https://www.technoscienceslumintervention.org/moodboard daily 0.75 2018-06-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1511808028028-WKNCYPMZSSJBISVXFLS7/WP_20170620_007.jpg Technicities https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1511808028028-WKNCYPMZSSJBISVXFLS7/WP_20170620_007.jpg Technicities https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1511808088572-3MOF97YUMK34GPV6S7U8/P1000293_a.jpg Technicities - NGO worker in informal settlement Quinta da Serra, Lisbon, 2008. Site under construction. Text about NGOs in slums to appear soon. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1511808169473-WSQEIP9UGIT8R9HI9DSC/P1000861.JPG Technicities - Experts assessing informal built environment, Cova da Moura, Lisbon, 2008. Site under construction. Text about assessing informal built environments to appear soon. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1511808375565-3FUWVFCU5BQ0CQOZDNK9/WP_20170620_007.jpg Technicities - Non-standard collective electricity provision at Jamaika, Lisbon, 2017. Site under construction. Text about non-standard infrastructures to appear soon. https://www.technoscienceslumintervention.org/work daily 1.0 2026-01-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1511807021397-VPW5124VSXY9LL81I3PI/057.JPG The Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1513696735031-TR3RX84DXIDQZXLR37KQ/PER_1.jpg The Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1513699554883-51S7OFITKJ68IBPJWTAT/Mar%C3%A9_Oct_2014_Ana_Teresa_Ascensao_a.jpg The Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1513699735137-VR250VJC4A8O4Z8MY57O/Slum_tour_Rocinha.jpg The Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1514480406969-FYG6N9AO73O7DLIA97V6/BBC_Water_Drainage_in_Mafalala.jpg The Project - Drainage system in Mafalala, Maputo, 2016. Photo by Kate McGeown, BBC. “Slum upgrading is a process through which informal areas are gradually improved, formalised and incorporated into the city. (…) The activities tend to include the provision of basic services such as housing, streets, footpaths, drainage, clean water, sanitation, and sewage disposal. (…) [However,] slum upgrading is not simply about water or drainage or housing. It is about putting into motion the economic, social, institutional and community activities that are needed to turn around downward trends in an area. In addition to basic services, one of the key elements of slum upgrading is bringing secure land tenure to residents as well as access to education and health care.” (Cities Alliance 2016) The work of UN Habitat and the international system of aid organisations has for over three decades followed the paradigm that was first set in motion by the World Bank in the 1970s to upgrade slums rather than just clear and rehouse their populations. Coming on the back of Turner’s work on ideas of vernacular or traditional knowledge in building, of poor people’s creativity or of user sovereignty in self-housing solutions (Turner 1976), slum upgrade then evolved into a process usually tied to Structural Adjustment Programs, especially in African and South American cities. The option for upgrading can be argued to be an imperative in developing countries, where the state has few resources for comprehensive options such as that of universal rehousing. However, slum upgrading can also be considered a neo-liberal policy in the sense that it aims to alleviate living conditions for slum dwellers without addressing the structural causes of poor informal housing. But since the alternative usually entails externally imposed clearance and relocation, slum upgrade is still regarded as a better solution for the communities involved: “Local, national and international policies have steadily evolved from repressive approaches aiming to eradicate slums and control the ‘undesirable dwellers’ (migrants and other social ‘undesirables’) to an assimilating of the urban populations” (Bolay 2006: 285). Effects on incumbent populations One of the most debated consequences of slum upgrade projects is that they can often end up pushing the most vulnerable slum residents out of site. This is especially the case where the prevalent type of access to housing is made through informal rental systems. For instance in Nairobi, Gulyani and Talukdar (2008) note how the city’s slums constitute low-quality but high-cost shelter for the urban poor in the city, who see very little of the earnings from this informal housing economy re-invested to upgrade housing conditions. In such type of situations, “slum upgrade programs that create assets – such as housing with legal title – for slum residents that the better-off [also] lack are likely to be the subject of gentrification” (idem: 1921). In other words, once housing conditions or tenure are improved, home or deeds are quickly commodified and either grabbed by a slightly more affluent household or re-appropriated by the slum landlord class able to enforce evictions and passed on to those more affluent households. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1513699112834-VF3X91QWBJZWDTXJZY61/P1050605.JPG The Project - The Plano Inclinado funicular at Favela Santa Marta (right) as seen from Botafogo, 2015. Site Under Construction. Text about Favela Bairro-type interventions to appear soon. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1513704607566-93ITB1RYHT6YUKBLRVZO/Macau_Map_1929_Detail.jpg The Project - A map of Macau, 1922. The area of Bairro da Ilha Verde is marked as the ‘Neighbourhood of the Chineze Indigent’. Source: Jesus, 1990. In a few sites across the Portuguese empire, colonial authorities experimented with housing provision to very urban poor populations via what would later be considered as ‘Sites & Services’ programs, devised by the World Bank in the late 1970s and early 1980s as one of the twin responses to informal settlements, the other being in situ slum upgrading (Huchzermeyer 2004). Similar initiatives of plot and basic infrastructure provision had also been practiced in South America and Asia before ‘S&S’ was enshrined as global policy. In the Portuguese-speaking landscape they include the innovative bairro municipal (municipal neighbourhood) in Lobito, Angola, planned by its master planner Francisco Castro Rodrigues in 1970-73 for indígenas (‘indigenous people’). A type of ‘Sites & Services’ program, its plans involved a total of 7,500 units, with the municipal government setting the foundations and providing materials (cement from Lobito, bricks from Catumbela, zinc panels from a factory in Benguela, all linked to the colonial manufacturing economy) and future residents providing their labour. It was a successful experience: homes were built for/by the urban poor and it became an established part of the city (Fernandes, 2002, p. 47). Another example comes from a different type of colonial relationship, that of Portuguese colonialism in China. It concerns the landfill site of the Bairro da Ilha Verde in Macao in the second quarter of the 20th Century. The area was mapped in 1922 as the ‘Neighbourhood of the Chineze Indigent’ (Jesus, 1990, p. 128) and underwent an embryonic sites & services programme to transform it from a vernacular settlement into an informal but monitored settlement of a population of fishermen-turned-industrial-workers (of a gun powder factory) as well as those involved in more precarious work (the indigent). Later, in 1962, the location was earmarked by the Portuguese authorities to house foreign refugees (boat people), thus it continued to have a role as the deposit area for the undesirables. By then, the term ‘indigent’ was substituted with a more medicalized ‘incurables’, inscribed in the urban plan for the area and again referring to mendigos (beggars), vadios (tramps) and those with mental illnesses. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1513703396175-WXJ148O5CQWJLM3FZRTZ/Periferia_Bissau_1970.jpg The Project - The beginning of Bissau's periphery, c. 1970. Photo by Maria Emília Caria, source Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino. Site under construction. Text about colonial urban plans to appear soon. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1528814797407-9MNYG72UJ08M7FW6ZPRO/1.JPG The Project - Cupilum de Cima, Bissau, 2018. Thirty of Bissau’s forty urban planning areas are deemed informal or spontaneous, 85% of its dwellings have no direct access to water and electricity (MOPCU 2005, Andrade 2011) and while there are few cases of ultra-dense slums common to other metropolis in the Global South (dwellings are usually well distributed in settlements, i.e. with space between them), a significant percentage of its neighbourhoods are undeniably poor urban environments. Such state of affairs is rooted in the city’s uneven development during the colonial period, where urban plans were an integral part of a highly segregated society, instituting a complete spatial separation between the white colonialist city centre and the suburban ring (Silveira 1989). The latter was where different populations lived (ethnic Pepel, Mancanha, Mandinga or Beafada, among twenty other ethnic groups; or religious Muslim, Catholic or Animist) yet they were broadly defined as ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ (see more, Intervention Model VII). This urban periphery did not have infrastructure, with the exception of two neighbourhoods (Santa Luzia and Bairro da Ajuda) built by the colonial administration for a minority among the urban poor. Santa Luzia was built for ‘assimilated natives’ in 1948; Ajuda to rehouse people whose homes were burnt in a large fire in 1965 – such projects were part of the late colonial urban development plans (Planos de Fomento) devised, first, to stabilize the workforce needed for the developing colonial economy and, later, to appease populations as the liberation wars went on in the rural areas (Domingos 2015). Yet while the two neighbourhoods amounted to a few hundred dwellings, the periphery was estimated to have 30,000 inhabitants at the time (Acioly 1992: 16; Milheiro 2012: 22-25). Then, in the decade after Guinea-Bissau’s independence in 1973, persistent rural migration to the city saw it grow substantially, and the process became acute after the Structural Adjustment Program in the mid-1980s. The city reached 384,600 inhabitants in the Census 2009 and an estimated 450,000 inhabitants at present. It is not a large metropolis but, in its own small scale, has experienced a similar process to other African capitals, that of a tenfold increase in population over the past 40 years. The majority of the areas outside the city centre lack basic infrastructure and services, and Bissauans lead a complex and often shifting everyday life in the pursue of water, electricity, education or health. Urban life in Bissau, as in other African cities, is still of a conditional, provisional and fluctuating nature (Simone 2004). One example, simply the latest, concerns the water and electricity failures in March and April 2018, caused by public utility company EAGB’s inability to buy the diesel needed to power the 19 electric plants that supply the city, which is related to the lack of support funding from the central government as well as to failed payments by households. In the meantime, the only public lighting in several parts of the city was provided by solar energy streetlights which can work off-grid put in place by a Spanish NGO – an illustration of both the country’s dependence on foreign aid and of the type of standalone alternative infrastructures devised for the urban futures of cities in the Global South. Such splintered technologies arrive at the end of long histories of infrastructure inequality, and while they undeniably ameliorate people’s lives they usually fail to structurally improve the city beyond the short term. This said, different areas in the city have been the subject of plans and programs of intervention, following different intervention paradigms. I expand on three of them below, each with reference to a particular neighbourhood. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1512065249653-YWQUWPBU6R204GTHPAEB/13_AAC.13.020A.jpg The Project - Architects and residents at a SAAL Meeting, Algarve, 1976. Photo by Alexandre Alves Costa Participatory or social architecture became an integral part of the discipline from the late 1950s onwards, with several architect-theorists (Giancarlo de Carlo, Colin Ward, J.F.C. Turner, later N.J. Habraken) experimenting on different types of client-architect relationships and even on a different understanding of architecture itself, in the sense of an emphasis on the process rather than simply on its outcomes – the ‘housing as a verb’ trope Turner retrospectively introduced in 1972. User participation in the process of designing and building mass housing for the working classes was quickly transposed to interventions in informal settlements, namely Peruvian bairradas and Brazilian favelas. Among the latter was the influential intervention on the Favela Brás de Pina by architect Carlos Nelson dos Santos, which for the first time introduced the aim of ‘urbanising favelas’ (in the sense of infrastructure provision and plot division rather than clearance and displacement, as had at first been planned for the area) and assisted self-building with financial aid from public developer Codesco and National Housing Fund (BNH – Banco Nacional de Habitação). Residents were ‘assisted’ in house building only if they wished (the idea was to be as little normative as possible), and in fact house plans and layouts were first designed by households and only later reviewed by architects. The Brás de Pina experiment was an inspiration regarding many of its elements, but perhaps the most important is that it became a social elevator: by the mid-1970s the area was completely integrated in the adjoining lower-middle class area. The only weakness, though an important one and related to this, was that as the area became slightly more affluent many of the original recipients sold their houses and moved to other favelas. Unfortunately such outcome is still today repeated in many interventions in informal settlements: marked improvements to the social and built environment of a particular community do not solve structural poverty, and this is something which is worth keeping in mind. Notwithstanding, the Favela Brás do Pina experiment was an inspiration for many social architecture projects, especially in the Portuguese-speaking world. One was the SAAL housing program in Portuga. Below I look at it as an instance of urban technical democracy (Callon et al 2011) avant la lettre. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1511806753771-EKP3BV32GUAMDDHJ5T9J/WP_20170620_008.jpg The Project - The Jamaika towers in Seixal, Lisbon Metropolitan Area. The socio-technogram of a highrise slum Jamaika, or Vale dos Chíçaros, originates from the squatting of nine unfinished low- and high-rise residential buildings in the late 1970s, left unused after the original developer went bankrupt. The buildings were occupied by poor Portuguese migrants, immigrants from São Tomé and Príncipe and Guinea-Bissau as well as by a small contingent of Portuguese Gypsies, all in dire need of housing. The residents were first surveyed with a view to rehousing within the scope of the PER program (see Interventions I) in 1993, with several updates by the Seixal City Council in the following years. The most recent update is from 2017 and it registers 236 households, of which 97 (around 300 people) are not eligible for rehousing (Henriques 2017b). Together with the area of Quinta do Mocho in the Loures municipality (since demolished), Jamaika constitutes a Portuguese variation on the ‘slums in the sky’ theme, such as Hong Kong’s rooftop shanties or Caracas’ Torre David. As in these cases, the self-built dimension usually associated with informal or squatter settlements appears on a previously (and expertly) built structure, the tower skeleton. It was on the latter that residents implanted their apartments by erecting walls, finishing interior spaces, laying out makeshift electricity connections, installing windows and bringing all possible portable equipment (such as heaters, fans or dehumidifiers) to improve living conditions. The Jamaika towers are a good vantage point to explore, at the low-end of the residential highrise spectrum, what Jacobs et al (2005) – following Latour (1987) – refer to as the technogram of housing. This can be conceptualized as the diagrammatic understanding of the heterogeneous interactions between housing technologies, people and institutional arrangements and how each human or non-human agents (pipes and cables, managers and users, politicians, owners and investors) takes part respectively in ‘stabilising’ or ‘destabilising’ housing as a sociotechnical hybrid. They argue that the “ability of a highrise building to ‘hold together’ and provide a satisfactory home for its residents or to ‘fall apart’ and become unlivable – sometimes even demolished – is dependent upon the extraordinary and ordinary dramas of associations between people and technologies.” (Jacobs et al 2005: 2). The question concerns who or what are the agents and elements that hold the buildings of Jamaika together, what has made and makes them work, what type of intervention (if any) should the towers have and with what urgency should it be applied here? To answer these questions, we need to enter the network and follow its constituent elements, but at each point new questions arise and make us take some quick detours, most of which related to social and political arrangements, so at the end we arrive at something more akin to a socio-technogram. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1511795350995-J8NE44PMMP5RGLKRZCVE/Padre_Valentim_18_a.jpg The Project - The Quinta da Serra informal settlement in Lisbon, 1989. Photo by Father Valentim Gonçalves. The place of the urban poor in cities has a long and contested history since at least the early 20th century. Where and how are they located in the city are the overarching questions of a history that has had to do with the capitalist expansion of the city, migration, colonialism or segregation, and which has been carried out by way of, among others, different urban planning techniques and types of state intervention in informal settlements. Such history has also had to do with the agency of urban poor populations in building their homes, their communities and their illegal/informal/squatted parts of the city. The latter, after being tacitly accepted in moments of urban expansion, become in a second moment the object of intervention and are operated by the scientific instruments of statistics, planning, engineering, architecture, social initiatives and others, with a view to be improved or eradicated. This second moment is the central object of this research, which aims to reflect on the types of slum intervention projects, from late 19th century slum clearance to land titling programs, participatory architecture, slum upgrade initiatives, projects of material and social rehabilitation of informal settlements or police and para-military intercessions in the informal city. In this website I provide glimpses of this splintered history in the Portuguese-speaking landscape, related to cities such as Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Maputo, Bissau and Macau. The website is based on an individual research project funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology [grant n.: SFRH/BPD/95805/2013]. It draws from archival research, analysis of the socio-technical innovations different disciplines have engendered to deal with the informal city, and from an ethnographic look into the informal knowledges and low-fi technologies used by different urban poor populations in different cities at different historical times. Click on the images in the homepage and find out more about intervention types as well as about specific informal settlements in different cities. Suggested citation: Eduardo Ascensão, research website www.technoscienceslumintervention.org, (last accessed on day/month/year). https://www.technoscienceslumintervention.org/about daily 0.75 2017-11-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a1c1b4864b05f9f4ae57bd3/1511793604043-UTS23490OQXR1ZH1NDLX/eduardo_ascensao.jpg About