This was Heliosa Strobel's re-phrasing of one of Jaime Lerner's guiding planning principles. With this quote as a starting point, me and my curly-haired friend Zoe Chaves built out an artifical debate for our final Urban Planning and Sustainable Environments course.
Moderator’s Opening Commentary:
Every city coming of age in the twenty-first century must confront an acute tension between economic development pressures and historic preservation agendas. In the era of globalization and neo-liberalism, rapid and uncontrolled growth all too often replicates an interchangeable, monotonous placelessness conducive to capital investment. However, De Certeau, wary of this risk, reminds us “haunted places are the only ones people can live in.” Carmona echoes this sentiment in her work “The Perceptual Dimension,” claiming “places provide an anchor of shared experiences between people and continuity over time.” The value of these haunted ‘places’ within the urban fabric is all too often overlooked and the places themselves lost due to the pace and scale of urban change in the modern era. This debate will address the role of historic preservation as a tool to mediate economic development as against social sustainability. For the purpose of this debate we will examine social sustainability in relation to three goals: the pursuit of equity, the facilitation of multiple narratives and the balance of collective and individual needs. In each we will examine the value of flexible versus prescriptive preservation policies—visiting experts Zoë C and Zoë M will each be advocating for one policy approach.
Pursuing Equity
Prescriptive
The recent designation of Cape Town, South Africa’s Bo Kaap neighborhood as a historic district serves as a compelling example of the government’s active pursuit of a more equitable urban environment. The prescriptive regulations regarding the aesthetic norm for street facades successfully highlight the distinctive heritage of the historic Malay quarter. This new visual prominence serves as a symbolic legitimizing of the role of the marginalized Malay population in Cape Town’s narrative and governance. The symbolic value of Bo Kaap’s new visual prominence is confirmed by Carmona’s assertion that “environments represent, communicate and embody patterns of power and dominance.”
Furthermore, this somewhat intangible symbolic value is compounded by a very tangible economic value that serves to further combat Apartheid’s legacy of racialized class boundaries. Bo Kaap’s aesthetically compelling and distinctive character has attracted international attention in the form of tourists and sightseers who provide a substantial flow of capital through this traditionally low-income neighborhood. The opportunity for low-income residents to capitalize on this influx of tourists with disposable income provides a steady source of income for those who take the initiative.
Finally, the prescriptive regulations serve to disincentivize up-scale, insensitive private developments. Considering the proximity of Bo Kaap to the central business district in conjunction with Cape Town’s emerging identity as a global city, the successful prevention of such private developments is crucial to the pursuit of an equitable urban environment. As ____ points out in “Street and City Patterns: Settings for Streets and People,” while “there may be many owners of a project…they act as one” hence, if market forces are allowed to prevail regardless of heritage status, “the number of actors participating individually in the nature of city development is fewer than before.” Hence, prescriptive preservation serves to protect the voice and interests of Bo Kaap residents in the development of the city against the encroachment of institutional and global actors.
Thus it is evident, as laid out in my commentary, that prescriptive preservation in Bo Kaap has provided the residents of this historically marginalized community with symbolic, economic and political prominence that collectively combat entrenched inequities.
Flexible
I have certainly seen the vibrant tourism market in action on Bo Kaap’s streets; I have no doubt that this presence contributes to the health of the neighborhood. But is this the kind of economic activity that will best stimulate the urban economy towards a more equitable future?
In conversation with 34-year Bo Kaap resident Nadeem Jones, I glimpsed an alternative narrative to the neighborhood’s historic status. Mr. Jones, resident of a one-story home on Waal Street, would like to add a second floor onto the residence. The addition, he explained, would combat the overcrowding his family experiences, and also allow them to host more international exchange students and larger Malay-style cooking lessons: the family’s two sources of income. The historic designation forbids such building activity, as it would alter the structure’s façade. While exchange students and culinary pupils are undoubtedly drawn to the area for its authentic aesthetic, the rigid code of preservation hampers some residents’ ability to reap the full economic benefit of this outside interest. In this way, the structural preservation may be read as a force that works to preserve the income inequalities entrenched in Cape Town’s non-white communities.
Furthermore, Bo Kaap residents must complete necessary façade renovations using building materials that match the original materials. A consequence of this preservationalist tactic is that the generally low-income Bo Kaap families must repair their doors and windows with materials that are priced above their means. This building directive ought to be partially supported by the tour operators who directly benefit from showcasing the area’s antique charm. If a small percentage of each company’s annual net profit were to be captured in a building materials fund, perhaps in a few years time the money could be used to offset the costs of larger style-conscious renovations, such as the story-addition Mr. Jones dreams of. This small-scale neighborhood planning partnership would successfully preserve the aesthetic heritage of Bo Kaap, while also addressing some of the pressing social issues that face Cape Town’s colored families. However, without a more flexible and innovative policy, the high cost of façade renovations will continue to contribute the ongoing displacement of long-standing Malay residents due to market forces.
UCT scholars Dewar and Uytenbogaardt have developed a planning framework that speaks to this need for conscious minimalism: good urban interventions, they believe, “provide the minimum necessary constraints required in a particular context to achieve positive settlement form, rather than comprehensive control of all areas and all aspects of a settlement.” Minimizing and rethinking some of the guidelines that surround housing preservation in Bo Kaap would not undermine the importance of the past, but rather highlight the complex layering of histories in this area, while allowing for the necessary individual freedom to combat structural inequities.
Facilitating Multiple Narratives
Prescriptive
In Hanoi, Vietnam we are now witnessing a crucial turning point where there is a risk of the dominant narrative of the market economy obscuring and, in many cases, overtly replacing the physical layering and mixing of multiple strains of cultural influence. According to Logan, this “successive layering of foreign cultural influences onto the original Sino-Vietnamese urban environment is one of the most striking features of the old sector of the city.” This same sentiment is reiterated in multiple sources and confirmed by my own experiences. However, despite this collective value placed on the dynamic accumulation of multiple narratives throughout the ancient quarter, local expert Hoian asserts that it is more fragile, at risk than ever due to the pace and scale of global forces—indeed, some assert that the “last decade of modernization threatened Hanoi’s character more than decades of poverty and war.” While there are comparatively few landmark buildings of particular significance in the ancient quarter, the neighborhood patterning and cross-pollination of vernaculars. The prescriptive preservation of these more mundane and ordinary architectural forms would provide a crucial core of heritage structures that would facilitate the continuing incorporation and juxtaposition of multiple narrative strains within Hanoi’s many eras and stages.
Flexible
Yet the process of preservation has exposed Hanoi to domineering forces comparable
to market forces. Heritage efforts surrounding Hanoi’s Old Sector have included a huge array of foreign actors, including the Australian, Japanese and French governments. The latter entity tends “to see Hanoi as largely a result of French administrative, architectural and planning genius, and consequently…that the city’s conservation should be primarily a French responsibility.” French architecture is an undeniable part of the cityscape of Hanoi, but has its preservation, augmented by a former colonizer, come at the expense of crucial counter narratives?
A more eclectic and flexible preservation policy is required to successfully facilitate multiple narrative identities within the urban context. Consider Curitiba, Brazil, a small city that has received global attention for its innovative means of historic preservation. In Curitiba, the sum of preservationalist efforts has not been stagnated facades but a system of green spaces that simultaneously sing the collective urban narrative, improve citizens’ quality of life and mitigate the severity of regional flooding.
Bosque do Papa is a prime example of this successful planning trend. This small, densely greened park blends recreation with historical reflection, the fringes of the central clearing devoted to representations of the modest housing that Curitiba’s Polish immigrants inhabited in the late 19th century. [Fig. ] Bosque do Papa successfully integrates an alternative historical narrative into the city plan, preserving the Polish immigrant identity while also furthering Curitiba’s broader development goals of providing citizens with high square meterage of green space. Flexibility in the meaning of preservation, in the Curitiban context, has cultivated a more diverse and dissonant collective narrative and in doing so has facilitated a more resilient, sustainable social structure.
Balancing Collective and Individual Needs
Prescriptive
Hanoi’s new master plan is a stellar example of prescriptive preservation objectives providing a framework for the balancing of collective and individual needs. Hanoi’s Ancient Quarter facilitates a way of life that could not function within the market economy independent of its physical context. However, Hanoi’s rapid economic development and opening to global actors is equally dependent on a particular urban form to facilitate its transactions and patterns of activity. Both are, in their own way, collective needs—however, the global actors carry an individualized, private influence capable of overpowering the Ancient Quarter’s transactions and patterns of activity. The prescriptive preservation of the Ancient Quarter coupled with the creation of a distinct, modern CBD more accessible by car in addition to a range of satellite cities will allow for individuals to operate without threatening collective systems on which others depend for their livelihoods and utility. Hanoi’s prescriptive restriction on development in the Ancient Quarter is a crucial tool for the balancing of collective and individual needs.
Flexible
The protection of Hanoi’s inner core and resulting peripheral development, in the form of new urban areas and satellite cities, is an admiral attempt at balancing preservation and growth management. But how will it impact the persons who live and make a living in the protected sectors?
A northeastern new urban area called Viet Hung is slated to house several hundred former Ancient Quarter residents by the time it is completed in 2015. They are being forcibly relocated by the state to relieve the residential overcrowding of the tube houses. These people, who probably are accustomed to living right above their commercial enterprises, will have to commute into the Ancient Quarter daily, jeopardizing their livelihoods and undermining the environmental sustainability of a city already choked by traffic. In addition to compromising the welfare of these individuals, the low-density aspect of Hanoi's preservation challenges the city's collectively- held developmental goal of creating decentralized nodes where people can both live and work. The mechanisms of preservation in this context are simultaneously tools that work against some individual and collective interests in the city.
More flexible and nuanced approaches to preserving history can heighten quality of life for individuals and serve collective development goals.
Moderator’s Closing Commentary:
Modern cities necessarily have multiple, conflicting and contested historical narratives. In order to ensure the overall health of a region, planners need to consider how the past and its built legacy may be best leveraged towards creating a more equitable and vibrant urban future. In closing this debate I hope to call attention to the pitfalls pointed out by each of our contributors—rigid, prescriptive preservation is commonly a top-down process that frequently sacrifices the agency of the individual to the interests of the collective while libertarian flexible preservation can result in bare-minimum performance and often sacrifices the agency of the collective to the interests of the individual. We hope this debate serves to inform the ongoing negotiation of economic development and social sustainability in urban planning interventions in the world’s emerging global cities. We hope to encourage culturally sensitive, context-specific consideration of these issues.
As a final thought, “every act of preservation is a reinterpretation of history.”
Works Cited:
Carmona, Matthew, 2003. “Chapter 5: The Perceptual Dimension,” in Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design. London: Architectural Press.
De Certeau, Michel. 1984. “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life. S. Rendall (trans.), Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 91-110
Jacob, Allen. 1995. “Part Three: Street and City Patterns: Settings for Streets and People,” in Great Streets. Boston: MIT Press. pp. 202-235.
Lamster, Mark. January 2011. “The Grass Isn’t Always Greener,” in Architect. http://www.architectmagazine.com/planning/the-grass-isnt-always-greener-a-master-plan-for-h.aspx
Logan, William S. 1995. “Heritage Planning in Post-Doi Moi Hanoi,” in Journal of the American Planning Association, Summer 2010. pp. 328-343.
Southworth, Barbara. 2002. ‘Urban design in action: the City of Cape Town’s Dignified Places Programme- implementation of new public spaces towards integration and urban regeneration in South Africa’, Urban Design International. Volume 8, Number 3. pp 119-133.
Strobel, Heliosa. Lecture in Curitiba, Brazil.
Tran, HoiAnh. Lecture in Hanoi.
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