Great City, Great Place’ was how Sanjit Rodrigues, commissioner of the city corporation, described Panjim while speaking at Z-Axis, a conference organized by the Charles Correa Foundation in the city last month.
The theme of the conference was ‘Great City, Terrible Place’. It was intended, according to the organizers, ‘to connect the fraternity of thinker-doers in the domains of architecture, urban design, planning, social projects and conservation to an audience of influencers, professionals and students of architecture, planning and design thus creating a consequential community of intellectuals who will invariably influence the future.’ And hopefully, one might add, in a better way than they do the present. For, despite Rodrigues’ accolade, there is little reason to feel good about the urban environment today, even in Goa. And architects are complicit in the mess.
This was admitted by more than one speaker at the conference too. They were a diverse crowd of traditionalists, technocrats, innovators, and revolutionaries, and from all over the world except – unforgivably – Goa; the only speech from here was the welcome by Rodrigues, and that because the Corporation was one of the hosts. There was also only one woman, in a total of 20 speakers.
The South Asian presentations were the least impressive, mostly about big projects for big patrons, i.e. with that old architecture-as-elite-monument-while-the-people-around-can-go-to-hell approach which has given architects such a bad name; or about dousing those monuments in appropriate brahmanical symbols like yantras and temple lamptowers, as if their caste location was not already obvious in function and methods.
Most other speakers at least focussed on the issue at hand – i.e. the raw deal afforded by big cities especially to the poor – but with varied approaches. The Dutch Ton Venhoeven and UK’s Peter Bishop both spoke of big government interventions; while the objectives seemed great, little was said about involving the users. ‘Who believes in government any more?’ countered Alfredo Brillembourg, US-born architect working in the slums of Caracas. His position, like that of Italian Simone Sfriso, working on small projects in Africa and Asia, was a bit top-down too, but less in the ‘big-brother’ sense than in the ‘white saviour’ one, with developed-world architects taking developed-world attitudes to mass housing and institutions elsewhere – not a bad thing at all — while also saving themselves from the recession back home.
An impressive presentation was made by Nigerian Kunlé Adeyemi, whose firm NLÉ (At Home) works with local communities to develop projects like the award-winning floating school of Makoko. Built on 256 plastic barrels, the school floats on the Lagos lagoon, in the midst of a floating settlement once condemned as a slum and demolished. Its success, both as institution and tourist attraction, has made the authorities rethink their approach to the community, and also offers solutions for the wetter world of the future.
But if there was one speaker who really provided food for thought, by challenging everything architects normally stand for, it was Spanish architect Santiago Cirugeda. Called a ‘guerrilla architect’ and a ‘self-build legend’ (Al Jazeera, Aug 19, 2014), Cirugeda’s architectural firm, named Recetas Urbanas (Urban Recipes), in Seville, is famous for reclaiming public spaces for the community. Their projects are low-cost and self-build in which the architect plays the role of facilitator, not for design or technical issues – those are handled by the community – but to deal with the law, politics and bureaucracy. In these last few years of economic crisis in Spain, where more than 500,000 homes lie vacant even as the populace is buffeted by state-enforced austerity drives, Cirugeda has achieved fame for using empty sites and buildings for people’s needs – by hook or crook.
A recent project was La Carpa (the Big Top), a collaboration with theatre people to create Seville’s first self-built independent art space on an unused plot of government land. It consisted of 2 second-hand circus tents, a building made from shipping containers, and another – the araña – also made of recycled material, and resembling a giant spider.
‘Some say my buildings are ugly. I say, don’t you have an ugly friend? Everybody has an ugly friend – the important thing is that he’s your friend! Architecture is obsessed with beauty, but it’s really not important.” The important things for architecture, according to him, should be people and social function.
La Carpa has been taken down now but in the 4 years of its life it hosted tens of thousands of people attending music shows, plays and workshops.
As Spain continues to reel economically, self-help and self-build are becoming more and more common. But Cirugeda started much earlier. The first time he was visited by the police, he says, was as a student, when he converted a large dumpster into a mini-playground for kids in the red-light area of a city with just one public playground; like most of his projects it was built with local help. “Sometimes we do things that are illegal. They don’t harm anyone and the purpose is to benefit people.”
The ideal city, according to him, is not that with better energy and infrastructure, but one with better connections between those in power and those without.
He makes sense. Goa’s small cities may not be as appallingly polluted, poorly-housed and traffic-jammed as many Indian megapoli, but we can’t rest content with Sanjit Rodrigues’ self-congratulatory description of things. A recent article, ‘Scam Infrastructure feeding Goa’s Debt Trap’, by Vivek Menezes, contained a long list of huge projects currently being pushed by the Parsekar-Parrikar combine: any number of bridges (including in no-development areas like Tiracol), the mammoth Mopa, an oceanarium at Miramar, a huge convention centre at Dona Paula ‘to deteriorate still-empty like the Lusofonia stadia’, posh cinema facilities for IFFI, and so on. These are projects that will swallow a huge amount of public money, projects not needed by ordinary folk, but projects that architects lust for.
It would be good if we in the architecture world of Goa paused to listen to Santiago; it might broaden the idea of architecture, and make the profession less destructive. It might improve our cities as well.
(Amita Kanekar is an architectural
historian and novelist.)
