Christoph Lueder

Kingston University London, Knights Park, Kingston-upon-Thames, KT1 2QJ, UK.

Keywords: Urban Villages; Informal Urbanization; Topography; Typology; Open Poché

Introduction

Imaginative no less than analytical scenarios for urban futures cannot afford to ignore the crucial

role of informal settlements and urban villages in absorbing global urban growth. At present, the

informal economy provides 85 per cent of all new employment opportunities around the world; over 90 per cent of urban growth is occurring in the developing world (UN-Habitat, 2014). Production of new urban space is shifting from the advanced economies of the northern hemisphere to the developing countries of the global South, triggering new theoretical speculation on global urban futures. Although urban planners have long exposed the many environmental and social problems that informal urbanization incurs, recent discourses increasingly recognize its essential and indispensable role in contexts where regulatory planning fails to provide affordable housing or serviced land to migrants. An estimated third of the developing world’s urban population lives in slums; thus a significant fraction of urban space is produced by the builder-inhabitants of informal settlements and urban villages (UN-Habitat, 2014). Informal urbanism is defined as the production of urban space independent of formal frameworks and assistance that does not comply with government regulations. Urban villages, enveloped by rapidly urbanizing environments, can appear to be receding phenomena, bound to gradually disappear or abruptly be relinquished as their economic base in agriculture or craft is displaced by the industrial and services sectors. Resonances in structure, economical base and modus operandi link informal to ancestral settlements, self-constructed, improvised building to artisan-constructed, vernacular architecture, that is, a conspicuously growing to a supposedly receding

urban phenomenon. Informal settlements and urban villages forge links between the present, future and past. They adapt and reconfigure remembered urban and building typologies through feedback obtained continuously from the actions and experience of construction and inhabitation.

Mehrotra has described informal settlements and urban villages as ‘kinetic cities’ in opposition to ‘static cities’ governed by government regulations (Mehrotra, 2008).

In a series of collaborations engaging international academic and community partners, my colleagues Alexandru Malaescu, Iulia Fratila and I have documented three communities, each exemplifying a particular context and model of development. The first, Jabal Al Natheef, was founded in 1945 by Palestinian refugees; the rapidly growing city of Amman has since enfolded it and placed it in a situation resembling that of ancestral urban villages. Acute overcrowding and scarce resources have led to complex, three-dimensional assemblages of buildings that derive from negotiation between neighbours, and, despite numerous severe problems, imbue Jabal Al Natheef with identity and spatial richness (Figures 1 and 2). The second, Ban Krua, is an urban village and community of Cham Muslim silk weavers settled on the banks of the San Saeb canal in the heart of Bangkok (for a detailed account of my research on Ban Krua, see Lueder, 2014a). Threatened by the industrialization of silk production and by municipal infrastructure projects, Ban Krua’s resilience is rooted in the versatility of its spatial organization that is able to capitalize on opportunities, such as the cessation of annual flooding, and to alleviate problems such as overcrowding (Figures 3 and 4). Finally, I discuss Cerro de la Cruz, a neighbourhood situated in the ravines overlooking Valparaiso, which forms a complex, three-dimensional assemblage from homes whose positions and forms derive from continual negotiations between neighbours, engaging complex interdependencies between topography, views, ventilation and exposure to sunlight (Figures 5 and 6). Drawing on interviews, as well as surveys of urban space and buildings, I examine how processes that are driven by feedback from the actions and experience of construction and inhabitation register in urban and built form (see also Lueder, 2014b). In all three communities, I explore the responsive and the memetic dimensions of the kinetic city. The former plays out in negotiations between urban structure and topography; it can be productively compared with and contrasted against urban paradigms established by Sitte and Le Corbusier. The latter concerns the recuperation, adaption and fragmentation of remembered spatial typologies. I scrutinize the memetic dimension through a juxtaposition of Rowe’s paradigm of ‘ideal types’ against evolutionary metaphors and genetic codes.

Figure 1: Ban Krua, Bangkok, Thailand, Rossi plan, 2014.

（文章来源：URBAN DESIGN International excerpted）