The rules of the game are fairly straightforward:
~ 1 (one line that serves as your thesis statement)
+ 3 (three sentences that expand upon -- without repeating -- the original line)
+ 9 (sentences that flesh out the idea).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
~1 It is time to believe that the informal settlements that have sprung up around the world in the post-colonial conditions are in fact the most direct human responses in the search for a sustainable urban model for the future.
+3 The future of the urban landscape sees a proliferation of informal structures that shift at uncertain rates and patterns, eking out an ambiguous dimension where the previous vocabulary for urban spatial delineation has no meaning.
While these spaces, such as the informal settlements in Cape Town & Johannesburg, South Africa, as well as the city of Kinshasa, Congo are plagued with the seemingly chaotic and pessimistic reputation of violence and drugs, they nevertheless also foster a cultural vibrancy and sense of community that challenges the more static, Modernist notions of city conditions.
If given the right considerations, informal settlements can inspire the spontaneity of interactions ‘in-between’ architecture spaces, relying on the pragmatic wisdom of its citizens in reestablishing cities to be much more responsive to real, lived experiences.
+9 The British economist Malthus’ warned at the end of the 18th century that the population growth of urban spaces will eventually outpace that of food production, creating urban conditions of mass starvation, hysteria, and death.
Though the ‘Malthus nightmare’ has so far proved to be largely premature, it has nevertheless pervaded the paranoia of the Western psyche as the rural population incessantly moves towards an urban trajectory.
In analyzing the growth of urban spaces up to the 21st century, it is clear that not only are cities developing at a more rapid rate than ever, many cities around the world, especially those of developing and 3rd world nations, have inflated to become “megacities” of over 10 million inhabitants.
While Western nations and their government security bodies preoccupy themselves with a fear of the failure of states, they might in fact have to face a new fear -- the failure of cities.
One can look to the past at the “Walled City” of Kowloon a seminal urban condition to analyze because it is largely considered to be the “closest thing to a truly self-regulating, self-sufficient, self-determining modern city that has ever been built.”
It was a single, tangible, informal structure that serves as a “working model of an anarchist society,” and the resilience of its self-determining system had the potential to grow into a fully respectable anarchic city.
In the book “City of Darkness – Life in Kowloon City,” the author Girard poignantly observed that the residents have succeeded “in creating what modern architects, with all their resources of money and expertise, have failed to: the city as ‘organic mega structure,’ not set rigidly for a lifetime but continually responsive to the changing requirements of its user, fulfilling every need from water supply to religion, yet providing also the warmth and intimacy of a single huge household.”
With cities around the world inflating at uncontrollably rapid rates, projects such as the proposed Shimizu Mega-City pyramid in Tokyo Bay, Japan exemplifies the absolute absurdity and excessiveness to which a society will go towards mannishly attempting to solve the issue of population control – ever blindly moving urban spaces towards a hyper modernist level of control and efficiency without regard to the basic instinctual human needs and desires.
Cape Town, South Africa, with its increasing influx of migrants and a geography that allows little room for expansion, is an ideal location to explore bold ways of organizing informal settlements so that they improve the informal settlements of the present while sustaining the complex urban conditions of the future.
