musings on Design in Development MScBUDD 2011_2012

horizon of the possible

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 00:18:00 +0100

notes from Bangkok/what did I learn from the field trip:

1. We are in the ‘post-political’ times where coproduction really does seem like the only way to make significant change.

2. We, (people), in the end are so simple, we want security in the future. The question is how much you’re willing to risk the present to secure the future, and what your perception of that risk and the future is.

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I will mention it again because to me it’s critical. The dual structure of NULICO and CODI is an incredibly strong force for changing the conditions of so many peoples lives. The force is in that together they have changed both people’s perception of what’s possible as well as the conditions of possibility. By conditions of possibility it is both short and long term, practically speaking people now have access to loans at low interest, and access to secure land that wasn’t available to them before, while theoretically speaking there is an opportunity to see how people could produce their lives in a different way, or form the relations of production in a different way than the neo-liberal capitalist model we are so familiar with. But why? what’s the motivation? It’s about locating things that we can be passionate about, but to be passionate about something you have to have a vision about what that something is. And to me that’s a short coming of CODI’s longer term vision, there’s too much burdern somehow on the urban poor to vision another reality on their own. Yes they have the best solutions to their immediate problems, but how can one expect them to envision (let alone desire!!!) a radically different future, to think about an alternative future is a luxury in someway, and I think as academics from secure backgrounds we’re forgetting that a bit. We conducted a game called ‘The River of Life’ with various groups of people and communities, and the results confirm this reflection, (although I admit the instructions were possibly lost in translation) the task was to put symbols of boulders or flowers as obstacles or opportunities for the past, the present, and the future. Now I was anticipating detailed futures, such as becoming a hairdresser, and the opportunity being owning your own shop, or wanting to go to school but mom needing you to watch your sibling … but instead the result was ‘collective tenure forever’, and “happiness forever” The answers really made me step back, similarly with our mapping exercises the question of what was beyond the walls of the site was equally absent on majority of people’s radar. A role of a practitioner is to broaden the horizon of the possible at the site level, but what about the siteS level, the ‘city’ level, the national level? Some networks are proving the benefits of working at the different scales but most important is how the scales influence each other? And who? Baan Mankong reminded me of these critical questions when talking about scaling up movements.

...unveiling some of the assumptions in Pattaya, a fresh start!

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:57:00 +0100

I should have posted this entry weeks ago, while we were in Bangkok. I’m still coping with time management, endeavour that has been almost unachievable during the fieldtrip, and especially after it. This post pretends to reflect some of my thoughts after working for several days with the communities in Pattaya, the site I was assigned to. It was 5 days in total, working far away from our base camp, the JL Bangkok, but since the day we arrived, we were welcomed in such a warm and friendly way, we just didn’t’t want to go back to Bangkok! Everyone was open and trying to engage with us, understanding that our presence there might help with their project somehow - in other words, they were expecting also something from us. They made us feel like “home”. We had 5 days of hard work, very long hours, some sunburns, but also had wonderful company, exciting assignments, challenging demands from the communities, vibrant dynamics, generous hosts, delicious food and enthusiastic and wonderful people. This positive atmosphere made the working flow within the group easy and enriching. As to my opinion, the exchange and complementary roles worked out really well, since it was the first time we were working together with UDP students.

First of all, we have to understand the context of the. Pattaya is 170 km south from Bangkok, and is widely known as an international tourist destination with over 1 million visitors per year. The city obviously relies primarily on its tourist-oriented economy. The first thing that surprised me is the huge disparity between the registered population of 100.000 and the estimated hidden population which is five times more. A big percentage of this hidden population is informal dwellers and migrant workers attracted by the employment opportunities this sector provides. So Pattaya city, together with the challenges of seasonal earning variations, inflated land values and environmental degradation, also has to deal with the challenges of hosting informal dwellers and a huge hidden population due to the above mentioned. The interesting thing of this situation is how Baan Mankong emerged in the City as a side- effect of the Mayor’s vision to transforming the City into a Global Tourism Centre. In line with this discourse of cleaning and greening the city to improve the image of Pattaya as an international tourist pole, low-income housing became a priority for the administration in the form of policy 14.11 “Low-income housing: garbage free and healthy living”. This policy is a compromise from the authorities to supporting Baan Mankong Programme for 15 years, with infrastructure, drainage and garbage management. Baan Mankong started with the joint effort of municipal authorities and a researcher from Pattaya University. The key factor in triggering Baan Mankong, the political commitment and implication, is shown in the close relationship between communities and the City Department of Social Welfare. Besides having 2 monthly meetings in the City Hall, Kao Noi’s temporary Community Savings Office is currently located in the City Hall and the Mayor himself was present at the recent Holy Stone ceremony.

We worked with two communities that were both relocation projects and both found cheap land in the same peri-urban semi-consolidated area of the city. The first community we worked with was Baan Nern Rodfai, the second BM project in Pattaya comprising 63 households. They are still trying to get approval from CODI and meanwhile, they have a heart contract with the landowner of the relocation site for 1/5 of the average value of the area until November. The community has faced serious organizational difficulties and this is the 3rd attempt to start the program. Finding committed leaders and people with steady income has been the most arduous. The program is aimed to the more vulnerable members and it’s enlightening to discover that people also think beyond housing: they want to be trained by NULICO to produce bricks that they can sale in the new site and then scale up to other sites. Most of migrant workers don’t see the benefits of joining BM, but I think they signify a potential demand of rental space in the new site, and therefore represent a source of income that could be reinvested in the community. There’s also a potential for flexible site schemes and house design to adapt to the diversity of the members of the new site.

The second community we worked with is Kao Noi, the pilot Baan Mankong Project in Pattaya. It is a 304 household relocation project that started 2 years ago, bringing people together from 5 different communities. They got their land at 1/4 of the average value in Pattaya due to the generosity of the landowner. What we found really interesting is the fact that they have the support of powerful external actors who play a key role in the organisational structure of the project. They’ve also had the support of NULICO, CODI and have had many visits to many other projects, both successes and failures. One of the strong points of Kao Noi is how well organised they are, and how committed and accountable their strong leaders are. They also think beyond housing: the first thing they are building is the community centre and 14 subsidized welfare houses for the most vulnerable members of the community are going to be built. If I had to say a but in Kao Noi is that I coulnd’t see real participation in the design process and this resulted in a standardised design solution.

After working with the communities, some thoughts and conclusions were discussed between us. We believe there is an opportunity to capitalize the connections with the authorities, but also with external actors from the civil society who are engaged with program and play an essential role keeping the momentum. Pattaya showed us the potential role of external actors from civil society as a catalyst for the BM and keeping the momentum forward, bypassing the binomial state-people. Another key factor is the existence of a strong support network for skills training (organizational, finance, design) and a strong exchange network to learn from other experiences, to forge people to think beyond housing. We consider that one of the burdens of the BM in these communities is that, though flexible in some aspects, BM rigid in others such as rejecting rental schemes that would be more inclusive of transient population and at the same time could be a source of income for the communities. Also giving a fix amount of money per household for both land and housing diminishes the amount they have left to build their houses, as land value in Pattaya is quite high. This might force them to go to commercial banks for loans to complete them; with the entailed dangers these have for poor people. The lack of land regulation and public land leaves them with little room for manoeuvre for land acquisition in future upgrading, and will possibly result in a displacement of communities towards cheaper land areas in the city when this mysterious philanthropic landowners disappear. If the upgrading of the 33 communities of Pattaya is done comprehensively and in an integrated manner within wider planning, there is a possibility of scaling up the programme city wise. We see a very strong asset for the BM in Pattaya in the potential shift on the perception of the informal city by the society, not seen as separate from the formal city, but as a part of it, moving beyond the dichotomy formal/informal.

What is Bangkok? Bangkok is energy. Bangkok is infrastructure....

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:13:00 +0100

What is Bangkok?

Bangkok is energy. Bangkok is infrastructure. Bangkok is division. Bangkok is noise, lights and tourists. Bangkok is two cities. But above all, Bangkok is people.

And it was these people that we discovered were at the heart of the Baan Mankong programme.

So what is Baan Mangkong? In the immortal words of Somsook Boonyabancha, Baan Mankong ”is a project from the city, it’s far from perfect. It’s okay, it’s alright”

She is right, of course. We identified definite over-arching issues of accessibility, motivation and momentum during our time working with the communities. However, while these were the aspects we focused on in our subsequent presentations and reports, we all came away with a much wider vision of the impacts this programme has had that simply what could be improved.

For Baan Mankong is not just a programme for the people, but it is a programme by the people. And this, I found, made all the difference. This meant that the programme not only fostered the people’s ability to initiate change, but also their passion to do so. Most of the time, it tapped into and nurtured the passion that is already there. Yes, there were still issues of motivation to join the programme, of the short-sightedness, of the inability to see beyond the risks to the benefits without concrete and visible proof, but the passion and drive was most definitely and concretely there.

It comes down again to people. I know many will say that Baan Mankong goes way beyond people. It is financial mechanisms, it is politics, it is participatory design, it is negotiating power. Yes, Baan Mankong is all these things. But these things cannot occur without the involvement of people. As many mechanisms can be put in place as you want, but unless the passion of those they are meant to affect exists as well, nothing is going to happen. Conversely, if no platforms exist, but the people are motivated, they will usually find a way.

The brilliant thing about Baan Mankong is its ability to recognise the desire for change and transformation already existing on the ground, and through its emphasis on the collective, bring these desires into one large, powerful, energetic mass. The programme emphasises the role of the people as the creators, not receivers, of urban change and transformation.

And the ball is already rolling, and rolling quickly. As an example, in the district I had the pleasure to work in, Chatuchak, had quite a few communities that were working on their own initiatives and plans. And while they were aware of each other’s movements (a few communities were hoping to use a completed Phase One in Lang Witthayalaikru Chankaseam to help their own initiatives move forward), I do not think they were aware of the sheer numbers in the district that were pushing for this change until our presentations at CODI. We asked all the representatives from Chatuchak to stand up, and then they were able to see just how many people were there. People who were already involved and who were moving towards the same transformation they were. And at this particular meeting, it went even further. With absolutely no prompting from CODI, a contact list was being passed around all community members in attendance, no matter which part of the city (or great Bangkok area, in terms of Pattaya) they were from. This collective force of change, the people, is amassing.

Baan Mankong still has some issues with accessibility to the programme. And motivation to join the programme is still missing within some members of the population. But Bann Mankong is allowing the people of the city to become their own force to shape and change their futures and surroundings. And it is doing this by providing support for the strength and capacities that already exist with the urban poor.

Baan Mankong is a programme that helps enable the people to create a space for themselves to have a say in “What is Bangkok?”

Scaling down versus Scaling up

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 21:57:29 +0100

The fieldtrip experience allowed us to interact with and see up close a possible scenarios for the cities of the third millennium. During the year in the academic sphere, critical analysis often brought moments of discouragement and pessimism seeing the incapacity of spatial design solutions to deal with issues such as poverty and informality in an effective way. The work of CODI and the Baan Mankong program has been teaching us a possible way to imagine our cities differently. This new imagination is driven by peoples demand and ability to transform, enhancing their ability to decide for their future, change it, and to be active citizens.

It is an example of how a special program in a national department can have the potential to change the condition of the urban poor, without being interrupted by unnecessary bureaucratic and political mechanisms brought from national and international agencies. In this way there is little space for us, as international practitioners , to be part of this change since we come from a specific context and culture. We had the opportunity of being part of this mechanism as a student who have been asked to study the CODI’s work, analyze and reflect on it, and perhaps providing a moment of reflection for the organization by bringing different stakeholders together. Our presence created an occasion to keep high the interest and generate discussion on alternatives.

Since we went back to London several reflections raised in my mind. Mainly, after being a part of the field trip experience and after interacting with people on the ground, I do not think that the BMK program is reimagining a new city on a wider scale. While there is definitely a potential for changing spatial production in the city – in terms of house design, neighborhood upgrading – the change in institution and policy is not happening via this program. I would argue that perhaps it is not in the will neither of the community nor of the program. The scaling up of the program is an issue that should be complemented also to its opposite risk of scaling-down or in a better word “collapsing”. What it might be important is not only looking on how expand it, but also how it will sustain itself in a long term, financially and locally.

Reality within the BMK

During the field we had a default tendency to look on how the program can reach a wider scale, influence the policy around the city and its decision making process; changing the status quo and the top down approach and looking for ways to achieve a structural transformation. The question is if the communities’ capacity and will follow this research direction, and if there is too much expectation, especially in the academic environment, for their actions, going beyond their needs and their understanding. Hence, if the program is based on their will, there is in the root a difficulty to open wider discussion.
Furthermore Bangkok for me had several stratifications, both physical and social, with historical and cultural origin, combined with the global flows of capital that fragment the city in big scale. These stratifications and fragmentation are difficult to contest. Within this fragmentation, especially spatially, peoples design demand is bringing a “cleanification” or “purification” of informal areas, following a homogenizing aesthetic system. There is not space for contestation but space for improvement, starting from a political program where the community play their role based on their will, interest and consensus to the program and their leaders. However, the Baan Mankong program, even in a different level, is showing a different way of producing space, which instead of contesting the “traditional” one it is adjusting to the existing space. This is especially the case where land is owned by public entities such as the Crown Property Bureau.

Visiting the sites showed us that many people had joined the program with the specific goal of physical upgrading, specially related to housing and infrastructure improvement. This keeps the people together around a tangible and common interest. The spatial dimension becomes in this way an end, a final product that in some occasion reflected a mere replication of the same typologies. Despite this tangible improvement in the people life, the specific and too narrow down focus on the house dimension have some implications, losing the relation with the urban context, within communities and their surroundings. Furthermore it became a mathematical proportion, in some case the re-blocking schemes have been lead by an equal subdivision of the land in plots according to the number of the households allocated in same hose typology.

After the community upgrading, people start to see the needs for common spaces, social amenities, welfare, education, training and income generation. Communities start to have an active role in the society seeing that a change can be in their hands. But where is the limit of this improvements? Where the communities and people can arrive to reach this issues that goes beyond the specificity of the case?

A horizontal scaling up through a stronger network among communities and the involvement of external actors is the line that has to be followed, perhaps using the existing CDF’s and the CODI network. Moreover, the BMK should be a starting point, enabling the communities to solve their issues by themselves, expanding their influence, creating their own saving bank, and being mobilized. However, in some communities the network is not so effective as it should be, the communities, particularly their leaders, are focus in their specific issues related to a specific stage of the program, looking in short term solutions, not having time and the will to share knowledge, problems and opportunities.

Looking to the future

The burden that the communities have to deal with can become too heavy, in particular when the individuality start to emerge both in the short and long term. In the first one the individual needs and aspirations sometimes contrast with the community goals. In addition, the common idea of equal subdivision or the necessity to readjust to a smaller land parcel for a benefit to the common (example in the re-blocking schemes, families that has big houses or plot or rental earnings) can threaten the success of the program and bring skepticism as well as hesitancy to join. However, when there is a common aspiration the program is almost endemic and necessary that someone has to reach a compromise and deal with some disadvantage.

It might be more problematic the emerging issue of individuality in a long term, in particular when the loan will be paid and families and cooperatives will become owners. in some cases, in particular in public land, the best agreement usually is 30 years lease for the land and single ownership for the houses usually after a 15 years repayment. In this cases the is the risk that people interest become individual, losing the collective action that remain a formal cooperative is renting or owning a piece. What happen to the single ownership if the collective lease is not renew after 30 years? How can a cooperative stay cohesive and steady in a such long term, avoiding contrast among its owners and members that can also change and move or sell their house, avoiding the risk of dissolution? What it will happen in 30/40 years to a cooperative, born sometimes quickly to deal with bureaucratic purposes, that will own a land in the middle of Bangok? Might happen rather than a scale-up a collapse of the system?

Looking Back and Thinking Ahead: a post-Bangkok reflection

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 20:48:03 +0100

“Have landed safely in Bangkok.
Smells and looks like Karachi.
Love, Sarah”

This was the text message I sent my parents upon arriving in Bangkok on 27^th April, 2012. The message marked the first of many assumptions I made about the city over the next few weeks.

In an involuntary attempt to adjust and orient to my new surroundings, my mind kept making parallels to places in my memory. My initial observations of Bangkok – the balmy breeze, the sound and chaos of traffic jams, the highway and road networks, the splintered economic development – reminded me of Karachi. Of course, in a few days I started discovering the city more closely; I started talking to its citizens, started understanding its currency, tasting its food, and noticing its varied urban charm. Yes, in many ways – characteristic of Asian cities – Bangkok was like Karachi, but not quite. It managed to set itself apart and soon I began interacting with a city like none other I have visited before.

Riding the canal taxi boats, the Sky Train, the Subway, the tuk-tuk’s, and walking down the serpentine alleys of Bangkok’s inner markets, I discovered a city bustling with something to offer for everyone. It had an old world oriental charm contrasted against a modern, glamorous, and sometimes decadent mix of entertainment. And yet, behind this world-class cosmopolitan semblance, lay also a city struggling with the inequitable consequences of urbanization. Informal settlements stuck out like cavities in an urban landscape fast succumbing to market pressures of speculative land and real estate development. The urban poor could be seen striving to make ends meet while the demand for housing and healthy living environments increased all around us.
Studying this demand and Bangkok’s ability to address it was our main task as student practitioners in the field.

We had our assumptions – conscious or unconscious- from the start: about social transformation, effective development, our ability to create change, and the purpose of the field trip.

As we began visiting the various informal neighborhoods and started talking to community leaders from the Baan Mankong program, it became apparent to me that my time in Bangkok was going to change my perspective on how I read and understood a city. A city is more than its sights and smells, a city is made of its people and our trip to Bangkok under the auspices of CODI showed us just how important collaborative people centered processes are for a city.
By the fourth day in Bangkok, I realized that I had been given a unique opportunity to witness and experience a dynamic social process that consisted of innovative urban triumphs and inspirational personal journeys. The staff at CODI, ACHR, the Thai students, and the residents of the member communities all started forming a bigger picture for me. And yes, this picture was definitely not like Karachi anymore.

The people of Bangkok that hosted us represented the city’s resilience against the tyranny of capitalist urbanism – these individuals and their collective efforts symbolized, for me, an important quality within Bangkok. Personally, this quality was the peoples openness to new forms of knowledge and the willingness to share. They recognized that a change is needed to address the income and quality of life inequalities that are present in a city like Bangkok, moreover the urban poor and the organizations engaging with them were beginning to address critical issues of dysfunction occurring in rapidly urbanizing cities. The more I interacted with members of the Baan Mankong, I realized that they were citizens that were embracing an opportunity for empowerment. However, there is a big picture and there is a small picture —- wherever I looked in Bangkok there are lessons to be learnt. This willingness to share, this embracing of social and political empowerment was definitely happening, but I began to question how widely effective it was. I was aware of the numbers – that the program had worked with 1,010 communities in 226 towns and cities, in 69 out of 76 provinces, involving 54,000 households. But in a city rapidly growing, in a country consistently developing, how significant were these numbers? The program markets itself as a revolutionary transformation that is spreading rapidly across Thailand, but there remain many people who are either incapable or unwilling to be part of Baan Mankong.
The Baan Mankong Program is “far from perfect, it’s okay” —said Somsook Boonyabancha offering a very poignant clarification for policy makers and planners who are often tuned towards making ‘perfect’ solutions that work well across institutional scales. This, in practice, cannot always be the case. The on ground realities are different, people’s needs change, and life cannot be standardized according to the delivery requirements of a social welfare scheme by the government.

This emerging question of scale has been one of my main reflections following our return from Baan Mankong. After learning about the successes and challenges that the communities need to work on, after unpacking the potential of the program according to our lenses, an important and pertinent question remains:

How do we scale up a collaborative, multi-stakeholder, negotiation based housing delivery program?

After writing a 186 page report on our experience and lessons from the field with 9 other colleagues from BUDD, I still cannot answer this question, but I am glad that Bangkok helped me ask the question in the first place.

This is how Bangkok is different from Karachi. It may smell similar and echo some of the regional aesthetic, but it is a city that is beginning to ask important questions. Karachi was asking some of these questions during the 1970’s, but not on a unified platform such as CODI. The strength of the Baan Mankong and CODI lies not only in their unique approach to collaboration and empowering of people, but also in the ability to foster and host different forms of knowledge exchange. Cities all over the world often face similar problems, because as humans we create similar issues where ever we are, but the way in which we address them and battle the odds is what sets us apart. This is what gives people in cities their own voice – the people of Bangkok are beginning to find their voice through Baan Mankong and CODI. This voice may not be loud right now, but perhaps one day it will be loud, effective, and exemplary for people facing similar issues across the global south.

Some additional thoughts:

In my personal opinion, land ownership, real estate development, and speculative urban planning remain the issues that policy makers need to critically analyze when catering to the rising demand of urban poverty. Flexibility on land development plans, re-adjusting national and municipal approaches towards capital generation, and focusing on user based spatial reconfiguration in cities can be the beginnings of large scale reform. A serious and coordinated symposium on the future vision of a city is needed so that programs such as Baan Mankong can negotiate their position and role in urban development. The bridging of communication gaps – whether they be socio-economic and/or institutional – needs to be facilitated either by agencies such as CODI and the NHA. I would like to argue that a crucial room for policy maneuver can emerge in the gaps revealed by such a multi-stakeholder dialogue.

Community Architects as part of reflection on Baan Mankong

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 19:16:00 +0100

Turning our minds back to our thoughts of Bangkok and the Baan Mankong programme before we left on the fieldtrip makes it so tempting to compare, to compare everything. Pre and post fieldtrip. A vs Z.

It’s this hindsight-mania that makes it a mistake to see this stage of our understanding as the clearest viewpoint from which to look down and see that experience laid beneath us, to see the path we took and mistakes we made; the glaringly obvious - now obvious, the questions never asked or answered…we can only make making visible that which we felt we saw, or didnt.

Before departing for Bangkok, I think we all found aspects of the CODI programme a bit of a mystery with regard to the literature we could get our hands on; trying to find out more about private investment in housing or the state sector, or the (to me anyway!) backseat drivers of the Community Architects.

Okay, we knew they were there somewhere, they had a website. A pivotal part of the CODI run programme to make “People (as)the subject of development” (CAN Community Handbook II, ACHR 2011) but their exact role, and even their number, was a bit unclear. This changed as soon as we entered the context of CODI and the Baan Mankong (BMK); within a day we had been introduced to members of our site groups that formed part of a movement of community architects in South East Asia (from Nepal, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam as well as Thailand), something that was detailed further through a seminar on our second day at CODI. I was really impressed by the parallel integration of their work to that of CODI, and realised they, the Community Architects Network (CAN, with support from ACHR) was something much bigger.

The breadth of the vision of programmes involving community architects such as BMK is astonishing; it doesnt focus on how you build your house, but how the local branches out to connect with the regional and so on, to create a new quality of life. Moving away from the needs of the individual to the possibilities of the multiple - its something that got me thinking, and of course…comparing.

This ‘active role in creating places for living’ is really brought to life in the CAN Community Handbook publication (Volume II, 2011; part of a series of ACHR handbooks for Housing by People); a great accumulation of the work of the CAN coalition full of examples, activities, tools and workshop techniques used for mapping and planning spaces and futures. From looking at this work, the ‘Tips’ section seemed the most representative of their approach and that of the Baan Mankong, “Even if some persons may not feel like participating..”:

Make it easy and fun by letting people be the subject in the working process.

Work in small groups so that people can easily discuss and share ideas.

To dream, draw and discuss.

Find collective ideas and consensus from the ideas of the small sub group.

Make it visible and tangible.

A natural leader always emerges through the working process, just wait, listen and observe.

Practical information and solutions are always with the people.

Trust building is the key of forming small groups.

No need for one hero, one leader.

Let people be active by identifying and distributing the right tasks to the right persons.

For any decision making, the criteria for the decision must come from the collective ideas of people.

All the above taken from the CAN Community Handbook (Version II; 2011. ACHR)

Looking at the strengths of Baan Mankong and community architects: Creating netwroks, building understanding and collaboration; it could be said that there were parts of the process that both could help improve, especially the post-construction phases of the programme. Its touched upon briefly by CAN, but something that could be helped by the continuation of strengthening realtionshops already in existence so that communities can go further, by themselves - as it was evident in some of the areas visited in Bangkok that a ‘post-construction drift’ was at play once individuals houses etc were completed - all contributing to a terrible loss of cohesion in what up until then had been a totally collaborative process.

Minor faults in what at first glance seemed a singular scheme, but with reflection becomes clearer that there are as many branches of this tree as there are roots.

With many thanks to all the community architects I met involved in the programme, but especially Sok Le and Danak from Cambodia.

I’d advise anyone interested in the work of community architects to look up the CAN facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/CommunityArchitectsNetwork/info

or ACCA/ACHR related articles such as this:

http://web.me.com/mauriceleonhardt/ACHR_2/Blog/Entries/2011/11/15_CAN_-_Community_Architects_Network_-_Update.html

murmur and our very long version acknowlegement

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 17:37:00 +0100

Ever since come back from Bangkok we had been fully occupied with the presentation and report until finally handed in the work last Friday. For me, now it is time to rethink what I have learnt and done in this field trip.

First of course it is the experience gained in the field, both working with ‘real people’ but to observing as well as getting information using my own senses. To be frank, even now, when I recall the memory of Bangkok, I could still feel the pressure brought by the flood of information that easily make me drown. Of course time is needed to digest everything.

The other memory that I would treasure owing to the field trip is the experience to work with so many people at one time. Though depressed sometimes as working in this huge group, we could not reach consensus easily, I could always feel the passion brought by every one in the group about contributing to the work and see the sparks brought by the interactions of different ideas. It is very interesting to share opinions with people grown up in different countries as our value and education are diverse. The curiosity of knowing what other people would react to the same topic and my ideas always hold the torch for me while I was stuck in the exhausted group work. But as we know each other better, I feel the group work was getting better and better with the time passed by. I would like to thank everyone that I work with. Thank you Group E!

Finally, I have some words for the next year students. There is no need to be nervous to work with the community as they are really nice and warm. But the time would fly away faster in the field, so while you could prepare yourself with a comfortable mood, objectives and materials that you need to use should be ready before you departure.

Owing to the word limitation in the report, the acknowledgment I wrote was totally transformed into a very brief one. But still, I would like to present here to thank every one that help us with sincerity and memorize this fantastic experience as well.

Acknowledgement (long version)

We would not be able to have this fantastic experience without the help of:

All the kind support from CODI, the staffs are very friendly and the food is amazing.

Thank you Pi Jin, your warm welcome help us to settle down in the unfamiliar country.

Thank you Somsook Boonyabancha, though we do not have enough time to hear more from your condensed wisdom, we really appreciate your sapiential speech and the kindness you show to our wild thoughts and ideas.

Thank you Supitcha Nong, for hosting and translating the meeting and making sure that we could move on smoothly.

Thank you Nattawut Usavagovitwong and Wijitbusaba Ann Marome, your presentations set the scene for us.

Thank you Kitti Patpongpiboon, your amazing speech extend our knowledge to the unfamiliar

We would also give our thanks to all the community architects and Thai students that help us in the field, without their help, the communication would not be possible.

There is a special thank you we need to give to all the people from communities, no matter what different roles they are playing, community leaders, representatives from NULICO, or normal members of a community, we do think that their hospitality and kindness to share all the information as well as knowledge with us are the most precious memory in this field trip.

We need to give a sincere thank you to all the DPU staffs and alumni that guide us in the field; their experience and knowledge help us in arming ourselves to face the problems and difficulties.

Thank you Anna Schulenburg, it is your considerate care that makes our trip much easier.

Thank you Barbara Lipietz, your comment opens another door for our BUDD horizons.

Thank you Benjamin Leclair, from you we see one of the successful model of the future development of our BUDD students.

Thank you Camillo Boano, your insightful critique always drives us back to the right road.

Thank you Cassidy Johnson, your focus in disaster prevention always reminds us to think about the sustainability of any current decision-making.

Thank you Ruth Mcleod, thanks to you that people like us from architecture and urban planning background start to realize the importance of relating the technique to the real world by having an eye on the financial solutions.

We would also give our thanks to the other DPU staff, though they did not accompany us, what we got from them guide us all the way along this journey.

Thank you Jorge Fiori, your idea about scaling up always lights the candle in our mind.

Thank you Alex Apsan Frediani, the participatory action plan was mentioned again and again in the discussion and gave us lots of ideas about the participatory workshop.

Thank you William Hunter, your patient tutorial was always missed by us in the field.

And there are lot people that we would not be able to thank one by one here, but it is the effort of every one of them that leads to the realization of this field trip and this report that now presents to you.

At last, we would like to thank all the BUDD and UDP students, it is with you that this trip is so memoriable.

After the field trip to Bangkok, and after many discussions, in...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 23:54:13 +0100

After the field trip to Bangkok, and after many discussions, in the group we decided to base our analysis and strategies around the concept of ‘boundaries’. We recognised the physical and social transformation that the program – Baan Mankong – has triggered in many parts of the city, and concluded that the program had very good conditions in place to keep supporting the development and upgrading of low income communities in Thailand. Nevertheless, we recognised there were several boundaries that were preventing some initiatives to get the attention needed to improve the quality of the upgrading processes, or to expand the spectrum of social transformation in the city.

Some of the boundaries – the physical ones – were easy to recognise, and many others have noticed and studied them. One of the reports from BUDD last year was built around the concept of “depocketisation”. It explores among other issues, ways to integrate a city that has grown around pockets of development sharing only roads or canals that connect them to each other. From visiting Bangkok we also identified an obvious division line present in many parts of the city; the elevated infrastructure. Apart from creating barriers between neighbours in the city, it also marks a vertical division between the rich and the poor in Bangkok. Using this infrastructure, to move faster in the city, has a cost that many cannot afford. Both the sky train and the express ways are not designed for the majority of the population, the low income citizens. Thinking about this socio economic disconnection, in a city with a strong culture of tolerance and solidarity, inspired us to propose strategies to restore the communication and create interest on working with each other in pro of a more inclusive city. Having said this, it is important to mention that it was hard to come up with ideas that could be brave, creative, going towards our definition of transformation, and at the same time grounded on reality; on the reality we managed to be part of for at least two weeks. We concluded that our strategies could be bold and realistic only if the interest of the different parts was included forming alliances - just like the way CODI currently works. We felt it was important to create opportunities where the low income communities could show to the city their potential as actors in the transformation of the city. I believe with our strategies we are not asking too much to the people from those communities. We know it may not be of their main interests to be heard at the city level and make an impact on the planning of it. However, we know from the experience in the field that the good relation with landlords and the district is happening at different extents and can be explored and strengthened around the benefits of a common project; the shared space.

From my view, there are two strategies in particular that address the reconfiguration of partnerships. One is “Building the common” and the specific actions related to common spaces outside the community, and the second one is “Reconfiguring relationships around land”. In the first one, the objective is for the communities to think outside their physical boundaries and recognise the surroundings and the district as something they could also influence. At the same time, the objective is for shift the perception from the city towards the urban poor; from communities in need to participants of the development in the city. Through a competition and grants, communities are asked to propose a project, an activity or an intervention that could improve the life of many in their district or surrounding area, not only from the people in their communities. It should be something to be built outside the community or at least clearly open to the city. The ideas could go from pedestrian bridges up to community centres or parks, depending on what the community consider as priority. Ideally this should not interfere negatively with the upgrading programs inside the community. Perhaps, it is managed through a different type of loans, or grants that otherwise were not designated to housing.

In the second one “Reconfiguring relationships around land”, we saw the opportunity to understand the value of land in a different way. The issue of land was not easy to analyse because the situation in the sites we visited was not as conflictive as we had imagined; either you have land or not, and in that case someone – CODI or even the District – will help you negotiate to get some land somewhere. However, there is a question in the back of my mind since Colin Marx’s lecture about land; ‘how is it possible to value land in a different way?’ And in the case of many places in Bangkok, what is the value of land for someone who owns a house/flat but will never own the land where the building is? How to build a stronger link to the site that can prevent the possibility of eviction? Perhaps land itself can be the basis to build a stronger relationship between the landlord and the community. We proposed a new way of land sharing where the cooperative and the landlord form a partnership to build and manage a project, which can generate profit but at the same time support social services needed in the community. This idea could be attractive for public landowners who currently run some welfare programs in their sites. Having the cooperative as a ‘partner in business’ can shift the dynamics in the relations, bringing more confidence to the people and sharing responsibilities between the parts. Also, for the community it could be a way to secure their stay in the land for longer, since they are sharing with the owner more than land, they are now sharing a project – in some cases a building. A physical outcome of this partnership could be a mid-rise building with 60% of commercial units to rent (housing, offices and shops) and 40% of social uses such as affordable renting units, community centre, nursery, market, among others. Through the creation of these alliances, we are not solving the problem of ownership of land – because we felt that was not a problem for many people renting land. However, for those living there, gaining a new partner for the development of their site is a fact that can influence the way people value the land.

The experience of the trip and the exercise has been a unique opportunity to critically understand some of the complexities of collective upgrading initiatives for the urban poor. The context was sometimes surprising, sometimes shocking but incredible interesting and rich in content. Although I cannot imagine when and where, I am convinced I will be recalling this experience and comparing it with others in different contexts. I imagine myself trying to find somewhere else the potential for collective people-centred alliances that CODI, Bangkok and its people showed to us.

Scaling : Waves Working In Phase After four months of...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 15:25:00 +0100

Scaling : Waves Working In Phase

After four months of intensive group work, to learn from the Baan Mankong programme in Bangkok and seven months of total work in groups for the BUDD masters course, the practical nature of collaborative working and the often extraordinary capacity of the ‘collective’ has been demonstrated to us first hand by this intensive experience, in a way that could never be done with just theory alone.

I expect that we have all experienced the almost subconscious experimentation with our team role, our behaviour, instinctively trying to gauge how to make the best of the opportunities as you are able to understand them from your perspective and with your unique combination of personality, skills and knowledge, strengths and weaknesses. By trying to find ways or ‘strategies’ to make the best of others, each member no longer becomes a ‘set fraction’ of a total group contribution, they become part of something different and more dynamic, where ideas and processes are able to change, challenge, adapt and grow.

Our group observed that the process of social transformation in Bangkok was not a two dimensional phenomena, but a complex, diverse, misshapen, unique and beautiful interconnected patchwork of flux and change.

How does one attempt to ‘scale up’ social transformation? And what is the meaning of scaling up in this context? To make sense of this, our group, sought to bridge the gaps, or ‘fill in’ processes of social transformation via strategies to build strategic alliances, networking actors with shared interests in order to create opportunities for synergy, particularly at an intermediate scale.

In an earlier blog, I referred to the notion of ripples or vibrations mentioned by Somsook Boonyabancha as a metaphor for the spread, transfer and translation of knowledge and structural change “vibrations affect everybody” she explained. Upon completion of the group’s final Bangkok report, it occurred to me that a parallel metaphor could be applied to our conclusions…

In physics, ripples or vibrations are conceptualised as waves. If three waves for example, that are in synergy with each other (known as ‘in phase’) converge, they produce a single wave of three times the magnitude, where as when equal waves that are slightly ‘out of phase’ interact, the result is a single wave without this intensity. If the waves are exactly out of phase, then the energy of the wave cancels out and the water surface remains still.

Similarly, here I conceive of Bangkok as a vast lake with hundreds of waves or processes of different size, frequency, magnitude and duration, continually being made and their impacts spreading across the water. By aiming to encourage these existing processes to work ‘in phase’, (using time, scale and typology of the processes strategically) then the magnitude of their energy will join for maximum effect, creating something all together different and more transformative than the sum of their parts. In this way, by working with existing forces, perhaps the impact and transformative nature of existing processes can travel further and deepen across the realm of space, culture, economics, and politics and across sectors, scale and time. Perhaps, fundamentally, the first role of the practitioner is simply to ‘dive in’ and start from reality, finding ways for processes to work in synergy for mutual gain to make the best of what is already happening.

Paper versus reality

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 21:08:14 +0100

During the preparations for this fieldtrip I walked around for a long time with the question of what our work would entail and how it would benefit CODI’s way of working as most of the impressions I had were of an organisation that had a clear idea of what their goals are and how to (successfully) implement their strategies on the ground.

In the field we finally got the opportunity to witness the work of CODI and if the BM program really is what it claims to be: demand driven and community centred.

In all honesty I have to say that the program largely impressed me, but small cracks within the BM started to show during the work and conversations in the field. A range of power and social dynamics within the communities became clear, especially in Pattaya where communities seemed to show several exceptions to the general working methods of the BM program: several communities came together on one relocation site, community leaders came from outside the community, business people and local authorities were the main triggers in the process of joining the BM program, … making me question how demand driven the process is in reality or if what we witnessed in Pattaya was just a unique case as the program was still very new in this part of Thailand.

But re-joining our report group soon made clear that there was no one standard approach of Baan Mangkong. As several people pointed out after the fieldwork: there are as many BMs as there are projects. This flexibility has made it possible for BM to reach out to a large number of communities, although in some cases it does seem to overlook some groups, or faces some challenges in communication and organisation among and between communities.

I would say the words of Somsook Boonyabancha capture what we saw in the field: ‘It is not perfect, but it’s ok’. And in this world, is that not what we should try to work with? Nothing will ever be perfect, will ever have the capability to answer to everyone’s needs and desires, but an ‘ok’ program seems to be an amazing step forward from which many organisations could learn. But saying that, I do have to return to the question I asked myself before: how can a program so community based be implemented in other context which are so focused on individual needs.

Some thoughts on scaling up Finally, we experienced Baan...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:46:00 +0100

Some thoughts on scaling up

Finally, we experienced Baan Mankong on the field, speaking with the people who make it on the ground. Actually what we witnessed was a huge transformation process going on beyond Baan Mankong: before, after and in parallel with it. We saw communities that rebuilt their neighbourhoods without even asking for a loan from CODI, and others that used their savings to create community enterprises and funds covering health, death, education; we met an architect that did beautiful and successful interventions in Bangkok slums, and had never heard of Baan Mankong before; we talked to people that realized their dream of owning a house thanks to the NHA-supplied flats; we knew communities actively pushing against upgrading, and State authorities promoting it… and so on. It soon became clear that Baan Mankong was our entry point to Bangkok, but not necessarily the only or main focus of our attention.

The transformation I observed in Bangkok was a big mess of a process, going on at various scales, led by so many people, not always towards the same direction and often out of synch. So, when we started our discussion about scaling up, I was not sure that was exactly the point. Why think about amplifying the process, when the key could just lie in a deeper synergy among its parts? This sinergy, we thought, might project transformation much further. With my group, we started our discussion on scaling up starting from this consideration. We further refined our thought, and tried to schematize it as follows.

A process of transformation increases its impact following three main axes, that we defined as size, time, and magnitude. Size includes the number of people involved and the geographical area touched by the process. Bringing in more and more people and expanding the territorial action range is what is conceived as scaling up in its most common (and reductive) meaning. However, long-term transformation won’t be achieved if the process doesn’t produce a change capable to evolve and reproduce itself; in other words, it has to sustain itself over time. For what concerns magnitude, things are a bit more complicated - we weren’t even so sure about this word. It refers to the extent to which a transformative process impacts the lives of people, or, to be more schematic, to which dimensions of transformation it covers. We defined four dimensions: cultural, economic, spatial, and political. If transformation occurs only in some of these dimensions, it will be only partial.

Clearly these axes are interrelated and the advancement on each one of them influences the others. For instance, a programme that is implemented steadily for ten years is more likely to influence more people and more dimensions of transformation than one with a duration of just one year; a programme that involves millions of people will probably produce a more durable social change than one focused on a few individuals; and a shift in cultural, economic and political relations will plausibly shape the spatiality of the city and affect a huge number of people. However, none of them is sufficient in itself to achieve transformation.

At this point, our focus shifted on these interrelations. We kind of agreed that, in order to achieve transformation, a process has to advance comprehensively on all three axes, and each advancement drags forward the others. The basis of our strategies we devised, then, has been to address this question.

“If people aren’t changing, things aren’t changing. So things...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:25:08 +0100

“If people aren’t changing, things aren’t changing. So things change when people change. Upgrading, the way we see it, is a process in which a group of people are changing because they begin to believe in their own power and see that they are not different than all the other citizens in the city. […] If a whole group of people starts believing in their own power, energy and ability –this is upgrading” (Boonyabancha, 2005).

While the winter in London started to decline and the spring loomed for a few days, we started studying the Baan Mankong (BM) programme. It was almost four months ago. Now, the rainy days indicate that the winter is still over UK, and the spring days have been shorter and faker than we thought. These four months have had different phases. From a theoretical approach defining concepts, to a fieldtrip in communities on the heart of Bangkok; from presentations about first appreciations based on readings, to the production of a report that aims to be coherent and portraits both the analytical approach and the lived experience.

In this context, it is not easy to summarize an overview of the process and learning. On the contrary, it is so easy to get lost in the specificity of an interesting programme, in the details of the places visited, in the amazing people that we met, in the particularities of Thailand. During the last two weeks, our efforts were focused precisely on that: to deconstruct and describe the main learning of the fieldtrip, in order to extract the knowledge that can scale outof Bangkok to our practice and reflection beyond the course. Curiously, the main learning that I can extract is precisely about scale: as in my own process of learning, there is knowledge that can scale from the Baan Mankong programme to wider processes of transformation. I would like to share the summary of our reflection about scaling-up, as stated by my group in our report:

We understand the scaling up of a transformative process as advancement along three axes.

Axis one refers to size: in order to scale up, the process needs to involve a wider number of people and actors and to cover larger portions of territory. This coincides with a more conventional understanding of scaling up.

The second axis represents time: it refers to the process’ capacity to reproduce, evolve and sustain itself over time. We will refer to this as scaling on.

The third axis is about the magnitude of the process: namely, to which extent it covers the four dimensions of transformation (political, economic, spatial, and cultural) impacting the lives of people in a more fundamental way beyond upgrading. We will refer to this as scaling across.

Clearly, the axes are deeply interrelated, and advancement on one of them influences the others.

However, radical social transformation can’t be achieved without a comprehensive advancement along these three axes. As previously explained, we believe this can only be achieved within a space of collaboration between “bottom-up” mobilization and “top-down” reforms. We will refer to this collaborative process as scaling out and scaling in.

This is my main learning. Ok, maybe at first sight it doesn’t look very concrete, but studying the BM programme it appeared so clearly. Scaling processes of transformation implies drawing strategies that: involve more people and institutions (scaling up); sustain on the time (scaling on); impact the cultural, political, economic and spatial dimensions (scaling across); and occur within a process of collaboration of different sectors (scaling out and scaling in). Simple. Great.

I think that the main challenges are in the capacity to reflect such processes of transformation into the space. The gap between the cultural, economic and political transformation, and the space produced, represents a main fissure. In the course of scaling across described above, the dimension of space is probably the more problematic. This challenges our capacity to build strategies able to imprint the socio-economic transformations into space. Even in an amazing program as BM, this gap persists. In any attempt to replicate transformations as presented for Boonyabancha, along with the “people’s change”, it is necessary to design systems able to engage space production with socio-economic transformation. The space, as one dimension of this rubric, will inform the development of socio-economic alliances, in a reciprocal relation that can be overlooked.

Back to London, what is next?

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 11:16:00 +0100

Coming back to London, we had so many things to do, a lot of group works, presentation and the final report! There are too many things in our mind. How can Bangkok increase the involvement of poorer citizens, especially those who living in informal conditions? How to break the boundaries in term to bridge the gaps? What are the boundaries to address that possible to scale up Baan Mankong?

We consider the boundaries; the ideas of the boundaries are based on our experiences of urban poor in Bangkok, especially in the observation of spatial disengagement, during the field trip. We see the boundaries significantly restrict the program from successful operating of upgrading program, which is Baan Mankong. However, the boundaries that we see are not just physical, but also socio-economical in the way of achieving restructuring of the political and socio- economic status quo, which is currently consists of certain exclusion and non communication. Moreover, the situations in Bangkok are very dynamic, which should not be reduced by only one single action and solution. Instead, it needs evaluations and adaptability to each context and event in order to achieve sufficient upgrading in all sites and forward the momentum.

Those observations lead us to the strategies as an umbrella to break the major boundaries (social, spatial and organizational) and to integrate a comprehensive form of active citizenship. Our debate and discussion brought us to the four main strategies: building the common, urban triggers, reconfiguring relationships around land and adjustable program requirement. These positions itself are build upon the opportunities that we see in the field currently and we believe could be used and strengthened the existing socio-political platform for maximum benefit.

ACT 2: VALUES & VISIONS Culture at play Thai society is...

Wed, 30 May 2012 00:40:00 +0100

ACT 2: VALUES & VISIONS

Culture at play

Thai society is shifting from traditional agri-culture to modern industrial society, but still there are structural characteristics of Thai culture that make it very different from westernised ones, and in the particular case of the urban poor’s fight for the right to live and work in the city, make the definitive difference between having access or being pushed away from the very contested city centre.

In the field, while studying CODI and the Baan Mankong Program (BMK) we realized the role that Thai culture plays in the whole process, and how these values are permeable to all society.

Thailand is a Buddhist religious country and Buddhist belief puts forth the concept of moderation and non-confrontational action in life, and also that improvement of society in general will bring benefit to all in the long run.

We saw that BMK, being a program that address the most dispossessed residents of the city and their need for proper housing in a safe environment, is playing an important social role that brings Thai society to recognize its benefits. We saw that the existing Thai ‘culture of solidarity’ is favorable to the BMK program and overall, among different social and economic stratus, there is the facilitation of process.

Visions of the city

Fast growing economy cities are the ground where many competing forces are at play over the opportunities that such a thriving urban context offers. Bangkok is no different. There we acknowledged the role of centralized structures of decision in the greater processes that are constantly shaping the city - On one hand having to cope with solicitations for housing from those living in informality, and on the other hand with the private sector pressures to access available land for investment and development. And transversal to both were land accessibility questions tied to land owners that have a saying over most of the available land in Bangkok.

These different actors share the ‘need’ for the city but have different understandings of what the city means and of what it should provide - There are different visions of the city being devised simultaneously in continuous mode. For some it is the ground for capital accumulation via speculative action. For others it is the opportunity to access housing and a sustainable livelihoods inside the city.

On top of this, there is a big disconnect between conceptions of the city by those who have the task to imagine it, and perceptions of the city by those who actually live and use it in an everyday basis - Misconceptions over the city ‘of the others’ are frequent and counterproductive when addressing the complexity of poverty in the urban context.

In economies driven by liberalization of capital, where images of ‘world class cities’ stubbornly prevail as single dry solution of development, social demands are usually overcast by speculative forces working on the level of decision, and these are usually out of reach for those most dispossessed.

The case of the BMK program in the city of Bangkok is particular, exactly because it puts forth an alternative way to access those levels of power decision that dictate the outcome of the city to be, through collective organization of the urban poor, while these fight for their right to live and work in the city. We can say that BMK openly deals with pressures from speculative action, promoting collective civic action to confront it.

BUDD FIELDTRIP TO BANGKOK IN 3 ACTS So finally a post. I did...

Tue, 22 May 2012 23:00:35 +0100

BUDD FIELDTRIP TO BANGKOK IN 3 ACTS

So finally a post. I did have something written in my log book… a pre-field trip entry that somehow never managed to free itself from cellulose. These demanding processes for multi-tasking performances where never my strongest…

ACT ONE - Individuals of a collective (20 May 2012)

In my pre-fieldtrip thoughts, just before our field trip, after having been submerged in the ‘collectiveness’ of the Ban Mankong (BMK) program for such a great while, I found myself mostly curious about how the individual perspectives and performances of those participating in the BMK project, both of those benefiting residents and of those managing and facilitating the whole process, would be revealed to us in the field, its dimensions and how it influenced the program.

We had studied most of the complex socio-economic reality of the program and the key question of land and conditions of access to it by the most dispossessed. Looked in deep at the actors involved and researched the issues/problems that could be drawn from our investigations. Throughout our work and in our consecutive presentations we played, reshuffled and played the cards again, continuously dissecting the knowledge that was accessible to us, and then again feeding from our feedbacks.

But this wasn’t enough… I kept on feeling something was missing.

We had become knowledgeable of the BMK program it is true… but I felt our knowledge of the subject was still of a ‘dry kind’ - As if there was another dimension that was still missing, dimension I had only glimpse ‘fishing’ from loose articles and news online… not enough to fully grasp - The individual perspective. The subject’s words.

It’s not hard to understand why I felt this component missing - I already carry around something as fifteen years of professional practice, and during those I became very accustomed to working with people. Either in commercial practice or in development, I firstly worked directly with the subject of my work and secondly researched around the same subject. But in the case of the academic work/research in BUDD it has worked the opposite way around - Your first contact is with the ‘books’ and the experts… and only after will you meet the subjects.

By then we had been always accessing the perspective of those either, studying the program, or managing/working with it - Only in Bangkok would we access the very personal and individual perspectives of those involved with it, in the field, in a daily basis. And In the end I found this to be the ‘glue’ that had been missing. The matter that gave cohesiveness to all the academic knowledge we had been exposed to.

I realized I simply had been having a difficult time conceiving a program like BMK, completely dependent on collective action and organization, without understanding the individual wants and needs that create the basis for all of it to grow on… those that are actually the tiny individual dynamos that all together, building collective synergies, make the BMK program possible.

As Soomsok herself says, “Ban Mankong is not a program about housing. It’s a program about people”.

People, collective are strong, isolated are weak, inexpressive. The best chance of gaining a voice, many times political, is through collective organization in order to be able to fight for what we believe in, and this usually happens around collective interests and objectives.

In the case of people who don’t have many financial resources their dispossession is even greater - For the residents of Bangkok that live in informal settlements and aspire to see their houses ‘formalized’ and integrated in the city, collective action is the most efficient way to fight for the right to live and work in the city, and the right to be recognized a full citizenship status.

People being central to the BMK program, makes them one of its major challenge, but also where its greatest opportunities will inevitably lie.

I saw the individual motivation of people as key to the functioning of the whole program, either as a initial catalyst or to keep the ‘momentum’ during the program.

Important here is not to confuse ‘individual’ with kinds of egocentric motivations, but to understand it inside the dimension of the individual motivation - a relational complex where come to play family ties, close social relations, support and dependences, livelihoods opportunities and access to a safe and secure environment in which to live in.

Across the sites we visited, I found the lack of motivation to be a recurrent obstacle to the development of the ‘formalization’ process of the city put forth by the BMK program, hindering the process for up-scaling - may it be scaling up by mere replication, strengthening processes or reaching the transformative level of institutional influence and change.

So here I question - How to keep the motivation of those who only engage in collective action to achieve their personal objectives, and after lose interest in the collective dynamics? Without keeping that momentum the collective action slowly fades and residents simply go on with their ‘individual’ lives… and there is the lost of community sense.

Maybe in these peoples perspective, the program served its end when providing them access to proper housing and relative secure tenure… and that’s it. - They will most certainly keep on thinking like this if the greater possibilities of collective organization are not made evident to them.

We saw that in some of the cases where there is a ‘healthy’ savings group in place, and collective dynamics is finding useful ways to keep answering the individual needs and wants in innovative and useful manners, we encounter ‘healthy’ communities, with positive future perspectives and built on dynamic network relations. And these would frequently have gone beyond the initial ‘strategies for housing financing’, and diversified their funding alternatives for areas as Livelihood insurance, Health and Education and even community welfare schemes to care for the eldest and disabled.

In my opinion there are lessons to be learned from what is happening in the ground, and opportunities for the program to exercise the ability to innovate and adapt to different subjects and circumstances. Adaptability and flexibility are key.

To keep individual motivation going, BMK has to start accommodating both diversity and individual initiative, and cater for the sense of belonging of residents, much needed to ensure long term sustainable solutions.

So in the end, this may mean that the program may need to be prepared to go from ‘acupuncture’ interventions… to several degrees of strategic transformation.

(Act 2 to follow…)

A diary from Bangkok…City of Life How difficult was it to create...

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:39:00 +0100

A diary from Bangkok…City of Life

How difficult was it to create time to blog from Bangkok? Very difficult! The intense schedule and regular group meetings left me personally with little time and even less mental capacity to engage in comprehensive individual reflection on my fast-paced Bangkok experience. However, I was keeping a personal logbook in which I noted random thoughts and observations. I’ve extracted some of those along with key photos to share the experience of two remarkable weeks contesting with questions of transformative urban development in the city of life…

Day 1 – 27 April | A Golden Welcome

We arrived at Suvarnabhumi International Airport late in the evening, and received a hot and humid yet golden welcome to the city of Bangkok. There’s nothing better than arriving into a city around sunset, to witness the dynamics of its shift from day to night. The first impressions are of a complex and multi-layered city, where massive billboards, buddhas, fast food chains, street markets, electric lines and extensive infrastructure seem to somehow smoothly intersect with people and define place. JL Bangkok seems like it will make a lovely home for the next two weeks…

Day 2 – 28 April | A Multimodal Tour

Following an early morning excursion up and down Ramkhamhaeng Road, in the afternoon we all joined a group tour of Bangkok. We began our journey with a very interesting, stench-smelling klong/canal boat ride that emphasized and brought out the pocketised reality of urban development in the city. Our destination was Asoke Pier to take the metro to the vibrant and bustling Chatuchak weekend market. With its concoction of smells, sounds and sights, to me the market was an emblem of how overlooked informality offers a much-needed source of livelihood to many on which the urban economy clearly thrives. Following a bout of touristic shopping, to leave we struggled through the crowds and traffic and ascended to take the sky train to Siam Station, then descended again to jump into tuk-tuks in groups of three to take death rides into the Old City, also known as Rattanakosin Island. Hot and exhilarated, there was no better way to end the day than with a delicious Thai dinner at the Navy Club, in a beautiful outdoor area overlooking the Chaophraya River, offering picturesque views towards Wat Rakang and Wat Arun on the other bank. As we took the taxi back to the hotel, I couldn’t help but reflect on the multi-modal transit systems the city offers, and how each offers a unique way of interacting with and experiencing the city…

Day 3 – 29 April | Deconstructing our assumptions about Baan Mankong…

Visit to Nanglerng Community was the highlight of this day – My eyes could not help but go into tears at the nostalgic nature of being under that tree with the community…

Today we manned the 40 degrees centigrade hot and humid weather, and followed our charismatic tour guide Pittim (meaning old sister) through 4 different communities across Bangkok, at different stages of the Baan Mankong program. Following a drive through Rattanakosin Island and a quick tour through some of its key landmarks, we began our journey at the 100-year-old Nanglerng community, hidden behind the old city’s street edges and pompous facades. Here we were warmly greeted and exposed to how this community tactically uses art and culture as a tool for community mobilization and development. In collaboration with Japanese artists, active members in the community organize cultural events and activities focused on children, with the intent of raising awareness amongst younger generations around poverty. Such engagement is consciously political in nature, which sees creativity “as a tool to brighten a dark soul”, and which aims to use the community’s history and tradition of art and dance to mobilise for rights. Watching the dance performances as well sat under the tree reminded me of a similar yet starkly different gathering in rural Sudan 5 years ago, and the political symbolism inherent in such collectivity under the shade.

The second community we visited was Chalernchai, located next to the abandoned expressway. This community is one of the Baan Mankong pilot projects that underwent reblocking and upgrading, and is a striking example of sustained activism 10 years after the initiation of the program. After enduring massive struggles to achieve their current gains, and approaching 100% loan repayment, they are facing along with several neighboring communities the threat of renewed evictions by the government to make way for the new expressway. To me the story of this community represents what might be the never-ending battle between squatter communities and speculative urban development. Prior to coming, we questioned what happens to communities after loan repayment is complete, but perhaps Chalernchai alludes to the discounted reality of the ongoing battle between communities and speculative urban development? And perhaps it’s the need to remain mobilized that is still holding the community together?

We then visited Pha Gluay community, which is a Baan Mankong relocation project. The community had a clearly strong leadership and was well networked with other communities in the area through learning and knowledge sharing exchange visits. Given that it’s a relocation project, all homes were designed by a CODI community architect, and while the community leader acknowledged the presence of conflict in many other BM projects, discounted their prevalence within her community, and spoke positively of the gains achieved by her community and the positive impacts achieved through relocation for all households involved.

The last community we visited was Bang Bua, an exemplary pilot community which through clear strong leadership was capable of setting up the first Community Development Fund and secure funding beyond that available through CODI, available to meet the needs of multiple communities. The marked contrast across the two banks of the klong highlight the capacity inherent in well-organised community collectives and the empancipatory nature of community development funds.

The intense exposure to all communities today, to their culture, hospitality and unique stories, enabled us to deconstruct some of the stereotypes around the roles of community leaders, as well as some of our extreme conceptions of power relations amongst the communities. We were clearly dealing with empowered community members who had the capacity to strategically present their achievements and challenges, and provide conscious systematic responses to our critical questions. The concept of organized communities wasn’t a myth afterall, and the image of the over-empowering and monopolizing community leader was clearly an exaggerated one, at least in my view…

Day 4 – 30 April | “Good Luck to your country”…

Following a tour of the CODI ‘headquarters’, then a general overview of Urban Development in Thailand offered through presentations by Dr. Nattawut (Mark) and Wijitbusaba (Ann), we received our first dose of inspirational Somsook Boonyabancha talk. The visit to the 4 communities the day before helped grant a lot of grounding to what she had to share about people/demand-driven, city-wide slum upgrading in Thailand. It was interesting to experience first-hand the glitch in her use of the term ‘upgrading’, and the way she elaborated on the politics of people upgrading and empowerment through capacity-building, innovative finance mechanisms, community-led surveys, strategic partnerships and constant scaling-up to achieve critical mass. Endless pages of readings on the Baan Mankong program got smoothly moulded into Somsook’s discourse on the bottom-up transformation of the culture of urban governance. Political mobilization was clearly implicit in way Somsook spoke of the BM program. Indeed, when referring to the importance of tactically seeking state support and funding for pro-poor projects and policies, Somsook highlighted the importance of superseding mere lobbying to “let them dance to our song…[and] open the space for people to influence politics”. What I saw as central to her talk was the emphasis on the importance of organizational flexibility and the need for constant conflict management within CODI, as a body that sits between the government and the people.

Yet Mr. Kitti Patpongpiboon’s subsequent talk was to me the icing on the cake. He shared with us “the cold truth about finance”, and provided an interesting and detailed account of the development of housing finance in Thailand. Mr. Kitti elucidated his own insights and contributions to the sector, and shared his views on the direct impact of global politics on local housing markets and finance. His core hypothesis is that CODI’s success lies in the fact that it was initiated by finance professionals, and in its focus on pushing communities to save and conduct financial management; a crucial backbone to enabling them to access loans for upgrading. Mr. Kitti also highlighted the importance of understanding local politics and economics when looking at housing and finance, offering as examples how politicians prefer to fund rural land as opposed to housing in return for more substantial votes, and how microfinance can never work in Thailand. To me, his talk emphasized the uniqueness of the Thai context (historically, politically, and culturally speaking) and the CODI model, as well as its extremely conditional replication in other parts of the global South. Indeed, in a one-to-one conversation he referred to it as pure luck, and acknowledged my newly developing stern view on the murky truths about the development industry and its strongly intertwined nature with structures, as well as the non-replicable nature of the CODI model, ending it by saying “good luck to your country”! Good luck indeed….

Quote of the Day: “Community networks function like social media does for middle and upper classes, linking horizontally and building multiple overlapping platforms for interaction and learning” - Somsook Boonyabancha

Day 5 – 1 May | All about ‘community’ politics, design & building…

At CODI - more heat, humidity, good food, knowledge exchange and another inspirational talk delivered by Somsook Boonyabancha. Today she shared what she believes to be the 6 main points of what she calls the politics of change, and what I saw as the principles of transformation as seen within the BM program. Those, as I gathered, were as follows:

Savings groups
Information (community-led surveying, mapping and enumeration)
Organization
Momentum
Negotiation
& Regularity (in all the above)

It was good to hear Somsook elaborate on the above points alongside references to creativity, then straight after attend the very intriguing discussion panel that brought together NULICO, CODI, district council and community representatives in equal conversation in front of a large audience of development practitioners, discussing the achievements and latent challenges of the Baan Mankong program.

The second panel discussion was no less interesting, and it was great to finally meet with some of the key players on the ground when it comes to community architecture in South East Asia, and gain better understanding of how they began, how they are networked and some logistical details about the manner in which they operate, and how they envision scaling up. The unique setup of the Community Architects Network (CAN) stems from its ability to tap into support mechanisms from higher education institutions and organizations such as CODI and ACHR. Given my skepticism about the challenges that CAN needs to maneuver around, it was inspirational to hear the story of community architecture in contexts such as politically unstable Myanmar, and poverty-ridden and flood-threatened Bangladesh. And to see a woman and man from the Community Builders network sitting next to the community architects and sharing their expertise and knowledge and answering our questions made me think – it really is happening and does work!

Prior to arriving in Bangkok, it was easy to make assumptions about the approach of the community architects to working with communities, but it became clearly evident throughout the Q&A session that they embraced a great degree of sensitivity and rigor in their approach. Even if they lacked all the right answers, they were well aware of all the challenging questions. Some of my friends from Northern contexts might question the implications of such approach to the discipline of architecture and the role of expert knowledge. However, having experienced the gulf of isolation between what architects can offer and what the urban poor need, and having grappled with the question of the role of the architect for over 10 years, all I can think, at least for tonight, is hats off to CAN and the Community Builders Network!!

Day 6 – 2 May | The NHA & LPN

A very hot day spent on foot out and about exploring National Housing Authority (NHA) programs and projects, and private real estate developments…

Although the majority of my colleagues were being, in my opinion, overly critical of the NHA and what it does, to the extent that our tutors had to remind them of the importance of not seeing them as the ‘bad guys’, I was observing with completely different eyes. To walk into an almost 40 year old housing authority that has been active on the ground extending housing to citizens, inspite of resource and market constraints, was refreshing to see. More striking to me was witnessing the fact that the authority was led and managed by charismatic, highly qualified and insightful people who could elaborate on the challenges they face just as well as they could speak of their achievements. While I should remind myself to avoid making comparisons between Thailand and Sudan, or Africa in general, it must be said that following this day’s visits I am only more convinced about the need to differentiate between ‘developing countries in development theories, approaches and discourse.

We were taken through the differences between the Baan Eua Arthorn (BEA) program (which literally means ‘we care for you’!) and the Baan Mankong program, and reminded that both were conceived of by the same individuals. While some might only see the fact that the BEA program only addresses upper low-income, and upper middle-income households, to me they were both contributing to addressing the same challenge of land and housing provision. Indeed, I see the BEA and BM programs as two sides of the same coin that supplement each other. If we are to look beyond challenging structures to working within them, then it is important to build flexible institutions that meet the varying needs of the urban poor through different mechanisms and partnerships and under different conditions…

Quote of the Day: “The housing market is very competitive…CODI works with visible poverty, but we address invisible low-income households who are not necessarily part of slums. CODI addresses the people who want to live together forever, but people who buy with us can in the future move forward. We do different work…” Chamnian Duryapraneet, Deputy Governor, NHA

As for the private developments, to visit those felt like visiting a gated, Italian-themed real estate development in Dubai or anywhere else in the world, where easily accessible land at the periphery of urban areas is expropriated or given informal permit to be used for residential uses beyond its original allocation. Four types of standardized designs with Italian names, constructed of pre-cast concrete panels manufactured in one of the largest south-east Asian factories, also unsurprisingly owned by the developer. Just another manifestation of the globalization of consumerist dreams, trends and desires…

Day 7 to 12 – 3 to 8 May | Journeying through Wangthonglang…

Following our pre-site work sessions at CODI, we were to start working in our individual communities for the next 4 days. This began with an introduction to the sites by community leaders, all gathered to present to us the stories of their respective communities, and the achievements, problems and challenges they face around implementing the Baan Mangkong program. It was interesting to note the difference degrees of charisma and presentation skills characterizing the community leaders, and the different ways in which the audience received them.

The community leader we later got to know as the cool and charismatic Nomklao community icon, contributed to introducing us to our sites in Wangthonglang district. The 7 communities we got assigned to work with are all living on land owned by the Crown Property Bureau (CPB), located at the heart of the city, just across the klong from our hotel. While the district used to be located at the periphery of the city, it got engulfed by urban sprawl and continues to be used by the CPB to relocate communities located in more central plots. We were taken through detailed technical information about the sites and shown a few diagrams, all still leaving much to be questioned and researched over the 4 days on site.

We hit the ground without expectations, and with a seemingly restrictive schedule that would allow very little focused time in just one community to enable us to produce substantial outcomes. Journeying round in our vans between the 7 communities proved extremely eye-opening, as all of them were very unique and were at very different stages of the Baan Mankong program. It became evident from the first meeting that the community had high expectations from us, but due to the fact that we had little knowledge of the sites, we couldn’t assess the feasibility and viability of those expectations. As we were gradually exposed to the contentious politics on the ground, there was a constant pressing need to be more proactive as a team and review and refine our strategies of action on the ground to be able to use our time on site more tactically.

Every single meeting with our communities was professionally staged and celebrated, with microphones, music, tropical fruits, a gathering of community leaders and committee members, icy bottled water and last but not least, staff from the CPB. Throughout our 4 days on site with the communities, CPB staff would show up and exhibit strong presence, and have a major role to play in the nature of interactions taking place on site between our group and the communities. Indeed, the CPB, while presenting itself as a very progressive and philanthropist landowner seeking to improve the living conditions of the urban poor squatting on its land, can also be seen as having coopted the discourse of bottom up development, and is using it to clean up its land and raise its value while gaining profit.

It was interesting to note how the 2 Baan Mankong pilot communities in Ruamsamakee and Kao Pattana were at a stage where their community groups were disintegrating, and where some of the home-owners we spoke to were struggling with loan repayment. New squatters had arrived, who were either trespassing illegally, or family members whom the original households wished to integrate into their communities. A second group of communities were in the middle of the process – Rungmanee Pattana and Nomklao, while others such as Sapsin Kao and Thepleela were in a conflictual introductory stages to the whole process.

The initiation we received to the BM program through readings in London then through he preparatory sessions at CODI, all seemed to paint a picture that did not reflect the conditions that we observed at Wangthonglang. Indeed, the CPB was playing an instrumental role in the process, there was no presence of NULICO or CODI members on the ground, and BM projects were proceeding only as a result of a memorandum of understanding between CODI and the CPB. The CPB was responsible for deciding what changes could take place, and their inclusion of communities in development was mainly consultation-based. They dictated the housing designs for communities to choose from, and the houses they were designing cost more than those that were offered through direct collaboration with CODI.

While working with the communities, we were asked by the CPB, upon enquiring if the community had a specific brief for us, to conduct a re-blocking exercise for Thepleela community. However, our field enquiries and conversations with residents from the community revealed no interest in upgrading, and a divergent preference for just upgrading instead. We were able to extract these findings about Thepleela (and about other communities as well) through a variety of mapping tools and techniques such as site reconnaissance, interviews and the river of life. Inspite of our attempts to try and use our time and those findings strategically, and give something back to the community, we found ourselves in conflict between the interests of a philanthropist landowner, and a historical, under-developed community without access to basic services, and a complex demography and conflicting household interests.

I personally do not see the CPB as the ‘bad guy’, and I believe it represents the exemplary landowner that can seldom be found anywhere in the developing world. Nevertheless, our deliberations and observations throughout our time with the communities made us realize the challenges to participatory development, and how as practitioners we can get easily coopted by powerful actors on the ground. We also experienced first-hand the complications involved in getting 100s of people to agree on a shared future vision that they can collectively help to shape.

All in all, my experience over the 4 days working with our hospitable communities in Wangthonglang made me realize that even in a context as unique as Thailand, we will seldom have time, resources and support to comprehensively address challenges and manage conflict. The best we can do as practitioners is exercise to a consciousness of the challenging questions, as we rush to create much-needed change on the ground.

It was a blessing to be exposed to what it can be like working with organized communities. They overwhelmed us with their hospitality, warmth, transparency and willingness to share ideas, and take us into their homes and hearts. And, given that endless long meetings and challenging group dynamics can easily drain ones energies, it was refreshing to work with people like Oby and Sokly, who were both instrumental at animating the occasional stress moments by reminding us to smile and repeating “don’t worry!”. Hmmm…thinking of it again, I think the best lesson we all learnt in Bangkok was that transformation could only begin with a smile!

On relocation Seven out of eight among the sites I and my group...

Sun, 20 May 2012 14:02:00 +0100

On relocation

Seven out of eight among the sites I and my group visited were relocations: it means that people have been resettled to a location other than were they used to live. Relocation was depicted in the literature as the last ditch, something to turn to only if there are no other chances. Interestingly, most of the people we met were not living together before the relocation: they were living scattered along the canal, or in different neighbourhoods, and they often got to know each other because of the Local Authority surveys about households in need or at risk of flooding. Thus the relocation also marked the birth of the community. These people came together for, and are bound by the common objective of securing land and getting a house. Therefore, usually the new communities ‘work’, and are effective in using the Baan Mankong programme, which is founded on people organized in communities.

In the only case of on-site upgrading that we saw, the 60-year old community of Rattanatibet 14, things weren’t going so smoothly. Yet that was the kind of ‘community’ we imagined reading our pre-departure essays: people living together since one or two generations, located in a consolidated urban tissue, who mobilize through Baan Mankong to achieve their common goal after a triggering event – in this case, a fire. Instead, in Rattanatibet 14 the Baan Mankong programme caused a fracture among people between those who joined and those who didn’t. The community leader – actually, leader of half community – showed us the map of their proposed upgrading, with some streets drawn in dotted lines cutting through existing buildings. “The owner of these houses,” he explained, “don’t want to move out. They don’t agree. So we can’t carry on the project.” And why don’t they join the Baan Mankong? “They’re not sure the project will work. It doesn’t seem reliable to them. And some of them run activities that people here don’t like. There are some rules in the communities and they don’t want to follow them. One has a snooker house and we don’t like it, one runs a hotel, and we don’t want strangers here, you know.” The Baan Mankong part of the community pushed the Buddhist temple that owns the land not to renew the contract to the non-BM dwellers, and initially the temple acted so: “They wanted us to be united as a community, so they didn’t renew the contract to individuals. The others have to join Baan Mankong, if they want to hold a regular contract.” Then the non-BM part of the community organized a protest at the Committee for Religious Affairs and got its 3-years contract back. But recently the Committee has changed its members, and now that the revision of the contract is near, they might review the agreement again. In brief, instead of fostering a community, in Rattanatibet 14 the Baan Mankong increased frictions among people.

As a tool, Baan Mankong can be used for many different aims and produce different outcomes. In this case it seemed that a part of the community employed it to impose a certain vision of ‘community’ on the others - with whom we couldn’t speak. After this example, I started looking in another way at the previous seven communities we visited, result of a relocation. People who trusted the programme and chose to join, to get the land, to get a house, were there as a ‘community’. The others, those who didn’t join – because of an array of motivations that we couldn’t really explore since we had no contact with them – were left behind. This contradiction wasn’t clear in the relocated communities, but it stood out in Rattanatibet 14 where the two parts couldn’t be separated physically and were living together, intermingled and in tension.

Again in London, after a memorable experience...

Thu, 17 May 2012 20:10:00 +0100

There were so many experiences, thoughts and discussions shared, every night before going to sleep, in a bus journey or in the hotel´s entrance with a beer on hand. I really enjoyed the long, detailed chats with Paola, with my 3 Colombian friends and with Buddor and Silvia in the bus. It was amazing to see how each person perceives their own country, and how opinions differ from one person to another. At some point Caro (the other Colombian girl) and me couldn´t stop talking. We were discussing if a similar program could succeed in our country, but due to the complex and conflictive situation, the conversation was redirected to other issues, such as “Public Transport” (inspired by the multiples flyovers and planning structure of Bangkok), “Politics”, “Buddhism and the Culture of Consensus”, “Colonization and its implications”, “Global forces that affect our country”, etc… we went to the edges. In Camilo´s words: “ehhh Colombianas, you talk too much”.

On the other hand, these 18 days on ground helped me to test all the previous information acquired and the strategies developed for the report. Finally, I got a sense of the scale of the Baan Mangkong Program, its relevance, and how a people´s development approach works in practice.

I understood the importance of the constant reflection and re-adaptation of any program: how to take advantages of the opportunities and maximize the use of resources, but also how to keep our minds on the ground, be aware of its limitations and the implications that any new strategy could produce.

As Mariana said before, it is not just 1 Baan Mangkong Program. Each community made an impact in it, and they have been able to use and adapt the program according to its interests and needs. Therefore, I appreciated so much the interaction with the different communities. I could discover through stories the struggles and different reasons of why people mobilize and entered to the program, but also, why the program does not fit all expectations or people´s demands. Undoubtedly, for all the communities it has been the means to struggle for a better lifestyle. For some, it has been the catalysts for their transformation: a process of collective learning and constant action to claim new rights and to be equal in its society. While for others the program gives the opportunity to get a secure housing.

Let´s see what happen with the production of the report and the compilation of the others´reflections.

“Para cerrar con broche de oro”, I add this picture. An amazing landscape in Ko Samet Island, where we stayed the last three days. Cheers.

With the energy to do things!!!

Thu, 17 May 2012 20:08:00 +0100

I think now is the time to comment on my experience on our field trip.

Today (written on the 11th of may after the presentations), we have shared all our learning gained from the communities. I am completely amazed with the solidarity, collective action and aspirations of Thai people. It has inspired me and given me the appetite to develop those ideals. Now, I believe, that change is possible (for my country in particular) if we start to push and mobilize people to achieve common goals.

It has been very interested to understand Soomsock’s way of action. It opens new possibilities and made me understand that change can start outside the political arena. Instead of struggling for political change, I should take initiatives, work with others, be in constant action and find the way to move forward. Only little by little and through collective actions it is possible to challenge the inequalities and injustice of the system that unfortunately is so much embedded in our culture.

It is clear that BMK program is only the excuse to bring these new ideals forward. Bringing people together and mobilizing towards a constant learning and action process. The aim of this process is about social change through housing production, but how to adapt these ideals, methodologies and strategies to achieve other goals, especially in the struggle for a cultural change? Is there any production process that is right to challenge this goal? Ok, that is all for now, a party is waiting for me, catch you later!

common goals thorugh common spaces

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:12:35 +0100

In the past days, during the field trip, me and my work group have tried to share with the communities we have been visited a diverse way of looking at their conditions.

We have done mapping, interviews, time lines, letting them express the priorities of issues they see in their living into that specific community. We have asked individually what elements they would aspire to see and maintain into their community. In doing so we aimed at understanding what is their view of the environment they live in, both collectively and singularly.

It has been surprising the level of collaboration they engaged themselves with, committing their energies and time with great involvement and enthusiasm, drawing the mechanisms at place at the moment, in the past and in the future intentions and aspirations.

We have attempted to triangulate our questioning, sometimes asking indirectly about issues we were keen to understand, always keeping in mind who we were talking to and contextualizing the position of that individual(/s) within the community’s hierarchy.

Among the issues we identified as the most pressing are the lack of communication and exchange of information among the communities living next to each other and within the community itself. The components of the community, when asked to depict the image of the environment they would like to be surrounded with, mostly pointed out collective elements, rather than individual priorities.

We interpreted this kind of willingness as a necessary step forward needed to strengthen the sense of community, the capacity to improve collective decision making and to increase the visibility of that group of people sharing the same land as well as interrelated issues and obtained achievements.

It therefore emerged the need to create space for communal activities and goals: in the design proposals we drew we took into consideration the physical constrains of a stripe of land developed along a canal. We noticed how this shape encourages one way movement rather than occasions in which to share and exchange stories, collective impressions and information.

In order to find possible answers to their needs and desires for a better living we proposed design alternatives in which the communality of shared spaces such as play grounds or community centres has a major role. In this way a more solid sense of community can be built not exclusively with the aim of facing more effectively threats of flooding or eviction, but also with the intent to keep alive the quality and beauty of the physical outcomes of the achievements reached together.