‘Everyday Stories’ is an illustrated storybook on the challenges faced by girls and women in Karail Basti in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Based on the real-life experiences of six girls from the Karail settlement, the book examines bias, injustice, and gender-based discrimination. Ever hopeful, like its protagonists, ‘Everyday Stories’ illustrates the power of collective action. The book is written and illustrated by Sadia Sharmin.
TRIALOG 124/125: A Journal for Planning and Building in a Global Context
From the Ruins of 21st Century’s Urban Development: The Paradigm of Self-organisation
Elisa T. Bertuzzo and Günter Nest
Manifesto of the 21st Century’s Own Settlement Form
Habitat Forum Berlin
Räumliche Ressourcen: Architektur im Prozess gesellschaftlicher Verantwortung
Rainer W. Ernst
Raum ist eine gesellschaftliche Ressource.
Rainer W. Ernst zeigt: Die Qualität unserer Lebensräume wird einerseits durch unterschiedliche Eigenschaften bestimmt und andererseits durch demokratisierte Entscheidungsprozesse bilanziert und geprägt. Ihre Herkunft, Wirkung, Verfügbarkeit und Gestaltbarkeit zu begreifen und interessenspezifisch zu kombinieren und zu verorten, verlangt der Architektur das neue Arbeitsfeld der »Möglichkeitsräume« ab. Das Buch macht deutlich, wie Architekt_innen in diesem rückkoppelnden Verfahren zusätzliche Möglichkeiten für die kreative Gestaltung von Lebensräumen finden können.
Edition N° 14 Moloch, Kiez & Boulevard
Die Stunde der Städte
ANKOMMEN, ARBEITEN, ÜBERLEBEN
DIESE SIEDLUNG IST KEIN SLUM
Elisa T. Bertuzzo • Beobachtungen in Karail Basti, Dhaka
ARCH+
Planetary Urbanism: The Transformative Power of Cities
Elisa T. Bertuzzo, Günter Nest and Habitat Forum Berlin
Manifesto of the 21st Century’s Own Settlement Form
Elisa T. Bertuzzo and Günter Nest
Information Overload
Mapping by Habitat Forum Berlin Team
On the Myth of Informal Urbanisation: Karail Basti, Dhaka
Elisa T. Bertuzzo
Cities in Flow – Dhaka, Kolkata
StadtBauwelt 192, 48.11
The two megacities Kolkata and Dhaka lie in the core of the world’s biggest Delta. What does the strong interdependence between human settlements and water mean to the inhabitants of these 14-million metropolises? To which risks are they prone? And by which measures do the two cities, which share similar geographic location and common cultural roots, tackle the challenges of urbanisation? HFB curated this issue of StadtBauwelt in order to promote a dialogue between practitioners and researchers of two cities whose similarities have rarely been thematised in the last 50 years. Urbanists, architects and publicists from both cities and Germany focused on two aspects of Kolkata and Dhaka’s “flow”. On the one hand, a compelling housing crisis concerns all social/income groups, but has clearly devastating implications for the poor. On the other, the struggle of planners as well as inhabitants to use, control and live with water is addressed. To the contributions in English…
StadtBauwelt 192, 48.11, with contributions by Elisa Bertuzzo, Boris Braun, Partha Das, Keya DasGupta, Günter Nest, Mahbub Rahman, Salma A. Shafi, Christina Zeiske. Berlin: Bauwelt Verlag.
Smooth and Striated. City and Water, Dhaka / Berlin
Elisa T. Bertuzzo, Nazrul Islam, Günter Nest, Salma Shafi
For the first time, the metaphor of smooth and striated space, developed by Deleuze/Guattari in A thousand plateaus, is applied to the study of two cities. The experience on the street level, reported in words and in photography, allows to make urban life in its complexity and irreducibility sensible. The articles highlight the continuous interplay of planning, appropriation, negotiation and adaptation processes involving politics and urban population in both Dhaka and Berlin. The book furthermore presents a selection of articles from the international seminar “City and Water, Dhaka/Berlin”, in which experts in architecture, urban studies as well as hydrology from Germany and Bangladesh discussed on issues such as different social groups’ access to water bodies, the relationship between water bodies and urban public sphere, water management, equitable architecture as well as architecture on water.
The publication, collecting the proceedings of the seminar „Public Places Bombay“, documents some of the issues discussed during the seminar – from factors enhancing a sense of place to urban ecology – and makes ideas for a long-term preservation of Mumbai’s public places available. Besides exploring alternative directions for a conceptualisation and creation of public places in Mumbai, it provides an understanding of existing public places in India’s megacities valuable for international comparisons.
Mehrotra/Nest (eds.), Public Places in Bombay. Bombay: Max-Mueller Bhavan Bombay 1996.
The Fort Precinct in Bombay
Rahul Mehrotra, Günter Nest, Sandhya Savant
The Fort Precinct occupies a significant position in Mumbai, for it marks the historical origins of the city. Its highly structured form, reinforced by magnificent public buildings, makes it architecturally an important and valuable area also for contemporary Mumbai. This publication presents ideas and strategies which work towards conserving it.
In particular, Volume I contains the proceedings of a workshop organised in October 1993 with the aim to stimulate a debat regarding possible conservation strategies. Volume II presents a conservation proposal based on detailed mapping and documentation carried out in the follow-up of the same workshop. Includes a Heritage List for Mumbai.
Mehrotra/Nest/Savant (eds.), The Fort Precinct in Bombay. Bombay: Max-Mueller Bhavan Bombay 1994.
Arbeiten und Wohnen in städtischen Quartieren
Rainer Ernst, Renate Borst, Stefan Krätke, Günter Nest
In Africa, Asia and South America, but also Europe and North America, small local businesses and informal economic activities relevantly contribute to the functioning and regeneration of cities’ core-areas. This book analyses, with special attention for differing working conditions in the specific countries, the close interrelationship between these two functions – working and living – in such urban areas. The highly productive character of such double-function of neighbourhoods is highlighted and methods for preservation, support and improvement of this mix are discussed. With examples from Mumbai, Caracas, Mexico City, Nairobi, Surabaya, New York and Budapest, this publication delivered one of the first comparative analyses of informal economy and dwelling.
Borst/Ernst/Krätke/Nest (Hg.), Arbeiten und Wohnen in städtischen Quartieren. Basel/Boston/Berlin: Birkhäuser Verlag 1993.
Living in Cities
Habitat Forum Berlin
By means of a portray of five cities – Banjul (Gambia), Salvador (Brazil), Surabaya (Indonesia), Aleppo (Syria) and Berlin (Germany) –, this book reflects on the features which, in the last decades, allowed certain cities to thrive in the face of sweeping international modernization and on those which played a decisive role to profile others for their cultural uniqueness. Hereby, the careful observer recognises that the implicit dynamism of cities also shapes life in the „old quarters“.
Habitat Forum Berlin, Living in Cities. Berlin: Metropol Verlag Berlin 1990.
Building Community: A Third World Case Book
Bertha Turner
This book describes major breakthroughs in housing made by the poor of Third World countries. Between half and three-quarters of all new homes in most Third World Cities are built by low-income people. The publication documents examples of how people can win their rights to resources for housing and the freedom to act for themselves; how governments can enable people by supporting local initiative; and how essential changes in understanding can come about. The cases present many useful examples of ways and means for locally self-managed home- and neighbourhood building, improvement and management. Hereby, the great variety of programmes illustrated by the case studies highlights a key issue: the common but vain search for replicable programmes to be administered by central authorities. Every successful programme, such that is to match people’s needs and priorities, is uniquely adapted to its place, time and actors.
Bertha Turner (ed.), Building Community. A Third World Case Book from Habitat International Coalition. London: HIC/BCB/HFB 1988.
Our current favourites
This Is Not an Atlas: A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies
Edited by kollektiv orangotango+
This Is Not an Atlas gathers more than 40 counter-cartographies from all over the world. This collection shows how maps are created and transformed as a part of political struggle, for critical research or in art and education: from indigenous territories in the Amazon to the anti-eviction movement in San Francisco; from defending commons in Mexico to mapping refugee camps with balloons in Lebanon; from slums in Nairobi to squats in Berlin; from supporting communities in the Philippines to reporting sexual harassment in Cairo. This Is Not an Atlas seeks to inspire, to document the underrepresented, and to be a useful companion when becoming a counter-cartographer yourself.
CECI N’EST PAS UN ATLAS
LA CARTOGRAPHIE COMME OUTIL DE LUTTES, 21 EXEMPLES À TRAVERS LE MONDE
La carte spatialise des données économiques et sociales. Alors que la cartographie traditionnelle reflète et conforte les pouvoirs en place, la contre-cartographie montre une autre réalité de nos pratiques de l’espace : inégalités de conditions de vie et de droits, compromis politico-économiques, accaparement des terres, destruction des habitats par l’agro-industrie et l’industrie extractive… Ceci n’est pas un Atlas, à travers 21 exemples internationaux, montre comment la cartographie critique se fait outil de terrain au service des luttes et des mobilisations.
Mapping It Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies
Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Over 130 leading lights from different fields—artists, architects, writers and designers, geographers, mathematicians, computer pioneers, and scientists—make sense of exterior and interior worlds through highly personal and imaginative maps and charts. Some have translated scientific data into simplified visual language, while others have condensed vast social, political, or natural forms into concise diagrams. Many have reworked existing maps to subvert their original purpose or to present an alternative view of reality. Others play with the map’s commitment to truth by plotting invented worlds and charting imaginative flights of fancy. Going further, some offer entirely new kinds of maps or even reject the map’s claim to bear facts altogether. In the introduction, acclaimed novelist Tom McCarthy reflects on the relationship between maps, literature, and knowledge, while Hans Ulrich Obrist closes the book by considering the territory of maps from the perspective of the arts and philosophy.
An Atlas of Agendas: Mapping the Power, Mapping the Commons
Freek Lomme (Author), Brian Holmes (Contributor)
An Atlas of Agendas is a political, social and economic atlas, informing the public about sociopolitical power structures and activating opportunities for the self and the commons.
The French research and design group Bureau d´Études has been producing maps of contemporary political, social and economic systems that allow people to inform, reposition and empower themselves. Revealing what normally remains invisible, often in the shape of large banners, and contextualizing apparently separate elements within new frameworks, these visualizations of political and business interests and relations rearticulate the dominant symbolic order and actualize existing structures that otherwise remain concealed and unknown.
Cartographie radicale – Explorations
Nepthys Zwer, Philippe Rekacewicz
There are cards that say no. Radical cards, which reveal and denounce, which protest. To understand these rebellious maps, their functioning, their strengths, and their possibilities, this book undertakes a journey of exploration at the heart of cartographic creation. What exactly happens when we make a map, be it radical, experimental (also known as critical mapping or counter-mapping), or conventional? What intentions preside over its manufacture and its implementation?
Archipelagos: From Urbanisation to Translocalisation
Elisa T. Bertuzzo
How does increasing movement and mobility influence the production of space and its future opportunities in urbanizing regions? Based on field research in Bangladesh and West Bengal, the author presents the everyday life stories of nine homeless individuals and interweaves them with the approaches of thinkers such as Marc Augé, Walter Benjamin, Partha Chatterjee, Henri Lefebvre, Ananya Roy, Saskia Sassen, and others.
Lefebvre for Activists
Kollektiv Quotidien
50 years after his writings, Henri Lefebvre’s contributions gathered in this bilingual book pursue the goal of adjusting and reclaiming the concept of “right to the city”. Parallel to a critical examination of the concept of everyday life, of alienation in times of digitalization, and of conceivable strategies of individual and collective appropriation of space, the book examines the connection between urban politics, activism, and art at a time when extensive privatization, migration, and precarization have fundamentally changed the urban landscape and the lives of the people who live in it.
With contributions by Klaus Ronneberger, Christian Schmid, Christoph Schäfer, Stadt von Unten, Ulrike Hamann, Daniele Togozzi, Johanna Gilje, Uroš Pajović, Benjamin T. Busch, Elisa T. Bertuzzo.
Edited by KOLLEKTIV QUOTIDIEN: Victoria Claire Anderson, Elisa T. Bertuzzo, Johanna Gilje, Lin Nowicki, Uroš Pajović, Daniele Tognozzi.
The durable slum
Liza Weinstein
In her well-researched book on Dharavi, Mumbai’s iconic self-organised settlement, Liza Weinstein puts forward the factors that can affirm the right to stay put of the poor in India’s big cities. A special merit of her book is that Weinstein reappraises and relativises the worries, currently spread in Western academia, that the coalitions between elitist politics and business groups will wipe the traditional relays of local democratic accountability away. This concern, though vis-à-vis enforced privatisation and corporatisation of urban institutions justified, focuses the fragile groups of society and how these might be losing scope for resistance to top-down interventions. As Weinstein shows however, in the case of Dharavi – where the professionally, ethnically and religion-wise heterogeneous residents’ communities, along with local politicians and housing activists, were successful in preventing or at least de-routing upgrading projects implying eviction – things can be very different: urban dwellers do entertain far-flung coalitions too, and via these are able to counter corporate strategies.
Liza Weinstein, The durable slum. Dharavi and the right to stay put in globalising Mumbai. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2014.
Human Settlements
Bruno de Meulder, Kelly Shannon
A clear, grounded and critical overview on the human settlements discipline over the last 60 years, its consolidation as a field of practices in the 1970es and its intellectual and practice-oriented evolution until today. The main object of interest is hereby urbanism, whose capacity to integrate a science of and action upon the city comes to the fore in the human settlements practice. In urbanism, the specificity of design connects with non-specific issues such as social exclusion, poverty, unsustainable construction and urban growth. The selection of keystone urbanistic interventions in the 60es-80es exemplifies how different practitioners handled these issues and interpreted this relationship, at the same time delineating changing paradigms in the discipline. The third session presents contemporary approaches to human settlements that contextualise the “lessons learnt” but also mirror the ongoing discussions and different positions in the field.
de Meulder/Shannon (eds.), Human Settlements: Formulations and (re)Calibrations. UFO series 2, Amsterdam: OSA/SUN architecture Publishers 2010.
The places we live
Jonas Bendiksen
Led by questions such as “how do people dwell and live in the poorest urban areas of the world, how is their habitation like, of what are they proud and which are the problems they face everyday?”, the MAGNUM photographer Jonas Bendiksen lived for various months in slums of Nairobi, Mumbai, Jakarta and Caracas. In the book documenting a worldwide exhibited installation, his 360° portrays succeed in bringing us into these home spaces and everyday life experiences, described by their inhabitants in short comments. They shed light on everyday hardship and violence, but also on solidarity and functioning social networks.
Jonas Bendiksen, The places we live. New York: Aperture 2008.
In her intervention into the “Asian Century”, Spivak re-thinks Asia in its political and cultural complexity within debates on the “Global South”, modernity and urbanisation. The collected essays present deep-going reflections e.g. on Afghanistan’s historical and engendered narrative, on de-localisation and diaspora, on the limits of “theory” vis-à-vis everyday hegemonial structures in Bangladesh, on Bangalore’s cyberliteracy , as well as on the turbulent “present” of the Caucasus. With their passionate and irreducible critique of pre-formulated identities, they contribute to a pluralised, non-generalised idea of Asia and set the basis for the development of a “continental pedagogy” that never evades singularity.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias. Malden/Oxford/Victoria: Blackwell Publishing 2005.
ZwischenWeltenSchreiben: Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz
Ottmar Ette
Instead of engaging with movement and dislocation, philologists often followed a narrow interpretation of the spatial turn, which led their efforts to “fix”, or determine, emerging literary spaces in a literary cartography. In contrast to this, Ette suggests that vectorisation and fractalisation of literature and the spaces it represents are giving birth to transcultural, translingual and transareal patterns of and for movements. Such emergent type of literature, of “writing-between-worlds”, is produced while moving (physically, mentally, emotionally…); its essential transitoriness eludes any attempt of localisation in a cartographic image. Hence, Ette launches the fascinating challenge to forge a poetic of movement for transareal studies. His own search leads him from Ulysses’ return in a foreign homeland to the Shoah narrative, from a digression on translation to the issue of writing in a language other than the mother-tongue, from the multilingual world of the Caribbean islands to the relationship between Arabic and American literatures.
Ottmar Ette, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben: Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz. Berlin: Kadmos 2005.
La production de l’espace
Henri Lefebvre
This book, which due to Lefebvre’s characteristically “erratic” writing style should be read in its original French version, marked the spatial turn and provided its most extensive, rich and inspiring conceptualisation. Incorporating the socio-historical experiences and writings of the 1950es and 60es, his thought is here concentrated and projected towards a highly complex theorisation of city and urban life as ultimative end of human development and at the same time product of continuously interacting processes of physical/material, mental/ideological and social production of space in everyday life.
Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos 1999.
Fragmented Dhaka
Elisa T. Bertuzzo
Within three decades, Bangladesh’s capital city passed from a population of one million to twelve million people. This confronts its inhabitants, observers as well as planners with contradictions that ask for redefining our ways of living in and thinking about the city. In particular, Western conceptions of public space and “urbanity”, challenged by a symptomatic fragmentation, apparently need to be overcome. Drawing on ethnographic methods, this empirical study observes Dhaka’s spaces and situations and describes the production of enriched spaces through everyday life practices. Appropriation and adaptation processes carried out by inhabitants are hereby showed to provide, in certain cases, hints for sustainable mixed forms of urban development via-à-vis lacking or bad administration.
For the first time, Henri Lefebvre’s theory of production of space is applied with all of its implications to an empirical study. City and urbanity emerge then as the result of three continuously interacting and interdependent space production processes: physical, mental and social.
