Humans have the innate ability to build cities. As a social species, it is hardwired into us. Up until the modern age, we used this ability to create some of the most beautiful settlements — mostly without the help of planners or architects and indeed without any clear plan of what it was we were creating — but not anymore. Today, settlements are more likely to be the self-referential towers of Dubai or the exclusive gated suburbs of America. They are increasingly dominated by the world-class global capital, which takes less interest in place or community and sees buildings as investment instruments sold to the highest bidder.
We must use the analogy of climax vegetation to explore the way humans traditionally created cities and how this might be harnessed to create an alternative to such approaches. According to this analogy, in every ecosystem, land that is left undisturbed will develop into a state of mature broad leaf woodland, rainforest or grassland and will stay that way until conditions change. Similarly, climax states of human settlements emerge across the world to suit local climatic and social conditions through a very human process of incremental change, spontaneity and negotiation. If true, this process has been severely undermined by the well-meaning agency of the planning system and overwhelmed by the power of the market. There is, however, a place where it can still be studied: in the development of informal settlements that accounts for a third of the worldwide annual production of housing.
One must be careful, however, not to romanticise these slums since, in the worst of them, the living conditions are truly miserable. Yet they are examples of human resilience where their residents see them as places of opportunity where they can get a toehold in the city.
This is as true of Dharavi in Mumbai, Rocinha in Rio or Makoko on Lagos as it was for Little Ireland in the Manchester of the 1930s or the Rookeries of Victorian London. We therefore go beyond the politics of land occupation and seeming disorder to ask whether the way in which slums are being built in the developing world is so different to the way that London and Paris were developed in the 17th century or the industrial cities in the 19th century. Is what we currently witness in the slums, not some modern aberration but the centuries old, messy, unpleasant business of city building? Our studies (compiled in the book Climax City) reveal that the form and structure of historic cities is similar to modern slums. Give the latter a few centuries and maybe they will also become beautiful functional towns and cities. This, of course, is not inevitable (some slums never improve) and this can take many years, but it is an age-old process. Rather than lament or idealise urban informality, perhaps we need to understand the process by which it takes place.
Informal settlements are complex urban forms that are gradually changing and evolving to meet the needs of their communities through several interlinked processes of self-organisation. They are human habitats created not through planning or design but through the interplay of relatively simple rules and forces. Small differences of culture, climate or local circumstances can change these rules and lead to different outcomes, but the world settlements created this way are more similar than they are different. Rather than being planned, they are the result of millions of decisions taken by individuals and families to make themselves more secure and safe, to improve their lives, to protect their privacy, to sell their goods, to flaunt their achievements, indeed to express all manner of human needs and desires. On one level this is similar to a termite mound and science can teach us much about how these self-organising systems function. However, even settlements that are entirely unplanned are the result of human interaction, something infinitely more complex than the handful of pheromone signals used by insects.
Observing Five Slums in Guwahati
To understand this process, we studied the formation and evolution of five slums in Guwahati, capital of the Assam province in North East India. Combining morphological analysis with personal interviews and community group discussions illuminates important findings. It was clear that, unlike termite colonies, humans form community organisations that are able to exert a degree of control over the settlement and to shape the way that it is occupied, built and improved. While it may be a stretch to call what they do as town planning, they are usually able to envisage a future vision for their settlement that is better than what they currently have and also work towards it.
These settlements are not therefore solely emergent structures that are the blind result of individual decisions. There is an element of planning, however informal and inadequate this may be. There is also a strong element of complexity at play because their residents have limited control over what happens, which accounts for the similarities between different slums and between slums and traditional urban areas. Informal settlements are therefore rather a combination of emergent behaviour and human cooperation. It is this unique mix that creates human settlements. Through reviewing the case studies in Guwahati we were able to break this process down into a series of stages:
Occupation
The most fundamental decision is the location of the slum because, of course, somebody initially had to decide to occupy the land. Each of the case study areas had survived for some time (one for 150 years) so by that test, at least, they were in a good location.
Talking to residents it was clear that the ‘best’ locations were not necessarily the most advantageous places because on those one risked being thrown out by developers. Ideally one wanted land close to work opportunities that no one else was concerned about or which could not be developed due to difficult site conditions or conflicted ownership or designation. Many slums are founded in peripheral locations where the pressures on space are less intense. However, even these may soon become engulfed in the expanding city and appropriated for development. This is a complex process because, while someone at some point will have made a decision to found each slum, there will at any time be thousands of people looking for an opportunity to squeeze them out. The established slums are therefore a self-selecting group.
Appropriation
Having found a suitable site, the next step involves the appropriation of the land to establish the slum. The oral histories of the slum dwellers revealed that an important part of the process concerns ‘founder families’. Most slums have a small number of larger plots in the best locations. The families who first established the slum and who retain a leadership role in the community occupy them. These families often control who is allowed to settle in the slum and which plots they are allocated. They become the leaders of the community association, sometimes collecting rent and even dispensing justice. This process of allocating plots and regulating what can be built determines the physical form of the settlement. The main streets tend to be the original pathways that crossed the site but the way in which each new structure is fitted in and the way that it relates to these public routes and to its neighbours is controlled by the founder family and through traditional customs. In this way, the larger settlements develop a labyrinthine but complex street network with a hierarchy that any urban designer would recognise.
Transformation
These slums are the result of constant change. They are never finished and never stay the same for long. The driver for this incremental process of change tends to be the individual home. Houses start off as a single flexible space, similar to a rural dwelling, in which all of the family’s activities take place.
As the family’s fortunes wax or wane, the space evolves. Hard times might see spaces subdivided and sublet, while improving fortunes will see temporary materials replaced with more permanent ones and spaces extended upwards, perhaps allowing the ground floor to be turned into a shop.
As the family prospers, they will increasingly be able to divide private functions from public areas and to appropriate the public realm outside their home to express their status and increased sense of ownership. Collectively, all individual changes to the home feed into the evolution of the neighbourhood.
As with the homes, the external spaces are never finished. There is a constant trade-off between internal space and the public realm, the limits being imposed by custom or shared agreement. This includes boundaries beyond which no one would extend their home (which becomes a common building line), or the location of the community courtyards and even spaces for refuse. This is linked to infrastructure works such as lighting and sanitation and to public facilities such as a community hall or even a school. Everything will develop and evolve through a process of incremental change, constantly working towards a position where everything is optimized even though this point will never be reached.
Consolidation/Saturation
For many slums, the process of gradual transformation leads to their consolidation if tenure becomes available to residents. It gives households a sense of security and also allows them to invest in their home and in the settlement as a whole. Over time, the process of consolidation will turn the slum into ‘respectable’ neighbourhoods, indistinguishable from many other parts of Indian cities and tend to resemble the ‘natural towns’. However, not all slums are fortunate enough to consolidate. Some never manage to achieve tenure and exist in a state of perpetual uncertainty. This lack of security prevents the process of consolidation.
Other slums are the victims of their own success because they attract more and more people and reach a point of saturation.
In one of the case studies the population density exceeded 1,500 persons per hectare, which puts huge pressure on basic services and utilities as well as community ties. However, it is probably misleading to use the word saturation because it implies a point when the slum cannot absorb any more people whereas in reality there is no way to stop more people from arriving. This process of saturation also makes it very difficult for slums to consolidate.
Spontaneous Settlements as Emergent Systems
The above study gives an insight into the contradiction that even the most spontaneous settlements are shaped by leadership and planning while also being complex and emergent systems. This interaction between planning and emergence we believe to be at work, not only in the slums, but in all human settlements including the great cities of the developed world.
Cities may be built one building at a time, but the people deciding where and what to build do so with a social framework that requires negotiation with others. In the formal city this may mean obtaining a building permit or planning permission. In an informal settlement it means getting the permission of the community leaders or just negotiating with the neighbours. In interceding these ‘permissions’ the authorities and the community will apply future concepts of how they would like the settlement to be. These might be idealised utopias or just a desire to avoid deterioration and decline. If informal settlements were allowed to develop for many years to reach a climax state, some of the slums that we have studied may grow into a form or urbanism very similar to the older parts of our modern cities. It is true that the climax city process has given us some of the most beautiful towns and cities in the world but this is far from being the inevitable outcome.
We cannot leave the city to its own devices because the climax state of modern capitalism is not something that we should accept. At the same time we should not delude ourselves that we can devise a perfect alternative because all of our experience tells us that the task is impossible. We therefore need to look more closely at the interaction between planning and natural urban growth and rethink the way that we plan cities to shape rather than seize climax city process. Planning can set the parameters and conditions for complex urban growth to produce more benign outcomes. This was perhaps recognized in the past but has been lost in the modern planning systems. It is a vital art that we need to rediscover.
(From the forthcoming book Climax City: Master planning and the Complexity of Urban Growth. Publisher: RIBA Publishing. Authors: David Rudlin & Shruti Hemani)
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