I just started working on a side project that led me to a book about public housing in Singapore written in1975.  With more than 80% of Singaporeans living in public housing, or Housing Development Board (HDB) flats, these buildings have more than shaped the landscape of Singapore, they have also shaped many aspects of Singaporean’s lives, from shopping habits, to socialization patterns, to commuting patterns, even how children play.  I can’t wait to share more on this project in a few months, but for now I will just say it has facilitated many of interesting conversations about a topic I am very passionate about: housing.

Yesterday evening though I spent some time looking through this book with friends.  As they reminisced about growing up in similar flats,they reminded me that their is much more to Singapore’s housing story than simply improving the physical conditions of housing. Instead the story must be about those that were housed, about how they live and how their lives were changed by HDB flats. For now though enjoy these HDB photos circa 1975.

- Melissa

Queenstown Neighborhood VI,which has 4,500 units

Toa Payoh New Town

Queenstown Neighborhood IV with 5,000 housing units and light industry.

“Typical” living rooms in a three room (2 bedroom + living room) flat and a five room (4 bedrooms + living room) flat.

All images are from “Public Housing in Singapore a Multi-Displinary Study” Edited by Stephen H.K. Yeh, Published by Singapore University Press for the Housing and Development Board. 1975.

Unlike Amy’s running experiences in Dar es Salaam, I must admit that I am quite spoiled by Singapore’s extensively developed park system, complete with a Park Connector Network of running and biking trails.  The National Parks Board is even working towards completely connecting these trails so that one day I (in theory) will be able to run around the entire island. Even with all of this lovely infrastructure though I must admit I am slightly jealous of the ad hoc sites throughout Amy’s run on the Swahili coast.  My favorite run thus far is along the Ulu Pandan Canal because it passes through a variety of different Singaporean spaces, including the Clementi HDB Housing estate, landed houses, a set of community gardens, a few patches of Singapore that still feel “natural,” while also passing under MRT tracks, elevated highways, and an old Railway.  Even in this humidity, the shaded trail at sunset and this diversity of spaces make for a pleasant jog. Enjoy.

- Melissa

Ulu Pandan Canal

A glimpse of some community garden plots.

Someone fishing in the canal Sunday evening.

Part of the extensive drainage system that feeds into the canal.

Running under the old railway tracks.

The MRT tracks on the left and the highway on the right.

A giant Buddha in the background.

Sunset on Sunday.

All photos were taken by the author, some may have also appeared on instagram.

Ocean Road near my office in the city center is virtually undeveloped, and a precious open space that is lively and active as the sun sets – teenage guys play soccer, partners do calisthenics and running drills in the sand, loners shadow box, people sit on the eroding sea wall and watch the waves, ladies and gentlemen sell coconuts and ice cream. It’s not just the beautiful scenery that makes running less painful – it’s the people too. The coconut vendors cheer me on with chats of “Mazoezi, sista!” (“Exercise, sister!”), “Yes! Yes!”, and “Safi sana!” (“Very fresh!”). Passers-by also dole out big smiles and thumb’s ups that are just bursting with encouragement – perhaps these little gestures are meant to keep a little runner going who looks positively bedraggled, beet red and broken down. But in the moment I will allow myself to feel like one of those tall, lithe, cheetah-people that run marathons in like five minutes, as I plod along the beach basking in its lovely friendliness.

Below are a few scenes snapped while pretending to check my running time on my phone. It’s high tide and the sun was setting. Enjoy.

~Amy

Nightly football game:

Contemplation 1:

Kids playing in the waves and hamming it up:

Contemplation 2:

Tree, precariously close to eroding into the ocean but hanging in there:

All photos by author, and appear as they were taken. That is to say, un-Instagramed.

By: Ariana K MacPherson

**Cross-posted from the SDI blog**

Mumbai has a constant buzz. That is the best way to put it. The city is always moving, coming and going in all directions And full of light. I arrived in Mumbai three days ago, and immediately was taken aback by the vibrancy of it. Even as I made my way from the bustling airport at 1am to my hotel, taxi cabs lined the streets and pavement dwellers sit in front of their tin shacks, eating around fires.

I am here to visit the Indian SDI alliance, an impressive trio of organizations consisting of Mahila Milan (the women’s savings collectives, which are federated citywide as well as nationwide), the National Slum Dwellers Federation (a network of male-dominated slum dweller federations operating at the same scale as MM) and the support NGO, SPARC. I have heard tales of the dynamism, innovation and success of MM-SPARC-NSDF, but truly there is nothing like seeing it for yourself. The same goes for Mumbai, for Dharavi, for all of it: you can read all the books, see the movies, read the newspaper and taste the food abroad, but there is nothing like coming face-to-face with the life of the city, of the people, to make you really understand.

Yesterday was my first day in the field. Alongside a colleague from SPARC, I visited three of Alliance’s projects in Greater Mumbai. First we stopped at a housing project in Dharavi called Rajiv Indira, designed by the women of Mahila Milan. The building is light and airy, with children playing and riding small bicycles in the wide corridor. On the ground floor there is an open courtyard, where women congregate with their kids, chatting about the day. All but the top two floors of the building have been constructed with 14-foot ceilings so that families can build a mezzanine floor to maximize the 225 sq ft space.

The women make this happen through financing from various sources, but savings is a big part of it. Not only does money collected through daily savings go towards financing the actual housing projects, but it also serves as a means to organize, mobilize and unify the group around a common vision for the community. Even after moving into the building, the women continue to save in order to pay for maintenance and further improvements to their homes. It is not a project-based activity, but instead becomes the very core of their activities.

I have read so much about Dharavi. How residential and commercial uses co-exist. How many millions of dollars are generated there. How high the population density is. How poor some of the living conditions. How vibrant, and dynamic a place it is. But again, nothing compares to reality. It is not simply a slum – Dharavi is a town. The true essence of an informal city, existing right in the centre of the formal city, feeding into it minute to minute and day by day. We make our way to a community toilet project, turning off the main (4-lane) road and onto a crowded, winding side street. We pass a Hindu temple, painted bright with garlands and incense adorning the entrance, and are shaded by green canopies of tall, old trees. A white cow passes us on the right.

We arrive at the community toilet and it is bright, airy and clean. My colleague explains that it is used by 226 families (roughly 1,300 people), each of whom pays 20 rupees per month (about USD .40). Others pay 2 rupees per use. There is a caretaker who looks after the facility daily, closing it only from 1am – 5am. He has a room upstairs that he shares with his family, and there is a lovely roof terrace with a mosaic tiled floor that can be used by the 226 families for community events and meetings. There are basically two other options for toilets in Dharavi: 1) shit wherever you can find a hole, which often means holding it in until it is safe (especially for women), and of course causes numerous health risks; or 2) use one of the government-provided communal toilets, which tend not to be well looked after, and are often dark, smelly and unpleasant to use. By making this a community project, it has kept the toilet clean and pleasant to use. One of us even stopped to pay the 2 rupees to use it during our visit!

The last site we visit is a housing project called Milan Nagar, also designed by the women of Mahila Milan, located in Mankhurd settlement quite a ways from the centre of Mumbai. This group of women were pavement dwellers, perhaps Mumbai’s poorest population, and some of Mahila Milan’s oldest members. They lived in shacks along the sidewalks, crowding the streets near Bombay Central station. The women tell us that one of the biggest differences in their lives today is that they are no longer called “pavement dwellers” – that they are respected by others because they now live in formal housing. But pavement dwellers chose their spots on the streets to be close to economic activity, and the women say this is one of the challenges of their new home. It is further to go to work, and they cannot come home between jobs to spend time with their children. There are three different design options within the building, each one consisting of a mezzanine floor like the building in Dharavi. The homes are modest but beautifully maintained, with sparkling pots and pans and spotless floors. Children play in the hallways, and music pours down the stairwells as a family upstairs prepares for an upcoming wedding.

After spending the afternoon at the SPARC offices, housed in a beautiful old municipal building in South Bombay, another colleague whisks me off to a Mahila Milan function in honor of a Hindu holiday celebrating the beginning of spring. This is the real thing. There are hundreds of women, all dressed in colorful saris and their best gold jewelry. We are asked to come on stage, and are honored with flowers, and decorated with saffron and turmeric on our foreheads. We eat sesame sweets and listen to the women speak about their daily realities, from the importance of daily savings to their struggles with crime. Before the close of the evening, traditional music comes on and the women begin to dance. We are drawn into the crowd and a young women smiles and grabs my hand. We dance together, laughing and I doing my best to imitate her every move. It is infectious – the vibrant soul of this community. Empowered and real, dancing under the scaffolding of 900 new homes.

Therefore while my first CNY in Asia may have been mostly spent in private spaces instead of exploring how the city celebrates in public, the simple act of sharing a few meals with people allowed me to remember why I love living in cities. In the end it really is the people that draw us to cities.

- Melissa

Braised Duck at a Lunar New Year Lunch with an Indonesian Family

Yu sheng, meaning “prosperity toss,” a relatively new Singaporean CNY traditional dish which everyone tosses together before serving.

Spekkoek, a descendent Indonesian layered cake that a friend brought back from Jakarta.

An early CNY meal with National University of Singapore colleagues and researchers from Europe, Australia and Hong Kong after an international workshop.

Watching a lion dance at the Singapore Art Museum.

For photos of Singaporeans celebrating the Year of the Dragon outside of their homes, especially in Chinatown, CNNgo has a beautiful sideshow of the festivities.

All photos are by the author, the art work featured at the beginning is from the Singapore Art Museums Signature Arts Prize.

The air in Accra is humid and full of dust. After spending days inside heavily air-conditioned conference centers and nearby hotels, you start to forget the realities of city life.  Luckily, I got a reminder.

I spent my last day in Accra in the centrally located settlement of Old Fadama. Old Fadama is an informal settlement occupying 31.3 hectares of land along the Odaw River and Korle Lagoon in central Accra. Established in 1981, its population of roughly 80,000 inhabitants is made up of traders and migrants from across Ghana as well as other neighboring West African countries.

The community has resisted threats of eviction for nearly a decade through use of tools such as enumerations, mapping and lengthy negotiations with the Accra Municipal Authority (AMA).  Most recently, the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor (GAFUP) and the Old Fadama Development Association (OFADA) have been in negotiation with the AMA around the clearing of structures from land around the Korle Lagoon in preparation for a large-scale de-silting project, funded by the Netherlands Government. Korle Lagoon has experienced decades of pollution serving as the main runoff for the entire city of Accra and its shores as dumping ground for much the city’s solid waste.

Initially, the AMA requested that 100 feet of land be cleared to make way for the project. GAFUP and OFADA members estimated that clearance of 100 feet would mean demolition of nearly 3,000 structures and eviction for roughly 7,000 inhabitants. They quickly entered into negotiations, proposing that the amount of land be reduced to 50 feet. Immediately, the community went to work enumerating the 50-foot area. Reducing the amount of cleared land to 50 feet meant a reduction to 1,192 residential and commercial structures and 3,000 people. Still not ideal, but certainly a marked difference.

Armed with their enumeration data, GAFUP and OFADA met with city authorities at the AMA and succeded in negotiating for their proposed 50-foot area instead of original 100 feet, reducing the number of people affected significantly.

The next step was a community led demolition and realignment of structures on right of access identified and negotiated jointly between the residents and the City Authorities. Members of GAFUP and OFADA led this process, first meeting with community members to explain the demolition and relocation process.

Getting the wider community on board has been key to the success of the process. I spoke with a woman whose structure is waiting to be demolished. She has been a member of GAFUP since 2008. However, she says she doesn’t know where she will go when her structure is demolished – that she will simply have to find a piece of vacant land and erect her structure there. Sadly, this means she will likely have to live on the edges of Old Fadama, where the dirt paths are riddled with rubbish and the harmattan hits harder against the shack walls.

Despite these inevitable hardships characteristic of any relocation, resettlement of displaced peoples to other locations within Old Fadama is a success story in and of itself. Most tales of relocation involve displacement to many kilometers outside of the city, far from social ties, employment, and opportunity. Thanks to the successful negotiations of GAFUP, OFADA and People’s Dialogue Ghana, this is not the case in Old Fadama.

In our discussions with GAFUP and OFADA, it became clear that a waste management plan will be crucial to the success of the imminent de-silting project in order to prevent continued pollution of the lagoon. This is a key time for GAFUP, OFADA and People’s Dialogue to put their negotiation skills to use. Waste remains a major issue in greater Accra, and the creation of a community-led waste management program for Old Fadama could serve as a key tool for income generation, community upgrading and negotiation with local authorities around the community’s capacity to engage in the upgrading process.

Farouk Braimah, director of the Ghanaian support NGO People’s Dialogue, stresses, “This whole exercise promises huge benefits and leverages. We anticipate capitalizing on this exercise to strengthen our hitherto weak relationship with the city authorities of Accra and to feed into [other projects] in Accra and Ashaiman.”

Bearing witness to the reality and determination of this community, alongside some of its key leaders, was certainly an experience no conference could compete with.

- Ariana

For more photographs of Old Fadama, check out SDI’s albums on Flickr and Facebook. 

Follow SDI on Twitter @sdinet

It’s a beautiful Sunday in Dar es Salaam – join me on a bike ride meandering around Dar’s city center over on my cycling blog, Cyclopology.

~Amy

Map of Kiberia – Kiberia, an informal settlement of about 750,000 to 1 million people in Nairobi, Kenya, was the site of a large participatory mapping project. The Map pictured was created as part of a larger crowd sourcing community mapping project using volunteers and tools from OpenStreetMap, the GroundTruth Initiative and community organizations.  The final product is a digitized map called “Voice of Kibera” which allows residents to share community information via news, videos, and SMS messages, which are added to the map using the open source Ushahidi platform.

Incremental Housing in Iquique, Chile and Nuevo Leon, Mexico – The government of Chile hired the Architectural firm Elemental to design incremental housing, on land purchased through a government subsidy as a new form of “social housing.”  Instead of using the traditional “sit and services” approach to social housing, the architects here went beyond providing the basic foundation and infrastructure necessary for families to build their own homes.  Instead the firm designed the most expensive half of the house – the structure, bathroom, kitchen and roof. Then the family completed the remaining portions of their home. Through this unique approach a variety of houses emerged.

Grassroots Mapping - Lima, Peru.  According to the exhibit, “Grassroots Mapping is an open-source, participatory approach that enables communities to create their own maps using inexpensive equipment. Residents own the resulting images and maps, which they can use to support land-title claims or to aid in upgrading efforts.”  Having participated in a community mapping project in South Africa before I know that one of the most complex elements of such a project is getting reliable aerial images of these areas.  Therefore I found the simple approach used here quite exciting.  An MIT graduate student simply used digital camera with continuous mode shooting lofted by a kite, balloon, or inflated trash bag to snap aerial images.

Even though the exhibit has since closed information about all of the urban solutions can be found on the project’s website.

- Melissa

All images are linked to their original source or taken by the author at the exhibit.

10. Curitiba, Brazil: Model of Sustainability  “Curitiba won the Global Sustainable City Award 2010 and is hosting a few World Cup matches in 2014.  To prepare for this planners have realized that they need to improve the city’s infrastructure to handle the huge influx of football fans.  CNN also featured a story on Curitiba after it was awarded the Global Sustainable City Award in 2010.”

9. Visiting Navotas: The Slums of Manila  ”In the third and final article of his series on Manila, the capital mega-city region of the Philippines, Australian urban planner Marcus Tudehope ventures to  Navotas, one of the seventeen cities that make of the Metro Manila region.”

8. Film: Dharavi, Slum for Sale  ”A new documentary by Director Lutz Konermann portrays the story of the controversial redevelopment of Dharavi in Mumbai, India.  Dharavi, the largest slum in India and possibly the largest in the world, is home to over one million people and millions of dollars of industry. US trained developer Mukesh Mehta’s Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) seeks to demolition the slum and build high-rise buildings that will both rehouse the existing squatters and provide extra housing to be sold at market rates that will fund the rest of the project.”

7. Singapore: Efficient vs Resilient City  “As I wait for a shuttle bus this Sunday morning to take me across the island instead of the much faster, less crowded train I can’t help but be as upset as my fellow passengers at SMRT for using Sunday morning to finish their track inspection. As I wait on the bus though and read the many opinion pieces in the paper and blogs about this planned outage it suddenly occurred to me: I would never have left my Brooklyn apartment on the weekend without first checking the MTA’s website for disruptions in the F train service.”

6. China’s First Property Tax  ”While studying in Shanghai this summer I learned that many newly rich Chinese acquire property as an investment because there are very few other legal investment options that are as lucrative.   The absence of property tax also provides an incentive for hoarding property since there are no annual costs.  However this is about to change in Shanghai and Chongqing as the national government announced last week that it would allow cities for the first time to impose property taxes on homeowners in hopes of stopping speculation in the housing market and to shift a major source of government funding away from land auctions to property taxes.”

5. Comparing Urban Form  ”Have you ever wondered how New York City’s urban form compares to London?  Or the ancient streets of Rome?  This comparison from Bricoleurbanism compares eight famous cities’ urban form at the same scale to the city of Mississauga, ON, revealing ‘the inherent problems of scale in trying to evolve any suburban, auto-oriented area into a more pedestrian-oriented center.’”

4. Urban Form in Shanghai vs. New York City  “After walking the massive blocks of Pudong this summer I was not that surprised when I realize that one block in Pudong was the same size as about 6 blocks in Lower Manhattan.  What is surprising though is to consider what the size of these city blocks may mean about the density of these cities if future development mirrored these sections.”

3. Ranking the World’s Mass Transit Systems  ”Have you ever wondered what the best mass transit systems in the world are?  Most New Yorkers would agree that we do not have the cleanest system in the world, nor the most efficient system given recent MTA service cuts and constant construction.  However New York certainly does have the busiest and more efficient public transit system in the US…”

2. Rebuilding after Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami  ”As Japanese authorities are still trying to avoid nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture while also dealing with at least 350,000 homeless citizens, it is difficult to think about plans to rebuild Japan.  However groups like Architecture for Humanity already are thinking about rebuilding efforts….”

1. Dar es Salaam: Underwater and Underreported  “If you’re reading this from outside of Tanzania, chances are you haven’t heard that large swaths of the 3-million plus city of Dar es Salaam have been underwater for several days. It’s a situation of superlatives: flash floods due to several month’s worth of rain in 72 hours, including the highest rainfall ever recorded in a single day, have caused the worst flooding the city has seen in 57 years. Thousands are homeless, much of the city has been paralyzed with damaged roads and power outages….”

Happy New Year from the Encountering Urbanization Team!

For photo and graphic sources see original articles.

If you’re reading this from outside of Tanzania, chances are you haven’t heard that large swaths of the 3-million plus city of Dar es Salaam have been underwater for several days. It’s a situation of superlatives: flash floods due to several month’s worth of rain in 72 hours, including the highest rainfall ever recorded in a single day, have caused the worst flooding the city has seen in 57 years. Thousands are homeless, much of the city has been paralyzed with damaged roads and power outages. The BBC published one article, and AccuWeather posted a video, but aside from that the disaster hasn’t registered much of a peep yet outside of the country.

If the flow of information outside of Tanzania has been a mere trickle, communication within the country has its own major blockages that are already fodder for a nasty blame game.  The government blames residents that have been warned not to construct homes in low-lying areas and “lazy engineers” that have been told time and again to fix roads and bridges. Residents and researchers have warned the government about blocked drainage systems and allowing big new developments on wetlands that don’t pay attention to flood risks (see Twitter posts below, for example). The Tanzanian Meteorological Society apparently issued warnings of high rains that were ignored by everyone.

The immediate institutional response to the floods hasn’t received rave reviews either, though rescue crews have been hard at work. Here’s a stark example from a conversation between the federal disaster management authorities and a local paper yesterday:

“The director of disaster management in the Prime Minister’s Office, Mr Joseph Shiyo, said he was on leave and directed this paper to contact Ms Nyachenge Nanai, who declined to comment. ‘I’m sorry…I think the procedure is known. I cannot comment on the matter, sorry,’ she said before hanging up.“

Where information has been slow or lacking from the sources you’d most expect it from, Twitter seems to be filling a void – a search for #DarFloods yielded a community of people that are active with the latest relief effort (and also a lot of questions about what the heck is happening in the city). Here’s a sampling:

General Information (note the first tweet is from the President himself)
@jmkikwete: Share and raise awareness on the situation through #DarFloods and SMS. (+255 754 777 775)

@IamNchaKALIH: 23 DEAD, about 68 injured and 4000 dar residents displaced due to floods caused by heavy downpour, the heaviest since 1954 #darfloods

Relief effort
@GillsaInt: At Mchikichini relief centre. Lot of homeless people. At least they are having dinner n water #DarFloods

@Tanganyikan: Here @AmorMtage serving food to more than 600 victims #darfloods

The Blame Game
@AfricanGenesis: You cannot neglect backbone of eco development e.g. infrastructure and yet pursue huge goals! Look at our drainage today! #darfloods

@wilbrodslaa: #darfloods: Poor drainage system. While collecting billions in tax, the city is running on one of the oldest drainage systems in East Africa.

I’ll leave you with a few images pulled from Twitter,  blogs, and a bike ride I took this evening to get a sense of the damage. A lot of people have lost everything. Please think of them during the holiday season and after.

~Amy

Tanzanian forces in a rescue boat | Photo: President Kikwete's Twitter feed

Damage to the Selander Bridge and burst water pipe, near the city center | Photo: by author

Flooded homes in Dar | Photo: Zainul Mzinge

Land Rover in a very large hole | Photo: @No1YouthChannel on Twitter

Messy traffic and stranded passengers | Photo: Zainul Mzinge