which overlooks the whole.

We are working with Groundwork London and Community Links in Canning Town on training and entrepreneurial opportunities for the build and running of the site. This hybrid commerce garden will be programmed so that it can change its spots; at times restricting entry to the under fives; at times being ticketed for a whole site performance; but most often attempting to a beer garden ambiance where the siloed generationally defined activities of London life are eroded and children are welcomed into the adult world. This is perhaps the purpose of attempting the project, to prove that neighbourhoods can host a mix of social enterprise hard sell enterprise young children’s activiites, adult games and activities and a licenced café which allows for socializing between families, young people and the elderly. http://caravanserai.org.uk/

^Leicester Waterside As Viewed By the Market

Leicester Waterside

Leicester Waterside was going to be entirely flattened and rebuilt, but now there are no real plans for the area because its land values calculate at ze. Like the adjacent riverside site of Frog Island it is threatened by falling occupation and strange fires. However there seems little reason for this neglect. The site has impressive resources, a varied collection of buildings of all ages, a range of committed local businesses, and a position abutting the main road into the city. It fronts the River Soar and a weir where the river meets the Grand Union Canal. There are herons and cormorants, protected reed banks and water lilies. The opportunity to investigate the potential of the site arose when we won an ideas competition for Loughborough University’s sustainability think tank Adaptable Futures. The brief called for a demonstration of material concepts around adaptability. However we were keen to tackle the physical challenges of adaptability in tandem with real live economics in an environment where economic and human factors are key drivers.

We started with existing uses and businesses and established a forum on the ground and online. The diversity of businesses on site is impressive. There is a simple breakfast café, a coffee bar, an ancient pub with a yard that was a bear pit along the old Roman wall, the beginnings of a nursery under the Baptist Church that has taken over the first floor of a factory, an independent singing school for children and teenagers, a jeans factory, an electronic assembly line, warehouses for shoes, an empire of toys, two wholesalers for decorators, an electrical retailers and a national firm of builders’ merchants, recording studios, bodywork garages, auto rental services, white van sales, and others. Our first forum, held in the café on site, was an immediate success. We found that while some people already had some contact with their neighbours, they all found it interesting to network, and discuss future life on the site without the pressure of comprehensive redevelopment. http://adaptableneighbourhoods.com/waterside/

We are not there yet but can already start to imagine regeneration without the middle men, generating jobs directly with local businesses without the dislocation and upheaval of a new build vision. Such a vision is insulated from economic shocks because it refuses to lay all its eggs in one basket. Instead, adaptable and incremental development can help foster a broad range of enterprises of all sizes, occupying buildings of many types, that can each respond in their own way to the winds of change.

At Leicester Waterside, we are rethinking what success might feel like for a city. In the short term, creative new signage to shout about the local businesses, pop-up gardens, events and markets using left over spaces. To start with, small modifications to buildings, like enlarged openings on the ground floor, to liven-up the public realm. In the longer term, flexible licenses and varied forms of tenure will help generate and maintain a rich cluster of small-scale enterprise and experimentation, all operating with an ethos of low carbon living, together with new housing that makes the most of the site’s proximity to the city centre.

In June the local recording studios will open up the vacant sites belonging to the HCA for Leicester’s Riverside Festival.  We have been working with Groundwork Leicester and Transition Leicester on funding proposals for a new Urban Nature Reserve on the site which will act as a demonstration project for pocket gardening and vertical greening around existing business uses. Regular events and new environmental credentials will bring people across the ring road to discover this other Leicester on the banks of the River Soar.  Seasonal change coupled with seasonal market activity will attract new diverse audiences and new activity to an ignored area. Not all these initiatives will have a long life: their temporariness is in itself a virtue. When developers are once again vying for the land local businesses hopefully will have the confidence, economic power and political influence through a Neighbourhood Plan to retain the character of the area. http://adaptableneighbourhoods.com/waterside/

Conclusion

We have high hopes for all three of these projects, but we are working against the odds. Unfortunately any city keen to see some action in a recession is still packaging up bigger and bigger parcels of land for unimaginative single or mixed use. Often a single flashy façade is all that is on offer in exchange for the draining of local commercial energy for miles around.

In this activity is the stalemate, the dead space where sounds die, the purgatory of the might-have-been and the oblivion of hope. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Post by Cany Ash

collaborative consumption

Collaborative consumption is a major trend in sustainability at the moment. For example, Zipcar, the largest of the car clubs where cars are shared by communities in half-hour slots, is now a billion dollar company in America. At the other end of the scale, the social centre at 56a Crampton Street in south London includes a bicycle repair space with a full set of tools, which the local community can share to fix their own bicycles. Sustainability is driving away from consumption of goods to consumption of services.  Of course, car rental companies and bicycle repair shops have been doing things like this for ages. However, the ways and means of sharing resources have become more innovative against a backdrop of the likelihood of resource shortages and the need to reduce the production of greenhouse gases. The question for us is how we can apply this to the built environment.

Commercial office buildings are inhabited for less than a quarter of the time. That is to say, for 10 hours out of the 24-hour day (40%) and for five days out of seven in a week, on top of bank holidays (65%). In addition, people are either ill or on holiday for about 15% of the time.  Ideas about the working environment have become more flexible with the increasing popularity of hot desking and serviced offices. Equally, a mobile workspace is embraced more and more; from home, in the café or park, at clients’ premises or while on the move.

Space is underused

Businesses want to be functioning 24 hours but employees don’t want to work night shifts, so they have offices in different time zones. Consequently, all around the world, office buildings lie empty most of the time. And as the world’s population grows and urbanises, even more offices are built that lie empty most of the time.  In the developed world, as the economy changes from an industrial to an information age, fewer factories and more offices are needed. This increasingly mobile and knowledge working population requires more smaller homes as people live longer, have children later and divorce more. But while space per office worker reduces, residential space per person is increasing. Small homes are inefficient to build and to run.

The cities we have inherited are generally far from efficient. They are often low density with poor streets and public spaces. They are often not nice places to be, which is why people flee to the suburbs to even more low density where there is a reliance on cars. Such a reliance is unsustainable as petrol becomes more expensive and the resources scarce.  Life in suburbia doesn’t bring people happiness, however, as they lose contact with community, commute further to work and consume more as a result. Leisure is increasingly digital and mobile, as smartphones and tablet computers deliver television and social networks to us wherever we are in a compact format.  As a result of spending more time commuting, and more money and time eating out and social networking, we increasingly use ‘home’ just as a place to sleep and procreate. Web-based networks, such as couchsurfing.org, suggest that many young people in society no longer feel the need to nest. They carry their life in a bag, travelling extensively and moving base regularly.

Making better use of expensive space

So, what if we could use our buildings and places more flexibly and more efficiently: buy the use of the space rather than the space itself?  Perhaps we should aim to occupy a building half of the time instead of a quarter? This opens up the possibility that the entire doubling of the world’s urban population between now and 2050 (three billion extra city dwellers) could be accommodated in existing buildings. Therefore reducing environmental destruction through mining or greenhouse gas emissions for building materials.

But could a future like this ever work?
Would people accept it?
How wouldit be organised?
What would it look like?

In this groundbreaking piece of commercially grounded research and development innovation, we have set out to provide some potential answers to these questions.
Market-driven adaptation
Innovation tends to be driven by markets so we need to understand the market drivers behind these changes.  Is new build value greater than total development cost including external costs of mining finite resources and production of green house gases (excluding land)?
If yes: Is it greater than total development cost as above including the value of the land and any buildings?
If yes: Is it greater than the value of the land and the enhanced value of the buildings plus the value of embodied carbon and social value of existing fabric and use?
If yes: Consider demolition and redevelopment with new maximum sustainable adaptable buildings.
If no to any of the above: Consider value enhancement through adaptation.
Similar questions can be asked for existing buildings and spaces.
Is the building/space in the highest value use?
Is the building/place fully utilised (intensity of existing use, 24/7)?
If yes: do nothing
If no, consider: Change to highest value uses
Add meanwhile buildings (beach huts, roof pods, floating spaces)
Create Nomad Pavilions (intensify 24/7 use within buildings)
Ameliorate and animate space between buildings
Add transition spaces (cafes, libraries, outdoor seating)

Monitor, Feedback and Adapt
This process doesn’t stop, it is a continuous process of questioning.

Have social, climate, physical, institutional, technological or market conditions changed?
If no: do nothing
If yes: go back to stage one.
Space Efficiency – Nomad Pavilions

The technology is in place to use internet booking systems to find somewhere to work or sleep with short notice. There is already the demand from travellers, low budget workers and sofa surfers Storage lockers, which are accessible 24/7, can be used to store possessions. At the moment, serviced offices are more like car clubs. A further stage of innovation could be to design buildings with spaces that can be used for both work and sleep during a 24-hour and seven-day period?  These same principles would apply to the buildings that we once called offices and in the future will be known as Nomad Pavilions. With sliding and pivoting walls, furniture that folds or rolls away, these buildings would convert incrementally from office to residential at the touch of a button each weekday evening. Many offices already have showers and Wi-Fi.  It’s a bit like living in hotel but with all your own possessions. 

These moves would also require innovations in our regulatory system. For example, which use class these would fit into – currently sui generis but potentially B1/C3? Also, there would need to be consideration of the security of tenure desired by occupants as well as how prices might be controlled.  As mentioned above, markets always adapt. If this increased use of space were to generate higher revenues, which more than compensate for higher costs (particularly if the embodied carbon in buildings and in combustion engine travel starts costing more) then the funds for these buildings will be forthcoming.

Pods

It is no longer as simple as travelling from point A to point B; people want to be in different places at different times. Caravans and campervans serve this function but are dated and underused. Instead we could designate pod sites all over the place, in the city (on the roof, in the yard, on the riverbank) and in the country (on the beach, in the hills). These pods would be designed to operate as workspace and as living space, and move to meet demand. We would hire them by the time slot: 8am-6pm five days a week or 6pm-8am plus weekends.  Our personal belongings, which are increasingly few in an anti-consumerist information world, would live in our secure private store (accessible 24/7). Thus, accommodation costs would be halved, our discretionary disposable incomes would double and we spend more time travelling.

In-between times and places

At the beginning and end of the day, we would move from our working place to our sleeping place and we would meet our friends virtually, in the spaces between buildings (streets, squares, parks) and as we travel. Libraries will re-establish themselves as public spaces where our communities store all the things that we share between us, along with cafes and shops.  Where building uses overlap, we would use these, probably ground floor, transient spaces as our social spaces to eat and meet and also to wait for our private space to come available.

Post by Chris Brown. This text was originally written as part of Ash Sakula winning submission to the Adaptable Futures competition, now a live project -one of our family of Adaptable Neighbourhood case studies- that you can follow HERE Chris writes his own blog that you can visit HERE

The area has been dedicated to light industry for the last 40 years, and for the last ten has seen a rapid growth in Artists’ live/work studios re-occupying old industrial fabric. Currently the area is a rich mix of artists’ studios, live/ work units, social enterprises, light industry and residential.

What follows is a series of architectural snaphshots that give a cross section through the area, its life, and the architectural types in which it is all contained and which helped catalyse it all…

Case Study:
The Old Peanut Factory

Something of a hunter-gatherer instinct kicks when you walk into Ecobuild and are surrounded by so many potentially useful components. I have to confess that until this week, I was an Ecobuild virgin.   In the past Ecobuild came and went like the seasons and was luckily not something I had to do. The new eco-marketing industry is full of mountebanks which come in the form of awkwardly repackaged badly designed products. I have long been in Nick Grant’s eco-minimalist camp: if in doubt, leave it out. Not that we haven’t been on the rock face tunneling for routes to install MVHR clobber in both our new build housing and retrofit projects, but we generally find new products  through head down surfing rather than trade shows. BUT I am a convert! It is good to see real stuff…

Already on the train I fell into a deep timber conversation with Guntis Rubins of the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia who suggested that the innovative wood material DendroLight was a cool patented product –  a sandwich with a satisfying edge showing how half the wood is missing…like the old door blanks with the honeycomb cardboard, but much stronger. Apparently there is very little glue in it, but it is sandwiched between two layers of 4mm MDF.

Luckily upon arrival, I immediately ran into Irena Bauman who sent me off on the right track: timber and natural products. I found the Bluwood house and after a bit of bargaining got the stand for our 5-year-long pop-up market in a garden, the ‘new trading post in East London’  the Canning Town Caravanserai.  That alone was worth the trip. Bluwood is a coating that has come from Canada and is only blue so you know what has been coated to protect timber from the weather fire and termites. The sympathetic stand reminded me of Blue (Da Ba Dee) by Eiffel65, a shuffle song I love on my bike. They can do the same stuff using a different vegetable dye and you can also have it orange!

 Was nice to see Markus Becker next to a giant poster of our Adnams shop, great product if you want to avoid aluminium in large glass facades.

But the best of the bestest at Ecobuild was Ray Khan, commercial director of Humbleside Danelaw, bringing me a GRP roofing sample. Following some chats we’ve had over the last few months, he has managed to have  a beautiful textile set into a gel coat on his GRP roofing. We love him because he is the first and best sponsor so far on Canning Town Caravanserai and because he loves experimenting with his material. He’s got the thickness of resin down to make this tough material as light and smart and eco friendly as possible and keeps trying. We are going to build a palace of floating multicultural textiles with his continued support.

Ecobuild is not a bad place to confront what you do as an architect – I’ll be back.

Post By Cany Ash