Combating poverty with architecture

The neighborhood Hoograven in the Dutch city of Utrecht is in need of a fix up and last week newspaper De Volkskrant reported about the plans (article here & here). This article drew my attention for several reasons. First of all, because of the two people that were hired to make the plans: Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner. I have to admit that I had never heard of them before, but according to the lead of the article, these two Venezuelans are “well-known for their unorthodox slum architecture”. Slums in so-called ‘developing countries’. And now they have been invited to come up with a plan for an urban area in one of the richest countries in the world. I wondered if this was a sign that we are slowly learning to let go of this false binary of ‘developed’ versus ‘underdeveloped’ - so difficult in practice (also for me), although so often preached.

But I found the article interesting in more ways. Sometimes you get the impression that architecture is all about beautiful or conceptually clever buildings - at least I did, when I was still taking some classes in that area as a student. Not so for these two architects. They have together started up S.L.U.M. Lab, according to its website bringing people together “to work towards an understanding of the link between urban planning and poverty alleviation.” But what is their take on poverty?

In our own research a particular approach towards development and poverty takes center stage, namely the capability approach of Nussbaum and Sen. It views poverty reduction as the expansion of human capabilities that allow people to live the lives they have reason to value. It is a very multi-dimensional interpretation of poverty, going beyond simple poverty indicators in terms of income. We will investigate in the upcoming years what sort of implications this approach has for (our thinking about) technology and design. As I already mentioned in my blog from September 18th, a group of people from all over the world decided last month to establish a thematic working group on this topic. Urban design seemed initially not covered in the description of what the group is going to be about, so Mona Luxion pointed out to other members of the group. Examples given were very much high-tech (ICT, medical technologies), while design covers so much more. So we added this example: urban environments may be conducive to people’s capabilities for affiliation. Affiliation is one of the ten capability categories that Martha Nussbaum considers to be central for any human being. According to her this entails, amonst others, “being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another”.

Now how can urban design contribute to people’s capabilities for affiliation? I have not had the time yet to dive into the work of Brillembourg and Klumpner, but from what I read in De Volkskrant their work may be able to inspire us here. They consider architecture not to be about buildings, but about the people living in an urban area. And they put this into practice by working together with those people to develop plans for their neighborhood. The core of the preliminary plan for Hoograven, resulting from their consultations, consists of three ‘activity centers’ where people will be able to meet, play sports together, etc. A quote from the article (my translation): “More important than designing a beautiful building is getting social processes started, so they think. And that is a message that many Dutch architects have forgotten about according to them.” Here are two people coming from the South and having worked in the slums there, now teaching important lessons to the North. It is one of the things that I like about the capability approach as well: its nuanced take on poverty and development allows us to see that similar challenges exist all over the world.