MCHG + ramble + draft

This post will be a backlog of previous thoughts that I should have dumped earlier. Ah well, prepare to scroll...

McGill's Minimum Cost Housing Group, has a GREAT website with easy navigation to a pretty good collection of past M.arch theses... all related to low (with the goal of minimum, I presume) cost housing. I was surprised to discover that a lot of them had to do with squatter settlements in SE Asia, not "affordable housing" in the Western sense.

I read Chapter 2 and skimmed a couple of other parts of Rachelle G. Navarro's thesis on improving sanitation in waterfront communities. There were definitely parts that coincided with my interests, particularly breaking down the reasons why squatters chose to squat on waterfronts. Navarro confirmed some of my initial intuitions -- most urban cities, many of them former colonies, were intentionally chosen and settled for their advantageous locations for trade and defense. She argued that while coastal lands were considered highly (economically) productive environments in rural areas (for fishing and trade I presume), the coast is seen as an “idle” region in urban areas (not sure if I agree/understand that…) I do see the point that water (be it rainfall, a river or lake, etc) seems to be a natural element in rural areas, while it is a foreign element in the urbanized environment (sewage, storm drains, etc are required to mitigate/interact with it)

She also listed a number of coastal cities with notable squatter settlements, which I've referenced here:

• Guayaquil (Ecuador)
• Recife (Brazil)
• Monrovia (Liberia)
• Lagos and Port Harcourt (Nigeria)
• Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea)
• Delhi (India)
• Bangkok (Thailand) – “khlongs”
• Jakarta (Indonesia) – “kampungs”
• Buenos Aires and Resistencia (Argentina)
• Accra (Ghana)

Other useful notes: most common concerns in waterfront settlements are clean water, sanitation (of human waste), clean/safe environment (free of insects, garbage, standing water). I quickly brainstormed possible solutions...rainwater catchment, composting toilets, incentives to recycle more comprehensively through policy (like Jaime Lerner's environmental policy to buy trash and collected recyclables from slum dwellers in Curitiba, Brazil which led to huge improvements in cleanliness of public areas).

Navarro also noted differences in disease levels during the rainy season. It seems to be that any design that involves the flood plain needs to critically consider annual flooding and change in the occupiable ground plane.

…which makes for an uncanny segue in my thoughts for my studio project at the moment. My key words: action, distribution and time; essentially, how actions and activities of people are located within a built environment and both analyzing and guiding these changing dynamics over time. For Mumbai, and other coastal cities with flooding problems, the ground plane is an active changing element in the landscape; Not a neutral plane to receive human actions, but one that immediately influences human action and distribution.

All of this is sort of melding into one big fat unrefined idea. I will attempt to dissect it, starting now.

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*40 min later. It’s taking longer than I thought -_-;; will chew on this for awhile and post later tonight (I hope).