Perched behind the fog that hides the mountains of Bogota is the home of William Oquendo. It is a maze of doors and windows, in which a room opens to the kitchen and bathroom vents out into the living room.
Five thousand 5000 km away in Rio de Janeiro, Gilson Smokey lives at a three-story house built by his grandfather, his father terrace, and now himself . It is solid; made of bricks and mortar on the ground floor, the concrete on the second, and random combination of zinc tiles and loose brick on the third. The last is the contribution of Gilson, he will also improve its level of income increases.
On the other side of the world in Bombay (Mumbai since 1995), houses encroaching on railway tracks, built and rebuilt after the many demolition efforts. "The physical landscape of the city is in perpetual motion," Suketu Mehta observed Shacks are built with bamboo sticks and plastic bags "Maximum City. '; families live on pavements and under the flyovers in fragile houses built with their hands. And while Dharavi-have the largest slum in Asia better quality housing, running water, electricity and security of tenure, this is not the case for most new migrants in the city .
Mumbai has seen a recent wave of mass urbanization that the population of India is moving from rural to urban areas. New colonies in Mumbai began to follow the same route as the slums of Latin America, which have developed over generations. However, the 20,000-density city residents per square kilometer compared to 40 in Bogotá or Rio de Janeiro 50 will require an innovative form of progressive development. As noted Mehta, "there is not enough space for everyone to be [in a house] at a time, except when they are all asleep [, and] body movements are kept to a minimum."
in a country that is less than 30 percent in urban areas, Mumbai provides a home to villagers who move to the city and recreate the village. Inevitably then, the community is the greatest asset of informal settlements. It provides a safety net for vulnerable populations, which do not depend on the will of the government, but on a self-regulating mechanism of mutual support. and, since the incoming city dwellers have not yet caught up with the speed of transformation of the city, it is the closest link the village slum is the village in the city.
urban growth
Bogotá, on the other hand, like most South American cities experienced with the biggest wave of rural migrants settling in what was then in the process of squatter settlements. Soaring numbers of new citizens in such a short period posed the challenge of providing adequate services. Informal settlements prospered and temporarily eased the housing crisis, but still one in five urban residents in Latin America live in favelas, barrios invasiones or, as they are known locally. Initially illegal and quite precarious, many of them have gradually become consolidated communities successfully incorporated into the urban fabric.
Resulting from the informal nature of urban development, urban transformation in South America and Southeast Asia is entirely dependent process time and money. Squatter cities township developers grow gradually, and always responding adjustment to the immediate needs of a community.
When I arrived in Mumbai I moved into the top floor of Mangal Kunj, a building in the suburb of Bandra. We rented the penthouse apartment of a fairly new building that was over ten years. The elevator had buttons to a twelfth floor and we assumed it must have been purchased cheaply, given that there were only eight floors. One morning, while I rushed over to start the long drive, the elevator screen read "9". Soon, entrepreneurs shelled roof bringing bags of cement and deliveries of bricks. Three months later, the former penthouse Mangal Kunj is sandwiched between the original building down and construction work that leads to the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth stories.
A similar example of progressive development happens in New Delhi Ashoka University, liberal arts college Ivy League style. requires the progressive construction of buildings to provide in different stages and purposes. Not only must they adapt seamlessly from university for administrative use, but they will also grow over time. A building now has six floors; five years later, there will be twelve.
The culture of "city-village", rapid urbanization and to sharing economy so that there is constant adaptation. the home of William will soon have a fourth story, and Gilson Smokey consolidate the third floor of his home favela, paving the way for a new level terrace above. the slums of Mumbai will replace plastic roof tiles for farms and replace bamboo sticks with brick walls. Other buildings like Mangal Kunj will build their stories fourteenth and fifteenth, while Bogotá will continue to see protruding steel trusses on the roof of houses, ready to go up another level with the birth of a child or after the promotion 'a member of the family.
While New York and London house people who move from city to city, all familiar with the label of a urban lifestyle, Bogota and Mumbai are the cities of villagers on the road to urbanization. They serve as a first step in the transition between the countryside and the city; undeniably the most radical leap. Families move from fields to the barracks, and from there to the middle-class neighborhoods; of Jogeshwari in Mira Road (Mumbai) and from Cazucá Nuevo Usme (Bogota), people on opposite sides of the planet gradually adopting a new lifestyle.
As village cities evolve into global cities, architecture should respond to the need for continuous reinvention. The design is a broader understanding of context, beyond aesthetic considerations and the immediate spatial relationships. It is the intimate relationship between people and place; an unpretentious response to complex urban problems. A lesson can be drawn from the nature of progressive development in cities like Bogota and Bombay; it is essential to recognize the intrinsic change, not against, but complement it.
References
[1] Mehta, Suketu. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 04 137.
[2] (a) anuario Estatístico Do Estado Do Rio De Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro, RJ O Centro, 2010. DVD; (b) Alcaldía mayor of Bogotá DC, Mapa Bogota - Atlas http: //mapas.bogota. gov.co/atlas/visor/index.html (accessed April 2012); (c) Ministry of Interior - Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, Census of India 2011 http://www.censusindia.gov.in/pca/default .aspx (accessed August 2014).
[3] Mehta, Suketu. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, 488.
[4] Mehta, Suketu. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, 549.
[5] UN-HABITAT, the state of cities in the world 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide (London: Earthscan, 2010): 44.
a version of this article previously appeared on Urbz.
Laura Amaya is a Spanish origin, Colombian architect-high, and US-educated and urban thinker. She spent a lot of time in Italy, and did extensive research on urbanism in Latin America as a research scientist at Cornell University. She now lives and works in India, and is fascinated by better relations between the people and the place through the transformation of the physical environment.
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