Transcriber: mariana vergnano Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic
Thank you very much.
My question is: If design is relevant at all today.
Good morning.
I would like to take you with me to a journey,
and try to make you imagine a situation,
or put yourself into a situation,
which I found myself in, few years ago,
and which changed my perspective of design
180 degrees.
This is Sandra.
Sandra is a mother of two.
She lives in El Salvador.
She is an ice cream maker.
She makes 80 ice creams a day,
and she gains 8 dollars.
In the weekend, she sells double of that
and she can pay for her utility] bills.
Sandra is the owner of a terrain in El Salvador,
in which there is a house.
And this house is basically made simply
with reusing materials using bricks and wood.
And, in this house she has two rooms.
The one, the largest one,
is used for living,
for sleeping and working,
and the other one, the little one,
is used for living and eating
and interacting with her children.
Sandra has a backyard –
a possibility of expansion of her house.
Her backyard has a latrine
and simple services.
Please remember that Sandra doesn't have sewage in her house,
and she uses, the water
through an outlet, which is 10 meters away from her house.
And she collects water starting early to wash herself and to bath,
and to – you know what it is used for.
Sandra built her house through an association –
it is called Auto Construction.
And they help you, basically, build the first meter of your house,
for which they support you, they finance you in doing that.
The rest is up to you and your neighborhood, if you have any,
and if you have a social cohesion within the community.
And she was able to build this.
She has a loan.
It's 10 years long loan, and she is paying it right now.
Sandra's kids go to school.
One goes to primary school,
the second one goes to secondary school.
The secondary school is not present in the neighbourhood where she lives,
so, the daughter, who is 12,
needs to pay 1 dollar to go to the school and come back.
School is really important, because Sandra
happens to live in a neighbourhood,
with two gangs members operating, and very violent,
and they tend to engage with youngsters,
because they are usually the easiest to be engaged,
for a little money,
and because their penalties, if being caught, are really little.
So, in my opinion,
Sandra thinks big,
when she buys a land,
a land that can be extended possibly, when her family grows,
when she tries to generate an economy for herself,
and when she tries to educate her children,
despite the 1 dollars back and forth.
I am a designer and, a few years ago,
I started requestioning my position,
whether indeed design was important at all –
and to whom was it important.
Obviously it was important for me, a couple of years ago,
because I really enjoyed my buildings,
or the buildings I was working for,
being published everywhere.
But the reality of things is that
my curiosity pushed me to the edge of design
and wanted me to explore further.
I was terribly curious about understanding
what was making Sandra so intriguing, and so interesting to me.
So, I started exploring her.
And what I discovered was that there was no profit at all,
coming out from Sandra.
However, with my super dedicated team,
which I think dearly [of] –
We spent our evenings, our weekends
in trying to brainstorm the basic elements of architecture.
So, conventional architecture elements, things that come to you
every time you have a client, and the brief comes in –
we started to bisection them, looking at them,
trying to manipulate them and spending a lot of energy
in talking about simple questions, like economy,
design, identity, social issues,
place.
This is called – this is strategy,
I think it's a well known strategy, it's called mental map –
and you do it for any kind of discipline.
In this case we used it for understanding the issues of design.
And basically what it led to was a strategy
for master planning in developing countries.
At the end of the day, this method wanted to transfer
our knowledge to somebody else.
I will try to explain you what I mean by this.
This is a chart
that we had created in my office,
simple for the sake of – trying to brainstorm on things.
Like, for instance, individual, which is so dear to all of us.
Individual is a person.
How can a person function?
A person can function through health and happiness.
How is happiness brought to a person?
Through jobs, through good weather,
good food and so on and so forth.
This is a very simple, but yet complicated
and it can go on forever.
And [unclear], of course.
One day, a client came up to us.
A client of a very open mind, a client super visionare.
And they – the client wanted to give us a try,
to try to give us a try on this site in particular.
We are in El Salvador
It is a fairly difficult site, and –
we didn't know it, yet.
But there had been already different designers,
trying to design something on this site,
something meaning housing for people
that needed to be removed from dangerous sites
or left over parts of this society,
because of vulnerability of the geography.
So, they asked us to do something on this site, there was no brief.
So, it was the perfect opportunity for us
to implement this game, which we called
the Urban Toolbox.
The first thing that we did, when we arrived,
was a full immersion with people,
with the locals, and with locals designers as well.
And, yes, at the beginning we felt very uncomfortable
because we came there with our trolleys, with our bag full of knowledge,
while they were just asking us simple questions as:
How can I protect my crop during the raining season?
Where do I put my pigs?
Pigs?
(Laughter)
So, what we started doing was
trying to understand the place, initially.
What is the place all about?
We went to the site and we understood
that everything that could be going wrong was happening.
They were using this site to protect people
from disaster areas,
meaning high floodage.
So, in El Salvador, in Central America,
it happens that three months out of twelve, it rains.
When it rains there is no capacity for infrastructure
to sustain all this rain,
and the rain flushes away houses.
This was a perfect location allowing houses
to be flooded away,
just because it was steep – it was on the top of the hill.
The location was extremely difficult.
We found ourselves in the middle of two gangs,
they are called "La Desierto" and "The Thirteen",
and they are gangs smuggling drugs.
The site is totally isolated from the urban area.
So, we are not in a city area,
we're not inside a village,
but we are outside, isolated.
So, what can we do in this situation?
Well, first of all, we tried to connect,
to bring connectivities
between the site and the urban area around it.
We tried to engage with the gangs
instead of excluding them and thinking of them as dangerous.
And we tried to take advantage
of the geography of the land,
instead of being scared about it.
These people are going to be removed from a situation of danger,
and they are going to be placed in a so called Paradise.
The situation that we found ourselves in, is not a paradise,
so we need to reinforce the infrastructure,
in order to profit from the rain falling down from the sky,
instead of allowing the rain to wash away the entire village.
The second operation that we did,
is trying to understand the society
that is going to be moving in the neighbourhood.
I would like to inform you that the families
that are going to move in in the site,
it's about 1000 families,
for 210 houses,
so it's a mega a project, indeed.
And the families are usually single mothers
with children,
with possible extension of grandparents and siblings.
What does this mean?
For us maybe nothing, but for Sandra it means a lot.
She has one house with one room,
and in that room everybody needs to sleep,
she also needs to work,
and she also needs to entertain her children.
As designers, what we can do, is create flexible spaces
that can be used both as living
and as well as sleeping, and working.
So, that's what we tried to do.
In terms of identity,
the community that will be moving inside our site,
is totally heterogeneous.
They are people that come from different sites,
they don't know each other.
So, it's really extremely important for them
to try to unify and become a community.
Only in a community you can support
and sustain yourself.
One of the tools to create a community
could be, for instance,
to make them build their own houses together,
and create public spaces together.
Economy is a big issue.
Generate jobs for these people
is like not just put them in a site,
provide accommodation for them
and just let them live there.
They will just become parasites
and wait for the first subsidy coming around.
They need to generate economy for themselves,
but they need also to be helped to generate the economy.
One of the skills, that we can give to them,
is for instance, talking and exchange information
and let them understand how to build a house,
how to build frames,
and let them build their house, and let them build their frame.
Or just to motivate them and incentivate their skills –
as, for instance, traders.
They are very good in trading drugs.
Environment. (Laugter)
I will not bore you with the usual aspects,
which is of course climate change,
which however has a great impact
in the traditional way in which they live.
For instance, the woman, that is fetching wood
for her traditional cooking,
might also be pointed out as the cause for deforestation,
but she does need that wood to cook.
Other issues about environment – they can be on the negative side.
Let's look at the positive side.
Environment can be extremely powerful, if harvested well.
We have been thinking about the orientation of the houses
to fetch the sun,
or the big cisterns to get the water,
or to orient it nicely,
so that they can capture the prevailing winds.
Not to forget, of course, about the employment of waste.
It's really important that we do take advantage
of everything that we can fetch
that we can find around and reuse it, somehow.
Technology.
Technology is, like my college Aaron just explained, full of information.
There is a lot of information out there,
and is up to us to select the right information to donate to them.
Like, the application of low-tech technology is extremely important.
Like, try to teach them
how to do things that they can do.
Talking about modularity is really important,
and replicability is also extremely important.
You teach them how to build the modular
and they can replicate, and replicate until they learn it,
they get it and they can build something for themselves.
Participation.
Going back to the usual suspects.
This is very important.
You need to talk to them understanding
what they can do for you and what you can do for them.
It's like a two directional conversation,
you talk as a technician and you receive local inputs.
It's really interesting, because at the end of the day
what happened to us when we where there –
It was a big workshop, we arrived,
we gave lectures, very abstract lectures,
nobody understood anything.
At the end of the workshop,
after the seven days,
it was very interesting – they were giving us lectures
and they were teaching us how to do things.
Design.
I am not going to show you anything that I've done today,
because that is not important.
What is important is the conversation that we entertained together with them,
and the fact that I was the technician at first,
and I thought them the know-how,
and they just apprehended,
they took it over, and transformed it into something they can use,
maintain and manage.
Because at the end of the day, we have to remember
that we are there, to leave.
We are not there to stay.
They need to take our knowledge
and use it for their own benefit, and for their own community.
Well, the biggest satisfaction is that
our toolbox gets unfold,
or our knowledge gets laid on the plate
and gets understood.
Everybody understands how it works,
everybody can start playing with it
and they can really managing it and mastering it.
The development driven by the locals is sustainable
and it reinforces living and the living conditions for them.
I would like to conclude with this slide.
And I would like you to read it,
and I will assist you in reading the second part of this slide.
90% of our cities is informally designed by their inhabitants,
without the help of planners or designers.
My question is –
Is the urban designer an outdated figure?
Well, I came to the conclusion that it is, in many ways.
But in many other ways it's not.
It is for the 10% of the population of this world, it is outdated.
The way we have done it – is passé.
But, for the 90%, it's not.
It is really important, in my opinion,
to do embrace this 90%
and make their life worthwhile.
And this is my big thinking.
Thank you.
(Applause)