Bruno De Meulder

Understanding the ‘Village in the City’ in Guangzhou Economic Integration and Development Issue and their Implications for the Urban Migrant

As with many cities in China experiencing rapid urbanisation, Guangzhou is undergoing a specific form of urban development characterised by the engulfing of rural settlements: a process resulting in the so-called village in the city. This paper uses three modes of economic integration (redistribution, market exchange and reciprocity) as a framework to examine the interrelationship of various development issues and conditions of these villages. It shows that the poor integration in the spheres of state redistribution and formal market exchange pushes migrants to focus on survival strategies that relate to the self-organisation of housing, employment and education. It also makes a critical review of several (re)development projects, each relating to one or more of the different modes of economic integration. This paper concludes that new project approaches that organise a productive interplay between market exchange, redistribution and reciprocity are needed.

The interplay of state, market and society in the socio-spatial transformation of “villages in the city” in Guangzhou

This paper examines the changes in the ways in which villagers have gained access to resources and services over time in what are now “villages in the city” within the city of Guangzhou. It compares and contrasts three periods: the clan-based traditional villages, the commune period and the period since the 1980s (which includes great economic success in many villages). It also discusses how migrants fit within this, as they have come to form a very large part of the population in these “villages in the city” but are largely excluded from state provision and from the benefits accruing to “villagership”.

The role of key stakeholders in the bottom-up planning processes of Guangzhou, China

The interplay between key stakeholders in urban development is one of the key concerns in contemporary international theory on urbanism and planning. This paper seeks to contribute to this concern, addressing the interplay between three key stakeholders (the state, the market and society) in the bottom-up planning processes of Tangxia Village, a typical ‘village in the city’ in Guangzhou, China. The mosaic spatial structure of Tangxia Village has been produced and overlapped by different planning processes, each created by various key stakeholders. The socio-spatial structure of the traditional rural settlement formed the basic layer of Tangxia Village, while newly added layers have resulted largely from the intertwining of regulated city development and unregulated self-development. Recently, a bottom-up process has generated a wide range of attention, as it has functioned very well in reshaping the space in Tangxia Village. This paper concludes that the integration of bottom-up processes and micro-strategies would strengthen the performance and efficiency of redevelopment strategies for Tangxia Village.

A relational and processual re-cartography of infrastructure: E17 Motorway Landscapes

ABSTRACT E17 Motorway Landscapes proposes a relational and processual re-mapping of the E17 as it crosses the south of West Flanders in Belgium. Motorways are usually conceived, perceived and most often mapped as alien elements superimposed on the territory. To be able – at least partially – to break free from this settled cartographic orthodoxy, the re-mapping of the motorway follows three specific strategies of cartographic exploration. First of all, the motorway landscape is cartographically de- and recomposed according to a relational rather than to a topographical logic, thereby revealing alternative measures of rhythm and contextual reinterpretations of scale. Second, the motorway landscape is mapped as a process by incorporating the previous state of the selected elements into the maps and by furthermore stressing their transformations in relation to the E17. Lastly, the motorway landscape is reimagined as a thick, albeit fragmented body, by means of a content-specific symbolization scheme, designed to reflect attunement and relationality between different object categories.

From planning to profiling: reactivating characteristic watermarks to structure the Flemish territory

Abstract Flanders distinguishes itself in Europe by its flat and dispersedly urbanized territory. If water was originally the main spatial structure, its role has been minimized over the last two centuries with the manipulation of the hydrologic network, the overlay of infrastructures, and a generalized urbanization. The development of a preventive and decentralized water policy, synonymous with making room for the water, could however, potentially reactivate the structuring capacity of water. Reporting on design investigation in the urban region of Genk, this paper demonstrates how the search of ‘space for water’ highlights and reinterprets the micro-topographic features of the landscape. Besides dealing with pressing water issues, the design of space for water can indeed simultaneously unlock the latent structure that underpins Flanderss (sub)urbanization and thereby play a key role in a requalification that redirects its development into more sustainable avenues.

On Allotopia: The Spatial Accumulation of Difference in Bixiga (São Paulo, Brazil)

This article will unfold a longe durée spatial biography of the urban area of Bixiga (São Paulo, Brazil) to probe the particular role of space in the conflation of different cultural practices and territorial claims. The extended case study bridges indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial urbanization as they amalgamated an intricate assemblage of material and cultural strata. Combined historical urban analysis and fieldwork allow to uncover how the resulting urban milieu integrates discrepant urban worlds, perpetually iterating between centrality and marginality, innovation and degradation, oppression and resistance. Building on Foucault’s (1984) conception of heterotopia, Bixiga will surface as an allotopia, a place that accommodates, cumulates, and celebrates a multitude of differences. It sheds light, this way, on more insurgent histories of urbanism, where urban space is piecemeal forged through contentious struggles over space in the city.

Urban landscape design exercises in urban metabolism: reconnecting with Central Limburg's regenerative resource landscape

Abstract The design research presented here uses urban landscape design to attempt to reframe sustainable resource management. Urban metabolism projects generally originate in industrial ecology, emphasizing performance-oriented technical and entrepreneurial approaches.1 However, industrial ecology approaches experience difficulties in making meaningful connections to social, economic and spatial contexts. Building on landscape architecture analysis and design methods such as mapping and systemic design, this article will highlight urban landscape designs capacity to reframe questions stemming from the urban metabolism model through the production of future imaginaries. Using the Belgian Central Limburg regions transition into a circular economy as a design exercise, this paper suggests that urban landscape designs constructivist approach2 has the potential to embed social and economic dimensions in applying urban metabolism. Operating ‘from within’ its intervention field, urban landscape design potentially facilitates transdisciplinary dialogues in urban metabolism design research.

Re-visiting Three Neighbourhoods of Modern Tehran: Chaharsad-Dastgah, Narmak and Nazi-Abad

In 1945 the municipality of Tehran planned for the first time the development of large-scale Residential Neighbourhood projects. Over-population, increasing rents and land prices in central Tehran made de-centralisation and expansion necessary. With the approval of the first seven-year development plan in 1948, the construction of ‘Low-Cost Housing’ got a prominent place on the development agenda (Planning Organisation, implementation report of second socio-economy development, 1964). The ‘Rahni Bank’ [Mortgage Bank] was appointed by the Tehran Municipality as the executive organisation for low-cost housing projects. The organisation included young Iranian architects with European training and new ideas for the creation of a modern Tehran and adhering to the credo of modernist urbanism. The first modernist residential neighbourhood ‘Chaharsad-Dastgah’ was built in 1946 for government employees. As in so many (official) discourses (worldwide) of the time a lot of emphasis goes to efforts to attain affordable prices, what was supposedly related to materials, economy of scale, modern techniques and middle-class as a target group. In 1952, the new cabinet approved the construction of two large townships, respectively, Narmak in the north-east and Nazi-Abad fields in the south of Tehran. In Narmak and Nazi-Abad designs, the challenges of modern and traditional life style were clearly seen. As such, their development histories (conception, implementation, reception and appropriation) are crucial to understand the metamorphosis of Tehran from a traditional city into a modern metropolis. The present chapter attempts to shed light on these development histories as a particular case study that articulates the specificity of Iranian modernism and modernisation.

A look into the vibrant lives of a residual building: Ocupação Hotel Cambridge, Avenida 9 de Julho, 216, São Paulo

While São Paulo experiences persistent urban growth, its historic core paradoxically accumulates vacancy. Ever since the 1970s, real estate investment seems to favor new centralities. This leaves many of the city’s central properties, even some of its most iconic buildings, prey to decay and abandonment. Since 1997, social movements have systematically been occupying vacant buildings as a response to the city’s housing crisis and as a protest action against political deficiency. Evidently, these occupations are strongly contested, accommodating people in often precarious conditions while constantly risking violent eviction. Nevertheless, they could also be acknowledged as spatialized practices of insurgent citizenship (Holston, 2009), as a form of insurgent urbanism and as such, the germs of a radically different form of urban renewal. Beside tagging the façade as an act of appropriation, adaptations to these occupied buildings are mostly limited to the interior. Hence, this emergent, but also ephemeral practice of urban renewal leaves little trace on a conventional figure ground. The conceptual section unfolds Hotel Cambridge and its occupation. The section as a frame almost prefigures the inclusive and plural urbanism that the social movements are inducing within the city, through the reuse of its residual building stock. Starting with the hotel’s construction at the bottom, time progresses to the top of the section, illustrating how the building is transformed to house the most various lives and events, reflecting a rich diversity of identities over the course of only a few decades. Time is not conceived as an exact, proportional metric: depending on the degree of adaptation, certain phases in the transformation process are given more prominence in the section.

Dam[ned] landscapes: re-visioning the volta river Project’s unsettled territories

As was the case for several other nation-states emerging from colonialism, Ghana’s ‘auspicious start’ as an independent country relied on growth prospects resulting from large-scale infrastructure projects. Dams and hydro-electric equipment, railways and roads, mechanization of agriculture and industrialization formed the basic ingredients of a recipe promising modernity, development and nationhood. For Sub-Saharan Africa’s first independent country, such components would be combined under the aegis of the Volta River Project (VRP), which foresaw the radical restructuring of the territory accompanying the creation of the world’s largest man-made lake. Within such framework, this investigation reflects on how landscape’s double role as both medium and message of the VRP was and is being played out. It re-traces the main gestures aiming to master the novel water body and its effects on the surrounding territory, intended as a salvific rationalization of cropping, irrigation and re-framed livelihoods. Landscaping, hydraulic engineering and town planning intertwined in the salient spaces along the Volta River. Large-scale dams, model resettlement villages, cooperative farming and industrial new towns were projected and realized. These interventions supposedly paralleled the nation’s re-birth from the ashes of colonialism, but were rather key tools for camouflaging a neo-colonial enterprise performed under a nation-building guise. In terms of agriculture and productive landscape management, the VRP was therefore considered a unique opportunity to induce the shift from famers’ “wasteful, fragmented system of agriculture to a settled and improved pattern of farming”. Land classification maps and cropping patterns reflected the ambition to maintain soil fertility without reliance on the bush fallow system. Migrating, shifting and dynamic uses of the landscape were replaced by a national agricultural policy emphasizing large-scale mechanized farming, facilitated by the regrouping of the displaced population from 740 villages into 52 townships. By 1968 however, over 60 percent of the resettled farmers had migrated away from state cooperatives and farms to explore other development opportunities created by the Volta Lake. After almost five decades of inhabitation, the VRP’s realized components have engendered widespread contestation and appropriation by the 80,000 resettled people. Indeed, the Ghanaian territory is still suffering from both the VRP’s underestimation of social and environmental aspects, and from the overestimation of the interventions’ effects on overall development. Novel dynamics, based not only on survival strategies but also on a creative adaptation to the new cultural and productive landscapes engendered by drawdown agriculture and potential irrigation schemes, form both a threat and a challenge to environmental management. Today the informal practices of migrant fishermen and livestock farmers continuously confront the normative approach of the Volta River Authority (f. 1961) and clashes with both ethnic and administrative boundaries. By mapping the considerable mismatches between endogenous landscape logic and inhabited VRP components, and by confronting historical plans with current environmental dynamics in three relevant samples around the lake, this contribution reflects on the “multi-purpose” nature of the project attempting to combine economic, social and human factors and the consequent expansion of the landscape’s uses. The research intends to offer a complex reading of the VRP’s hereafter by integrating, enriching and multiplying the urban and landscape imaginaries at play in the intervention’s re-articulation. It directly questions the tensions between technical and normative efforts to regulate the Volta Lake’s existence and the dynamic appropriations of its landscape.